I remember the moment I realized my employees were happier than me. From the outside, I had it all: 50 education centers across 10 countries, thousands of students, several successful businesses. But while others clocked out at 6 p.m. and switched to their lives, my workday never ended.
Like almost every entrepreneur, I started my business for freedom: to travel, spend time with family, give gifts without counting. Money was supposed to be the road to that life, not the destination.
My way out began with a simple decision: I stopped carrying everything alone. I stepped out of operations and delegated what I had managed myself for years. And when I finally had time to live, not just work, I was able to articulate what had happened to me.
My wife helped. When everyone around us became obsessed with a healthy lifestyle, she said we were chasing the wrong thing: Running won’t make you happy if you’re running in the wrong direction. Not healthy—happy. That’s how what I had been feeling got its name: happy lifestyle. Here are the three rules it rests on.
1. Seek contrast, not altitude
Imagine two identical glasses of water. You drink one at home after a workout and immediately forget about it. The other, after two days in the Sahara, when you’re running on fumes.
In both cases you simply drank water. But after the Sahara you crossed from “dying of thirst” to “alive”—and that leap between states created the feeling of happiness. I call it the delta: the gap between where you were and where you ended up.
The steeper the climb, the sharper the feeling at the top. But we quickly settle into any peak—psychologists call this hedonic adaptation. The new altitude becomes the norm, and you need a fresh starting point. That’s why people run marathons, or go on expeditions or retreats, deliberately pulling themselves out of familiar comfort to experience the delta again.
But do you really have to pay that price every time?
Three years ago I broke both bones in my ankle and ended up on crutches. Months later, I took my first pain-free steps, and to this day, when I recall that moment, I feel joy simply from being able to walk.
To feel that happiness, I don’t need to break my leg again. I just need to mentally return to that period for an instant and measure today from that point. Modern psychology confirms that this technique raises our sense of happiness in the present.
I use it every day. Today I spend more than half the year traveling and do only what I love—ideas and strategy, not operations. That kind of work could easily become the new normal, but I remember the version of me glued to work chats around the clock, and from that vantage point today’s freedom feels fresh every time.
2. Get rich in the right currency
I know a serial entrepreneur who has enough money for several lifetimes. But the only thing you can talk to him about is business. No friends, family somewhere in the background, and nothing outside of work sparks any interest. Money turned from a tool into the sole objective, and everything else was pushed to “later”—which never came. He got rich, but in the wrong currency.
So what is the right currency?
The longest-running study of human life—85 years of observation at Harvard—sought to answer what kind of wealth actually makes people happier. Generation after generation, the answer is the same: The people who grow happier over time are not those who earned the most, but those with the strongest relationships—with a partner, friends, family. That is the currency that doesn’t depreciate.
3. Don’t adopt someone else’s unhappiness
You’ve probably noticed: You spend an hour with someone who talks exclusively about their problems, and after the conversation you feel drained, even though everything in your own life is fine. Psychologists call this emotional contagion. We automatically absorb and synchronize the emotions of those around us without realizing it.
The body doesn’t distinguish whose experience it is. Someone else’s distress triggers the same physiological response as your own. In a University of Konstanz experiment, participants who merely observed someone else’s stress showed elevated cortisol, the stress hormone.
The third rule of a happy lifestyle: Be careful about the people you surround yourself with. Someone else’s dissatisfaction with life can become yours.
This isn’t about turning your back on people when they’re struggling. Everyone goes through hard times and needs someone to listen, and being that person is what closeness is for. It’s different with people who are unhappy not because something happened, but because that’s how they see the world. They’ll always find a reason to say everything’s terrible, and they have no intention of changing any of it. They aren’t looking for your support—they’re waiting for you to agree: The world is unfair, and there’s no point in trying.
Savor the moment
The three rules above are about creating conditions for happiness. But there is one more, the hardest of all: learning to recognize and savor happiness while you’re experiencing it. As Viktor Frankl wrote, happiness cannot be pursued—it ensues. But only if you are attentive enough not to miss it.
The paradox is that when we are truly happy, we don’t think about happiness—we just live.
