The Michael Shermer Show The Saad Truth About Happiness
Happiness As An Ultimate Goal
- Happiness is an ultimate goal intrinsic to human motivation, but achieving it requires adopting correct mindsets and decisions.
- Effort towards happiness is a process, not an instant state or mood change.
Spousal Support in Weight Loss
- Gad Saad lost 86 pounds over roughly 18 months by tracking calories with his wife's help.
- Having a supportive partner monitoring intake was key to sustained weight loss.
Chunk Goals Into Small Wins
- Approach goals by focusing on small, manageable increments instead of overwhelming large targets.
- Celebrate consistent daily or weekly progress to build momentum and avoid discouragement.
Everyone wants to be happy. The question “How can I be happy?” drives countless decisions across the world, and billions of dollars are spent on marketing a wide variety of answers to it. Increasing evidence shows, however, that unhappiness is on the rise.
Already known to an audience of hundreds of thousands as “the therapist for everyone,” Dr. Saad contends that happiness is not merely a changeable mood, but a process toward which all people can strive by following basic steps known to humans for millennia; happiness can be measured and assessed, and strategies devised to achieve it.
Drawing on scientific studies, the wisdom of ancient philosophy and religion, and his extraordinary personal experience as a refugee from war-torn Lebanon, Gad offers a provocative, helpful, and entertaining treatise on how to strive for happiness, win it, and keep it.
Gad Saad, PhD, one of the best-known public intellectuals fighting the tyranny of political correctness, is a professor of marketing at the John Molson School of Business at Concordia University, where he held the Research Chair in Evolutionary Behavioral Sciences and Darwinian Consumption from 2008 to 2018. A pioneer in the application of evolutionary psychology to consumer behavior, he is the author of The Evolutionary Bases of Consumption, The Consuming Instinct, and numerous scientific papers and the editor of the book Evolutionary Psychology in the Business Sciences. His previous bestselling popular trade book is The Parasitic Mind: How Infectious Ideas Are Killing Common Sense. His new book is The Saad Truth about Happiness: 8 Secrets for Leading the Good Life.
Shermer and Saad discuss: operational definitions of the “good life,” “happiness,” and “well being” • emotions • eudaimonia (the pursuit of meaning) versus hedonism (the pursuit of pleasure) • genetics and heritability • cultural components • the Big Five (OCEAN) • marriage (mate selection) • health • exercise and stress reduction • religion • anti-fragility • a playful outlook and curiosity • variety (the “spice of life”) • what the ancient Greeks got right about living the good life • how failure may actually be a key to more happiness • persistence, grit, and risk taking • regret and the dark side of consumption and addictions.