#033 - Carl Cederstrom - What Happens When You Dedicate A Year To Optimising Your Life & The Happiness Fantasy

Modern Wisdom

Chris Williamson

Society & Culture, Health & Fitness

4.6 • 5.9K Ratings

🗓️ 8 October 2018

⏱️ 70 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Carl Cederstrom is an Associate Professor at Stockholm Business School, an author of several books and a writer for The Guardian, The New York Times and Harvard Business Review. Carl dedicated a full year of his life to immersing himself in the Human Optimisation Movement. This is the equivalent of going completely dick & balls on a 12 months of back to back Life Hacks episodes and Carl's experience is both hilarious and insightful. We also discuss his new book The Happiness Fantasy which analyses society's obsession with becoming happy and offers a fascinating alternative view to what we should be aiming for in our lives. Expect to learn why optimising masturbation is a difficult process, how you can write an entire book in a single month, what he found to be the single most effective optimisation strategy and why happiness might be a redundant word. Further Reading: Follow Carl on Twitter: https://twitter.com/cederstromcarl The Happiness Fantasy Book: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Happiness-Fantasy-Carl-Cederstr%C3%B6m/dp/1509523812/ Desperately Seeking Self Improvement: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Desperately-Seeking-Self-Improvement-Optimization-Movement/dp/1944869395 Check out everything I recommend from books to products and help support the podcast at no extra cost to you by shopping through this link - https://www.amazon.co.uk/shop/modernwisdom - Get in touch. Join the discussion with me and other like minded listeners in the episode comments on the MW YouTube Channel or message me... Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/ModernWisdomPodcast Email: https://www.chriswillx.com/contact Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hi friends, we are back again and this week we're talking about life hacks but
0:06.0	perhaps with a little bit of a different angle. Karl Cedarsstrom is an associate
0:10.9	professor at Stockholm Business School, part of Stockholm University and he's
0:15.4	writing has appeared in the New York Times, the Guardian, the Atlantic and Harvard
0:19.6	Business Review amongst many others. Karl spent 12 months immersed in the human
0:26.1	optimization movement, him and his co-author André Spicer dedicated one month of
0:32.6	the year to a different area of their life and trying to optimize it as much as
0:37.2	possible. This is the absolute zenith Mount Everest of trying to optimize your life
0:44.6	and the experiences that Karl went through have elicited some really really
0:49.0	interesting results. He'll tell us exactly what out of 12 months of pure
0:54.0	optimization was the single best tool that he came across, how he was able to
0:59.8	optimize his sex, his relationships, his vanity, his looks, his finances and a
1:04.5	whole bunch of other things and then we move on to his new book which is called
1:08.1	the Happiness Fantasy. Now recently we've discussed happiness quite a bit
1:12.8	with Susanna Hallenon and in the Q&A that I did with Johnny and Yusuf and it's
1:18.3	an interesting to see Karl's approach to it. He makes a strong case that
1:23.3	happiness isn't something that any of us should be aiming for and that there
1:27.1	are much more worthy terms that would make us much more fulfilled and content
1:33.4	within life. I'm going to leave it there. I won't present any spoilers for the
1:37.6	rest of the episode but I wanted to give another shout out to Scott McGrath who
1:42.1	sent in a screenshot of him sending out on another company internal internet, one
1:48.1	of our podcast episodes. Now thanks very much for that Scott. I really appreciate it.
	...

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