WONDER DRUG

The Wonder Drug according to this book is the act of serving others. Both authors are doctors, Trzeciak is an intensivist and Mazarelli is an emergency physician.

The authors quoted Scott Galloway, professor of marketing and bestselling author and entrepreneur, who gave this advice to his students: “Your job is to find something you are really good at, something of value to others. Then do it for ten thousand hours to, with grit and perseverance, become great at it. By then, the economic accoutrements, relevance, prestige, and camaraderie that follow greatness will make you "passionate" about whatever "it" is. And remember money is not an end, it's a means. Think of money as the ink in your pen to write your altruistic life story or the fuel to make your story burn brighter.”

The authors described three ways of a happy life based on Dr Martin Seligman’s classification. The first is what he called "the pleasant life” of hedonistic pursuits. By seeking pleasure, you will will superficially, temporarily happy. The data on this is clear that hedonic happiness is fleeting. It doesn't come close to the well-being/life satisfaction benefits of eudaimonic (having a higher purpose) pursuits, aka Live to Give behaviors.

Dr. Seligman's second plane is "the good life" where happiness is found via engagement or deep concentration when everything else falls away, what Hungarian American psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi famously called "flow”. When in the "flow" zone, you are using your strengths and fully engaged in them. You could live in a rundown shack, but when you are actively engaged in doing what you're good at, you'll get a flood of positive emotions. David Brooks talks about flow as "the dissolving of self”. When you are lost in your work or a cause, needling personal ambitions are forgotten. In freedom from self-interest, we feel happy.

Dr. Seligman's final (highest) plane is what he called "the meaningful life" of using one's strengths to serve others, finding a sense of belonging and purpose that creates the deepest, most long-lasting happiness. In his TED Talk on the subject, Seligman described conducting a survey that asked participants, "To what extent does the pursuit of pleasure (the pleasant life), the pursuit of engagement (the good life), and the pursuit of meaning (the meaningful life) contribute to life satisfaction?”The results of the initial survey - and fifteen replication studies-found that the pleasant life made almost no contribution to life satisfaction. The good life of engagement strongly contributed to life satisfaction. But the meaningful life makes the strongest contribution of all. If you have meaning and engagement, he said, pleasure is like the cherry on top of the sundae.

The authors ask a chicken-and-egg Big Question : Which came first, happiness or success?

Answer: You're not happy because you're successful, you're successful because you're happy.

This might go against the conventional wisdom about success.

Serving others is more powerful than you've ever imagined. And the sheer magnitude of it keeps coming back, to you and to them. It's not like posting a Snapchat, there and gone in seconds. Science supports the idea that a kind act can echo forever. You have done something that another person may never forget.