October 30, 2023 • 25 mins
Jia Jiang dreamed of being the next Bill Gates... but an entrepreneur needs the courage and confidence to ask for help. Jia was terrified of rejection - so couldn't fulfil his ambitions. That is, until he decided to beat his fear by seeking out rejection after rejection for a full 100 days.
Many of us share Jia's nervousness about appearing vulnerable and needy, but the science suggests that we and the people around us would be happier if we asked them for help more often.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:15):
Pushkin. We're in a first grade classroom in Beijing, China.
It's about twenty years ago, ahead of the annual holidays.
To mark the occasion, a teacher has brought and wrapped
presents for her students. The gifts are stacked up in
(00:35):
a corner ready to be handed out.
Speaker 2 (00:38):
And if she's just stopped right there, it'll be a
great story.
Speaker 1 (00:41):
Ja Jan was one of those excited kids.
Speaker 2 (00:43):
But she had all of us come to the front
of a classroom and said, hey, why didn't you guys
say nice things about each other? If someone calls your
name and says something nice about you, you can go
get a gift and sit down.
Speaker 1 (00:54):
One by one, the kids started sharing kind words about
their classmates.
Speaker 2 (00:58):
It was great when it started. Someone's can sing really well.
Someone is helpful to other teachers, and I'll applaud as
with might turn with.
Speaker 1 (01:05):
The flow of compliments soon slowed down and then petered out.
Comely worried, Jaw's teacher asked, doesn't anyone have anything nice
to say about the students who are still at the
front of the class. No one spoke. Three gifts sat
uncollected in the corner, and three kids stood rejected. At
the front of the room, and I was.
Speaker 2 (01:25):
One of them.
Speaker 1 (01:27):
It was just a fleeting few minutes in Jav's life,
but the events of that day cast a long shadow.
Joh eventually graduated school, then headed to college, and began
a new life outside China.
Speaker 2 (01:39):
But the thing is, once I came to the United States,
I started following like a path of almost like at
least resistance.
Speaker 1 (01:46):
Nearing his thirties, j'all felt like he was being held
back from chasing his dreams and fulfilling his potential, and
he traced some of that back to the fateful day
many years ago, where he stood rejected in front of
his classmates.
Speaker 2 (01:57):
Pretty sure it didn't help.
Speaker 1 (01:59):
You See, Jean needed all the confidence, self belief, and
drive he could muster because he had a dream.
Speaker 2 (02:05):
I've always wanted to be an entrepreneur. You know, I
actually come from a family of teachers, but I didn't
never want to be a teacher. I want to be
entrepreneur because I was inspired by Bill Gates.
Speaker 1 (02:16):
Becoming the next Bill Gates requires a willingness to put
yourself out there. You've got to be prepared to tell
potential investors and clients about your big plans and you've
got to be prepared for them to laugh you out
of the room. You have to knock on door after
door after door, asking for support and backing until you
get the answer you want. And Jaw just wasn't sure
he could handle that.
Speaker 2 (02:37):
I just felt like my fear of rejection was really
holding me back.
Speaker 1 (02:40):
Though now fully grown, Jaw still felt the pain of
his six year old self.
Speaker 2 (02:44):
And I was just miserable, to be honest, because I
feel like I'm getting old. My wife was pregnant, and
I just feel like I probably missed my mark to
be this entrepreneur that I've always wanted to be.
Speaker 1 (02:56):
So was shopping to admit defeat and give up on
his dream and remain miserable on this path of least resistance.
Speaker 2 (03:03):
Nope, So that's where I realized I got to overcome
this fear of rejection.
Speaker 1 (03:08):
Even if you didn't get dissed by your entire first
grade classroom, you can probably still relate to Jah's lack
of confidence. It's not just entrepreneurs who need to make
themselves vulnerable to others. Whether it's in our careers or
just in daily life, many of us have a hard
time asking for the help we need because, like Jeah,
we fear rejection. We may worry we'll get a big
(03:29):
fat no from a friend or stranger, or we may
just hate the idea of bothering busy people. We may
fear being seen as pushy or annoying or needy. These
fears may feel very real, but do they match the
reality of reaching out to the people around us when
we need help. By not even opening the conversation, are
we actually making ourselves and other people less happy than
(03:50):
we could be. Our minds are constantly telling us what
to do to be happy. But what if our minds
are wrong? What if our minds are lying to us,
leading us away from what will really make us happy.
The good news is that understanding the science of the
mind can boin us all back in the right direction.
Listening to the Happiness Lab with doctor Laurie Santos.
Speaker 3 (04:18):
I was a former college football player, so asking for
helps not the kind of thing I typically did very much.
Speaker 1 (04:25):
This is Social Connection expert and Happiness Lab regular Nick
Eppley lake Shaw. Nick grew up with a reluctance to
ask for help.
Speaker 3 (04:33):
It's pretty strong and capable, and I could do stuff,
and that always made me fairly reluctant to ask others
for help to do almost anything.
Speaker 1 (04:41):
If you've heard Nick on other episodes of this season,
you may recall that he studies the way our minds
mess up when it comes to happier social connection. Recently,
his lab has turned to the fears that he and
so many of us have when it comes to asking
for help.
Speaker 3 (04:54):
And our research and that of many others in the
field has been making it crystal clear that many of
those fears are miscalibrated, that as they're exaggerated, we tend
to underestimate how positively these interactions are going to go.
Speaker 1 (05:06):
Nick's work begins from a premise that many researchers argue
is a universal psychological truth. We enjoy doing nice stuff
for other people.
Speaker 3 (05:14):
I think feeling happy to have helped is a very
real thing. You go do something kind for somebody else,
you'll feel pretty darn good.
Speaker 1 (05:20):
We usually notice how good it feels to help others
when we're in the role of the helper. We forget
that the same maxim holds for the people we ask
to help us.
Speaker 3 (05:29):
Notice that asking for help from somebody else gives an
opportunity to do something kind for you. And by not
asking for help, you are really missing out on an
opportunity to make somebody else feel good.
Speaker 1 (05:40):
We sometimes worry that our requests will be a burden
on the person we approach, that they'll feel pressured to
say yes, but Nick's research shows that that usually isn't
the case, Especially when we have a relatively simple request,
Calling upon another person for assistance can be a gift
not just to ourselves but also to the person we ask.
Speaker 3 (05:59):
So in some ways, it seems almost selfish to not
ask other folks for help when they could give it
to you easily, because you're denying I'M an opportunity to
do something kind for you.
Speaker 1 (06:07):
The problem is we you We usually don't see it
that way, and when we fail to ask for help,
we don't get to witness the happiness boost it gives
us or the person giving us assistance, and so we
continue to believe that seeking help is an imposition rather
than a wonderful way to bond and make everyone happier.
Speaker 3 (06:24):
We only get feedback from the things we choose to do,
and we don't get feedback from the things we choose
to avoid, And in an imperfect world like that, we're
going to get a systematically distorted view of how these
social interactions are going to go that naturally confirms our belief.
Speaker 1 (06:42):
To test just how deeply ingrained these false beliefs are,
Nick designed a simple experiment. He set up a photo
op at a popular spot on campus. But the camera
he put out there wasn't a modern smartphone. It was
a vintage Polaroid instant camera. And that choice was key
because old school polaroids aren't built to let you take selfies.
Speaker 3 (07:02):
So in the old days, if you wanted somebody to
take a picture of you as a you got to
go up and ask them to do it.
Speaker 1 (07:09):
Subjects had to find a stranger to assist them, But
before they approached anyone, the subjects were asked how annoyed
they thought the stranger would be by being stopped, and
how positive their mood would be afterwards. Nick later compared
these predictions to what the strangers actually said about taking
the polaroids, and.
Speaker 3 (07:25):
We found that people tended to underestimate how positively others respond,
how willing they would be to help, how happy they
would feel helping after they actually did. It was a
more positive experience for the person you asked for help
than people expected.
Speaker 1 (07:38):
Nick subjects also grossly overestimated how inconvenience the photo takers
would feel. Their guesses were six times higher than what
the helpers themselves later reported six times higher. Our predictions
of how other people will react to our helping requests
are way way off.
Speaker 3 (07:55):
They were likely to want to try to help you,
and given that they were perceiving it as an act
of kindness, given that you'd ask for it, they'll feel
good when they actually help you out.
Speaker 1 (08:04):
Results like these prompted Nick to rethink his own resistance
to asking for help.
Speaker 3 (08:09):
Here in Chicago sometimes snows in the winter, but if
I couldn't plow my drive I was often reluctant to
have a neighbor come and shovel my driveway. And then
our work, in part, made it clear to me that
the neighbor would probably feel pretty good being able to
do that for me, And so I now will ask
him if he could do that if I can't, if
I can't shovel it, and it's created lots of good
(08:31):
conversations between us where I get a chance to thank
him for that. He feels good for it, and I
don't think I ever would have done that before.
Speaker 1 (08:38):
Asking for help to take a quick photo, or for
a friendly neighbor to lend you a hand shoveling snow
are great places to start. But aspiring entrepreneur Jajong was
in a hurry. He wanted to supercharge his fight against
his crippling fear of rejection, so the approach he took
was rather a extreme. He decided to ask people for
some pretty fantastic favors.
Speaker 2 (08:59):
I saw this big guy. He looked like a security
guard of some sort, and he was sitting behind a desk.
And I said, okay, I'm going to ask him. Then
I said, just inching toward him, I just slowed down.
I was like, this is so scary, but my heart
was calending. I was sweating.
Speaker 1 (09:14):
Well hear how all this turned out? When the Happiness
Lab returns in a moment want to be entrepreneur Jan
Jong wanted to beat his fear of rejection, so he
began where a lot of us do when we're ready
for a big behavior change. He did a Google.
Speaker 2 (09:32):
Search Google has not real Yoda.
Speaker 1 (09:36):
After a few clicks, Jean stumbled on a website that
would change his life forever. Rejection Therapy dot com, a
site that teaches a practice known as exposure therapy. Let's
say you want to get over your phobia of heights.
Exposure therapy would tell you to confront that fear by
visiting locations a little bit above ground level and then
over time climbing higher and higher, so that, through gradual exposure,
(10:00):
you get used to heights. Rejection Therapy dot com applies
that same logic to the fear of asking for help.
The website suggests things like challenging a stranger to a
game of rock, paper scissors or asking for a small
discount the next time you buy something. The challenges even
have different levels, so you can start with just a
mild taste of rejection and gradually build up to going
(10:22):
way out of your comfort zone. Jew was ready to
dive in.
Speaker 2 (10:25):
I was like, this is the best idea I've ever heard.
Speaker 1 (10:27):
The site recommended a month long challenge, thirty days of rejection,
and I.
Speaker 2 (10:31):
Didn't want to do thirty days because I was like,
you know, I want to go hardcore. Let me overdose
on rejection and see what happens. So I did the
one hundred days of rejection, and rather.
Speaker 1 (10:41):
Than performing these challenges privately, Jaque decided he needed to
film all his interactions and to share them with the
entire world.
Speaker 2 (10:48):
I know if I do this by myself, I probably
get a couple of rejections.
Speaker 3 (10:52):
This is quit.
Speaker 2 (10:52):
But if I declare that to the world, and I
would think people will hold me accountable. So I can't
just quit that easily. So that's what I did, all right.
This is my first try.
Speaker 1 (11:03):
Day one of John's rejection marathon started pretty spectacularly.
Speaker 2 (11:06):
I'm going to try to borrow one hundred dollars from
a stranger.
Speaker 1 (11:11):
Jah picked a security guard sitting by a desk in
the marble filled lobby of a nice mall.
Speaker 2 (11:16):
Excuse me, do you think I'm borrow a hundred dollars
from you?
Speaker 1 (11:19):
The security guard looked confused, like he couldn't quite believe
what he was hearing.
Speaker 2 (11:24):
No, no, why, all right? No, okay, sorry, thanks.
Speaker 1 (11:29):
Jew didn't wait around to answer the security guards question.
Speaker 2 (11:33):
I just ran as fast as I could.
Speaker 1 (11:35):
Jaw was downhearted. He assumed the interaction had gone terribly,
that the guard had badly rejected him. But all that
changed once he watched the footage.
Speaker 2 (11:45):
I was like this NFL scout looking at a game film,
you know, analyzing myself.
Speaker 1 (11:49):
Jaw was shocked by what he saw, and not by
the guard's reaction, but by his own.
Speaker 2 (11:54):
I looked so scared, and I was like, oh wow,
I didn't know he was a security or someone. I
don't know. He just sits there. He looks like a
security guard. I thought he might pull off a gun
or just yell at me or something.
Speaker 1 (12:09):
Watching the video revealed that Shaw had nothing to be
scared of. He didn't get the hundred bucks, but the
guard was nice. He even gave Jaw a window of opportunity.
He asked Jaw why, like, why did he need the
hundred bucks?
Speaker 2 (12:21):
Anyway? I could have said many things. I could have
negotiated with him. I could have said, if you can
do a hundred, can do five, you know he can
do one. I could explained that was overcoming our fair rejection.
I just ran. So I said, Okay, next time, no
matter what happens, I am going to stay engaged. So
I'm not going to run. That's the thing. I'm not
going to run.
Speaker 1 (12:42):
One day two of his one hundred days of rejection,
Jaw headed to his favorite burger joint, Five Guys Burgers
and Fries. He purchased a cheeseburger and ate it, and
then returned to the counter for the big.
Speaker 2 (12:54):
Ask, Yes, burger, Could I get a burger reveal?
Speaker 1 (12:58):
Could he have a burger refill? That is another cheeseburger
totally for free?
Speaker 2 (13:06):
Okay, all right, I'd like you guys a lot more,
even have a burger ripping on him.
Speaker 1 (13:11):
The cashier said no. But this time Jell didn't run
away and.
Speaker 2 (13:14):
I started negotiating. I started to stay calm and actually
explained myself. And when that left, I didn't feel us
bad like I feel way better than the first day.
Speaker 1 (13:25):
Jah was rejected. Five guys does not offer burger refills,
even if you ask politely, But the no Jah received
from the cashier yet again came with more kindness and
humor than he expected.
Speaker 2 (13:36):
Day two was the success on to day three.
Speaker 1 (13:41):
By day three, Jea already felt like he was heading
for a rejection gold medal.
Speaker 2 (13:45):
I'm driving to a Krispy Kreme.
Speaker 1 (13:47):
So his next ask took his odd requests to Olympic
level heights of ridiculousness.
Speaker 2 (13:53):
I'm going to ask them to make me some specialized donuts.
Speaker 1 (13:57):
Joh one of the folks at Krispy Kreme to make
him a set of five donuts interlocked in the shape
of the famous Olympic rings.
Speaker 2 (14:03):
Well, there's no way they're gonna say yes to that,
you know, And I would just come in and make
a joke and get read jacked in and hopefully not
be too scared.
Speaker 3 (14:13):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (14:13):
The employee, Jackie Brawn, got a pen and paper and
asked joh to help her sketch out the design. She
didn't look angry or confused. She kind of seemed to
relish the challenge.
Speaker 2 (14:23):
And fifteen minutes later she brought me out a box
of donuts that looked like Olympic rings. That is really good.
That's really good. Yeah, man, you'll make me really happy today.
Speaker 1 (14:35):
Jackie didn't even charge Jot for the donuts. It's on me,
she told him with a big beaming smile.
Speaker 2 (14:41):
So when I was walking out at that donut shop,
I was like, Wow, how many yeses have I missed
my life? Because I was expecting a no. So that
was a magic moment for me.
Speaker 1 (14:50):
Pleased with his success, John went home and posted the
Day three video, but it didn't get the handful of
us he was expecting. Millions of people watched that donut clip.
It got so much attention that his Olympic ring donut
story wound up on daytime television shows.
Speaker 2 (15:05):
I think Krispy Kreme stock actually went up that day. God,
there's like a marketer's dream, right, ask them for uh
donuts that looked like Olympic rings and I was like,
no way, they're going to say yes. They couldn't say
no to me. They were like, yeah, how can I
make this? And when I left there, I just had
tears in my eyes because I just couldn't believe. This
world is much nicer than I thought. It's much kinder
(15:27):
than I thought.
Speaker 1 (15:28):
Joe's donut success was a turning point for him. It
convinced him that he could successfully ask for just about anything,
and Shaw really did ask for rather strange things. He
asked to become a mannequin in a department store, to
give the safety announcement on an airplane, to slide down
the pole at a fire station, and defeed a lion
at the zoo.
Speaker 2 (15:49):
There you go, Hold on, hold on, It's okay.
Speaker 1 (15:54):
The videos that followed were as hilarious as they were popular,
like when he asked for a haircut from a dog groomer.
Speaker 2 (16:01):
Can you see me like a German shepherd like tabetan
mastiff or or child chow or something.
Speaker 1 (16:07):
Joe's video is eventually tracted the attention of a certain psychologist, and.
Speaker 3 (16:12):
I thought, this is fascinating, right, this is an extreme
version of what I did.
Speaker 1 (16:17):
Psychologist Nick Epley's research had already shown that people are
more willing to help us out than we think, that
they react more positively than we expect to simple requests
like taking a quick polaroid photo. But watching Jaw's YouTube videos,
Nick realized people may also agree to far more complicated requests.
Speaker 3 (16:35):
I mean, it's off the charts what he asked.
Speaker 2 (16:37):
People to do.
Speaker 1 (16:38):
Nick carefully analyzed Jav's videos, counting exactly how often his
pleas for help got rejected.
Speaker 3 (16:44):
And it turns out less often than he's accepted that
most of the time, a little over fifty percent of
the time, to these crazy requests, the person does it.
Speaker 1 (16:55):
Nick also watched to see the reactions of the strangers
that Jah approached. Did the donut makers and flight attendants
and zoo keepers get mad and yell at him and
tell them to go away? Or were they genuinely trying
to be kind and accommodating nix'onnalysis was striking. In the
vast majority of interactions, people reacted completely positively. Jaw's extreme
(17:17):
experiment and rejection therapy is a great example of two
things that our lying minds often get wrong. First, we
don't get rebuffed nearly as often as we fear, and second,
the people we ask for help are usually much happier
to oblige than we expect. But my guess is that
hearing Ja's story didn't exactly prompt you to go out
and demand weird shaped donuts, or to borrow money from
(17:38):
strangers on the street, or to head into a lion's
den at dinner time. So what simple strategies can we
all employ to be more comfortable in asking for help,
Things that will allow us and the people around us
to enjoy the happiness benefits that come from bonding over
a helping hand. We'll find out when the Happiness Lab returns.
After this quick.
Speaker 2 (17:58):
Break on dividing my life into BD and AD Before
donuts and after donuts, It was a watershed moment for
me because he opened up this whole new.
Speaker 1 (18:16):
World to me A decade after asking a Krispy Kreme
employee to build him the Olympic Ring Up Donuts. Jean
now runs the very company that inspired him, Rejection Therapy
dot Com. He's also an in demand speaker and the
author of Rejection Proof How I Beat Fear and became
invincible through one hundred days of rejection.
Speaker 2 (18:34):
I didn't plan this. I didn't plan this seem to
go viral and someday I'll write a book, someday I'll
do a blog. You know, someday I will give a
Ted talk or Beyond Lauras Angels show. I've never planned
all that. All I did was like I'm gonna do something.
Speaker 1 (18:47):
And the viral videos Jah made are now used by
clinicians to help patients with social anxiety. They may seem extreme,
but Jaw says they can still teach us important lessons
that we can apply in everyday settings.
Speaker 2 (19:00):
His first takeaway is people are actually much nicer than
we think. People are actually very open, especially if you
oftome wacky stuff.
Speaker 1 (19:10):
A second lesson is that your fears that people will
angrily reject you or think less of you if you
ask for assistance are likely to be very, very misplaced.
Jaw is living proof that you'll hear no far less
than you expect.
Speaker 2 (19:23):
When I started, I thought I was going to get
one hundred rejections, you know, maybe like I got some
yes as if you get really lucky. But as it
turned out, sometimes just by asking you get it yes.
Speaker 1 (19:33):
But to get to that yes, Jaw says, we also
need the courage to expose our vulnerabilities and to ignore
any worries we may have about seeming needy.
Speaker 2 (19:41):
I don't want to bother other people, and you know
I want to be independent, right.
Speaker 1 (19:45):
And the research backs this up. Psychologists have long found
evidence for what's known as the beautiful mess effect. We
assume that people will avoid us if we seem needy
or dependent on help, but it's actually just the opposite.
People like us better when we show weakness or express
emotional vulnerability or seek their help. Being messy makes us
seem more open and relatable.
Speaker 2 (20:06):
You're really good friends to ask for help. They ask
for a pig, they ask for help, and they're vulnerable
to each other. If you give and take, that really
built relationships. In fact, sometimes the fact that you're asking
shows that Okay, I'm asking you because I need you,
and that's really increases the bond you have with each other.
Speaker 1 (20:24):
But Connecting with potential helpers also requires changing the negative
mindset the many of us have about soliciting assistance. Your
at tension while asking for help can make the whole
interaction less comfortable for everyone. It's something that Jah learned
early in his days of rejection therapy.
Speaker 2 (20:40):
So I was expecting rejection, and all my focus is
how I could deal with that rejection. I think couldn't
even think the possibility that people will say yes to me.
And if you don't bring this aggressive energy, you're not
that tense. People actually relax when they talk to them
to decrease that tension.
Speaker 1 (20:57):
Jaw advises that you really do need to come to
terms with the possibility of being rebuffed and to relax
about it.
Speaker 2 (21:04):
That's actually the key. If I'm coming in and if
I'm open to rejection, then I'm fine. If I give
the other person the freedom to say no to me,
I give myself the freedom to ask whatever I want.
Speaker 1 (21:14):
One way to do that, Shaw says is to explicitly
admit that what you're asking for might not be doable,
and that it's totally cool if the person can't help you,
that you know they're not doing it. Just bite you
or because they don't like you.
Speaker 2 (21:27):
I say, Okay, I know I'm making a big request here.
I know this is a little bit weird, and it's
okay if you can't do it. If I put that
thing what they're doubting up front, it actually put people
at ease. He's saying that I can say no to this.
Speaker 1 (21:41):
And if you're still feeling guilty about your request, Jaw
suggests thinking back to how you felt when someone asked
for help. Would you really be annoyed if the situation
was reversed. Joe says he even thinks back to cases
where he felt frustrated when good friends failed to call
on him when they were in need.
Speaker 2 (21:57):
I had a friend and he spent like almost a
year looking for a job and he didn't ask friend help.
It was really hard for him, and I was like,
you could have told me earlier at that job. I
know someone who who was hiring for that job. Why
didn't you tell me earlier?
Speaker 1 (22:12):
But Jaw has one final strategy that makes seem counterintuitive
given his own experience. He recommends not going as hardcore
as he did.
Speaker 2 (22:20):
Go outside of the comfort zone a little bit. Don't
go like way out. You don't have to come in
and ask for one hundred dollars like I did. That
was a big step. It's like an exercise, right if
you never lifted weights, you don't want to come in
and bench press like three hundred pounds. You're gonna get crushed.
But go out of the comfort zone a little bit
and just test the water and then gradually expand your
(22:40):
comfort zone. You can start doing this again and again,
and every time you do. He becomes so much better
than before.
Speaker 1 (22:46):
And Jaw should know because asking for what he needed
publicly and fighting his fear of rejection didn't just change
his life.
Speaker 2 (22:53):
Jackie from Krispy Kreme right that the person said yes
to me to make Olympic donuts, it changed her life too.
Speaker 1 (22:59):
Jackie Brown also went viral for those Olympic donuts. A
viewer of Jaw's video even made her a Facebook page
entitled give Jackie a Krispy Kreme a raise. Thousand of
people signed the petition thank you.
Speaker 3 (23:11):
Thank you, thank you, thank you, I mean very very much.
Speaker 1 (23:16):
She received a personal visit from the CEO of Krispy Kreme,
and she now stars in training videos that are used
by the entire corporation.
Speaker 2 (23:23):
She become like a celebrity within her company, just all
because she say yes. Sometimes saying yes is more fun
than saying though.
Speaker 1 (23:30):
And Joah thinks we'd all benefit from the fun of
asking for help more often.
Speaker 2 (23:34):
The rejection therapy has become a movement. It just feels
my heart because I hope this movement can keep going
and to help people overcome their fear.
Speaker 1 (23:46):
So many of us are missing out on making new
social connections or deepening our bonds with existing friends just
because we don't want to ask for help or favors that.
Maybe because we don't want to appear annoying or vulnerable,
or because we fear the humiliation of our pleas being rejected.
But the science shows that our worries about being pushy
and needy are unfounded. People are way more happy to
(24:07):
help than our lying minds think. And our reluctance to
ask for help, why's it preventing the people we care
about from receiving the happiness boost that comes with being kind.
So why not follow Jah's advice and push your rejection
comfort zone a bit. You don't need to ask a
stranger for money or demand specialized donuts, but you can
make sure you give the people in your life opportunities
(24:28):
to support and care for you. It'll make them and
you feel much better than you expect. The Happiness Lab
is co written and produced by Ryan dilly Our. Original
music was composed by Zachary Silver, with additional scoring, mixing
(24:52):
and mastering by Evan Viola. Jess Shane and Alice Fines
offered additional production support. Special thanks to my agent, Ben
Davis and all of the Pushkin Group. The Happiness Lab
is brought to you by Pushkin Industries and me Doctor
Larry Santos
Pushkin. We're in a first grade classroom in Beijing, China.
It's about twenty years ago, ahead of the annual holidays.
To mark the occasion, a teacher has brought and wrapped
presents for her students. The gifts are stacked up in
(00:35):
a corner ready to be handed out.
Speaker 2 (00:38):
And if she's just stopped right there, it'll be a
great story.
Speaker 1 (00:41):
Ja Jan was one of those excited kids.
Speaker 2 (00:43):
But she had all of us come to the front
of a classroom and said, hey, why didn't you guys
say nice things about each other? If someone calls your
name and says something nice about you, you can go
get a gift and sit down.
Speaker 1 (00:54):
One by one, the kids started sharing kind words about
their classmates.
Speaker 2 (00:58):
It was great when it started. Someone's can sing really well.
Someone is helpful to other teachers, and I'll applaud as
with might turn with.
Speaker 1 (01:05):
The flow of compliments soon slowed down and then petered out.
Comely worried, Jaw's teacher asked, doesn't anyone have anything nice
to say about the students who are still at the
front of the class. No one spoke. Three gifts sat
uncollected in the corner, and three kids stood rejected. At
the front of the room, and I was.
Speaker 2 (01:25):
One of them.
Speaker 1 (01:27):
It was just a fleeting few minutes in Jav's life,
but the events of that day cast a long shadow.
Joh eventually graduated school, then headed to college, and began
a new life outside China.
Speaker 2 (01:39):
But the thing is, once I came to the United States,
I started following like a path of almost like at
least resistance.
Speaker 1 (01:46):
Nearing his thirties, j'all felt like he was being held
back from chasing his dreams and fulfilling his potential, and
he traced some of that back to the fateful day
many years ago, where he stood rejected in front of
his classmates.
Speaker 2 (01:57):
Pretty sure it didn't help.
Speaker 1 (01:59):
You See, Jean needed all the confidence, self belief, and
drive he could muster because he had a dream.
Speaker 2 (02:05):
I've always wanted to be an entrepreneur. You know, I
actually come from a family of teachers, but I didn't
never want to be a teacher. I want to be
entrepreneur because I was inspired by Bill Gates.
Speaker 1 (02:16):
Becoming the next Bill Gates requires a willingness to put
yourself out there. You've got to be prepared to tell
potential investors and clients about your big plans and you've
got to be prepared for them to laugh you out
of the room. You have to knock on door after
door after door, asking for support and backing until you
get the answer you want. And Jaw just wasn't sure
he could handle that.
Speaker 2 (02:37):
I just felt like my fear of rejection was really
holding me back.
Speaker 1 (02:40):
Though now fully grown, Jaw still felt the pain of
his six year old self.
Speaker 2 (02:44):
And I was just miserable, to be honest, because I
feel like I'm getting old. My wife was pregnant, and
I just feel like I probably missed my mark to
be this entrepreneur that I've always wanted to be.
Speaker 1 (02:56):
So was shopping to admit defeat and give up on
his dream and remain miserable on this path of least resistance.
Speaker 2 (03:03):
Nope, So that's where I realized I got to overcome
this fear of rejection.
Speaker 1 (03:08):
Even if you didn't get dissed by your entire first
grade classroom, you can probably still relate to Jah's lack
of confidence. It's not just entrepreneurs who need to make
themselves vulnerable to others. Whether it's in our careers or
just in daily life, many of us have a hard
time asking for the help we need because, like Jeah,
we fear rejection. We may worry we'll get a big
(03:29):
fat no from a friend or stranger, or we may
just hate the idea of bothering busy people. We may
fear being seen as pushy or annoying or needy. These
fears may feel very real, but do they match the
reality of reaching out to the people around us when
we need help. By not even opening the conversation, are
we actually making ourselves and other people less happy than
(03:50):
we could be. Our minds are constantly telling us what
to do to be happy. But what if our minds
are wrong? What if our minds are lying to us,
leading us away from what will really make us happy.
The good news is that understanding the science of the
mind can boin us all back in the right direction.
Listening to the Happiness Lab with doctor Laurie Santos.
Speaker 3 (04:18):
I was a former college football player, so asking for
helps not the kind of thing I typically did very much.
Speaker 1 (04:25):
This is Social Connection expert and Happiness Lab regular Nick
Eppley lake Shaw. Nick grew up with a reluctance to
ask for help.
Speaker 3 (04:33):
It's pretty strong and capable, and I could do stuff,
and that always made me fairly reluctant to ask others
for help to do almost anything.
Speaker 1 (04:41):
If you've heard Nick on other episodes of this season,
you may recall that he studies the way our minds
mess up when it comes to happier social connection. Recently,
his lab has turned to the fears that he and
so many of us have when it comes to asking
for help.
Speaker 3 (04:54):
And our research and that of many others in the
field has been making it crystal clear that many of
those fears are miscalibrated, that as they're exaggerated, we tend
to underestimate how positively these interactions are going to go.
Speaker 1 (05:06):
Nick's work begins from a premise that many researchers argue
is a universal psychological truth. We enjoy doing nice stuff
for other people.
Speaker 3 (05:14):
I think feeling happy to have helped is a very
real thing. You go do something kind for somebody else,
you'll feel pretty darn good.
Speaker 1 (05:20):
We usually notice how good it feels to help others
when we're in the role of the helper. We forget
that the same maxim holds for the people we ask
to help us.
Speaker 3 (05:29):
Notice that asking for help from somebody else gives an
opportunity to do something kind for you. And by not
asking for help, you are really missing out on an
opportunity to make somebody else feel good.
Speaker 1 (05:40):
We sometimes worry that our requests will be a burden
on the person we approach, that they'll feel pressured to
say yes, but Nick's research shows that that usually isn't
the case, Especially when we have a relatively simple request,
Calling upon another person for assistance can be a gift
not just to ourselves but also to the person we ask.
Speaker 3 (05:59):
So in some ways, it seems almost selfish to not
ask other folks for help when they could give it
to you easily, because you're denying I'M an opportunity to
do something kind for you.
Speaker 1 (06:07):
The problem is we you We usually don't see it
that way, and when we fail to ask for help,
we don't get to witness the happiness boost it gives
us or the person giving us assistance, and so we
continue to believe that seeking help is an imposition rather
than a wonderful way to bond and make everyone happier.
Speaker 3 (06:24):
We only get feedback from the things we choose to do,
and we don't get feedback from the things we choose
to avoid, And in an imperfect world like that, we're
going to get a systematically distorted view of how these
social interactions are going to go that naturally confirms our belief.
Speaker 1 (06:42):
To test just how deeply ingrained these false beliefs are,
Nick designed a simple experiment. He set up a photo
op at a popular spot on campus. But the camera
he put out there wasn't a modern smartphone. It was
a vintage Polaroid instant camera. And that choice was key
because old school polaroids aren't built to let you take selfies.
Speaker 3 (07:02):
So in the old days, if you wanted somebody to
take a picture of you as a you got to
go up and ask them to do it.
Speaker 1 (07:09):
Subjects had to find a stranger to assist them, But
before they approached anyone, the subjects were asked how annoyed
they thought the stranger would be by being stopped, and
how positive their mood would be afterwards. Nick later compared
these predictions to what the strangers actually said about taking
the polaroids, and.
Speaker 3 (07:25):
We found that people tended to underestimate how positively others respond,
how willing they would be to help, how happy they
would feel helping after they actually did. It was a
more positive experience for the person you asked for help
than people expected.
Speaker 1 (07:38):
Nick subjects also grossly overestimated how inconvenience the photo takers
would feel. Their guesses were six times higher than what
the helpers themselves later reported six times higher. Our predictions
of how other people will react to our helping requests
are way way off.
Speaker 3 (07:55):
They were likely to want to try to help you,
and given that they were perceiving it as an act
of kindness, given that you'd ask for it, they'll feel
good when they actually help you out.
Speaker 1 (08:04):
Results like these prompted Nick to rethink his own resistance
to asking for help.
Speaker 3 (08:09):
Here in Chicago sometimes snows in the winter, but if
I couldn't plow my drive I was often reluctant to
have a neighbor come and shovel my driveway. And then
our work, in part, made it clear to me that
the neighbor would probably feel pretty good being able to
do that for me, And so I now will ask
him if he could do that if I can't, if
I can't shovel it, and it's created lots of good
(08:31):
conversations between us where I get a chance to thank
him for that. He feels good for it, and I
don't think I ever would have done that before.
Speaker 1 (08:38):
Asking for help to take a quick photo, or for
a friendly neighbor to lend you a hand shoveling snow
are great places to start. But aspiring entrepreneur Jajong was
in a hurry. He wanted to supercharge his fight against
his crippling fear of rejection, so the approach he took
was rather a extreme. He decided to ask people for
some pretty fantastic favors.
Speaker 2 (08:59):
I saw this big guy. He looked like a security
guard of some sort, and he was sitting behind a desk.
And I said, okay, I'm going to ask him. Then
I said, just inching toward him, I just slowed down.
I was like, this is so scary, but my heart
was calending. I was sweating.
Speaker 1 (09:14):
Well hear how all this turned out? When the Happiness
Lab returns in a moment want to be entrepreneur Jan
Jong wanted to beat his fear of rejection, so he
began where a lot of us do when we're ready
for a big behavior change. He did a Google.
Speaker 2 (09:32):
Search Google has not real Yoda.
Speaker 1 (09:36):
After a few clicks, Jean stumbled on a website that
would change his life forever. Rejection Therapy dot com, a
site that teaches a practice known as exposure therapy. Let's
say you want to get over your phobia of heights.
Exposure therapy would tell you to confront that fear by
visiting locations a little bit above ground level and then
over time climbing higher and higher, so that, through gradual exposure,
(10:00):
you get used to heights. Rejection Therapy dot com applies
that same logic to the fear of asking for help.
The website suggests things like challenging a stranger to a
game of rock, paper scissors or asking for a small
discount the next time you buy something. The challenges even
have different levels, so you can start with just a
mild taste of rejection and gradually build up to going
(10:22):
way out of your comfort zone. Jew was ready to
dive in.
Speaker 2 (10:25):
I was like, this is the best idea I've ever heard.
Speaker 1 (10:27):
The site recommended a month long challenge, thirty days of rejection,
and I.
Speaker 2 (10:31):
Didn't want to do thirty days because I was like,
you know, I want to go hardcore. Let me overdose
on rejection and see what happens. So I did the
one hundred days of rejection, and rather.
Speaker 1 (10:41):
Than performing these challenges privately, Jaque decided he needed to
film all his interactions and to share them with the
entire world.
Speaker 2 (10:48):
I know if I do this by myself, I probably
get a couple of rejections.
Speaker 3 (10:52):
This is quit.
Speaker 2 (10:52):
But if I declare that to the world, and I
would think people will hold me accountable. So I can't
just quit that easily. So that's what I did, all right.
This is my first try.
Speaker 1 (11:03):
Day one of John's rejection marathon started pretty spectacularly.
Speaker 2 (11:06):
I'm going to try to borrow one hundred dollars from
a stranger.
Speaker 1 (11:11):
Jah picked a security guard sitting by a desk in
the marble filled lobby of a nice mall.
Speaker 2 (11:16):
Excuse me, do you think I'm borrow a hundred dollars
from you?
Speaker 1 (11:19):
The security guard looked confused, like he couldn't quite believe
what he was hearing.
Speaker 2 (11:24):
No, no, why, all right? No, okay, sorry, thanks.
Speaker 1 (11:29):
Jew didn't wait around to answer the security guards question.
Speaker 2 (11:33):
I just ran as fast as I could.
Speaker 1 (11:35):
Jaw was downhearted. He assumed the interaction had gone terribly,
that the guard had badly rejected him. But all that
changed once he watched the footage.
Speaker 2 (11:45):
I was like this NFL scout looking at a game film,
you know, analyzing myself.
Speaker 1 (11:49):
Jaw was shocked by what he saw, and not by
the guard's reaction, but by his own.
Speaker 2 (11:54):
I looked so scared, and I was like, oh wow,
I didn't know he was a security or someone. I
don't know. He just sits there. He looks like a
security guard. I thought he might pull off a gun
or just yell at me or something.
Speaker 1 (12:09):
Watching the video revealed that Shaw had nothing to be
scared of. He didn't get the hundred bucks, but the
guard was nice. He even gave Jaw a window of opportunity.
He asked Jaw why, like, why did he need the
hundred bucks?
Speaker 2 (12:21):
Anyway? I could have said many things. I could have
negotiated with him. I could have said, if you can
do a hundred, can do five, you know he can
do one. I could explained that was overcoming our fair rejection.
I just ran. So I said, Okay, next time, no
matter what happens, I am going to stay engaged. So
I'm not going to run. That's the thing. I'm not
going to run.
Speaker 1 (12:42):
One day two of his one hundred days of rejection,
Jaw headed to his favorite burger joint, Five Guys Burgers
and Fries. He purchased a cheeseburger and ate it, and
then returned to the counter for the big.
Speaker 2 (12:54):
Ask, Yes, burger, Could I get a burger reveal?
Speaker 1 (12:58):
Could he have a burger refill? That is another cheeseburger
totally for free?
Speaker 2 (13:06):
Okay, all right, I'd like you guys a lot more,
even have a burger ripping on him.
Speaker 1 (13:11):
The cashier said no. But this time Jell didn't run
away and.
Speaker 2 (13:14):
I started negotiating. I started to stay calm and actually
explained myself. And when that left, I didn't feel us
bad like I feel way better than the first day.
Speaker 1 (13:25):
Jah was rejected. Five guys does not offer burger refills,
even if you ask politely, But the no Jah received
from the cashier yet again came with more kindness and
humor than he expected.
Speaker 2 (13:36):
Day two was the success on to day three.
Speaker 1 (13:41):
By day three, Jea already felt like he was heading
for a rejection gold medal.
Speaker 2 (13:45):
I'm driving to a Krispy Kreme.
Speaker 1 (13:47):
So his next ask took his odd requests to Olympic
level heights of ridiculousness.
Speaker 2 (13:53):
I'm going to ask them to make me some specialized donuts.
Speaker 1 (13:57):
Joh one of the folks at Krispy Kreme to make
him a set of five donuts interlocked in the shape
of the famous Olympic rings.
Speaker 2 (14:03):
Well, there's no way they're gonna say yes to that,
you know, And I would just come in and make
a joke and get read jacked in and hopefully not
be too scared.
Speaker 3 (14:13):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (14:13):
The employee, Jackie Brawn, got a pen and paper and
asked joh to help her sketch out the design. She
didn't look angry or confused. She kind of seemed to
relish the challenge.
Speaker 2 (14:23):
And fifteen minutes later she brought me out a box
of donuts that looked like Olympic rings. That is really good.
That's really good. Yeah, man, you'll make me really happy today.
Speaker 1 (14:35):
Jackie didn't even charge Jot for the donuts. It's on me,
she told him with a big beaming smile.
Speaker 2 (14:41):
So when I was walking out at that donut shop,
I was like, Wow, how many yeses have I missed
my life? Because I was expecting a no. So that
was a magic moment for me.
Speaker 1 (14:50):
Pleased with his success, John went home and posted the
Day three video, but it didn't get the handful of
us he was expecting. Millions of people watched that donut clip.
It got so much attention that his Olympic ring donut
story wound up on daytime television shows.
Speaker 2 (15:05):
I think Krispy Kreme stock actually went up that day. God,
there's like a marketer's dream, right, ask them for uh
donuts that looked like Olympic rings and I was like,
no way, they're going to say yes. They couldn't say
no to me. They were like, yeah, how can I
make this? And when I left there, I just had
tears in my eyes because I just couldn't believe. This
world is much nicer than I thought. It's much kinder
(15:27):
than I thought.
Speaker 1 (15:28):
Joe's donut success was a turning point for him. It
convinced him that he could successfully ask for just about anything,
and Shaw really did ask for rather strange things. He
asked to become a mannequin in a department store, to
give the safety announcement on an airplane, to slide down
the pole at a fire station, and defeed a lion
at the zoo.
Speaker 2 (15:49):
There you go, Hold on, hold on, It's okay.
Speaker 1 (15:54):
The videos that followed were as hilarious as they were popular,
like when he asked for a haircut from a dog groomer.
Speaker 2 (16:01):
Can you see me like a German shepherd like tabetan
mastiff or or child chow or something.
Speaker 1 (16:07):
Joe's video is eventually tracted the attention of a certain psychologist, and.
Speaker 3 (16:12):
I thought, this is fascinating, right, this is an extreme
version of what I did.
Speaker 1 (16:17):
Psychologist Nick Epley's research had already shown that people are
more willing to help us out than we think, that
they react more positively than we expect to simple requests
like taking a quick polaroid photo. But watching Jaw's YouTube videos,
Nick realized people may also agree to far more complicated requests.
Speaker 3 (16:35):
I mean, it's off the charts what he asked.
Speaker 2 (16:37):
People to do.
Speaker 1 (16:38):
Nick carefully analyzed Jav's videos, counting exactly how often his
pleas for help got rejected.
Speaker 3 (16:44):
And it turns out less often than he's accepted that
most of the time, a little over fifty percent of
the time, to these crazy requests, the person does it.
Speaker 1 (16:55):
Nick also watched to see the reactions of the strangers
that Jah approached. Did the donut makers and flight attendants
and zoo keepers get mad and yell at him and
tell them to go away? Or were they genuinely trying
to be kind and accommodating nix'onnalysis was striking. In the
vast majority of interactions, people reacted completely positively. Jaw's extreme
(17:17):
experiment and rejection therapy is a great example of two
things that our lying minds often get wrong. First, we
don't get rebuffed nearly as often as we fear, and second,
the people we ask for help are usually much happier
to oblige than we expect. But my guess is that
hearing Ja's story didn't exactly prompt you to go out
and demand weird shaped donuts, or to borrow money from
(17:38):
strangers on the street, or to head into a lion's
den at dinner time. So what simple strategies can we
all employ to be more comfortable in asking for help,
Things that will allow us and the people around us
to enjoy the happiness benefits that come from bonding over
a helping hand. We'll find out when the Happiness Lab returns.
After this quick.
Speaker 2 (17:58):
Break on dividing my life into BD and AD Before
donuts and after donuts, It was a watershed moment for
me because he opened up this whole new.
Speaker 1 (18:16):
World to me A decade after asking a Krispy Kreme
employee to build him the Olympic Ring Up Donuts. Jean
now runs the very company that inspired him, Rejection Therapy
dot Com. He's also an in demand speaker and the
author of Rejection Proof How I Beat Fear and became
invincible through one hundred days of rejection.
Speaker 2 (18:34):
I didn't plan this. I didn't plan this seem to
go viral and someday I'll write a book, someday I'll
do a blog. You know, someday I will give a
Ted talk or Beyond Lauras Angels show. I've never planned
all that. All I did was like I'm gonna do something.
Speaker 1 (18:47):
And the viral videos Jah made are now used by
clinicians to help patients with social anxiety. They may seem extreme,
but Jaw says they can still teach us important lessons
that we can apply in everyday settings.
Speaker 2 (19:00):
His first takeaway is people are actually much nicer than
we think. People are actually very open, especially if you
oftome wacky stuff.
Speaker 1 (19:10):
A second lesson is that your fears that people will
angrily reject you or think less of you if you
ask for assistance are likely to be very, very misplaced.
Jaw is living proof that you'll hear no far less
than you expect.
Speaker 2 (19:23):
When I started, I thought I was going to get
one hundred rejections, you know, maybe like I got some
yes as if you get really lucky. But as it
turned out, sometimes just by asking you get it yes.
Speaker 1 (19:33):
But to get to that yes, Jaw says, we also
need the courage to expose our vulnerabilities and to ignore
any worries we may have about seeming needy.
Speaker 2 (19:41):
I don't want to bother other people, and you know
I want to be independent, right.
Speaker 1 (19:45):
And the research backs this up. Psychologists have long found
evidence for what's known as the beautiful mess effect. We
assume that people will avoid us if we seem needy
or dependent on help, but it's actually just the opposite.
People like us better when we show weakness or express
emotional vulnerability or seek their help. Being messy makes us
seem more open and relatable.
Speaker 2 (20:06):
You're really good friends to ask for help. They ask
for a pig, they ask for help, and they're vulnerable
to each other. If you give and take, that really
built relationships. In fact, sometimes the fact that you're asking
shows that Okay, I'm asking you because I need you,
and that's really increases the bond you have with each other.
Speaker 1 (20:24):
But Connecting with potential helpers also requires changing the negative
mindset the many of us have about soliciting assistance. Your
at tension while asking for help can make the whole
interaction less comfortable for everyone. It's something that Jah learned
early in his days of rejection therapy.
Speaker 2 (20:40):
So I was expecting rejection, and all my focus is
how I could deal with that rejection. I think couldn't
even think the possibility that people will say yes to me.
And if you don't bring this aggressive energy, you're not
that tense. People actually relax when they talk to them
to decrease that tension.
Speaker 1 (20:57):
Jaw advises that you really do need to come to
terms with the possibility of being rebuffed and to relax
about it.
Speaker 2 (21:04):
That's actually the key. If I'm coming in and if
I'm open to rejection, then I'm fine. If I give
the other person the freedom to say no to me,
I give myself the freedom to ask whatever I want.
Speaker 1 (21:14):
One way to do that, Shaw says is to explicitly
admit that what you're asking for might not be doable,
and that it's totally cool if the person can't help you,
that you know they're not doing it. Just bite you
or because they don't like you.
Speaker 2 (21:27):
I say, Okay, I know I'm making a big request here.
I know this is a little bit weird, and it's
okay if you can't do it. If I put that
thing what they're doubting up front, it actually put people
at ease. He's saying that I can say no to this.
Speaker 1 (21:41):
And if you're still feeling guilty about your request, Jaw
suggests thinking back to how you felt when someone asked
for help. Would you really be annoyed if the situation
was reversed. Joe says he even thinks back to cases
where he felt frustrated when good friends failed to call
on him when they were in need.
Speaker 2 (21:57):
I had a friend and he spent like almost a
year looking for a job and he didn't ask friend help.
It was really hard for him, and I was like,
you could have told me earlier at that job. I
know someone who who was hiring for that job. Why
didn't you tell me earlier?
Speaker 1 (22:12):
But Jaw has one final strategy that makes seem counterintuitive
given his own experience. He recommends not going as hardcore
as he did.
Speaker 2 (22:20):
Go outside of the comfort zone a little bit. Don't
go like way out. You don't have to come in
and ask for one hundred dollars like I did. That
was a big step. It's like an exercise, right if
you never lifted weights, you don't want to come in
and bench press like three hundred pounds. You're gonna get crushed.
But go out of the comfort zone a little bit
and just test the water and then gradually expand your
(22:40):
comfort zone. You can start doing this again and again,
and every time you do. He becomes so much better
than before.
Speaker 1 (22:46):
And Jaw should know because asking for what he needed
publicly and fighting his fear of rejection didn't just change
his life.
Speaker 2 (22:53):
Jackie from Krispy Kreme right that the person said yes
to me to make Olympic donuts, it changed her life too.
Speaker 1 (22:59):
Jackie Brown also went viral for those Olympic donuts. A
viewer of Jaw's video even made her a Facebook page
entitled give Jackie a Krispy Kreme a raise. Thousand of
people signed the petition thank you.
Speaker 3 (23:11):
Thank you, thank you, thank you, I mean very very much.
Speaker 1 (23:16):
She received a personal visit from the CEO of Krispy Kreme,
and she now stars in training videos that are used
by the entire corporation.
Speaker 2 (23:23):
She become like a celebrity within her company, just all
because she say yes. Sometimes saying yes is more fun
than saying though.
Speaker 1 (23:30):
And Joah thinks we'd all benefit from the fun of
asking for help more often.
Speaker 2 (23:34):
The rejection therapy has become a movement. It just feels
my heart because I hope this movement can keep going
and to help people overcome their fear.
Speaker 1 (23:46):
So many of us are missing out on making new
social connections or deepening our bonds with existing friends just
because we don't want to ask for help or favors that.
Maybe because we don't want to appear annoying or vulnerable,
or because we fear the humiliation of our pleas being rejected.
But the science shows that our worries about being pushy
and needy are unfounded. People are way more happy to
(24:07):
help than our lying minds think. And our reluctance to
ask for help, why's it preventing the people we care
about from receiving the happiness boost that comes with being kind.
So why not follow Jah's advice and push your rejection
comfort zone a bit. You don't need to ask a
stranger for money or demand specialized donuts, but you can
make sure you give the people in your life opportunities
(24:28):
to support and care for you. It'll make them and
you feel much better than you expect. The Happiness Lab
is co written and produced by Ryan dilly Our. Original
music was composed by Zachary Silver, with additional scoring, mixing
(24:52):
and mastering by Evan Viola. Jess Shane and Alice Fines
offered additional production support. Special thanks to my agent, Ben
Davis and all of the Pushkin Group. The Happiness Lab
is brought to you by Pushkin Industries and me Doctor
Larry Santos
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