That was a big smile on the front of your book. Part of the reason why you put that, what looks like a smiley face on it is because of this arc of happiness that you described. Yeah. That was quite surprising to me.
What do you mean by arc of happiness? Well, across, across almost every culture, the correlation between age and happiness is a smile. So zero to kind of 25 is beer, Star Wars, you know, making out prom, college football, or you know, premier league football. Zero to 25 is usually pretty happy.
25 to 45 is what I call the shickets real years. You realize that distinct to what your parents are unique, told you you're not gonna have a fragrance named after you or be a member of parliament. You have kids. You have economic stress.
Someone you love a great deal gets sick and dies, your parents, right? Life gets very hard, very fast, 25 to 45. And generally speaking, these are the least happy years. And then something wonderful happens, usually in your late 40s or early 50s, and that is you start recognizing the finite nature of life, maybe you have some economic security, maybe you've established relationships, maybe you have these really wonderful things that are less awful that looks and doesn't feel like you call kids.
You realize that life is short, you start finding appreciate, I don't know if you remember this. Steve, do you remember going out with your parents and your mom and your mom would like a salad would come and she'd stop the table and say, look at how beautiful the salad is. Or just admire the flowers. And you think, you used to think it's like, what the fuck?
And when you realize it's so weird when you turn into your, I stopped outside my house, there's a garden and I just couldn't stop marveling at the garden. The garden's here. I've never seen anything like it. We have this garden across from us in the park and I'm like, who are the gnomes that come out at night and manicure this thing so perfectly.
And I'm not into botany or horticulture and I can't stop marveling. I wouldn't have done that in my 27 year old self, but I do it in my 57. I find you find joy in new things. You find joy in the mundane as you get older and you get happier and the happiest generation, the happiest age cohort is the cohort that should be the least happy because they're not healthy is old people.
So what the learning here is that if you wake up at 35 and you have a couple of kids and you have a spouse or you have a job, you know, you think, shit, this is hard. I'm not that happy. Recognize that's part of the journey and just keep on keeping on, you know, happiness waits for you in most instances. So happiness is absolutely a smile.
And so I think it's helpful just to know that that as you move into your income earning years, as you move into your mating and child rearing years and the depth of work and your parents start aging, it's stressful and it's hard. If you're unhappy or feeling happy at times, that is normal. That's part of the journey. And for me, it was helpful to read that because I'm looking forward to all the happiness that's kind of coming my way and I can feel it as you get older.
You just start finding joy in weird places. When was the the pits of your arc in your life? When was when were your heartiest years as it relates to happiness? Well, losing my mom was tough for me.
But I think that the pit for me, you're an entrepreneur. The highs are really high and the lows are really low. The closest I can equate it to is is having a business like having a kid. You can see the thing.
It looks, smells, and feels like you. And when it does well, it's just like when your kid scores a goal or is doing great or is doing happy. There's just no joy like that. When something comes, you have your world of work.
You have your world of friends. And you have kids. You have kids. You have to find this out.
When something goes wrong when you're kids, the whole universe shrinks to what is wrong with your kid. I mean, nothing else matters. And you just can't sleep. You're stressed.
You're upset. You feel failure on a cosmic level because this instinct that pours over us is if your kid is failing, you have failed on a more cosmic level because you haven't been able to protect that kid. It's the same way with a business. When your business fails, you just, it's impossible to remove yourself from that failure.
My lowest moment probably professionally was in the great financial recession of 2008. In 99, I was a young man and was wealthy on paper. I started several commerce companies. I didn't realize most of it was not my fault.
It was the market. And by the end of 2000, I was broke. I lost everything through the dot com crash. Cloud my way back to some level of economic security in 2007, smacked again in 2008, lost almost everything.
And then my young son or my oldest had the poor judgment to come marching out of my girlfriend. So I was broke. And I had a son, a newborn. And a combination of the disappointment professionally, where I was now four years old and wasn't economically where I thought it would be, it was really upsetting and disappointing.
And then the stress, when you're a dude with no spouse or kids, you can kind of dance between the raindrops. If you need to, you can sleep on a couch. I was like, I can make a living. I can sport myself.
But living in New York, having what felt like economic failure, business failure, and a kid. And it's like, okay, my failures are now. Those kids failures, that was really stressful. It was also very motivating.
You know, I'd made some money. So I had made enough money to live kind of a, kind of a fake, wealthy life. I had nice clothes and a nice apartment. I could go to St.
Bart's. I had just enough money to give the illusion of success. But there's no faking it when you have kids. This person is dependent upon you.
I was living in New York. It's impossible not to make a good living in New York with kids. And so that was wildly stressful. It was like, okay, this is no longer about me.
When I fail economically, I'm failing as a species. I'm failing as a dad. That was a rough time. 2008, 2009 was rough, but it was also very motivating because I got very serious and started working very hard.
I didn't see my kids. We had another kid two and a half years later. I didn't see much of my kids until the age of five. I, you know, I tried to get home for a bath time, but I was very focused on getting my household back on economic firm footing again, but that was very stressful.
That's the biggest of a professional thing. What about your biggest personal pits? Pit. What did it teach you?
Oh, I don't know. I think are you both your parents still alive? Yeah. Okay.
So one of them will get sick and die. And that is the heart. The two things I found that kind of turn you into an adult are when you lose one of your parents. Which is the harshness of it is so unthinkable.
As a species, we have an inability to wrap our head around death for good reason. Otherwise we all just be freaked out and not willing to take risks and not hunt animals for fear. They might kill us and not take risks and never go outside. So we purposely can't understand it.
We can't imagine it. You can't imagine that this person is going to be gone and it is over. That is devastating. And it also just brings this harshness of life, like really president in front of you.
But at the same time, it creates tremendous perspective that, wow, the mortality rates 100%, my kids are going to have the same tragedy when I die. And I think I can't liberate you and realize that, okay, if I feel embarrassed, if I feel scared about risks, if I'm beating myself up over a mistake I made, you know what? It really doesn't matter that much. You should be kinder to yourself.
You should be more forgiving. There's great work by my colleague and I'm out of altar on palliative care where he surveys people who are weeks from the end. And they have a lot of regrets. They wish they lived the life they want to live, whether it was more open about their sexuality, being who they wanted to be with, going to the career they wanted to go with.
They were living their lives or other people as a huge regret or society. They wish they'd stayed in better contact with friends. But more than anything their number one regret is they wish they'd been less harsh on themselves. And that is, again, life isn't about what happens to you, it's how you respond to what happens to you.
And when someone dies and you realize the finite nature of life and we all have the same incoming, I think it's liberating because we realize that when you say something stupid and bored meaning, even when you have a business fail, when you pick a stock and it gets cut in half in two weeks and you're just hating on yourself. When you say something stupid at a party, when you say something unkind unwittingly and you're just like, Jesus, what was I think, and you're just beating yourself up, realize it's the person you're worried about, what they think of you, your situation, it's going to go really fast and it's going to be over. And all you're going to have is the people that miss you. You don't, you need to forgive yourself and you need to realize what feels important in the moment isn't that important.
And I found it very liberating. I was devastated losing a parent and was really my only parent, but at the same time it just gave me a lot of perspective. And then I think the second moment in your life we start to grow up is when you have a kid because up until that moment, and I'm naturally a selfish person, it comes very easily to me. But it's the first time in your life you're more concerned with someone else's well-being.
And it's, it's a strange sense to want someone else to be more concerned about someone else's well-being than yours. I mean, truly more concerned. And it's somewhat liberating. When I was your age on Friday, I'd start getting stressed like, what fabulous people am I hanging out with?
What amazing thing am I doing? Well, how can I hang around more interesting and hotter people? How can I have better experiences, sex more sex with hotter people, make more money, make more money? Now it's like, okay, we got to soccer practice Saturday morning, we got to play dates out.
It's all of a sudden just about them. I mean, it's like just about them. And for the first few years, that takes some adapting, but what you find, I find it's relaxing now to be more focused on someone else. I find it is relaxing and rewarding instead of just all you all the time, right?
So losing someone and gaining someone I think are the kind of key moments where you sort of grow up. I mean, losing your parent is something that happens to everybody. The economic strain I have, most people would pray for. But personal troughs, I've been really blessed so far.