📚 50 Book Giveaway, Finding Happiness, Hormozi's Secrets, and more.

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This is a global giveaway, the winner will be announced in this newsletter on March 2nd, 2025. Good luck everyone!

Official giveaway rules and terms

🎧 How To Use AI To Read More & Better:

It’s an app called ElevenReader and here’s why it’s so cool:

• You can access thousands of ebooks and audiobooks in the app for free.

• You can read an ebook and listen to the audio narration in sync which is great for retention.

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And the best part?

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Check out the ElevenReader app here.

📚 Book Summary:

This week’s book is “Life In Three Dimensions” by Shigehiro Oishi, PhD.

Dr. Oishi is one of the world’s foremost experts on happiness.

In his book, he shares new research on happiness, what actually makes for a good life, and how making happiness your ultimate goal can backfire.

Here are 3 lessons from the book:

📖

1) The Paradox of Happiness

Most people believe that the key to happiness is to focus on yourself and hit big goals, but research shows the opposite.

Decades of research suggests that people overestimate the happiness that major events will bring while underestimating the effects of minor ones.

The effects of a major accomplishment, like a promotion or buying a new car, seem to disappear within six months.

Happiness instead, is more likely to come from smaller but more frequent events, like having coffee with your partner most mornings or getting a workout in with a friend most evenings.

Research also shows that trying to make others happy has a higher impact on your happiness than trying to make yourself happy.

Spending money on others or writing letters of gratitude to others, had a better chance of increasing happiness than spending money on yourself or writing a letter to yourself.

One explanation for this is that studies show “happiness is the product of close relationships rather than personal accomplishments…happiness is not personal success, but interpersonal success,” writes Dr. Oishi.

In other words, it’s the quality of our relationships that truly bring us happiness.

And by investing our time and energy in others, we improve the quality and quantity of those close relationships which is what really matters in life.

📖

2) The Tradeoffs of Happiness

One of Dr. Oishi’s main arguments in the book is that happiness shouldn’t be your ultimate goal in life.

Happiness is only one part of the equation, there’s also meaning and psychological richness:

• Happiness focuses on joy and comfort

• Meaning focuses on impact and direction

• Psychological richness focuses on novelty and play

Each dimension has it’s tradeoffs.

Dr. Oishi tells a story about how he and his wife wanted to convert part of their yard into a brick patio.

They got a few estimates, with the lowest price being $9,000.

But after checking the cost of materials, they figured they could do it themselves for about $4,000.

So they watched a bunch of YouTube videos and went to the hardware store to buy shovels, bricks, and tools.

The rest is your typical DIY horror-story.

Carrying 300 bags of gravel and sand along with 2,000 bricks was literally backbreaking work. There were many days that Dr. Oishi couldn’t get up because of the back pain.

It took 3 months of constant, hard work to complete the project. Given how many hours they spent on the project, he and his wife didn’t save much money in the end, either.

However, years later, he and his wife still talk about the memories from that project and joke about the “great idea” to do it themselves.

Had he just hired a construction company to build the patio, he would’ve been happier.

But since he didn’t, he experienced a psychologically rich experience that he can look back on for the rest of his life. He also finds the patio more meaningful since he built it himself.

Now the point here isn’t to do everything yourself, but rather that you have a choice on how you want to live your life.

Staying in a resort on vacation might bring you more happiness and comfort, but going backpacking through the country will likely bring more psychological richness and adventure.

Buying a wooden table might make you happier, but building the table yourself will likely be more meaningful.

There’s no one right answer on how to live life, just tradeoffs.

📖

3) The Love of Your Life Is 15 Miles Away (or Less)

In the book, Dr. Oishi talks about the positive role romantic relationships play in happiness and goes on a fascinating tangent about finding love.

He mentions a study done in Philadelphia in 1931 that looked at 890 couples.

The most famous finding from that study was the discovery that over 50% of the couples had lived within 20 blocks of each other before marriage and that 33.5% of them had lived within 5 blocks of each other!

Now you might say that study is great but a lot has changed since 1931.

But wait…

Professor Karen Haandrikman had the same thought so she looked at the entire population of the Netherlands who lived together in 2004 and found 289,248 couples who lived together.

After a lot of research and surveys, Haandrikman found that 10.5% of the couples were born less than 1 mile from one another. And about 50% of the couples had picked a partner who had been born 15 miles or less from their own birthplace.

Which is hilarious because my girlfriend and I were born exactly 15 miles from one another.

So although the world might seem huge, chances are that the love of your life is closer to you than you think.

✅ Actionable Advice

1) If you want to be happier, focus on:

• Spending money on other people rather than yourself.

• Investing time and energy into relationships and friendships.

• Small and frequent interactions over big but rare career goals.

2) There are 3 parts to a fulfilling life:

• Happiness = Comfort, joy, security

• Meaning = Purpose, direction, impact

• Psychological Richness = Novelty, play, exploration

3) There’s a 50% chance the love of your life lives within 15 miles of you:

• Set your dating radius to 1 mile and then expand it over time.

💎 Weekly Gem:

Podcast: Alex Hormozi Reveals His $100M Writing System

Alex is an entrepreneur who’s worth $100M+ and the author of several incredible books including “$100M Offers” which has sold 1+ million copies.

In this podcast, he breaks down his writing process, how he decides what to cut, how he tests his content to reach more people, and many more helpful writing tips.

It’s a must-watch episode for authors, marketers, and creators.

Thank you for your support, read on everyone!

-Alex W.