Join us for a fascinating conversation with my guest, Mike Rucker, an organizational psychologist and behavioral scientist. Mike unveils the intriguing science of happiness and warns us about the risk of 'ornamental hygiene' that can emerge from excessively pursuing this emotion. His book, 'The Fun Habit,' serves as a guide to experience a life filled with happiness without obsessively quantifying it. Mike shares his journey into the field of positive psychology that started with the International Positive Psychology Association.
As we delve deeper, we explore the importance of autonomy and time affluence. Mike emphasizes the need for personalized approaches to support psychological well-being when common interventions fall short. We further discuss reclaiming agency and developing cognitive reserve to combat burnout. Fostering pro-social behavior and creating meaningful memories take center stage in our conversation.
In the final segment, Mike enlightens us about the difference between passive and active leisure. He explains the Hedonic Flexibility Principle and how curtailing unenjoyable activities can make room for purposeful leisure. As someone mentored by Michael Jervais, Mike also gives us a peek into his personal life and how he uses behavioral science to make activities fun, thereby improving engagement. This is a great opportunity to uncover these riveting topics with Mike Rucker, a beacon in the field of positive psychology.
If you liked this podcast
https://www.psychologytoday.com/intl/contributors/thomas-r-verny-md
Join us for a fascinating conversation with my guest, Mike Rucker, an organizational psychologist and behavioral scientist. Mike unveils the intriguing science of happiness and warns us about the risk of 'ornamental hygiene' that can emerge from excessively pursuing this emotion. His book, 'The Fun Habit,' serves as a guide to experience a life filled with happiness without obsessively quantifying it. Mike shares his journey into the field of positive psychology that started with the International Positive Psychology Association.
As we delve deeper, we explore the importance of autonomy and time affluence. Mike emphasizes the need for personalized approaches to support psychological well-being when common interventions fall short. We further discuss reclaiming agency and developing cognitive reserve to combat burnout. Fostering pro-social behavior and creating meaningful memories take center stage in our conversation.
In the final segment, Mike enlightens us about the difference between passive and active leisure. He explains the Hedonic Flexibility Principle and how curtailing unenjoyable activities can make room for purposeful leisure. As someone mentored by Michael Jervais, Mike also gives us a peek into his personal life and how he uses behavioral science to make activities fun, thereby improving engagement. This is a great opportunity to uncover these riveting topics with Mike Rucker, a beacon in the field of positive psychology.
If you liked this podcast
https://www.psychologytoday.com/intl/contributors/thomas-r-verny-md
Good morning. This is Pushing Boundaries, a podcast about pioneering research, breakthrough discoveries and unconventional ideas. I'm your host, Dr Thomas R Verny. My guest today is Mike Rucker, PhD with an MBA from the University of Southern California. If I say anything that is wrong, don't hesitate to correct me. Mike, okay, I'm sure you'll be fine, don't be so sure. He's a member of the American Psychological Association, an accredited member of the American College of Sports Medicine and charter member of the International Positive Psychology Association.
Speaker 1:Mike is an organizational psychologist and behavioral scientist. He currently serves as a senior leader at Active Wellness in San Francisco and is the author of the Fun Habit, which was recently published by Simon and Schuster. According to Mike fun isn't frivolous. It's vital for your well-being. His book is a step-by-step plan to bring more pleasure into your busy life. So before we get into the fun habit which I would like to, of course, I read on your website that your interest in this subject started in 2005, when you made a major commitment to fun as an intentional way of life, announcing the Live Life Love Project.
Speaker 2:Intentional, not international.
Speaker 1:Intentional? Yeah, I'm not. Austin Powers no perhaps international too, who knows, I know I like that Okay, I can't change it up. We'll add that to your bio, please. Please, tell me a little bit more about that. So what happened in 2005 that got you sort of on this journey?
Speaker 2:Yeah. So I think that's the culmination. You know, oftentimes when we look to creating bios, you know sound bites or coalescing of a lot of bullet points, right. And so I think that more is an ode to the fact that the International Positive Psychology Association was formed by a gentleman by the name of Dr Marty Sugglemann around that time and I got an invitation to be a part of that, my mentor. That got me into the world of psychology and again you said it.
Speaker 2:But oftentimes when I'm on a psychiatrist or psychological podcast, I like to make sure folks know I'm an organizational psychologist. I don't have a clinical background, although I've studied autonomy in the sense of the workplace quite significantly. But I was really interested in peak performance, my mentor, michael Gervais, who's known in that space. He was a clinical psychologist for the Seattle Seahawks and has a popular podcast himself called Finding Mastery. I just serendipitously got access to him when he was early in his career and he very much has stayed on that track right, and so I started drinking from his wisdom.
Speaker 2:But I soon found that this idea of peak performance didn't have a high resonance for me, especially because I had met Michael, because I was burnt out and so this budding field. You know, cheeks at Me High's flow is starting to become popular and Sugglemann's work, obviously and you know I could name drop a bunch of folks but people were starting to get interested and so for folks that don't know what positive psychology is, it's essentially a way to look at psychological tools for betterment, because up until that point right, we primarily looked at these tools of psychology to treat clinical outcomes, and so Sugglemann brought together folks from all sorts of walks of life, you know, to create this association, and that that happened in 2005. So that that's the ode to that date. When I started to look at, you know, sort of the corpus of the academic work and the other sort of, you know, a milestone although it's horrible to kind of frame it in that realm was 2016, 2017.
Speaker 2:I had essentially over optimized those tools, you know, where I had really created this overly, this over concern about my own happiness, and around that time my brother unexpectedly passed away from a pulmonary embolism, and so I was trying to use these tools of optimism and gratitude, sort of will, myself out of that malaise, to my own detriment. And so some of the book also impacts that, because around that time we've learned, and you're probably aware of this, but there's been a lot of research that, especially in the West, this over emphasis on happiness and always trying to be happy all the time has actually led to some. You know what we call ornamental hygiene, and certainly there's data suggests clinical outcomes as well.
Speaker 1:Yes.
Speaker 2:Was that a lot, I'm sorry.
Speaker 1:No, that's fine, that's fine. You said over-concerned about my happiness. I think you said that right, that's correct.
Speaker 2:And I really took that from the researcher in this area that I really like although her work certainly been replicated is Dr Iris Mouse out of University of California, Berkeley, and so I always like to clarify that the work in this field isn't necessarily valuing happiness or wanting people to flourish, wanting people to thrive. If you value happiness as an ideal and you want to foster that within your family unit, you want to design a life where it's abundant in your life, and that's certainly what I talk about in the book. There doesn't seem to be anything problematic in that area. It's that you know the kind of to boil it down to an internet meme, right, this idea of good vibes only when you create this dissonance, if you know you have a bad day and all of a sudden you're like, well, I'm not supposed to have bad days, right. Or you over quantify happiness, which we've done essentially with subject to well being, right, and in academia, that that serves a purpose, right.
Speaker 2:But when lay people kind of overlay this academic work and say, hey, let's look at your happiness on a scale of zero to 10.
Speaker 2:What happens when you create a life where you're always in that nine or 10 zone and you have a health event or you naturally have loss, because that's a part of life, right, there's no way to sort of go up. And then so, all of a sudden, the space so that you really enjoyed and you don't have the emotional flexibility to navigate these rough waters all of a sudden, can you know, send you down quite a downward spiral. In fact, you know, I, even though it was quite academic in nature your previous podcast was, you know, Steve out of UCLA talked about that in a lot of his research. Right, we know that this isn't just with regards to psychological impact, it actually begins to have physiological impact as well. So in that context, it becomes quite important to make sure that not only are we fostering emotional flexibility, but we're also finding a way where folks can find joy in the things that they do, rather than always kind of fixating, you know, on some sort of outcome where they're going to quote unquote arrive at happiness.
Speaker 1:So you are really advocating a more balanced view as opposed to the tyranny of positivity. That's correct. I was. I was reading the other day speaking of that. I was reading the other day about Samantha Irby, author of quietly hostile. Are you familiar with her at all?
Speaker 2:Vaguely. I'm not. I don't have a deep understanding.
Speaker 1:Well, well, neither do I, but I know this, that she's very overweight, and she said this is a quote. My body doesn't work right. It's hard to love it when it gives me so many issues. Also, can I just say the tyranny around loving yourself is bonkers to me.
Speaker 2:Well, and I think that's what's interesting in context, we might be jumping a little bit ahead, so feel free to reel me in.
Speaker 2:But I think another thing I unpack in the book is that a lot of us look at these broad based interventions, yeah, and can find discomfort in the fact they're not working for us, and don't realize that when we're talking about applied science, all of this is in a normal curve.
Speaker 2:So the one that I think has gotten highlighted the most from the field of positive psychology is Sonny Lubomirsky out of University of Riverside excuse me, uc Riverside looking at gratitude and how we know, gratitude is an essential tool. It's certainly fundamental to helping folks support their psychological well-being. But this idea that you create an intervention where you force someone or strongly suggest you find three things a day to be grateful for, if you find yourself in a position like the person that you mentioned, and that's not necessarily an appropriate response to what you're dealing with you can actually cause moral injury and psychological harm. So that's another thing I'm trying to bring light to is that if something's not necessarily working for you, then chuck it right. But ultimately, I believe that most of us do want to find joy in the things that we're doing and if we look at those things critically generally, we can improve our circumstances.
Speaker 1:So in your book, the fun habit, what are some of the sort of main points that you emphasize in your book? What should people do to get into the fun habit?
Speaker 2:Yeah, so at the broadest lens it's really about time affluence, right, we know from a lot of studies and, like I said, my academic research was primarily in this idea of autonomy. So I looked at it first within a workplace environment and we know there's a pretty direct line. There's some causal studies and certainly a ton of correlative studies that suggest when you lack autonomy within your work life, you see both poor physiological outcomes as well as, obviously, psychological outcomes. So I was like what about that construct within a broader sense? Right, because we look at fun oftentimes in a lot of the research is done in play in an academic environment, whether that be schools, both at the high school level and collegiate level. But with regards to hedonic tone and how that can improve sort of your understanding of how you have agency and autonomy in your life, I saw a big research gap and so in the book I look at that one how can we increase your time affluence? Because we know that it has a positive correlation. Again, looking back at this construct of autonomy and to get us to the starting line, it essentially is at a micro level. How do you become aware of how you're spending your time in any given week? Because I think a lot of adults don't realize how habitualized their life is, especially folks in what we call the sandwich generation. Right, and for folks that are not aware of that term, it's people that are caring for children and also aging adults, which is really a phenomenon that is pretty unique to this era. We're having kids later than we ever have, and we also have parents that are living longer than they ever have, and so there's this cohort of folks in the sandwich generation that have never existed in modern history. There's some of the most time for and burnt out folks ever, and so figuring out ways to mitigate that becomes important, and one of the first things is to figure out how can you reclaim agency and autonomy over how you're doing things, because a lot of times we can't reorganize your schedule in a profound way. That opens up a lot of these opportunities.
Speaker 2:But we can reframe the fact that if you do take time off the table for yourself, oftentimes you'll approach the things that you have to do with more vigor and vitality and the things that you have to do as kind of a second step. Oftentimes you're doing it through the lens of I have to do it. Sometimes in the literature we'll call this through the lens of a sense of duty, when really you can reorganize those things and still accomplish the task outcome, but do it in a way that is enjoyable for you. And so, you know, oftentimes we'll talk about things like passive and active leisure, right, and so an example that I think that highlights this well, again, you know, through the lens of parenting are folks that watch their kids just sitting on a bench. Essentially, you know, engaging in social media really just to pacify the time when, instead, if they figured out something that they would actually enjoy doing, because they don't like spending time at the park, they could find something that all three of them could do, right, and so now it's an active activity, it's creating pro-social behavior with your kids.
Speaker 2:So, if you believe the work of Dr Paul Zach and others, it's releasing more oxytocin which makes us feel connected and really does sort of limit some of the limitations of the ego.
Speaker 2:And then it creates an index of memories that you'll actually remember, because what we understand from neuroscience is that when you aren't really in the moment so again you know, kind of just mindlessly scrolling social media or you just don't want to be where your feet are you tend to not encode those memories, right, and so you lack any benefit of neuroplasticity because you know that encoding is not happening.
Speaker 2:And if you really have habituated your behavior, where everything is routine, we know that those memories tend to be stored in sort of a single cognitive unit, right, so you know. An example of that is do you remember the hundred times that you drove to work? Or do you remember the one way and that you probably did it about a hundred times, right? But if you drive a hundred different, unique ways to work, you might not remember every one, but you're certainly creating memories that we believe leads to cognitive reserve, which ultimately could stave off cognitive decline later in life. So I just gave you a bullet list of reasons why this becomes fruitful, right? One, potentially, you know pro-social behavior, which leads to a better balance of neurochemicals, this idea that we're connected to something bigger than ourselves, so that experiences are meant to be felt as a unit, and you know, in more of a collective experience. And then also, you know, potentially, these cognitive benefits as well.
Speaker 1:You said that those kinds of experiences create cognitive reserve. What is meant by that? What is exactly meant by that?
Speaker 2:So again, it goes back to that encoding of information, right?
Speaker 2:If you look at your brain as a hard drive, if again you have a single event, we'll go back to you know, driving to work, that's really.
Speaker 2:You're only using a finite part of that of that hard drive, right? And so what we believe is that if you don't have a ton of you know sorry to use kind of a casual term but if we don't have a host of interesting memories within our brain that are all stored in kind of different places, then ultimately the brain will start to whittle back because it doesn't need, you know, all those neurons that weren't put into play. And so what cognitive reserve means is that you have created all of these neural pathways by, you know, learning new things, by keeping an open mind, by having a host, this tapestry, this mosaic of different experiences, and since all of those things need to be stored, right, that we believe that those neural pathways have a benefit later in life. You know, if you are kind of in the throes of cognitive decline because they're, the body is able to put them to use, you know, to stave off memory deficiencies.
Speaker 1:Okay, that sounds reasonable and logical, but is there any evidence for that?
Speaker 2:Yes, there absolutely is. What's the evidence? The evidence is this idea again of cognitive reserve right, and so we know that people that have this tapestry again you know. So it really does need to be novel. When I first entered this space, I was working for a company called Scientific Brain Training. They were out of France but they were competing with brain game companies like Lemosody out of Stanford, and so we believe that any sort of novel experience would lead to this kind of cognitive reserve right.
Speaker 2:What was later found, because that work wasn't replicatable, is that that specificity. So again, going back to that idea of routine, it wasn't creating these neural pathways, it was essentially creating strong neural pathways, not new ones, but strong ones, and because you were learning a task, specific skill. And so what we now know is later in life that doesn't necessarily lead to protection against cognitive reserve. We'll find folks that are suffering from things like cognitive decline or Alzheimer's, that will be able to do those tasks really well but don't necessarily have the ability to maintain their memory. But the folks that have created a mosaic so learned a lot of different things, adventure through life and have a host of different experiences.
Speaker 2:There's some science to suggest that, also the ability to have an empathetic view to others. So I don't remember the research specifically, but I believe the intervention and it could be a small sample size. I'm always careful here. But I know that there was an interesting study where they had older adults go and listen to opposing political parties and try and just sympathize with that view rather than sort of being trenched in their viewpoint and kind of want to be combative. So with that prime and it was shown to have a potential benefit. So but the main idea here is to have a cluster of novel experiences. So again going back to that hard drive analogy right that you're creating these neural pathways that then can get used later in life once things start to denigrate.
Speaker 1:So, just like we know that it's important to have diverse bacteria in your gut, so what you're saying is that it's important to have diverse experiences in your life in order to continue to function well in terms of your brain activity.
Speaker 2:I would say it's more prophylactic. I don't one. I'm not a neuroscientist, so all I'm doing is regurgitating essentially what was a literature review for that chapter of the book. But it seems to be more prophylactic. I mean, we're really at the cusp of understanding cognitive decline and certainly it's an emerging science. I think just this year we had really the first drug that might actually be impactful. I mean, we're so far from really understanding. At first we thought it was a facet of diabetes, then we thought it was telomeres, then we thought it was DNA health. So I think there's certainly some really interesting schools of thought.
Speaker 2:I have a loose association with the Buck Institute, the Bay Area, that's doing interesting basic science in that space, but again it's kind of the wild, wild west. But what we do seem to have data to support the idea that, again, if you have lived a life where you've tried to learn new things, you've tried to engage in activities that you enjoy, it tends to be a prophylactic against this. So there are correlative studies to suggest that it can add as a protectant. Is that because it's a Cedicoline issue? Is it again strong neural pathways and the variety of those, rather than them being strengthened by action and specificity. I'm really butting up at the edge of my pay grade there.
Speaker 1:That's fine, you're doing great. So, coming back to your book and what you said about a few minutes ago, so do you advise in your book that your readers should perhaps keep a log for a week in terms of how they spend their time and then look at it carefully to see how they can improve the fun time, the happiness time?
Speaker 2:Yeah, so I have a basic model in there. Us Orgps folks love four quadrant models and so it's really an exercise of hey, can I borrow your watch so I can tell you what time it is Right? Yes, you know, there's only 168 hours in any given week. Hopefully you're sleeping at least 50 to 56 hours of those, and so you really only have to kind of log just over 100 hours within that week. And so, even though that's not the most fun exercise in the book, being mindful of how you've habituated your activity generally always yields low hanging fruit, because many adults, when you're like you know I can pause it. You know, based on stats, that 70 to 80% of your week is habituated and most people will push against that, you know, until they do this type of exercise. And often what is unearthed is that there is an immense amount of passive leisure within your schedule. And again, I'm not yielding this at any given listener, right? I'm just saying, as you know, kind of you know general anecdotes that there's always some sort of insight that comes out of that exercise Like wow, you know, it could be that you're habitually using social media, it could be.
Speaker 2:Wow, I didn't understand that. I'm in email, you know, 15 hours out of my week. It could be. I have a relationship of convenience where I just don't want to do this. It's just, I didn't realize that I had a choice. It could be the anecdote of the parent that realized you know, I just don't like going to the park. It's just, that's been our routine. Let me recapture my ability to change that. It could be wow, I don't have a date with my partner on the schedule and we haven't done anything together, you know, for four months. No wonder there might be some strain, you know, within the two of us. So whatever the insight is for you is going to be specific to your situation. But I have found very few examples where someone's like, wow, this was really illuminating. And then you know, you can figure out, what can we do about it. And one of the first steps is generally you want to see what you can stop doing.
Speaker 2:Because I think another facet of what you know sometimes is referred to as positive. You know toxic positivity is let's just pile more things on your busy to do list. Oh, you're burnt out. Well, here, let's get you to meditate five hours a week. Right, I learned that doing my practicum as a doctoral student.
Speaker 2:I was brought in because of my background in positive psychology to help physicians with burnout and the CMO, and earnest had, you know, the best of intentions, but all of the tools in our toolkit were essentially overlaying more time poverty on, you know, a vocation that is one of the most time poor, especially here in the States, right when, you know again, a lot of them are evaluated based on load rather than outcome, although hopefully that's slowly but surely changing here with the CMS, and so that was something that I've always taken to heart when we are looking to do this work. How can we create the space so that you don't feel like this is something that you need to take on? It goes back to what Dr Luba-Mursky uncovered when you have, you deliver broad-based interventions that might not be a good fit for your particular, for the person that you're working with, how can we reduce the things that really aren't bringing you joy? I call these agonizing and yielding activities, some of the activities that take a lot of energy, but what's more insidious is what are the things that don't take a lot of energy but are essentially keeping you out of an extremely negative valent state? For folks that don't know that word it's a fancy word.
Speaker 2:In psychology that means are you enjoying things or you not? When you're not enjoying your time, it can result in things like boredom, mild annoyance. If you can pacify those feelings, sometimes you're tricked into feeling like you are enjoying your time. When you really look at that critically, like I wasn't enjoying my time, I was just out of boredom now, so it felt better than boredom felt. When you look at that critically, like well, let's take those activities out and move them into doing things that really do bring you joy, because those tend to be infectious. The big light bulb moment for me when I was putting this work together because I was approaching it more as a behavioral scientist how can we manipulate the variables of your environment, the people that you're with the activities that you're doing, or potentially even the environment that you're doing them in?
Speaker 2:I landed on a piece of research out of MIT, stanford and Harvard that was like wow, okay, so this isn't just conjecture. This is clearly something that does have an immense benefit, but the benefit is down the road and so it's hard to actualize. The concept here is called the Hadonic Flexibility Principle. You can Google it. I'll just give it a broad stroke right now.
Speaker 2:What these researchers found is that, if the crux of the research was to look, are we truly pleasure seeking animals? Because that's always brought up in philosophy from young on out. They wanted to see. Is that true, or are most of the things that were motivated to do truly through this lens of pleasure? What they found out is if you are in a state of malaise or discomfort then yes, statistically you have a higher propensity to seek out forms of escapism, things like drinking, poor uses of time.
Speaker 2:But for the folks that were deliberate about having fun, so engaging things that really lit them up, these were the folks that stopped looking for fun things because their fun cup was full and actually were the ones that showed up the next day with more vigor and vitality to take on the harder challenges. Paradoxically, they were way more productive than the folks that have filled their lives with busy work. But I think one of the really fun things about the study and it was huge right, 20,000 sample size it came from time use studies. But it's not one of these casual inferences thematic analysis studies. This was Dr Tuck, who's now at Oxford as one of the leaders in statistical analysis. He did a lot of the work for COVID out of the EU. What they found is that these folks not only are more productive, but they have the cognitive resilience to be innovative.
Speaker 2:What we know is when you're burnt out sometimes it's referred to as ego depletion you tend to have to go through life using the heuristics and algorithms that have served you. It goes back to that specificity because those things are really comfortable Through deliberate practice. Folks that do know what they're doing can do it very well. But the idea to think outside of the box, to think nonlinear, to be creative, to be curious, to think of innovative solutions becomes depleted because we don't have the wherewithal to engage in that type of activity.
Speaker 2:The folks that are able to what we call in organizational psychology have transition rituals from work to their leisure life, sometimes their leisure life. Again, I'm not villainizing the workaholic. Sometimes leisure life is work, but things that they want to do, like for you and I writing a book. Someone might look at us and go, wow, they still work all the time, but at least it's something that we want to do, and so that's an important distinction. For folks that are able to do that deliberately, they live this blended life. A lot of folks don't like to use balance anymore, because that suggests you have to do this all the time. It's more, how do you get to engage in the activities that you're doing throughout your week in a joyful way, in a manner that fills you up? For me, that was like all right now I am backed by some rigorous science as well.
Speaker 1:So you are working in San Francisco. Is it At that wellness?
Speaker 2:Act of wellness correct.
Speaker 1:Yes, when you come across people who are simply not curious, as I'm sure you have I have, in fact there seem to be a lot of people who are not curious, who don't want to learn anything new, how do you motivate them to move, as you said, outside their box, outside their box of comfort? How do you motivate them?
Speaker 2:I approach most of those situations with a degree of empathy. I think again, what's become problematic in our space is we use these blunt instruments and don't do them in a sequential manner. So any form of mastery is really going to require someone to understand the process, and so oftentimes if someone has a packed schedule and they're like I can't just find an hour in my week, let alone maybe two or three hours daily, okay, let's start with that one day. How can we figure out what it is that would potentially bring you joy? And so having that invitation to sort of quote unquote, be playful, I think is an important step, and sometimes it might take two or three interactions with that individual. But once you get them to kind of be mindful of the benefits of this generally, you can get them on board.
Speaker 2:Another thing is I show grace to folks that just don't want to be curious or not have fun. I think, in the spirit of getting wiser as I get older when I was first starting this work, everyone has to be fun I've unearthed to kind of loop back to the beginning of the podcast. It is clear that fun and pleasure and getting hedonic value out of things that we do is sort of a restorative path to be really productive. It might not be for some folks, so I don't need 100% conversion rate into these ideals, but for folks that do feel that that's missing, I think having that invitation is an important first step, as pedestrian as that sounds Because a lot of folks are in that context because of their busy lives have created so many heuristics and algorithms and systems to just get through their day. They haven't thought about being curious, so they really do need that invitation.
Speaker 1:Yes, yes, very good. So was there anything in your own background that you think contributed to your interest in this subject?
Speaker 2:Yeah. So going back to my work in autonomy, I think that was the natural progression Again the loss of my brother. I kept trying to will myself out of that malaise. I essentially became an only child so I had to navigate the feelings of my parents and do that as now sort of the figurehead as they were working out that traumatic experience. Through that process of being polyana about my situation and lacking the emotional flexibility to navigate it, I got pretty close to a clinical outcome myself.
Speaker 2:I did become quite passionate about what is happening here because it was clear that a lot of folks we're also in the same space for a host of different reasons, whether that to be divorce, job change, the loss of a loved one, the change of a significant situation or even just burnout and loneliness, which we know are prevalent in the Western world, the fact that so many people were suffering this ill fate of essentially time poverty, it became really important for me to figure out not only what was the issue here, but how could we solve it.
Speaker 1:So what made you become a psychologist?
Speaker 2:Again my mentor, michael Jervais. So I had a really big entrepreneurial win coming out of USC At that time I thought my career path was going to be marketing and I had a successful exit out of that company. Then I tried to start a second company that failed miserably. So I had a lot of big feelings then. I think there's always this curse when you hit a significant success at the onset because you feel like you're invincible. So being able to work with such a figure head in psychology like Michael Jervais, that was a blessing and an invitation to be curious about the field myself.
Speaker 1:So are you currently in an intimate relationship?
Speaker 2:Yes, I'm married to my partner, anna, and have two children that I adore. How?
Speaker 1:old are your children, 11 and 8. Would you like them to follow in your footsteps?
Speaker 2:As an organizational psychologist? Yes, I don't know. That's a great question. I think they're always joke that because I talk about fun in such scientific terms, even though I have a very endearing relationship with my daughter. And, to answer your question at a more personal level, we're flexing our curiosity all the time. One of the funnest things I'd love to do with her is take different classes. I talk about that publicly. Right now we're enjoying cooking classes together, but she always quips that somehow I've been able to take the fun out of fun science because I use words like propellants and hedonic tone and things of that nature. I don't know. My daughter really excels as an impasse. If she went into clinical psychology I'm sure she would make her own dent in the universe. My son is very analytical, like his mother An engineer, an architect. It's really hard to fathom what might be ahead for him, but right now certainly he's showing those type of attributes.
Speaker 1:How do you yourself have fun in life?
Speaker 2:I'm really leaning into engagement that involves other folks. Again, like I said, I talk quite publicly about making sure that I'm deliberate spending time with my kids in ways that's not just fun for them but fun for myself. I still make sure there's intermittent date nights with my wife so that we're connecting on that level. From an activity standpoint, I'm trying to get to the beach as much as I can because I've always been a fan of surfing. Then, at a professional level, really trying to use this crossroads of psychology and behavioral science to create environments that draw people in Sometimes we call them honeypots but that give them access to ways of betterment, so that you're creating an environment that's really scaffolding For folks that want to better themselves but, to your point, feel lost in the process. How can we create tools that reduce that cognitive barrier to entrance? For example, I'm working with one company called EGEN because we realized that and it's quite profound when you think about it because a lot of folks, if you ask them in qualitative surveys so you do focus groups do you know how to work out? Unfortunately, this is what you learn as a behavioral scientist.
Speaker 2:A lot of those upstream tools really aren't helpful.
Speaker 2:People are going to tell you they know how to work out, but then you watch them on the equipment and that intimidation and the mild cognitive dissonance of not really knowing how to use it leads to attrition. You see huge dropouts in most of these wellness studies unless they're formulated with selection bias, which is a real problem, especially in workplace wellness, which is the RAND Corporation shine the light on that. But if you find ways to make it fun, the engagement to be self-serving, you enable people to use their autonomy and explore the space and science. We call it the territory, instead of giving them a map that's really discreet. You see all of these metrics go up in a positive way and so I've really been enjoying that side of the science of how do we use behavioral science so that we're not just doing broad-based interventions because we know they work, but we're making these interventions more inviting and more fun so that people stick to them and even if they do need to attrit out, we increase the rates of recidivism back into the programs.
Speaker 1:So, is there another book in the future for you.
Speaker 2:I think so.
Speaker 2:As I mentioned, I just got to visit your lovely country, and one of the ideas in positive psychology that I found fascinating, that was brought up in the Congress this year, is the difference between psychological thriving and psychological flourishing, and so thriving is the type of work you do.
Speaker 2:How do we take an individual and give them a better toolbox so that they can thrive in any given situation? They can either get themselves out of bad marriage or, if they have a biological predisposition to a clinical issue, we can support them on a path towards betterment, where flourishing is really more population-based interventions. How do we create an environment that allows people to thrive despite their circumstance? And so, even though it's a subtle distinction, one that fit well with the work that I am doing, because I don't necessarily want to treat folks at the individual level but if I can have an impact by creating spaces that allow anyone to come into those environments and enjoy the benefits of betterment, that would be something that I think I could spend the rest of my life doing. So that's an area of impact that I'd like to foster and, I think, the gaining wisdom in that area, especially because there is yet again a big research gap in how we do that, since these constructs are fairly new kind of delineating thriving from flourishing, I think would make an interesting book.
Speaker 1:Sounds interesting. Yes, so my final question what is the most important lesson you have learned about life as of today?
Speaker 2:I think to not be so. Outcome focused, right, and that's really hard, you know, oftentimes we talk about proper mental hygiene, being able to hold two conflicting ideals and be comfortable with that, right. Yet when we conceptualize that, it's really hard to sort of get that skill into play. And so so much, especially in the Western world, of our motivation. The underpinning is meritocracy, right, Because we want the best podcast. Right, we want to be the most prolific researcher.
Speaker 2:Both my parents were professors, and so you know perish or you know publish or perish. Publish or perish, yes, but that bleeds into everything we do, right, If we're not having the most fun, if we're not ranked well against the Joneses within our social structure, we can really live these unhappy lives, right, Even though we say that that's not something we want to do. And so, for me, how do you decouple the outcome and so still thrive to be the best you can? But if that doesn't work out, you know, allow yourself to move on and really have enjoyed the process, rather than, you know, deriving all of your enjoyment. You know, through this sort of end note Because, one, it's a lot more sustainable.
Speaker 2:Two, it goes back to what we were talking about You're gonna encode a lot more memories Because, instead of the trophy or the finish line being the thing that you remember, you remember, you know every workout with your friend or your partner. You remember the last, you remember the times it didn't work out but it still turned into an amazing experience, right? Maybe that wrong turn on the hike that led to a majestic view and that sense of awe Instead of I just did it, all you know, to try to place it, you know, at the end of life, and so for me, that's been the most profound how do you decouple the outcome but then still honor the outcome as something that's an honorable thing?
Speaker 1:Very wise words, very, very wise. Thank you, Mike. My guest today was Mike Rucker, and he is the author of the Fun Habit, recently published. A great book, not just about fun, but about how to live well and live happily and joyfully. So thanks again, and until we meet again, take care. Thank you for having me. It was a pleasure. Bye-bye.