5 life lessons from Yale's most popular course

Hello and welcome to this week’s edition of Prequel.

An especially big welcome to the 3,681 parents who have joined us in the last week. We are now one of the fastest growing parent communities on the internet 🙌

In case you’re new here, Prequel is the free weekly newsletter for parents who want their kids to succeed. We give you weekly insights on how your children can get ahead ― in school and in life.

We’ve got lots to tell you, so let’s jump right in. Here’s what you’ll get today:

💡 Valuable lessons they don’t teach kids at school
⚡️ Tutorials for your kids to learn new skills
🚀 3 tools to boost your family’s productivity

💡 Valuable Lessons They Don’t Teach You In School

Can you guess Yale’s most popular class?

Computer Science? Business? Critical Thinking?

Nope. It’s Psychology and the Good Life, a course about happiness - a subject that 99% of schools never talk about.

Here are 5 key lessons from the course that every parent should teach their kids:

1. About 50% of happiness is determined by genetics. 10% is determined by circumstances. And 40% is determined by us: our thoughts, our actions, and our attitude. Most of us overestimate the role of circumstances - and underestimate our own role - in increasing our happiness.
   

2. This means that most of us mistakenly focus on our circumstances when looking for sources of happiness:

   • Money

   • A fancy job

   • A fit body

   • Cars

   • An attractive partner

   Turns out these things don't improve happiness as much as we think they do. But why?
   

3. Hedonic adaptation: Gains in happiness from improvements in our circumstances are short-lived. We want something (like money). We get it (nice!). We're happy for a while (yay!). And then we revert to our old selves and want more of it (ooh but now I want the new iPhone).
   

4. So what does make us happy?

   The Yale professor studied tons of happy people to find out what works. And certain habits showed up repeatedly in happy people:

   1. Spending time with friends and family.

   2. Practicing gratitude.

   3. Practicing optimism.

   4. Physical activity.
   

5. But what about money?

   Money makes you happy. No doubt. But only up to a certain point. Studies show that once you hit $75k in income, any subsequent rise in income only has a mild effect on happiness. After that, you’re better off focusing on 4 key sources of happiness mentioned in the previous point.

You can read more here.

⚡️ 2 Tutorials To Learn New Skills

1. How to create a presentation with AI in less than 5 minutes. Watch the tutorial here.

2. Why young builders should focus on problems and not solutions. Watch the short video here.

🚀 3 Tools To Boost Your Family’s Productivity

1. Compose: Compose is a Chrome extension that automates your writing. It cuts down your writing time by 40% with AI-powered autocompletion and text generation. (link)

2. Khanmigo: Khan Academy's GPT-4 powered chatbot that explains difficult concepts and gives clear answers to hard questions. (link)

3. Magic Slides: An AI tool that turns your ideas into compelling presentations in seconds. (link)

Thanks for reading!

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Until next time,
Ivy
CEO Prequel, Beta Camp, Apollo
Follow my journey on LinkedIn