Give up on happiness. Go hard at wonder.

We are a world obsessed with happiness

We have cheap happiness officers and world happiness reports. Many self-help genres are focused on happiness as the end goal

Even America's founding documents say the pursuit of happiness. The challenges were so terrible at knowing what will make us happy

and frankly when you look at headlines when you look at the state of the world

happiness doesn't always seem like a realistic emotion rather than seeking happiness i think it's more realistic and more achievable

for people to seek wonder my name's monica parker i'm the founder of hatch and i'm the author of the power of wonder

The extraordinary emotion that will change the way you live, learn, and lead

I think it's a sad irony that we are, as a world, obsessed with positive emotions

In fact, often we end up in this situation of toxic positivity

What toxic positivity does is it really takes away the ability for us to experience the full richness of our emotional portfolio

If we focus so heavily on positive emotions we missing out on the richness of both negative emotions but also these mixed emotions that really help us metabolize what happens in the world

What's amazing about wonder is that it's both positive and negative at the same time

Wonder is not just this positive self-transcendent experience. There is a certain level of conflict. Think of a butterfly coming out of a chrysalis

There's violence there. There's terror there. But then there's the beauty. And so having a greater emotional portfolio, being able to tap into a lot of different types of

emotions to express how we're feeling actually makes us more resilient because we're able to

better make sense of what's happening to us in our world. And I think that that is what makes wonder so impactful

When I introduced the concept of wonder, I think people believe it's really amorphous

and spiritual, and it can be that. But it's also very grounded and concrete

It's about saying, I am going to see wonder in my day-to-day life

One of the ways to do that is with wonder bringers. They're whatever brings you a sense of wonder

A great indication that you are in the presence of a wonder bringer is it gives you goosebumps Nature is a really fundamental primary way that many people find wonder

We then have social. We can find a sense of wonder from the people around us

our families and our friends, or a charismatic speaker could be a social wonder bringer

And then we have cognitive. And cognitive wonder bringers are things like

thinking about the nature of a folded universe. You know, something that really gets your noggin thinking

The number of things that can bring you wonder within those categories are infinite

And all of these elements just help start to teach us about what brings us wonder

The challenge is we put a lot of barriers between us and wonder

One of those barriers is being in a hurry. We're always in a hurry and might just zoom right past wonder

Certainly these fabulous little devices that we have in our pocket, our phones

they want us to be clicking and scrolling as quickly as possible

But that doesn't help us get closer to wonder. We need to slow down, create the time and space in order to find wonder

And we can do that through what I call slow thought. There are a few different ways that we can bring slow thought into our life

And the first is meditation Meditation helps us quiet that chattering mind where we can banish rumination and allow our brains to notice wonder Another slow thought activity is narrative journaling

Our brains love stories. And so if we can write stories about our own experiences of wonder

that actually extends the experience of wonder and enhances it. And then the last slow thought activity is sleep

Sleep deprivation doesn't allow our brains to process what it's experienced from day to day

If we're sleep deprived, then we simply won't be able to engage

in the other slow thought activities that help bring us closer to wonder

people think because i wrote a book about wonder that i am an expert well i'm an expert at

understanding it but maybe not finding it i am not a wonder jedi master i am still on this journey

with everyone else and so every day i make a conscious decision to try to slow down to find

the beauty in the quotidian. We live in such a fast world, but if we choose to view the world

through a wonder lens, we can find it and find it every day. Get smarter, faster with videos from

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