And if you don't have all those three, you're not going to be a happy person.

I ask my students on the first day of class, it's a hard class to get into.

There's a lot of competition to get into the class.

I say, look, you're in this class, you bid your points because this is a point system for getting electives at the Harvard Business School.

It's a market.

And I say, so you must know what it is, right?

What is it?

And they'll go around and say, it's the feeling I get when I remember.

Wrong.

Happiness is not a feeling any more than the smell of the turkey is your Thanksgiving dinner.

That's evidence of your Thanksgiving dinner.

Your feeling is evidence of it.

If we look at the happiest people and the unhappiest people, the happiest people have in common three macronutrients: enjoyment, satisfaction, and purpose, which you need in balance and abundance.

And if you don't have all those three, you're not going to be a happy person.

And so I'll talk to very powerful people who say, frankly, I'm just not happy.

I will look at their macronutrient profile in the same way that if you said, ah, my digestion's all goofed up.

Well, probably you're not getting the right macros.

And ordinarily, what I'll find with strivers is that they're very high in stoic work ethic to get a whole lot of long-term meaning.

And they're very low in enjoyment, very low in enjoyment, what I find.

If I'm talking to undergraduate students, they're very high in enjoyment on the basis of high dose of pleasure.

And they're very low in meaning.

They're not getting a whole lot of meaning.

Or if they're real success junkies, they're trying to get as much satisfaction as they can.

And it's elusive because they're on the treadmill.

You know, it's like work hard, get the hit.

Well, that was good for a week.

The new car smell lasts for like a week, right?

You know, people always say, you know, it's the California phenomenon.

There's a lot of research on this about how long you'll be satisfied if you move to California.

And the answer is the sunshine will give you satisfaction for six months, but the taxes are forever.

You know, careful with, I mean, sorry, I'm not trying to hurt you, Rich.

I've made my peace with that, but go ahead.

It is a nice place.

So the point is that the balance that you need in the macronutrient profile of happiness is really the best way to diagnostically understand how happy you are.

That's where I actually start.

That's the definition.

Satisfaction, enjoyment, plus meaning and purpose.

And they all have a big science behind them.

Right, satisfaction.

We get that sense of satisfaction in the pursuit of something ambitious, right?

That's a goal met, the joy of a reward.

But the problem is not that you can't get no satisfaction, as Mick Jagger sings.

The problem is you can't keep no satisfaction.

The real problem is you get it and then it goes.

So you get the high from cocaine or alcohol, for example, but it's gone immediately.

You chase it.

If you never got it in the first place, it wouldn't be a problem.

If you literally got no satisfaction, there would be no problem.

But that you can't keep no satisfaction, that's the real problem.

But you can hack it.

You can actually hack it if you understand and go against.

You can get enduring or at least lasting satisfaction if you go against your nature, which is a really interesting body of literature, because it reminds us again that Mother Nature doesn't care if we're happy.

Mother Nature wants to fool us again and again and again and again to hit the lever because it makes us more genetically fit.

It helps us to pass on our genes by having more money, more power, more honor than the troglodyte in the next cave was fewer animal skins.

But we think that that car will bring us lasting satisfaction.

You have to hack that matrix and you can get lasting satisfaction.

The way to think about it is if you have a concept of your satisfaction in terms of what you have, you're in trouble.

But if you understand a more accurate model where your satisfaction is what you have divided by what you want, halves divided by wants, then you need a halves management strategy, but more importantly, a wants management strategy.

The secret to being more satisfied is not having more, it's wanting less.

That's the secret.

And one that's really elusive for all young people today who are psychological hedonists.

They're spending all their energy and time trying to avoid unhappiness.

What that does is that when you avoid pain, you're avoiding meaning.

What you're avoiding, learning what your purpose is through resiliency, what you're capable of, and the lessons you're supposed to learn.

And you're avoiding, to avoid your unhappiness is to avoid your happiness.

We need pain.

We need sacrifice.