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Here’s the script I am reading off, I do deviate a little, but it’s pratically a transcript:

So today I’m going to throw a bunch of ideas at you, but here’s the main pitch; if you listen to me now, in three months time you will be A) Happy and B) Good at something new.

Now that’s a pretty gutsy prediction. So let’s start off right there.
How good are we at predicting the future?

Let’s all take a little test of the crystal balls in our heads.

I want you to imagine two futures and think of which one you’d be happier with; In one future, you win the lotto. In the other future, you’re in an accident, you become a paraplegic and you’re left sitting in a wheelchair for the rest of your life

It’s really not that hard of a choice.

And it’s all nice and fine to think it, but let’s do what psychologists insist on doing, and go out and ask actual lotto winners and actual paraplegics just how happy they are – get some real data.

If you think that, well, of course the lotto winners are happier, well, you are wrong. Your crystal ball failed this test.

Because what we find is that one year after their lotto win or their accident, both groups of people report the same level of overall happiness with their lives.

But don’t fret, because failing at these sorts of predictions is just what our crystal balls do. We tend to predict things as having more impact, more intensity and a longer duration than they really do. And we do this with everything – from failing a university paper, to the expectation of a new shiny gadget, going through a relationship breakup, presenting a speech, so on and so forth.

And we over predict because it totally works. It lets us experience great happiness – when something good happens, we can make it great!

And it also lets us experience great happiness – when something bad happens, we can sigh with relief later that it turned out to be a storm in a teacup.

Hold on, did I just say that our tendency to predict things bigger than they really are lets us experience happiness in the face of both good and bad events? Well, yes, yes I did. And, you got to ask, why is that?
It’s mainly because whatever happens to you, you’ve got some pretty powerful techniques for getting yourself to a state of happiness afterwards.

Before we talk any further – let’s define happiness. The best working description I can come up with is that happiness is the opposite of depression. I say that, because everybody has a good mental picture of what it’s like to be depressed. You know what it’s like to be down in the dumps. So flip that, and you’ve got a range from contented to euphoric, that most people live in most of time.

Now, there are have been some very good studies in the past decade, like the ones by Edna Foa, a clinical psychologist who specialises in anxiety and trauma;

That show us an interesting fact – most people who experience a major traumatic event, will within two to three months, recover to a state of happiness in their lives.

And that’s because of powerful techniques that almost everyone holds inside them. And the truly amazing part is, even if you don’t, you can learn these techniques – one modern method of teaching them is called Cognitive Behaviour Therapy.

So let’s take that result, and apply it to increasing our level of happiness. If we can get ourselves from depressed to contented in three months, surely there must be a way to go from contented to euphoric?
Well, that would be the secret to happiness! That’s something worth talking about. And funnily enough, for a very long time, it was something that was left alone by the psychological community. Bringing about the study of happiness has only occurred within the past two decades, championed by people such as Marty Seligman, Dan Gilbert and Barry Schwartz to name a few.

And what they’ve found so far is that it can be just as interesting to take a person who is well and contented in life, and give them a few ideas to jump start them a little further, as it can be to help someone recover from a depression, and you can bring almost the same tools and definitely the same level of rigour to it.

So what I’m going to do now is give you a quick and dirty nutshell version of Cognitive Behaviour Therapy.
The idea is, you have thoughts – and these are voiced by that little voice in your head. You know this little voice pretty well. And these thoughts may be only tangentially related to where you are and what’s going on around you.

Now, we place a lot of power on the little voice in our heads. We base our emotions and behaviours off it. And we bestow the power of reality upon it – what our little voice tells us is happening, is what is happening. Except when it isn’t. The little voice in your head really gets it’s ideas from your crystal ball – the one that blows everything out of proportion.

See, what is taught in Cognitive Behaviour therapy is putting a lens between the little voice and the crystal ball. And this lens is whatever helps you see events closer in impact, intensity and duration as they really are. For instance, imagine a day when you’re late for work because it was pouring with rain, you missed your bus, and now your boss is really angry with you. So your little voice goes “This is a bad day. Something else will go wrong, and it’ll be big, I just know it!”. And what we can do, is put a lens on that of “Well, no, I’m at work now, I’m inside so it’s not raining on me any more, and I’ve already apologised for being late and my boss grudgingly accepted it.” What that lens, we can then think further “So today started out bad but now it’s going to be alright.” That’s not easy – it takes a bit of effort. The thought of it being a bad day is just much easier, and we’ve got to put in some work to turn that around.

And that work that we’ve done, is the creation of happiness. We’ve got some new thoughts, and from that, we feel happier. This is called “Synthetic Happiness”, in that we synthesize it from adding our crystal ball and our lens together to form a new little voice, that makes it easier for us to be happy.

But then you get the argument that Synthetic Happiness isn’t “real” happiness. And by “real” happiness, people mean the emotion that comes swelling to you after a good event, the high, the euphoria. And obviously this synthetic happiness is just a cheap knock-off, the sort of thing we say “Yeah, right, of course the paraplegic is just as happy as the guy who won lotto”.

So you can say that synthetic happiness takes you to a certain point, say, contentedness, and then beyond that you’re back in the classical model of good events causing happiness and bad events causing, well sadness and even depression – and from that point, you need to strive for this “real” happiness.
Why do we need to say that, though? Does creating these two different types of happiness provide something we need?

Well, yes, yes it does provide something we need. It provides a call to action. We can justify doing things by saying doing them will make us happy. We can justify avoiding things by saying that actually doing them would not make us happy.

And that can be quite a powerful tool at some times. But on the other hand, splitting happiness into “real” and synthetic takes all the good work we can do with bad events, and denies them to good events. When really all the goodness or badness of an event does, is make it easier on your little voice to sway one way or the other.

If after three months we’re back to happy from bad events, what happens three months after a good event? Well, we’re back to the same level of happiness most of the time. Why? Because your crystal ball was broken, and you over estimated the goodness of the event, so you went crazy making happiness to keep up, and then it came down after your over estimation was revealed. Either that, or the good feelings just fade away over time.

And our lens can help with this as well. If we see something through our lens as still a good event, but with less impact or duration, we still have a situation where it is easy to think thoughts that lead to happiness. So we don’t diminish our happiness by having a little reality check, you know “Will turning my twitter icon green to support the Iranian revolution really change the world? Well, no, but it is still a nice gesture of goodwill and support and I’m going to do it.” Are we less happy then than if we think that somehow our green icon will bring about world peace? Not really – we’d certainly say you’re not more happy thinking that way, because you’re blowing it out of proportion.

And blowing things out of proportion is what leads us to the biggest pitfall of good events – Regret. Regret is what we call it when we expect to be really happy, and we’re not. In fact, in some ways, you can have good events that make it easier to think thoughts that lead to depression than to happiness – like making a choice between two good options and then having your crystal ball make the path not chosen much more attractive and the little voice goes “If only I had done that instead”. You know, “The grass is always greener”, and all that.

And with this comes another idea we’re going to play with – the Paradox of Choice. It’s a neat little thing. The more choices you have, the more regret you have. If your options are Black and White, you’re not going to have very many regrets about a choice. But if you have to choose between say, even six different things, well, now you have five things you didn’t pick for your crystal ball to blow up into huge regrets.
So, if we’ve taken away the incentive of doing something because it makes us “really” happy, and we’ve said that over three months everything smooths out whether it was good or bad, well, then, what should you do? And be careful, because if you have to make a choice, you’ll just introduce more and more regret into yourself, which isn’t good.

It sounds like we’ve gone and taken something simple – do things that make you happy, and turned it into a horrible horrible mess. There’s voices and crystal balls and lens, it’s madness I say! Well, yes, but we’re not done yet. Now we’ll put it all back together with yet another idea – and this one is out of left field.
You may have heard of the ten thousand hour rule. It’s the idea that to become truly great at doing something, you need to put in a lot of practice. And by practice, we mean thousands and thousands of hours – like 3 hours a day, every day, for 10 years. It just sounds sensible, doesn’t it? We have plenty of evidence that the more we do something, the better we get at it. I’ll give you two well known examples – if you hear a great musician, you think of the hours and hours of practice they put into their music. And we demand thousands of hours of experience from pilots – we don’t let them be commercial pilots until they have a certain number of logged flight hours.

So you ask, why bring this up? Well, once you accept the idea that practice makes perfect, and why wouldn’t you, and then add that you can measure the amount of practice needed to reach different levels of proficiency at something, the question must be asked – how long does it take to become just good at something? To experience something and learn from it?

Well, some new thinking, such as that by Matt Webb, a design consultant from London, is that it takes around one hundred hours in the modern age to become just good at something. And that’s good news, because a hundred hours, while sounding like a lot of time is nothing whatsoever. You spend a hundred hours asleep each fortnight.

If you want to test this idea, think of how long various methods of learning take.

For example, University study. A Semester is basically three months long, with a break in the middle because students need their holidays. So that’s fourteen weeks of lectures. So a class that you have a lecture of each weekday, you’re spending seventy hours in lectures. Then maybe a tutorial each week, give or take two because there’s usually not one on the first week; Now you’re up to 84 hours. That’s not bad. If all you do is throw in an extra hour of study each week of the semester, including the break, my math tops out at exactly one hundred hours. How convenient. And we’re told in university, that if you attend all lectures and tutorials and do a little study, you’ll have a very good chance of passing the paper. And if you’re doing statistics papers, they’ll generally tell you exactly how much of a chance you have. And it’s quite good.
Now of course we expect university students to study more than one hour a week. But we also expect them to be doing more than one class a semester. So it’s not unreasonable to say that we’re pretty close to a hundred hour rule for a class at university, or at least close enough that we can round it there. But how long would a hundred hours take outside of a university setting? What’s a decent time frame to set it over.
Well, it turns out that around three months is a good time frame – It’s only one hour each day. Or one solid day each week. After three months, those both add up to just around a hundred hours. That doesn’t sound so bad.

But hang on, haven’t we said that after three months it really doesn’t matter if a particular event was good or bad? That it all ends up smoothed out in our new ideas about happiness? Yeah. So, where am I going with this? Well, it’s easy.

Let’s put it nice and simply.

Here’s a call to action. Set aside one hundred hours over the next three months. It really doesn’t matter how busy you already are, this isn’t that hard to fit into even the most squished of schedules. And do something with that time.

Hey, use barcamp as a way to find something new to do with that time. And then do it. And there you go, you’ll be happy and you’ll be good at something.

And if you get really stuck, look back over the last three months of your life. Is there something you did that stands out as close to this idea? In my case, I’d say it is my critical thinking skills – and that’s a bit of a cheat because I did a university paper called “Critical Thinking”. But in February I did make a choice to go back to university, and that for me was a call to action.

But don’t now go “Oh, I’m going to do a hundred hours on X thing already over the next few months”. Find something new. Get outside your comfort zone, so you can experience your crystal ball in a new setting, and put new lenses on it.

Now, as with any call to action, we must ask, why? Why do this? Well, because then you’re actively making your own happiness. In your hundred hours you’ll not only become good at something, you’ll become better at synthesizing happiness. Which is what I promised you would get if you listen to me. Well, you won’t get it from listening to me, but from doing over the next few months, and you won’t get it as much as you create it.

And that’s what I wanted to say. Now all that’s left to do is give credit where credit is due, and leave you with some thoughts, and maybe take some questions.

Firstly, credit is due to Matt Webb for the call to action. He gave a brilliant talk at reboot11, where he speaks about design and then in his last ten minutes drops this bomb concept of one hundred hours and calling everyone to action with it. He does it with a different appeal than I have here, an appeal to participatory culture. And it’s wonderfully powerful. I suggest you seek it out and watch all three quarters of an hour of it.

It’s so powerful, I chose to not only accept it, but to think on it, remix it, and share it on. And I hope you do the same. I’ve even gone ahead and created a second talk based off the idea, a 5 minute one I will present next at the rapid-fire session. I decided to do this longer talk first, because otherwise I’d be spoiling my own ending.

Also, behind every idea I’ve given you here there are people, and books behind them. So here’s your bibliography. Barry Schwartz has an entire book on the paradox of choice called “The Paradox of Choice”, Marty Seligman has written books on synthesizing happiness, called “Learned Optimism” and “Authentic Happiness”, so has Dan Gilbert – his is “Stumbling on Happiness”. The three months I keep mentioning, there’s several books about recovery from trauma by Edna Foa, and that timespan keeps coming up. The ten thousand hour rule is a major theme in the book “Outliers” by Malcolm Gladwell. Cognitive Behaviour Therapy? There’s whole libraries on that. One book I particularly recommend if you’re down in the dumps is “The Feeling Good Handbook” by David Burns.

And maybe you’ll find that holy grail, the one book on synthesis. Maybe it’ll come from the Santa Fe Institute, or the Singularity University; two places big in the research of interconnectedness.

So to gift wrap it all up with a neat little bow; Firstly, I want you to think of the one idea among those I’ve riffed upon that resonates most with you and go forth and google it. And secondly, of course, I want you to answer the call to action; set aside one hundred hours and just do something new. Not because doing it will make you happy, but that in doing something you will discover how you make your own happiness.