Welcome to the Brian Biffini Show, where we explore the mindsets, motivation and methodologies of success.

My name is David Lally, I'm the producer of the show, and I know we may be in challenging times,

but that's just why we've been working on shows to keep us upbeat and focused on the good stuff. Let's listen in.

Well, the top of the morning to you, and welcome to the program. Today I'm very excited to have our good friend Sean Acre on the program.

Sean has spoken on our mastermind summit. If you haven't seen his TED Talk, absolutely check that out. I know over 20 million people have seen that.

As PBS special Sean is the best selling author whose works include before happiness, the happiness advantage, and his latest book, which will get into a little bit today, is big potential.

He also recently launched a 21 day happiness course with Oprah Winfrey, and is working on bringing the happiness research into the schools of Flint, Michigan. So Sean, I'm sorry, it took a global pandemic together together this time, but welcome to the show.

Well, thank you for having me on. It's crazy times here. You have some great info and some great stuff for us at a time like this, but perhaps before we get into that, let's do a little backstory and tell us a little bit about where you're from.

I know I heard some of the story of you about your dad and you and your sister Amy and all of that stuff. Maybe you could fill the folks in a little bit on where you're from and what it was like growing up in the A-Core household.

I grew up in Waco, Texas. I lived there for 18 years, and this is the Waco of the 80s and 90s. I love living there. My father was a neuroscientist at Baylor University, so I grew up, you know, him hooking me up to brainwave machines and you actually literally tested my brainwaves in utero on my very patient way to patient mom.

I grew up in a household where we were fascinated by what the brain is able to do. I then applied to Harvard on a dare and somehow got in. I was in Validictorian in my high school in Waco, Texas. I was a volunteer firefighter and was shocked and excited to get in the Harvard, and then we couldn't afford it.

And then three weeks later, I got a military scholarship from the Navy that paid for the whole thing. So suddenly I got this opportunity to leave Waco to see the world and to be part of the military and to experience Harvard. And while I was at Harvard, I just assumed everyone would be so grateful to be there.

It's an incredible opportunity in this amazing school. And yet 80% of the students were going through depression, 10% of them contemplated suicide. And I got hooked on the question of what is it that creates happiness and meaning and joy within our lives.

And what we were finding was the people who were the most positive ones when they could become more positive. We saw all their business and educational outcomes improve.

So happiness was this incredible advantage, but it wasn't being accessed by so many people, even in this incredible environment. So ever since then, I've traveled to 50 countries doing this research, trying to figure out how do we create happiness, how do we spread it out to other people, and how do we use happiness to be coming advantage within our lives.

And I think everyone always thinks, hey, that person has no excuse to be unhappy, but I have reasons. So you look at it in people in Harvard typically are coming from a lot of backgrounds.

Sometimes if there's great resources and wealth, and sometimes it's academic excellence and so on and so forth. And you would think, man, if any group's got to be content in life, it's got to be the folks at the top of the ladder. But you found every day and helping people out there that even the folks with the most privilege and so on and so forth,

it wasn't a case that they were that happy. In fact, in many cases, it was the opposite. Yeah, you're so right. So I was a freshman proctor, which meant as a graduate student in exchange for room and board, they give you 30 freshmen a year and you live in the dorms with them and you count loans during that first year of being in that hyper competitive environment.

So you eat all your meals with them, you advise them, you bring them together for study breaks, you watch Dawson's Creek with them, whatever you have to do to get them to come together. And what we found was that while people were coming from such different backgrounds, they were all in this amazing space, but they're happy to slow those were not anywhere what we expected.

You know, later on in life, I went and did research working with a shanty town in Soweto, South Africa for the school that was there serving the shanty town that had dirt floors, they had almost no books.

And the students I met there were so thrilled to be doing school work. They just thought it was the greatest privilege because their parents didn't have it. And then I fly back to Harvard and I hear these students playing misery poker, seeing who had the worst hand compared to who had slept the least who had the most papers who had the highest levels of stress.

And that's exactly what we've seen in the business world as well that some of the people that I started working with at the beginning were the banks.

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