The Pursuit Of Happiness — My 7-Step Magical Formula For Personal Happiness

5. Always be hungry to learn.

There’s no excuse to stop learning.

One of my favorite things about living in Paris was the language and cultural barrier. I moved there and went to a French school knowing zero French. And after 10 months, it was still so bad that the dudes at Starbucks started speaking English before I could finish saying un americano glacé, s’il vous plaît.

But I got by rather swimmingly, even in the moments when the chefs would scream at you in an indecipherable language, throw knives, and assume you understood. Nod, say oui chef, get your shit together, and figure it out.

And I understand the language so much better now because of it.

That also goes for cultural norms, like never drinking red wine before white (always go light → dark); not tipping; and the fact that all of Paris takes a month-long “siesta” during the month of August.

If you didn’t know, now you know.

The same thing happened when I airdropped myself in Cape Town for a week (obviously without doing any research), rented a car, hopped in, and realized the wheel and roads were both on the flip side.

Most terrifying drive to a hotel ever. But I didn’t die. And I meandered through the most gorgeous backdrop I’ve ever seen.

Point is, those situations take you out of your comfort zone and constantly push your mental boundaries. Your brain is always engaged — and it never enters auto-pilot, zombie mode. And you learn as you go.

You don’t need to travel exotically, go to grad school, or spend any money to learn something new.

• Duolingo gamifies language-learning and it’s completely gratis.
• Coursera let’s you take classes from Stanford, John’s Hopkins, Yale, Brown, UPenn, and a ton of other elite schools for free. Udemy and Khan Academy are stellar, too.
• Codeacademy teaches HTML, CSS, JavaScript, PHP coding, and end-to-end web design, again, fo free.

I taught myself how to build a website and all aspects of an online business from scratch, without any experience or cash, using Google, YouTube, and a handful of books.

Be resourceful. Free information is everywhere.