Alex Shalman.comPractical Personal Development

I first heard about Tynan years ago. He was one of the people written about in The Game, a book by NY Times best seller Neil Strauss.

One way of describing Tynan is as eccentric, adventure seeking, entrepreneurial, vegan pickup artist who lives in Austin, Texas everywhere in the world! Tynan became a productivity monster, sold everything he had, filled a small backpack with the best gear and technology in the land, and set out to explore the world and find adventures. You can read about his great stories at Better Than Your Boyfriend, or follow his global adventures at Life Nomadic.

It should also be noted that Tynan is an author. He wrote the book Make Her Chase You, a book on how to attract women. On top of that, Tynan created the hit program Conversion Doubler, which seems to be the best multi variant testing tool on the market.

With all of that, and the life mantra “living life awesome”, I just had to interview him for the Happiness Project.

1. How do you define happiness?

It’s hard to define emotions. What I actively seek, though, are things that I consider “fun” and simultaneously “satisfying”. I think that those activities, along with a good attitude, are the ingredients for happiness. The habit of filling one’s life with these activities is the recipe for happiness.

For example, take the trip I’m going on right now. It’s fun because I’m meeting new people, seeing new places, and having new adventures. At the same time, it’s also satisfying. I’m gaining valuable life experience, understanding new cultures and learning tons of new stuff (including languages).

For me FUN = immediate happiness and SATISFACTION = lasting happiness.
If you go watch a movie it’s FUN, but you don’t get any residual happiness from it the next day. If you get some errands done you may not have fun, but the next day you might feel happier because you’ve gotten them out of the way. I try to spend as much time as possible doing things that are both fun and satisfying.

2. On a scale of 1-10, how would you rate your happiness now, versus when you were a child?

10. I’m pretty overjoyed on a daily basis. My happiness is also a lot more consistent than it was as a child. I used to let things get to me, like arguing with my parents over bad grades, or a girl not liking me.

3. What do you do on a daily basis that brings you happiness? (and how consistent is the feeling of happiness throughout your day)

I’m extremely happy all day long. The ultimate arbiter of happiness is me, so I spend a lot of time working on myself. I develop habits that I know will ensure my continued happiness.

I identify weaknesses in myself and create plans to fix them. That brings me a lot of satisfaction. For example, I have a simple system I came up with to make myself super productive. I get a lot of pleasure and satisfaction out of my work.

I also changed my diet to be 99% healthy (hey, no one’s perfect), which has brought me an immense amount of satisfaction while I eat.

I’m open to, or perhaps even look for, ways to do things differently. I try to do things other people aren’t doing.

Most importantly, I focus only on the positive. My day is 99% positive and maybe 1% negative on a bad day. If I focused on that 1% it might get to me, but if I focus on the positive, it’s very easy to be happy all the time.

4. What things take away from your happiness? What can be done to lessen their impact or remove them from your life?

Nothing. I feel like my baseline of happiness is so high that it would be impossible not to be happy. I think of the incredible coincidences that had to take place just for me to be alive. Thousands of generations of people had to exist for me to exist. If any one of those people changed any of their plans slightly, I may have never been born.

The fact that we have this incredible planet to live on is another insane fortunate coincidence. Look at the technology we have… I can be transported anywhere on the planet in less than a day. There are so many things to learn and to experience. We have language so that we can make our lives better by interacting with different people.

What about all the people in my life who I love and respect and have made a huge difference in my life?

The truth is that we have EVERYTHING to be happy about, it’s just a matter of realizing it and appreciating it.

I haven’t had a hard time in life, and I wouldn’t want to pretend to.
But I have had “bad things” happen to me. For example, I once had my entire life savings seized from me in a day. Six figures. Still, I couldn’t feel unhappy because of all the amazing positive things that completely dwarf the insignificant loss of money.

5. What do you plan on doing in the future that will bring you even more happiness?

Honestly I can’t imagine being happier. I’ll keep doing what I’m doing now and keep going after other goals (like learning more, making more money, making new friends, etc).

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To get more info about what the Happiness Project is and isn’t, please visit the Introduction Post. To see a running list of all participants, which I will be updating as things happen, please visit the Happiness Project Page.

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