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In the bright, improbable Venn diagram where philanthropy overlaps with film production and youth mentorship, Peter Samuelson has taken up permanent residence. A British-born Angeleno with the disarming warmth of a camp counselor and the résumé of a studio executive, Samuelson prefers the unassuming title “pro-social entrepreneur.” This, one quickly learns, is both characteristically modest and radically insufficient. It’s like calling a hurricane a breeze.
He has produced films you’ve seen, raised four children, and co-founded a string of nonprofits that read like the greatest hits of Hollywood altruism. There’s the Starlight Children’s Foundation, which brings joy to hospitalized children; Starbright World, a virtual support network co-launched with Steven Spielberg in the ‘90s, back when “online” still needed quotation marks; First Star, an academic lifeline for foster youth; and EDAR, a portable shelter designed to keep the homeless off sidewalks and under something like a roof. Samuelson’s life’s work is less a résumé than a constellation—each point radiating with the impulse to help, to mend, to offer a foothold.
His latest endeavor, Finding Happy: A User’s Guide to Your Life with Lessons from Mine, is an attempt to compress this lifetime of social entrepreneurship, misadventure, and something close to wisdom into a handbook for young adults. It is aimed, nominally, at Gen Z and Millennials—but one suspects that Samuelson, ever the optimist, hopes anyone with a heartbeat and a vague sense of unease might read it.
When I ask him to define happiness, he draws a line in the sand. “There’s short-term happiness,” he begins—“like sitting in bed with a bucket of chocolate ice cream”—and then there’s the long-term kind, the good life, the meaningful life. That elusive state, he believes, is inextricably tied to purpose. “The purpose of your life is to be happy,” he says. “But the way you become happy is kind of a little bit counterintuitive because it’s not grabbing. It turns out that where happiness comes from is pushing out help for other people.”
If that sounds like a bumper sticker, it’s worth remembering that Samuelson has tested the premise in places less idealized than a writer’s notebook. He was appalled to learn that only six percent of American foster youth attend college. “Completely bonkers,” he says, in the precise tone of a man who has made an entire career of finding such absurdities and doing something about them. His solution was First Star: long-term residential academies housed on university campuses, where foster teens live and learn in stable, caring environments. Fifteen years on, the program boasts a college attendance rate of eighty-nine percent—an almost miraculous leap in a demographic where statistical gravity usually pulls in the other direction.
It was through these students—whom First Star refers to, with dignity, as “scholars”—that Finding Happy took root. Samuelson, who sees the world like a producer scanning a script for structure, realized he’d developed a kind of psychological pattern recognition. “I’ve worked out what are the three dozen things that bother them,” he says. And he realized that, along with this trove of practical advice, he also possessed a catalog of cinematic war stories—episodes as ludicrous as they are revealing.
One chapter hinges on a memory from his early twenties in Marrakesh during the filming of The Return of the Pink Panther. At 3 a.m., a trapped kitten meowing from a hotel duct awakened his empathy—and his id. Naked and operating on what he calls “the reptilian fight or flight back of the brain,” he crawled five floors down a greasy shaft in an attempt at rescue. The kitten escaped. He did not. What followed was an hour-long struggle to reemerge, culminating in collapse and an ill-timed request from an electrician to review the petty cash.
The moral? Compassion is good. Impulse is dangerous. And if a risk can kill you, maybe don’t take it. But in Samuelson’s telling, the story is more than a cautionary tale. It’s a kind of parable for young adulthood, when the prefrontal cortex—the brain’s chess player—is still under construction.
These kinds of stories populate Finding Happy, which Samuelson structured with the knowledge that few eighteen-year-olds will read a linear narrative unless forced. Instead, it’s a kind of literary toolkit: questions on love, bullying, family, mental health, and self-worth are matched with mini-essays, anecdotes, and counsel from experts and students alike. The chapter on policing—a particularly fraught terrain for Black and Brown youth—was developed with input from Reverend Kelly Douglas and the students themselves. It is less lecture than lifeline.
For Samuelson, there’s no such thing as wisdom divorced from action. He teaches a course at First Star called “Random Acts of Kindness and Pay It Forward,” which opens with a moral thought experiment and ends with a small grant—$200 per student—to spend on someone in greater need. The results are staggering. One student rescued shelter dogs. Another bought improved toiletries for her incarcerated mother. In each case, Samuelson says, the money was less important than the agency it offered. “They have never had agency,” he tells me. “Suddenly they have to dream up someone in a worse place than them.”
The book’s emotional center of gravity is love—not the greeting card kind, but the urgent, unconditional kind foster kids so often live without. Samuelson describes a talent show at a First Star academy, where a nervous girl named Catalina froze mid-song. Without prompting, her entire cohort surrounded her like a protective circle. “We didn’t do this,” he recalls, his voice catching. “We just created the circumstance for the kids to build a family.”
There are moments when the narrative’s earnestness veers toward the sentimental, but Samuelson, to his credit, never flinches. Even the Target placement of the book—a detail relayed with amusement—speaks to his belief in democratized guidance. One of his kids joked, “Is it going between the condoms and the plastic spoons?” Maybe. But for a reader feeling adrift, stuck between impulse and obligation, plastic spoons and prophylactics might be exactly where advice like this is most needed.
In his view, the small, anonymous acts—volunteering, donating, raising your hand in class—are the bricks that build a meaningful life. “Just raise your hand,” he tells students. “That’s the same as sending that email.” It’s not about grandeur. It’s about showing up.
Samuelson’s publisher, unsurprisingly, thought he was nuts to include his email address in the book. But he did. Of course he did. He wants to hear from the people he’s trying to help. For someone who has built a life—and now a book—on connection, it’s the most natural gesture in the world.
There’s a kitten somewhere in a duct. There’s a child trying to sing. There’s a young adult who doesn’t know yet that happiness might be found in helping someone else. Peter Samuelson is listening for all of them.
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