(Rob Dubin Happiness Expert)
Happiness.
Something everybody is searching for and how to get it. But, how do you get it?
Well, Rob Dubin is one man who has made it his life’s mission to find out the answer to that question.
He’s studied happiness at Yale University and lectured on happiness at Harvard University.
He has learned how the science of human happiness can be used to teach all of us to be happy.
And in this interview he shares his findings.
Q – Rob, this is the first time I’ve ever interviewed someone about the topic of happiness.
A – Interesting.
Q – Most people think happiness comes to people who have everything going for them in life. But, that’s not really the case is it? So many rich and famous people are miserable. So, what is happiness? What is your definition of it?
A – Well, there are two types of happiness. One is called hedonic happiness and that has the same root word as hedonism and so that’s the kind of happiness where you can afford to buy the best steak and the best wine and drive the nicest car and live in big mansion and all those things just bring us momentary happiness. It doesn’t last. None of the hedonic happiness lasts for two reasons: the novelty of it wears off and there’s something called hedonic adaptation. So, the first taste of the ice cream cone is really good, but by the end of the ice cream cone it’s just not as special. So that’s hedonic happiness.
The other type of happiness is something Aristotle called Eudaimonic happiness. Eudaimonic happiness has more to do with fulfillment and satisfaction and it stays with you a long time. So, that’s the thing that creates meaning and purpose in our life and it brings that Eudaimonic happiness.
That’s really what we should be seeking more of or at least equally. We do want both kinds of happiness but definitely if you’re only chasing hedonic happiness you’ll never catch it. It never lasts.
So, you should seek this Eudaimonic happiness.
My Ted Talk is called ‘Happiness: Face Your Fears and Find It’.
So, it’s stepping out of your comfort zone and confronting things that are fearful for you so you grow and when you grow you’re happier.
A lot of times we have a big goal. For instance I sailed around the world. That’s a gigantic , multi- year goal.
But, you want to hit a sales target. You want your kids to get into the right school.
Often times it’s who you become along the way to achieving the goal that is much more meaningful than the goal itself when you actually get it.
So, we should all be trying to cultivate and look for Eudaimonic happiness. It’s happiness that comes from growth.
Q -You mention sailing around the world. You sailed around the world with your wife for 17 years. Is that correct?
A – Yes.
Q – Now, how could you afford to do that/ Were you a Wall Street stockbroker who mad a lot of money?
A – No.
Q – And Rob, a sailboat? That sounds dangerous to me.
A – Well, it could be dangerous.
We’d saved up enough money to go sailing for sort of 2 or 3 years and then have enough to come back and re-establish in our business. And that’s what we planned to do, but the stock market was very good and living on a sailboat was very in-expensive. So, at the end of 4 years my little nest egg was actually larger and we kept doing that.
So, I didn’t hit the Lottery. I didn’t get a big Wall Street win and I didn’t sell my business for a ton of money.
I did what they have a new term for called fire I think. Something about saving money and retiring early. A lot of millennials are trying to do it and that’s all we did. We just saved a lot of our salary for 3 or 4 or 5 years and had a little bit of a nest egg and we went off sailing. As I managed that money in the stock market it grew and grew and sailing was inexpensive so we were able to keep going.
Q – What was your business before you became a Happiness Expert?
A – I was a documentary filmmaker. As I got interested in sailing I was able to make a lot of sailing films and so I was rubbing shoulders with these multi-millionaires and billionaires who were competing in the America’s Cup and these high end yacht races.
They would fly in on their private jets and the crew would deliver the yacht and they would go to the race. So I was spending a lot of time with these people.
Some of ‘em were happy and then some of ‘em weren’t that happy.
A few years later I was sailing around the world spending time with villagers who were barefoot and lived in dirt floor shacks and some of them were happy and some of them weren’t.
So, I started studying what created human happiness and basically our only goal when we were sailing ourselves was to make ourselves happy initially and then to create happiness in the people we encountered along the way.
So, I ended up studying the science of human happiness in over 100 different countries and then when I got back and people wanted to hear about our sailing trip I started speaking about bit and I didn’t just want to show pictures of pretty sunsets and say we went here and we went there.
I wanted people to take something valuable so I started talking about happiness that I learned from all these Third World countries.
After doing that for a little bit I went, ‘ Do I really know what the hell I’m talking about? I’ve got my personal experience but do I know what I’m talking about?’
So then I actually studied the science behind it, the science of positive psychology and I found out all the things that I had identified by observation were exactly what the scientists who were studying it were teaching so I knew I was on the right track.
So, I now have both sides of it. I have the actual scientific literature of what the psychologists were teaching as well as what I had lived and observed in my own observations in 100 different countries as well.
Q – How happy were you before you started studying happiness?
A – I’m extremely happy. I’m the person who looks for the scenery on the detour. I spin everything that happens to figure out the positive side of every bad thing that happens.
So, I’ve had that in my DNA.
A lot of our kind of resting state of happiness is determined by our DNA. But, I’ve also learned how to leverage it.
I teach things that actually create happiness. For instance gratitude is one of the simplest ones. So we’re here in the Holiday Season and we all talked about what we were greatful for on Thanksgiving Day. But, if you do that same thing 365 days a year you will figure out what you’re greatful for. You’ll realize you have a lot to be greatful for.
And so the more good things you look for in your life you’ll keep finding more good things.
So, I got a lot of it from my DNA and I have always set up my life to do what makes me happy.
I grew up in Colorado. By the time I was 20 years old I loved doing the things we do here in Colorado – mountain climbing, skiing, and white water kayaking. I learned to take pictures and I loved making movies.
So, at 20 years old those were all the things I loved and then created a career as a documentary filmmaker making ski films and kayak films and mountain climbing films. So, I created a career around doping what I loved not what was most practical or what my parents wanted or what was going to be a good career. I’ve just always gone for the things that are going to make me happy.
Q – How many people can say what you’re saying to me? To be able to do what you want to do in life makes a big difference.
A – Exactly. You know most people do things to please others. They do what their parents expect of them. They do all these things for the wrong reasons that aren’t going to make them happy. I’ve always chosen to do things that make me happy.
Q – You’ve appeared onstage or alongside Tony Robbins. What’s the difference between you two guys? I would guess you concentrate more on being happy. Is that correct?
A – Obviously I wouldn’t compare myself to Tony.I was honored to be invited on his stage to talk about some experiences in my life but Tony has helped millions of people. He’s brilliant. He’s one of the best. He understands human psychology better than almost anybody. He’s been a huge positive force in my life. He’s a tremendous mentor for me. I’ve created a bit of a personal relationship with him so I got to know him. He’s benefited me in so many ways.
Q – Did you go to college?
A – I didn’t. I was quite lucky. When I was 17 years old I knew what I wanted to do as I just described. I knew I wanted to make movies and I wrote my purpose when I was very young. My purpose in life, the reason I’m here is to live my dream so that I can inspire other people to live their dreams.
I first did that with my movie camera by making inspiring moves of mountain climbing expeditions or people that were very inspiring leaders in pushing boundaries in some way or form.
So, I went on these kayak, mountain climbing and skiing expeditions. They were making me happy. I got to travel all over the world with my camera and get paid to go helicopter skiing or climbing the Himalayas.
So, I was making me happy. And then when that aired on ABC-TV it inspired people to chase their own dreams.
And then I made films about sailing around the world for many years which I’ve heard from hundreds of sailors saying you inspired us to go sailing. And so I did that for many years as a documentary filmmaker. And now I do the same thing from stage. I inspire other people to change their own dreams.
Q – Now, what is helicopter skiing?
A – Oh, it’s where helicopters take you up to the tops of really dramatic mountains and you ski. It’s like having your own private ski area.
Q – You’re not on some harness are you? They just drop you off?
A – Yeah. They drop you off and you ski down. It’s like the ultimate for skiers to go helicopter skiing. It’s like having your own private ski area. You got fresh powder in front of you. Nobody else has been on the mountain. So, I would get paid to do things like that or get paid to travel all over the world to make travel films for the Travel Channel.
Q – What a great job! And to think you did it without a college degree. That’s even more impressive!
A – I did go to film school. I knew I wanted to go into photography. So, when I was 17 and all my friends were applying to Liberal Arts colleges and they were going to change their majors two or three times along the way like most people do, I was lucky that I was able to do what I wanted to do.
So, I went to a film college and it was just as hard as college. It was a 3 year program.
Q – In January 2026 you’re going to Japan to lecture on leadership?
A – No, that’s just a ski trip. But I do speak on leadership all over the country because as a documentary filmmaker I filmed all these high achievers. I filmed world class athletes and Olympians. But, I also filmed Fortune 500 CEO’s.
I sailed with Ted Turner and the Chairman of AVIS, Buckminster Fuller and later I met Jimmy Carter.
So, I filmed a lot of high end, great leaders and I learned their strategies.
And as Tony Robbins says, ‘ Success leaves clues’.
So, as I got to film and spend time with all these high achievers I learned what they did, how they approached change, which is one of the biggest things everybody is dealing with to today. Our world is changing so rapidly in business and leaders have to have a strategy for change. They have to be resilient.
That’s where I apply my science of happiness also, to the work area because workers are burned out and dis-engaged. All the things we do for our workers is filtered through how happy they are.
So, you can give somebody a raise. You can give them benefits. You can customize their job for them. But, if they’re an unhappy person none of that stuff is going to have much affect.
If you take that person and teach them strategies of how to be a happier human being by focusing on gratitude, by focusing on fulfillment, now that same stuff you’ve done already for them, the benefits and compensation, now it really means something. And so they avoid burnout and they stay more engaged in their work.
That’s how we apply the happiness to the business world.
Q – This is a Happy Interview!
A – ( laughs)
Q – No negativity. No complaints. You wouldn’t believe all the people I’ve talked to over the years with such terrible, awful stories.
A – Well, that’s all perspective. One of the things that influences my speaking, one of ‘em is the documentary work with these high achievers. One of ‘em is what I learned sailing but the third pillar that informed my view of the world is my wife and I were once lost for 5 days in a mountain blizzard and after the 5th day the rescue was called off and we were given up for dead and the coroner told my parents they would recover our frozen bodies the following Spring.
We spent 5 nights out in the worst storm of Colorado’s history with no tents and not enough sleeping bags.
Eventually we got out and that’s when I got the first phone call from President Clinton.
My wife had severely frozen feet and hands and the doctors said they were going to have to amputate both of her feet and all of her fingers.
Having been through Tony’s firewalk we decided maybe there was another way. Maybe our body can do things we don’t understand.
And so we refused to let them amputate. And eventually she recovered. She didn’t get gangrene like they were worried. That experience is not a sad experience for us. We went through some really difficult stuff, the survival situation and immediately after that they were going to amputate her hands and feet and that’s a happy story for me.
Q – What did the doctors say when your wife recovered? Did they say it’s a miracle?
A – I guess I’ll have to go in a little bit of detail to answer your question.
After 3 days they said, ‘The tissue in her hands and feet are dying. She’s going to get gangrene or blood poisoning and unless we amputate it’ll kill her.’ And we refused.
It’s very dramatic when I talk about it in my speeches but, we refused and then we had this kind of standoff with the doctors.
Then we had a meeting with them. At first there were three different doctors. They sent a psychiatrist in to talk to us ‘cause they thought we were in denial when we said we’re not going to let you do the surgery.
But, eventually we inspired the doctors to look at the possibilities of her care in a new way.
They were treating her in a hyperbaric chamber like the use for scuba divers and they just took really good care of her and she never got gangrene. So, we were able to wait and wait and wait and wait and eventually her tissues recovered.
If she’d gotten gangrene we would not have fought with her doctors. We would have agreed to the amputation but we inspired them to see things in a new way.
They still cured her. At first they thought the only option was surgery and we helped them see other possibilities and then when they got onboard with those other possibilities they did great things and she recovered.
It was because of their great care that was our inspiration to inspire them to see it in a new way, to see the possibilities of it in a new way.
©Gary James
Official Website: robdubin.com
