Life can be overwhelming.

I was in my hotel room just before Christmas and one of the morning shows was playing on the television. Of course they are always chasing the next sensational headline, and their guest that day was the latest in a seemingly never-ending roll call of health and fitness gurus, every one looking to make more noise than the last. Tuning in, I heard him say, ‘We are actually not advocating stretching anymore …’

What? Really? I do stretches every day. That’s it, I’m out!

Every day it’s something different. A new idea that utterly contradicts what was being advocated just a couple of weeks ago!

I mean, seriously. It’s impossible to keep up. I remember when I was supposed to ‘carb load’ to boost my energy levels for the day. Not anymore! Now we’re told carbohydrates are evil. Then the trend was towards eating only meat. Eat like the caveman, they said. Yeah, that sounds like a good idea, let’s emulate the caveman. Because if he was lucky he might have lived to be all of 32 years old. Then it was fruit. Eat only fruit. All day. Then we got right down to it and just drank the juice. Everyone in Australia bought a juicer. The problem was, the fruit was full of sugar, and everyone knows sugar is bad for you!

Think about how breakfast has changed. I was always taught that eating a good, hearty breakfast set you up for the day. Not anymore! Now there are some who will advise you to stop eating at 6 pm and fast until noon the next day, or to eat five days a week and fast for the other two. I don’t know, now they have me on ketones and putting butter in my coffee!

The world is full of noise, yet no matter how much it annoys us, we are addicted to it. Every day brings a complete overload of information that’s impossible to keep up with. We all experience it, respond to it, even relish it. Sometimes I can’t believe the things I click on. In a corner of my mind I think and worry about the profile ‘they’ are building up of me, as I skip from a provocative Daily Mail headline to a famous sports personality’s drug addiction to the latest celebrity wardrobe malfunction.

One challenge is constant comparison. The relentless messaging that we need to be somehow better, fitter, stronger, smarter, more attractive. At every turn the media are telling us we’re not good enough. Of course, this is on top of the fact that we are all to some degree addicted to the dopamine hit we experience when we receive any affirmation, such as through our likes on social media. We are addicted to feedback and the approval of others. This is well documented and is not going to change anytime soon.

We are told we live in the greatest time in human history. Is that true? Well, it’s complicated.

So maybe we need to simplify it.

There are certainly strong arguments to be made that it is the most complicated time in human history. While most of us are pretty safe from contracting the plague or being cut down by raiders from a neighbouring village, we nonetheless suffer the highest levels of depression, anxiety and general unhappiness in recorded history.

Despite the thousands of books teaching us how to be mentally and physically healthy, mainly through doing the things we have always done — eat food, have babies, raise children, exercise and pursue healthy activities, and communicate with other human beings — it turns out we are less healthy and, what’s more, clearly less happy than ever. With so many more choices, life has become much more complicated.

The purpose of this book is to cut through that complexity, all that noise, and to introduce you to a simple, practical philosophy that encourages you to live your life with a greater focus on what is useful. We’ll explore useful things for you to believe to increase the possibilities of joy in your life. This is an idea that creates its own momentum. It will guide you towards identifying what is useful in your life and what is simply noise. It will help you figure out what you need to do and what you need to delegate or avoid. It will help you identify what matters and what doesn’t.

It will help guide some readers through significant adversity in their lives, while helping others create a strategy for infusing that mundane Monday meeting with greater energy. For many, it will be the call to action they have been looking for to create massive change in their lives.

This is my manifesto. My philosophy for navigating the craziness and the wonder of the modern world. It’s a simple, powerful idea that opens up limitless possibility for all of us.