I am sitting down today with Jannis Bandorski, serial entrepreneur who founded and co-founded multiple businesses; most recently, ARRtist, which provides networking and knowledge exchange for SaaS founders and Xletix, a market-leading obstacle course racing event.

In our conversation, we focus on his latest project: "the happiness remix", which he’s about to take to clients and other outlets. The happiness remix is essentially an eclectic mix of key lessons from the broad body of happiness research that he started to engage with as a graduate student. 

Jannis is inspiring to me because of his “go for it” attitude: If he’s excited about something, he just goes for it: whether its pursuing happiness research in one of europe’s pre-eminent management schools Uni St. Gallen; whether its teaming-up with some passionate supporters to help relocate one of Berlin's most iconic club spaces Bar 25, or spinning up a community for SaaS leaders in DACH: Jannis is the kind of person who sees more downside in not-doing than doing. There’s something infectious about his energy and that sense of possibility.

In our conversation, we focus on his latest interest in happiness habits: 

There are some well known attempts to define happiness in a way that allows you to optimize it. For example, happiness as a function of how different life events unfold compared to our expectations teaches us to be realistic about setting those expectations (see Mo Gawdat's work). Or Martin Seligman's famous equation that happiness = setpoint + fixed circumstances + voluntary conditions, which directs our attentions to those areas that actually are under our control.

Those definitions are still largely "meta": What areas of life should we focus on? What matters? 

Jannis cuts happiness into 4 broad components that all contribute to wellbeing: 

First, health, incl. moving, eating, breathing, sleeping; second, personal relationships and community/ belonging; third, work and focus, and fourth: purpose. 

*** If you happen to be listening to this on Spotify, there’s a question for you on the episode page: Please tell us about a happiness routine that you introduced recently that is simple to do and really effective for you. We’ll pool the best ideas and share them back ***

Some sources we cite:

The Harvard Study on adult development analyzes the determinants for well-being. You can find it here. We also refer to Tim Urban's book What's Our Problem, which you can follow-up on here.