I can’t believe it, I actually found the secret to happiness; and it’s not what I thought it was going to be. In this episode Russell talks about discovering the secret to happiness in the memories brought about in his family photos. Here are some of the insightful messages you will hear in this episode:

-- Find out why categorizing all his photos made Russell find his happy place.

-- See why Russell believes that happiness is found in the memories brought about by photos rather than in the event taking place in the photos.

-- And see what software Russell is using in order to organize all his photos.

So listen here to find out what Russell believes is the secret to happiness, so you can get happy too.

Now I want to preface this by saying I am not a scrapbooker, my mom is a hardcore scrapbooker, but I’m not. I’m the most disorganized person I’ve probably ever met. My mom told me that as a kid I was the messiest kid she’s ever had and ever seen. I don’t do good at cleaning things up. If you look at the Disc profile, I have a high D, high I, high S, off the charts on all those things, zero C. No organizational skills whatsoever. So this is like the frame of who I am.

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Hey everybody, this is Russell Brunson. Welcome back to the Marketing Secrets podcast, formerly known as Marketing in Your Car, and because today I’m in my Tesla, we could call it Marketing in Your Tesla, but we can’t because now we changed it to Marketing Secrets, like 2 or 3 years ago. So welcome back to the Marketing Secrets show, today I’m going to teach you guys how to be happy.

Alright everybody, so I’ve had a whirlwind last couple of months, I am not going to lie. It’s been fun, it’s been hard in all the things, and now just starting this week, things are starting to get just a little bit lighter. For example, I had for the last 2 months, my kids have had wrestling. So I can’t miss wrestling practice, so every single day I go to work, then I jump off at 3, from 3 til 6 I’m with the kids at wrestling practice, and then I come home and I try to get done the stuff I was supposed done from 3 til 6. So it’s like I’m adding 3 or 4 hours a day to my day, which has been exhausting.

Plus we we’re in the middle of a remodel and a bunch of other things, but the remodel is done now, and wrestling ended on Saturday, and then the book final, I have to get the final draft of the last rewrite in next week, so that will be done. Then Funnel Hacking Live is our last big thing, and then that’s done, and then it’s like, I got nothing to do. SO I’m really looking forward to that.

But this season has been by far the most insane, busy season of my life. I wish somebody could film it, because I don’t think anybody would actually believe. But it’s been fun.

Now what’s interesting, Saturday my boys had their district wrestling tournament, which is the thing they work towards all year long. And it was so awesome. The team, first off, the team took first. I think we’ve won 9 of the last 10 years, and we thumped them this year. I think we set the record for the most points, we got like 500 team points, and the number two team had like 300. So the team did awesome, which is great.

And then Dallin won his weight class, which is awesome. He had the returning district champ in the finals, and Dallin wrestled him earlier this year and beat him by one point in a really close match, but obviously as super nerd dad, I went and watched that match a million times, and then worked with Dallin on all the things. And this time Dallin wrestled him and this time Dallin thumped him. Major decision, and beat by 12 to 4, beat him by 8 points which is insane. So that was so much fun.

Bowen came in and Bowen did great for himself as well. The very first match he was beating this guy 10 to 1 and then he got thrown and pinned, which was heartbreaking. But then he won his next 3 matches, and he would have gone for 5th and 6th place, but this tournament only placed the top 4. So anyway, he definitely would have made at least the top 6 in the district, and potentially 5th, but he did great and I’m proud of him. It was just fun.

And Sunday, the next day was kind of a, you know, the next day where we’re all beat up, the kids are beat up, I’m beat up because I’m on my feet for like 15 hours walking around a gym, you know the stress of everything. So usually the day we’re all kind of just like beat. And Bowen told me, and Bowen is typically my little buddy, he doesn’t like working as hard, he told me afterwards he’s like, “Dad, yesterday was really, really hard, but I want to do it…” What did he say? Something like, “I want to do yesterday again.” I’m like, ‘what do you mean? I thought it was hard?” and he’s like, “It was, but it was so fun.” And I spent my day looking back two years ago and Bowen hated wrestling, and he got pinned every single time, and now he’s like, yesterday was the best day. He wanted to do the whole day again. Just wrestling, hanging out, anyway it was special.

So I tell you this because I want to talk about happiness. And one interesting thing, people always say, “Money doesn’t buy happiness. But it does buy a lot of cool stuff.” That’s actually really, really true. But it definitely doesn’t buy happiness. I’ve made more money in my life than ever and there’s a lot of times where I’m not happy. And it’s funny because you think there’s going to be a correlation between those two and there’s not.  But in the middle of this chaos I found my happy spot. And it’s not something I would have assumed.

Now I want to preface this by saying I am not a scrapbooker, my mom is a hardcore scrapbooker, but I’m not. I’m the most disorganized person I’ve probably ever met. My mom told me that as a kid I was the messiest kid she’s ever had and ever seen. I don’t do good at cleaning things up. If you look at the Disc profile, I have a high D, high I, high S, off the charts on all those things, zero C. No organizational skills whatsoever. So this is like the frame of who I am.

And for years I’ve been taking pictures on phones and cameras and just everywhere, and they’re all over the place, and I always had this…one time I tried to upload them all to this service, I can’t remember the name of the service. And I uploaded our entire lives to the service, and the service crashed and we lost every picture for the most part. Devastating. So for years I’ve had just boxes of old phones and flip cameras and negatives and pictures and all sorts of, just all over the place. And never anything to do with it.

And recently I found out about this little app on your phone and on your computer called Google photos. And I needed it because my phone got, I hate iCloud, I don’t know why, I think iCloud is the devil. So my phone was completely maxed out. I was like, ‘I gotta figure out something.” And I don’t know how I came up with it or found it or someone told me, I don’t even remember. But I downloaded Google photos, Google Photos took all the pictures and videos off my phone and threw them online and cleared them off my phone, my phone had all this space, and then the Google photos app, they’re all in t here.

And then what’s crazy about it, you can go on inside of Google or whatever online, and you can see all the pictures, you can see them on your phone, you can make albums. So I’ve been geeking out making albums. The search is insane. Like, you go and you’ll be like, and it’ll show faces and it’s like, “Do you want to find this person?” And you can name them so that in the future they know this is Collette, and this is Aiden, and this is Bowen and Dallin, you know whatever. And you click on it and it goes and finds every picture in your database that that person is hooked to.

Every picture, every video. And it’s insane. The person can be in a picture in the background of a picture, and it still scans the face, finds it, and brings that picture back up. The search thing is insane. Or I’ll type in ‘wrestling’ and it will show up every single picture in a wrestling room, or wresting, or singlets, or headgear. I don’t know how it does it but it is the best searching thing ever.

So as soon as I did that on my one phone I was like, “Oh my gosh, this is amazing.” So what I did next, I went and found all my old phones and I went and installed the Google photos app on all of them, and had, because I’ve been saving these phones for years, some of them are like the original iPhones, “There are like 3 pictures on here that I don’t want to lose someday.” So on all the ones I was able to, I went and installed Google photos and sucked all the pictures off all those phones into my thing.

And what’s crazy, it sucks them in there and it categorizes them based on date when they were taken. So I did that on Google phones, I went to my old Flip cameras, I had my brother rip all those and put them in a thing. Then I went and found my old pictures from my mission and from high school and from college, and from when Collette and I first got married, I found our old wedding pictures, I started going to photographers in the past that took our pictures and I started paying them off to buy the negatives and buy the original digital pictures.

Every scrap of everything in my house I’m getting digitized and throwing it in Google photos. I found every one of my high school wrestling matches, my college wrestling matches, both at BYU and at Boise State. I found every single time my kids wrestled growing up. Everything I’ve ever gotten now is on my Google Photo apps. And then Google Photos sorts them and synchronizes them, figures them out, and then I can make albums.

So what I do now is I create an album for wrestling 2000, what year are we, 2019. I threw every picture, every video, everything in this thing, and now that I have this album, I’m consciously when I’m with my kids and they’re warming up, I grab my phone and get pictures of them warming up. At warm up matches I get pictures, I get pictures of them hanging out with their friends. I’m like that creepy stalker dad that’s taking pictures of all these things. But as soon as I do, I have them all synced to that album, so every single picture I take at wrestling, it’s all synched to the wrestling 2017 album.

And then I found wrestling from 2016, 15, 14 and so I have these albums from all the wrestling, and I have albums for my wife and I, I have albums for my kids, albums for all our family trips, albums for when we went to the sand dunes. And we’re making these albums and organizing stuff, and it’s been so amazing.

So now if you go to the Google, there’s like a feed that shows you all your pictures and you can scroll through and everything is categorized by year, so you can scroll all the way back like 15 years now of pictures that are all categorized, have been scanned, you know Google has done their algorithm so you can find anything you want. And it’s all there.

And I’m having so much fun every free second going and getting pictures. And I share this with you because I heard someone say this the other day, and I don’t know if it’s true, I don’t know what the percentages are, I’m sure I’m going to mess up the stats, but when they said it, it rang true to me. They said, “Typically happiness in life does not come from the experience. Happiness comes from the memory of the experience.”

So a good example of this is after Funnel Hacking Live 2 years ago, we flew the kids out and went to Disney World because we were in Orlando right, took the kids to Disney World. And if I remember right, it was the middle of Spring Break, it was a nightmare. There were a billion people there, the kids were sick. We had kids puking at Disney Land, we had like, it was horrible. But looking back now I have an album that says this is Disney Land 2017 or whatever with my kids, and I look at the pictures and all I remember is getting off the Hogwarts ride and drinking Butter Beer and getting soaked with the kids, and the pictures in the hotel, and we got pictures in the like….all I see is these pictures of the memories, and like, man, that was an amazing trip. But if I remember the actual trip, it was, I don’t know if it was that good.

Same thing, we found the Disney Cruise pictures from 2 years ago, the pictures are so stinking cute, and I’m looking at it with Collette, and we looked at this one picture and there’s Norah and she’s in a bath towel and she’s got little pig tails and the biggest smile on her face, and I’m like, ‘This is the cutest picture ever. You remember that, it was so much fun.” And she’s like, “Do you not remember when we took that picture?” I’m like, “No, when?” She’s like, ”It was 3:00 in the morning, it was the 3^rd time that night she had puked in our bed and we’d called the stewardesses or whatever they’re called to come and clean up our entire room up. And that was after they’d cleaned it up and we had Norah wrapped up on the bed and she started giggling, and we took a picture of her giggling.” And I was like, “Oh my gosh, I forgot. That was a horrible night.” But the picture brought so much happiness to me.

And I think that so many times we’re on this journey, we’re having fun on the journey, we get to the destination, we get the destination and it’s not what we actually think it is. It’s not as good as we want. And then years later we remember back and we’re like, “Oh the good old days, back when I was in high school, back when I was…” we remember the memories of what brings us happiness.

And for me now, I have every picture that’s ever been taken of my kids. I literally going to my friends, “Have you ever taken a picture of my kids? Give it to me, I need it right now. Sync it to my phone. Air drop it, let’s go.” I’m just kind of, yes, I’m that dad. But now that on my phone with my kids, it’s funny because Aiden will be down, so I’ll pull my phone out and be like, “Hey, check this out buddy.” And I’ll go and click on the picture of his face, and it goes and it pulls every picture, every video, everything with his face. Even when he was an infant, I don’t know how it syncs it. Here’s pictures of him right out of the womb and today. And they can tell by facial structure that it’s still Aiden. So we’ll sit there and watch videos of him from 10 years ago, and it makes us both happy.

And with Dallin and Bowen it’s the same thing. I have these things where I can sit down on my phone and I can pull up the memory and instantly it’s like, just instant happiness happens.

So my big secret for being happy is realizing that like a lot of times in the moment, the thing you’re doing sucks, but the memory of that moment is where the actual happiness is, which is fascinating to me. So for me that’s made me, especially now that I have Google photos and its synced to my phone it makes me very, very conscious now of every single situation, taking pictures of it, even if it sucks because I want the memory. In a year from now I want this memory because that memory is going to make me happy. I might not be happy in the moment, because this pain sucks right now, but in a year from now the memory of this moment is going to bring my happiness.

So I’m taking pictures of all these things and every night I go into my Google photos, I see the stream and then I go and categorize and throw the things into albums or whatever. And it’s brought me so much joy and happiness.. So I wanted to share with you guys because I think a lot of times we’re running and running and in these moments and we’re tired and we’re, you know, we’re miserable and all these things. But it’s understanding that happiness doesn’t come in the moment, happiness comes in the memory of the moment. So make sure you’re capturing the memories.

Pull your phone out, I think the greatest, as much as the negative things about phones and iPhones, I think the greatest gift we have is the fact that we can capture so many memories. You know, back in the day, I used to buy a roll of 24 film, and I got 24 pictures and I’d make those puppies last because after it was done I had to go take them and pay for it to get developed and all these things. And I’d like, “Is this picture really that important?” And you take it and you don’t even know for 3 months until you get it developed that the pictures not good. And now all these things were announced and I can take as many pictures as I want, as many videos as I want. I have all these things and now I have the ability to store those with Google photos and categorize and find them again. It’s just, anyway, it’s my new happy place.

So for someone who’s not a scrapbooker, who’s not organized, who has no skill set of organization of anything, organizing all my pictures into Google photos has made me happier than almost anything I can think of. It’s bringing all the memories back to the top, and it’s been my happy place as I get stressed out. I’m like, I’m going to go to Google photos, or I’m going to go find, search my old hard drives and try to find some picture I can add to the hard drive. I literally have, right now I’m waiting, I’m sure driving Melanie, my assistant, crazy because I have all of the, all my high school and mission and first year of marriage photo albums I gave to her, she’s got some local company she found scanning them all.

I found Collette’s bridal pictures. When we got married she got bridal pictures done, but she could only afford at the time to get one printed. So it’s printed and it’s on her mom’s wall. And I’d never seen them before other than the one that’s on her mom’s wall, and I don’t have a copy of it. And we went back to the photographer and he went and found the negatives and sold them to me for a couple hundred bucks. So I’m getting all of her bridal, and I’ve never seen most of the pictures. They took 100 pictures, but they only printed one. So we’re getting all these pictures of my wife in her bridal dress, turned into real pictures that I’m going to have on my phone now. How insane is that? I’m sure that was a night mare when she got those pictures done. But the memory of that now is something that I am anxiously looking for.

So my poor assistant’s waiting. Everyday I’m like, ‘are the pictures back yet? Are they back yet? What’s going on?” and she’s like, “Don’t you need to be writing your book?” and I’m like, “yes, but that’s not my happy spot. My happy spot is these pictures. I need them on my phone categorized in Google photos in an album so I can be happy.”

So there you go, I hope that for some of you guys this brings you to happiness. I would recommend during Christmas vacation or break, spend some time setting up your Google photos account, start syncing all your pictures from your phone, then go back to your old phones and start doing it and you’ll be amazed what you find, you’ll be amazed how you feel, and you’ll be amazed at the happiness that hides inside of these pictures that are sitting around doing nothing.

Alright, that’s all I have. Thanks for today, thanks for everything, appreciate you all, and we’ll talk to you soon. Bye everybody.