Welcome to the happiness podcast.
I'm Dr.
Robert Puff.
I want to share some amazing stories with you,
But they may not at first seem like they relate to happiness.
I promise you they will.
So if you can hang in there,
I will relate them to how we can be happier in our own lives.
As humans,
We're capable of some amazing feats.
When it comes to memorization,
Our skills can be quite astonishing.
Last year,
I was visiting Malaysia and while I was there,
I visited and spent some time at the National Mosque of Malaysia.
I always enjoy talking to people and getting to know about their culture.
Well,
While I was inside the mosque,
There were three young people that came up and started talking with me.
It was two men and a woman and we were talking about their Islamic faith and I was asking them a lot of different questions because I'm very fascinated by different faiths around the world.
And these three people were very passionate,
Very sincere,
Very loving people who love to share about their faith.
We talked for quite a while and I learned a lot about their private lives too.
The woman was in medical school and she was preparing to get married that spring.
She was very sweet and actually invited me to come to her wedding.
But the two men wanted to share something about her because you could tell they were very proud of her.
She had actually memorized the entire Quran from the beginning to end,
Which very few people around the world have ever been able to do.
It's an amazing feat.
But not only did she memorize the Quran,
Her faith was clearly very important to her.
And then a different time,
I was in the south of India at an ashram in Thiruvannamalai.
It had been the ashram of Ramana Maharshi,
Who was deceased,
But they kept the ashram open after he passed.
If you don't know anything about him,
He was actually on the cover of Life magazine.
And Carl Jung,
The psychiatrist from Switzerland,
Was actually going to go visit him and interview him,
But wasn't able to go.
Many people in the west actually know of Ramana Maharshi.
While I was there,
I visited a Vedic school on the grounds of the ashram.
And at this school,
There were probably 20 youth that were studying the Vedas by memorization.
In the Hindu faith,
One of the main scriptures that they look to are the Vedas.
And the Brahmins,
Who are a specific caste that study the Vedas,
What they do is they teach their youth how to memorize the Vedas from beginning to end.
And you can probably imagine this is a colossal feat because,
Again,
It is a lot of verses that they're memorizing.
They actually help memorize the verses through music.
They align music with the verses,
Which allows them to memorize them more easily.
But it's still a colossal feat.
And then,
If we travel to the west,
I know everyone knows of Martin Luther King Jr.
,
But did you know that he memorized a great many of the verses of the Bible?
Not the complete Bible,
But he was very prolific in knowing verses of the Bible from memory.
And then the final story is when I was at Princeton,
One of my best friends,
His wife was studying to be a pharmacist.
So I knew her pretty well,
But I also knew she was an excellent student,
Top in her class.
And to be a pharmacist takes a lot of memorization,
And she had memorized an enormous amount of material about being a pharmacist.
It was very impressive.
I asked her how she did it,
And she told me,
Because I knew the answer before she told me,
That she used mnemonic techniques to memorize that much material.
Mnemonics are a variety of techniques to help us memorize anything that we want to memorize more easily.
So there's a few things I want to talk about and how it will relate to happiness.
The first thing is we as humans are capable of amazing feats of memory.
Of course,
Some people are more gifted than others,
But the truth is to really understand and learn something really well,
It takes a lot of time.
It takes a lot of effort.
It takes a lot of commitment.
But when we do that,
We get the rewards of knowing that material well.
And when we know a material really well,
It's going to shape us as it did in Martin Luther King's example.
It shaped his destiny and how he was able to help people around the world improve their lives.
And like my pharmacist friend,
When we study something really well and learn it well,
We become an expert at it.
And this steeping ourselves in any material,
Whether it be religious,
Whether it be scientific,
Whatever it be,
Shapes who we are as a person.
Because now we have knowledge that we can use and pull from without necessarily having to look it up.
And as we go through our lives,
It's available to us.
So when we need it,
It's there to help navigate our lives.
So how does this relate to being happy and having a happy life?
First,
To get really good at something we have to extend a lot of effort,
A lot of commitment,
A lot of time,
And keep extending that effort to make sure that knowledge,
That information stays inside our brains.
When it comes to happiness,
There are very specific things that we have to learn about,
Things that we have to do on a regular basis in order to maintain a level of happiness in our hearts.
And some of them are not easy,
Some of them are difficult,
And some of them go against everything we've been taught.
Because as humans,
We're conditioned to live a life a certain way.
And when it comes to being happy,
It may go against our belief system or the conditioning that we've been exposed to.
For example,
Let's say we're raised by parents who verbally and physically fought with each other a lot and were abusive,
Perhaps even towards us.
That's going to impact us and shape the way we interact with the world.
It doesn't necessarily mean we're going to turn out like them,
But unless we do things,
We're going to be impacted by what we saw and experienced.
Or let's say our parents and our upbringing was very dire in the sense it was negative and pessimistic and always looked at that cup as half empty.
For us to change that,
We need to steep ourselves in the opposite of that and start seeing the world as a cup half full and create gratitude and thankfulness for all that life gives us.
So now the four stories that I started with about memorization,
This is how they relate to our lives and being happy.
The four people that I mentioned did not know the material that they studied prior to studying it.
They weren't born with it.
They had to learn it.
And that took time,
That took commitment,
That took effort.
But because they took that energy,
They were able to shape their lives in a path that they wanted to be changed in.
And all of them got really good at understanding what they were wanting to learn.
And then when we learn something,
It shapes us.
Even the pharmacist,
My friend,
She learned how to be a really good pharmacist because she had great memory techniques.
What I've learned in life as I've studied happiness for most of my life now is that our culture that we live in does not breed happy people for the most part.
What I mean by that is the conditioning that we're exposed to overall,
Both our families and the culture we live in,
Is not breeding happiness skills.
From the news that we watch,
From the conversations that we engage in,
From the social media that we expose ourself to,
I would argue that the majority of the things that we're exposed to throughout our days probably aren't feeding our souls and making our hearts happier.
Things can,
Of course,
But we have to be very proactive in seeking them out and making sure that we expose ourselves to things that do feed our souls.
Many of the things that don't feed our souls are very exciting and thrilling in the short run.
Of course,
In the long run,
They're very bad for us,
But in the short run,
They're very delectable.
So here's my thesis that I'm ultimately making today.
It's that if we want to get really good at something like memorizing the Quran or memorizing the Vedas or memorizing the Bible,
We have to spend a lot of time,
A lot of effort to do this because these are all skills that are beyond our natural ability.
Now,
If we want to be happy,
The same is true.
We have to learn happiness skills in order to improve our lives.
Otherwise,
We'll just go down the path that we're exposed to and what we've been raised with in the culture that we live in now.
So here it is.
What I'm suggesting is find a teacher,
Find a philosophy,
Find something that helps you learn how to improve your life to be happier and steep yourself in it.
Learn it,
Really study it over and over again until it becomes something that you know really well.
And also once you do master it,
Keep learning it,
Keep studying it until you die because we tend to forget things if we don't keep practicing them.
Now we have to be honest.
We have to be vigilant because we can expose ourselves to things that seem like they're good,
But they may not be good for our soul in the long run.
So we have to ask ourselves,
Is the thing I'm steeping myself in helping me?
Is my life getting better?
Am I happier?
Am I waking up in the morning with joy in my heart?
Am I putting myself to bed at the end of the day with a smile on my face?
What we tend to do is find something good,
Really good for our souls and read it,
Study it,
Learn about it.
And then we set it aside and we don't look at it again because we think,
Well,
I've studied that.
I don't need to know that any better.
But that's like an athlete getting in great shape and stop working out because they're now in great shape.
They don't need to work out anymore.
We need to continue.
We need to really delve ourselves into things that improve our lives and study them and see the techniques that are being taught there.
And if they work for us,
Then we implement them.
And I would caution you on trying to find the teacher.
I would encourage you to find your teacher,
Your philosophy,
The ideas and concepts that are working for you right now that are improving your life,
And then really dive into them and master them and live by them and implement them in your lives.
Now,
Here's going to be the hard part because ultimately the person you have to listen to the most is your heart because we have a tendency to maybe like something about someone or something,
But we don't realize that overall it may not be that good for us.
That's where we have to really listen to our hearts and say,
Is what I'm delving myself into and learning about working?
Is it making my life and hopefully the people around me better?
You may find a podcast that you like,
You may find books that you like,
You may find videos that you find helpful,
But whatever you find,
Once you find it and you see that it's working,
Then you need to take the time and the effort to learn it well.
So it becomes second nature to you.
So you can by heart live by it.
We are capable of great feats when we put our minds to them.
And that includes happiness.
We really can have happy lives.
It's just not going to come naturally for most of us,
Probably any of us.
So when we find something that is working for us,
We need to really learn it well,
Study the nuances and apply them to our lives.
We are capable of doing amazing feats.
And when it comes to happiness,
Any of us can be happy.
It just takes a lot of work.
It takes a lot of effort,
But it's worth it.
If we're spending 95% of our time doing things that don't feed our soul and only 5% of our time doing things that feed our soul,
It's not going to lead to a happy life.
The one thing I've learned about living a happy life is we have to work at it because our culture is most likely,
Inevitably not going to feed our happiness.
If anything,
It's going to do things to deter us from living the good life,
But we don't have to be part of that.
We can truly have beautiful lives no matter what.
I mean that the only thing in the universe that's going to keep you from having a good life is you.
But the great news is you can have a beautiful life no matter what's happened.
Don't give up.
Find that which helps you improve your life.
And then in today's lesson,
We've learned that we're going to steep ourselves in that knowledge.
Learn it well,
Practice it well,
And find that our lives,
Because now we're committed to having a good one,
Is getting better every day.
So when we do take that last breath of life,
We'll look back and say,
That was a good life.
Thank you.
Thank you for joining me on the Happiness Podcast.
Until next time,
Accept what is,
Love what is.
