Most people burnout chasing success, but what if fun is actually the secret key to sustainable growth.

Welcome to today's conversation, where we challenge everything you thought you knew about happiness, success, and well-being.

If you're a high performer and ambitious entrepreneur or just someone feeling stuck in that burnout cycle, this episode is for you.

My guest is Dr. Mike Rucker, a behavioral scientist and the author of The Fun Habit.

He's here to flip the script on toxic hustle culture and show us why fun isn't a distraction.

It's a necessity.

And by the end, you'll walk away with a fresh take on how your relationship with joy,

leisure, and play could be the key to breaking through or holding you back.

Let's unpack the science of fun and see how these small moments of joy build a foundation

for real meaning and resilience.

Something that people might not appreciate on the surface is the fact that you're a businessman.

You have, you had several entrepreneurial endeavors. And now the book that you've just written is on fun and so I think people are going to they're

kind of confused here Mike so what led you to talk about fun so I was lucky enough to be a

charter member of the International Positive Psychology Association so when you know segment know, Sugglement and Cheek Set Me High came forth, I mean, I guess it was really Seggleman. You know, he had his book, Authentic Happiness coming out. And but, you know, people have been following Cheek's set me eyes work for a while. And I guess just to back up a little bit for folks that don't know what positive psych is, right? It's essentially

a facet of psychology that was brought forth because we had all of these tools from psychology

that could lead to betterment, but we weren't using them except for poor mental health up until

about the turn of the millennium, right? And so what these folks did with a bunch of other folks like myself and

academics and practitioners is we created this group to bring those forward, right? And so we're

talking about gratitude and mindfulness and flow and these things that can help anyone, you know,

with regards to better mental hygiene. At the onset, because we hadn't talked about happiness at all yet, we talked about that a lot, right?

And we were all like, hey, you know, we want to help people be more happy and we want to help people thrive.

What we didn't realize is paradoxically over indexing on this idea of happiness, we are making some of the most

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