Welcome to the happiness podcast. I'm Dr. Robert Puff. I live on the west coast of the United States in Southern California near Los Angeles.

Because of our proximity to the Asian countries, we do a lot of trading with them.

If you ever get a chance, we have a port here that takes in these huge, gigantic ships that come from Asia.

They've been traveling for a long time and when they get here, something really interesting happens.

Because they have so much momentum because they're so large traveling through the ocean.

When they get within about 25 miles of Los Angeles Port, they actually turn out their

engines and coast all the way in so that when they travel those remaining 25 miles, they don't have to do anything, but coast.

The tugboats are there to help make sure they get to the right destination.

I like this image of the cargo ships because I think it helps us understand

better human behavior. When we're born, we're much more like a canoe because we have our genetics and that sets a little bit in motion

but mostly we haven't been exposed to anything yet so there's not much directing us and we can

go a lot of different directions in life. But as time goes on, we start

creating habits, we start creating practices, and those things become like a boat in the water. With time, we become bigger and bigger and bigger and the longer we live, say into our 30s and

then into our 40s, 50s, 60s, 70s, however long we live, in many ways the bigger we get like the ship metaphorically.

What I mean by that is our habits become like a ship with a lot of momentum.

The longer we've done something. The longer we're probably going to be that way, the

more it's going to take to change our direction. And if we just coast, if we turn off our

engines metaphorically, we're definitely going to keep doing what we've been doing,

especially if we've been doing it for a very long time.

Perhaps when we hit retirement age, we're going to be much like the cargo ships. The direction we're going to go is going to keep

going that way and even if we try to change it, it's going to take a lot of work to create change.

So now, well over 30 years of helping people change, change their lives to become more happy,

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