If decoding happiness is possible, is it worth the effort?

Almost every song is produced in the way that lyrics and melody are written first, then the songwriter ponder upon what song title will fit best into the soul of the song. Similarly, in OYS community, we always curate the event content first, then only decide what event title will bring out the essence of what we were to deliver.

In that sense, our event on 23rd May, ‘De.Coding Happiness’, is an outlier because the content of the event is inspired and curated based on this title we collectively decided on.

Idea creation for the event

This event started with one of our contributor, Rishi, who is very passionate about happiness and wanted to create something about it. He had a rough idea for the event concept, and no event title yet. Our member, Hui said, “What about ‘De.Coding Happiness?” Like our previous event ‘Re.Connect’, put a full stop in between the word so it can mean both ‘coding’ and ‘decoding’.” We agreed that’s a pretty cool name, and that was it.

During the concept development meeting in a mamak store, ideas were flying across the table, but no one is getting the “okay that’s good let’s proceed with that” feeling so the discussion just kept on going.

It wasn’t until when someone mentioned “We only talked about ‘happiness’, what about ‘decoding’?” that we started to get a sense of what was lacking in the conversation. The word ‘decoding’ sparks the creativity in everyone, and the discussion ended in the next 15 minutes, with our concept modelling from Wolf of Wall Street, Mindvalley, and Art of Living Foundation.

Concept of De.Coding Happiness

One very crucial concept we apply in the creation of this event is ‘Reverse Engineering’. This concept is inspired by the two most influential organizations in the world teaching spirituality, Mindvalley and Art of Living Foundation.

Reference 1

In Mindvalley, one of its product, Binaural Beats audio, is produced utterly based on reverse engineering. They invited monks who had been meditating for more than 40 years, deploy high-tech neuro-sensors to their brain to capture their brainwave, and let them meditate. They extract the monks’ deep alpha brainwave data, reverse engineered it, and produced the Binaural Beats audio. So, what can the audio do? When you purchase and listen to the audio, it is able to tune your brainwave into the deep alpha brainwave like the monks’ within minutes. That’s reverse engineering.

Reference 2

The founder of Art of Living Foundation, Sri Sri Ravi Shankar, a.k.a. Guruji, is a spiritual leader who has been meditating for decades and reached the ultimate state of spirituality, the ‘Samadhi’ state. He noticed that when he was in Samadhi, he breathes a certain way, a certain pattern. Since then, he teaches all of his disciples not how to meditate, but how to breathe. In result, the breathing technique allows his disciples to reach Samadhi within years or even months of practice, instead of decades. That’s reverse engineering.

Reference 3

But the punchline that really shapes the whole structure for our event is a story from the Wolf of Wall Street, Jordan Belfort. This story is not shown in the movie, but he talked about it when he became a global speaker and shared his story on a world tour.

Before he was sentenced to jail, before his brokerage firm became the largest and most notorious in the Wall Street history, he started his firm with dozens of brokers, and he trained them every day. He was doing very well himself, closing 50% of his sales, but his brokers cannot close a single sale. Jordan was confused, “I taught you guys everything I know! Why can’t you close any sale?” All his brokers gave him the same answer, “There’s thousands of objections! It’s impossible to get through all of them!”

Jordan was annoyed, he gathered all his brokers in front of a whiteboard and said, “You guys told me there are thousands of objections, right? Let’s write them all down and tackle them one by one.” And there it went, everyone shot out all kinds of objections they got when they did cold-calls, and Jordan wrote them all down on the whiteboard.

And guess what? In the end of the day, there were only 14 objections on the board.

When we talk about happiness, when we ask “what can I do to make myself happy?”, the first thought that strikes would probably be “there’s too many, I don’t even know where to start”.

What if the statement is not true? What if there’s actually a finite number of things you can do to be happy? And you can learn all of them?

How I see [De.Coding Happiness] as a creator

Well, as interesting and rich as the event’s origin may seem, the actual event itself is probably not up to the par, since 2 hours is inadequate to cover this large topic. As an event curator, I was ambitious to want to make this event special and actually make a change in the participants’ life.

What we did was an activity for everyone to post their ‘happiness actions’ on the wall, we categorize and decipher them into patterns, to see what are the types of actions which bring us happiness. Then we document them all down, print it out and hand the hardcopies to all participants, so they will walk away with the ‘happiness template’ so to speak.

When we introduced the concept to the floor, I saw anticipation in the audience. But soon enough when we started the activity, I noticed people were actually enjoying the process of decoding happiness together, rather than expecting the result of the decoding itself. People care more about the connection they get in an OYS event than what they will walk away from it with.

It was until the end of the event I realized that I was curating this session as a workshop, not an event. And the heart of an OYS event is always the connection, not the result.

Yes, throughout the event, people shared they saw some new perspectives of actions that can bring them happiness, and they will try it in the future. Yes, we deciphered and saw the pattern, and printed it out as the ‘happiness template’, objective achieved. Yes, people gave feedbacks saying this is a good event and they enjoyed it.

But what really made this event good isn’t the decoding, isn’t the fact we manage to decode happiness. It was the sharing of personal stories from the audience during harvesting session, the conversation people had during activity session, the feeling of mutual acknowledgement when you saw someone else posted the same thing as you did, and all the other moments which created authentic connections between all of us.

This is my first time curating an OYS event, with the title [De.Coding Happiness]. I’m not sure if I’ve successfully decoded happiness, but I sure learned a lot about the essence for happiness in an OYS event.

Own Your Story (OYS) is a community-run platform that bridges creators and spaces through ‘fun, experiential & explorative’ experiences in urban centres, fostering a conscious community through connection and creation.

This article is written by our content creator Thye Zhehau.

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