Welcome to the Happiness Podcast. I'm Dr. Robert Puff.

In 2001, there came out a movie called A Beautiful Mind. It did extremely well and won four

Academy Awards, which included Best Picture.

It's based on a book by the same title, and it's about John Nash, a mathematician who won the Nobel Prize and had schizophrenia.

Schizophrenia basically is a disease where you're hearing or seeing things that aren't

there, but you believe that they are, and they seem very real. In the movie, a beautiful mind,

you get a very clear description of what schizophrenia looks like. Normally, the visions or the auditory hallucinations are based upon

very negative things about the person struggling with schizophrenia. So in John Nash's case,

he was hearing things like he's a failure and he's never going to amount to anything.

And even though this man was one of the most brilliant mathematicians of the 20th century,

was able to attend and excel at the top universities in the world on mathematics and end

winning the Nobel Prize, if you study his life, part of his hallucinations were

that he was a failure. And even though the whole world really felt that he was a brilliant man,

he struggled with, wondering, was he good enough? I share all this to emphasize the importance

of our thoughts. Our thoughts really matter and are

extremely powerful. And even if the whole world disagrees with us, our thoughts or our thoughts,

and we're going to follow them. I remember once reading a study about models, the most beautiful

women in the world, and when they asked each one of them if they thought they were beautiful,

they said no. They felt that they were average, and they had some flaw that stood out that really

bothered them.

You may be asking yourself,

but how is this relevant to me, Dr. Puff?

...