Stephanie Harrison

unfortunately, pursue things that don't end up contributing to lasting well-being in the long term.

And in order to address it, we think that we have to perfect ourselves and essentially be almost like a robotic version of ourselves.

It's really what you described, this cultural understanding of happiness that teaches us that if you want to be happy, you need to perfect yourself.

You know, somebody who's always doing everything perfectly and never makes a mistake and never struggles.

The second lie is really deeply connected to that, which is that you have to achieve more and more in order to prove how worthy you are.

You need to achieve more and more and consume as much as you can.

And you need to dominate other people and essentially cut yourself off from them and be completely independent.

And so that becomes a coping mechanism for so many people, particularly in our culture, where these things are rewarded and celebrated.

And these messages about happiness, they seep into our lives in so many different ways, whether it's through our workplaces or through the institutions that we see or what we see in the media.

And we end up doing things like burning ourselves out, working ourselves into sickness or ill-being, neglecting our relationships and doing all of these things in order to say, oh, I'll be happy when I get there.

And so it becomes very hard to untangle them if we don't have that awareness about what old happy is.

And the third lie is that we're separate from other people, that the actions of another person don't influence us, that our culture and systems don't have an impact upon us, and that we can basically do everything alone.

And I think all of us, as an entrepreneur myself,

The first old happy lie is that you have to be perfect because you're not good enough.

As somebody who has worked in a number of different environments, who has relationships with people who matter to me, I can pretty clearly acknowledge that I'm not able to do any of that by myself.

And so this pressure that we all feel, that voice in your head that tells you, I'm not worthy, there's something wrong with me, I'm broken, that we all have, it really comes from this old happy culture.

Even if I do some of those things independently, I'm still drawing upon support and resources and lessons and wisdom from other people at all those times.

And in order to address it, we think that we have to perfect ourselves and essentially be almost like a robotic version of ourselves.

And so that's the third lie.

You know, somebody who's always doing everything perfectly and never makes a mistake and never struggles.