← Young and Profiting with Hala Taha
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha
Arthur Brooks: How High Achievers Can Balance Success with Happiness | Mental Health | YAPClassic
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- [00:00]
Hala Taha
Today's episode of YAP is sponsored in part by Indeed, Shopify, Mercury, Quo, Revolve, Framer, Merit Beauty and Pipedrive attract, interview and hire all in one place with Indeed. Get a $75 sponsored job credit to boost your job's visibility at Indeed.com Profiting Shopify is the global commerce platform that helps you grow your business. Start your $1 per month trial period at shopify.com Profitting Mercury streamlines your banking and finances all in one place. Learn more at mercury.com Profiting Quo, formerly OpenPhone, is the number one business phone system. Get 20% off your first six months at quo.com profiting shop the latest trends from today's top brands with Revolve. Head to Revolve.com profiting and take 15% off your first order with code Profiting Framer is a design first, no code website builder that lets anybody ship a production ready site in minutes. Go to framer.com and use code Profiting to launch your site for free. Merit Beauty is a minimalist beauty brand that makes elevated makeup and skincare. Go to meritbeauty.com to get your free signature makeup bag with your first order. Pipedrive is a powerful, simple CRM built by salespeople for SalesPeople. Get a 30 day free trial at pipedrive.com Profiting as always, you can find all of our incredible deals in the show notes or@younginprofiting.com deals yeah fam as you may know, I'm a total fashionista. I love clothing. It is my favorite way to express myself. I love putting together outfits. It is one of my favorite hobbies. Fashion. I just love it. And when it comes to buying my clothes, there's really only one place I shop.
- [01:43]
For the last three or four years.
- [01:45]
I literally have bought all of my clothes from Revolve. Whether it's buying a gown for a wedding, work clothes, going out, dancing clothes, bikinis for vacations, vacation outfits. All of my clothes are from Revolve and Revolve is so amazing because they've got so many brands. They've got 1200 different brands from really established labels to up and coming brands and I just love discovering these new brands trying these clothes. It's always so high quality. Their shipping is just so fast. They've got overnight shipping, two day shipping. It's one of the best high quality stores that I know of that actually provides quick shipping. So if you need something in a pinch, Revolve is definitely your go to. Whether it's a weekend away or a big night out or a style refresh. Your dream wardrobe is just one click away. Head to Revolve.com Profiting and shop MyEdit to take 15% off your first order with code profiting. That's fast two day shipping, easy returns. It's literally the only place you need to shop from. It's the only place that I shop from. That's Revolve.com profiting to shop my favorites and get 15% off your first order or with code profiting. This offer ends November 9th. So happy shopping and get to it. Hey yap fam. One of the biggest traps for ambitious people is believing that success and happiness are the same thing. We chase promotions, money, recognition, only to find satisfaction fades as quickly as it arrives. The real challenge isn't achieving more, it's learning how to be happy while you're achieving. In this yap classic episode, we're revisiting my interview with happiness expert Arthur Brooks. Arthur is a Harvard professor, bestselling author, and columnist for the Atlantic. He spent decades studying how strivers can design lives that are not only successful, but deeply meaningful. In this conversation, Arthur reveals how the constant chase for goals can trap us on the satisfaction treadmill and why the key to escaping it lies in shifting from fluid to crystallized intelligence. Arthur explains how embracing life's struggles rather than avoiding them can actually fuel deeper joy and why, at the end of the day, love, not money or status, is what truly drives a fulfilling life. So, yeah, fam, I want you to sit back and enjoy this conversation with the one and only Arthur Brooks.
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Arthur, I'm super excited for this conversation and really appreciate the work that you've done in this space.
- [04:17]
Arthur Brooks
Well, thank you. I can't wait to talk to your audience. I mean, this is a huge show. Congratulations on your unbelievable success. Are you happy?
- [04:24]
Hala Taha
I am happy. I mean, I'm, I'm doing the work, but there are things that I learned from your work that I'm like, oh, I better start switching gears. We'll get into that. But let's start from the beginning of your happiness work journey. So, based on my research, you studied the topic of happiness when you were working at the American Enterprise Institute. Institute. Like I mentioned earlier, it's one of the world's leading think tanks. What got you initially curious about happiness and why did you start studying it?
- [04:52]
Arthur Brooks
Well, I'm trained as a social. As a social scientist, a human behavior is what really, really interests me. And I've looked at a lot of different things. I've looked at beauty, why people think Things are beautiful. Why people love art. Later I looked at at philanthropy and charitable giving, why people give to things that are really important to them. And it's the kind of the tap root of both beauty and charitable behavior and generosity is happiness. People want to be happier. And so, you know, a couple of decades ago, I thought, well, why am I not actually going to the root of this thing? And frankly, why am I not studying the thing that I care about the most? We could all be happier. The truth of the matter is that I could be a lot happier. So I decided I was going to turn my toolkit the statistical power that I had acquired over the course of suffering through a PhD. I mean, for Pete's sake, I might as well use it for something really useful and experiments in all the ways that are in social science and now, which is also merging with the field of neuroscience, using it for the things that people actually care about the most. So a few years ago, when I actually stepped down as president of this think tank and I took this current teaching position at Harvard University, I decided I was going to spend the rest of my working life, maybe the rest of my life writing, speaking and teaching about how we can bring people together and lift them up in bonds of love and happiness using science and ideas. And that's what I'm doing.
- [06:12]
Hala Taha
Very cool. Well, I can't wait to pick your brain on everything happiness. But let's talk about the genesis of your book. So I learned that you actually got the idea to write this book and really go deep on happiness because you encountered an elderly couple on a plane. And so I'd love to hear that story and what you learned from that encounter.
- [06:33]
Arthur Brooks
Yeah, I get all of my ideas from overheard conversations, generally speaking. I mean, it's like the world is my laboratory as a behavioral guy. So, you know, if you're in a Starbucks line confessing to your best friend that somebody just broke your heart, keep your voice down because I might write a book about it.
- [06:47]
Hala Taha
Watch out.
- [06:48]
Arthur Brooks
Yeah, yeah, totally. And so I was on a plane from LA to Washington D.C. you know, flight that I did a lot because I was the CEO of this company and I had to go all over the country all the time. I was traveling constantly and I was feeling a little bit insecure, to be honest. I was thinking, you know, I'm going to do this. It's going really well, but what's the end game? I mean, what am I trying to do here? I mean, I'm going to do it. I'm going to get better at It. It's going to be successful. I'm going to do it every year. And then at some point, I'm going to stop. And then what? I mean, what am I working towards? We gotta. We gotta work towards something. And I didn't have the answer to that, and it was kind of stressing me out. And I heard this conversation one night, kind of in the midst of this existential struggle I was finding myself in of this couple, where I could tell by their voices it was a man and a woman. I assumed they were a married couple, and I could tell that they were elderly by the sound of their voices. And the husband was confessing to his wife that he might as well be dead. And I'm thinking, whoa, what's wrong with this guy? And then she's trying to console him. It's not true. He's like, nobody cares. Nobody's listening to me. Nobody. Nobody remembers me. I actually couldn't quite make out his words. I could only make out her answers. So I could. I inferred from the conversation what he was saying. And I got this vision in my head of this guy. He must be somebody who's really disappointed with his life. He's not the kind of person that your audience is trying to be young and ambitious and getting ahead and profiting. He's probably somebody who missed all his opportunities, and now time has passed him by and it's too late. Well, the flight ends and we land at Dulles Airport in Washington. And I'm kind of curious. I mean, I'm not trying to be eavesdrop or anything. When the lights go on and we all stand up, I turn around to get a look, and it turns out to be one of the most famous men in the world. Everybody knows who this person is because of his exploits and his heroic acts in the 1960s and 70s. He's very old now, but he's super rich and famous, and justifiably so. He's not some controversial politician or actor or entertainer. This is somebody who really did amazing things, much more than I'll ever do with my life. And it made me realize at that moment, I mean, we're. People are recognizing him. And the pilot says, as we're leaving, sir, you've been my hero since I was a little boy. And he's beaming at that moment. But I heard him confessing to his wife just a little few minutes earlier, he might as well be dead. And it. It occurred to me that the world tells you that if you are profiting, if you're getting Ahead. Money, power, pleasure, fame. You're going to be happy. And that's a bogus formula. There's a reason for it. It's not like somebody's trying to sell you a bill of goods. It's your own brain that's telling you that. Mother Nature tells you that, but Mother Nature lies. She doesn't care if you're happy. She wants you to survive and pass on your genes if you can. She wants you to have 75 kids, but she doesn't care if you're happy. And so the result is happiness that's in your hands. This guy didn't know that. This guy. Oh, yeah, it's going to be great. The next thing, the next thing, the next thing. He was on the wheel of sort of the addiction to successes and trying to find satisfaction. He obviously never found it. I thought to myself, you know, this is my life's work. I got to crack this case. How could you be both successful and happy? And I've really specialized in. In entrepreneurs and then very ambitious people. You know, the people who are trying to get ahead, but who also need to be working on their happiness at the same time. I think that's what we can do and really help a lot of people's lives. That's what that little incident did for me.
- [10:09]
Hala Taha
Yeah. And I think this is such a great way to kind of set the stage for the conversation, because a big part of your work is talking about this concept of the first wave of success versus your second wave of success. And actually our brains are biologically different and hardwired different before 40 and after 40. So I'd love to learn more about that because I think this really sets the tone for everything else.
- [10:31]
Arthur Brooks
Yeah, a lot of people are starting to realize that a lot of psychology is actually biology. And I mean, we already know that a lot of biology is actually psychology. I mean, you got to think about the right things and. And set the right goals, and you can create a lot of your circumstances, which is really wonderful. But there's a lot of this, what's going on in your emotions, in your life, that actually has to do with the structure of your brain. And this is a perfect case of that. We find that almost everybody listening to us, not everybody, but a lot of people are in their 20s, early 30s who are listening to us. The structure of your brain is that you're climbing a curve of intelligence called fluid intelligence. Now, that has a lot of working memory, a lot of innovative capacity, and your ability to focus and get better at what you do. Especially in kind of thinking and these kinds of skills, knowledge workers, idea people, that you get better and better at it all the way through your 20s and 30s, your 10,000 hours, and you can just be killing it, especially by your late 30s. And, and everybody listening notices this, that they're getting better and better and better and better and better. Here's the problem. That fluid intelligence of innovative capacity, working memory, ability to focus and concentrate, that suddenly starts to get worse after about age 40. It's funny, I've. I've looked at, you know, startup entrepreneurs and physicists and financial professionals and doctors and, you know, everything, and it's kind of 39. Turns out to be this magic age when you're at your, the peak of your powers and then you start to decline. Now nobody's going to notice it, folks. Nobody should freak out. Nobody will notice it except you. You'll Notice in your mid-40s that things aren't as fun as they used to be. This is, this is the reason that people burn out. People burn out because they stop making progress. Humans are wired for progress. And when you stop making progress, you notice that you don't like what you were doing as much. So, you know, this is, by the way, there's, this is a common principle in everything. One of, one of the things that we all know is it's very easy relatively to lose weight, but it's impossible to keep weight off. So 95% of diets fail after a year. The reason is because making progress makes you happy. But when you hit your goal, the reward for hitting that goal is you never get to eat the things that you like for the rest of your life, which is not very enticing. Everything is about progress, including getting better at work. So dentists, you find that they tend to, around age 43, they're like, I think I'm going to start taking Fridays off and golfing. Well, didn't you love being a dentist? Yeah, but I don't know, I don't like it as much. Why? Because you're on the wrong side of your fluid intelligence curve and things are not getting easier anymore than they used to. That's super important. But there's good news, which is there's another intelligence curve behind it. And most people don't know about this. This is one of the key things that I write about. Most people listening to us, they're still climbing their fluid intelligence curve. But you gotta start making plans, because at some point, if you want to go from strength to strength in your life, you gotta be able to go from one curve to the other. The crystallized intelligence curve, we call it that. It's kind of your wisdom curve, your teaching curve. You don't have the same working memory, but you have this incredible pattern recognition. You have this ability to tell stories based on knowledge that you know that you put together in your mind. You can assemble stuff in your mind, which makes you a very good manager, a very good mentor, a very good teacher. And if you can walk onto that curve in your mid-40s, you're just going to get better and better and better and better for the rest of your life. Literally what people don't do is change. They don't change their careers, they don't change their jobs, they don't change the emphasis. And they try to live in the past of their fluid intelligence. And it's a huge disaster. When you see somebody I'm in my 50s. When you see somebody my age who's kind of depressed and.
- [14:09]
Hala Taha
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- [18:10]
Arthur Brooks
Good old days and kind of burnt out is because that guy is trying or woman is trying to live on her fluid intelligence curve instead of getting onto the crystallized intelligence curve?
- [18:19]
Hala Taha
This is just so interesting. I've never heard of this before and I don't think I can basically guarantee that 90% of my listeners have not heard of fluid versus crystallized intelligence. So I love introducing new topics on the show. So I'm in my 30s now, and I have to say, when I heard about this fluid intelligence thing, I got really, like nervous about everything because I'm like, oh my gosh, it's like a biological clock. Same thing about getting pressured to have kids. Now I feel like I have pressure to like, do everything in podcasting that I need to do before I turn 40 because, you know, I'm going to start to decline.
- [18:53]
Is there anything that we can do.
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In terms of like, brain health to kind of make sure that our fluid intelligence stays as healthy as it needs to be until we want to make that transition, to kind of have more agency over that shift?
- [19:07]
Arthur Brooks
Yeah. And the truth is that if you have a lot of fluid intelligence because you're trying to do a lot with your life, you're going to have it for a really long time. It's just not going to be as acute as it was. And so the real problem is not that you lose your skills. The real problem is that you lose your enthusiasm because of progress. That's the real problem. And burnout is not about getting worse at what you do. It's liking less the things that you do. So don't get me wrong, I mean, you're going to be, if you want to be doing, getting, doing a really great job at what you're doing with your fluid intelligence, you could be killing it in your 50s. Absolutely. Even beyond. The key thing is remaining at this really high level of energy and enthusiasm and just love for what you do. And that's the reason that changing the emphasis, changing the focus earlier is a good thing to do now. Every job, every person can actually do that. So just absolutely maximize your fluid intelligence and be ready to shift from the startup entrepreneur to the venture capitalist, from the star litigator to the managing partner, from the star researcher to the master teacher. That's really the kind of thing that's supposed to happen in your 40s and 50s. It's very natural, it feels really good. And you're going to have actually greater happiness because Crystallized intelligence maximization leads to greater happiness than fluid intelligence maximization does because you're serving others, which is such a beautiful thing. Now, that said, back to your question. Everybody at every age should be doing what they can to maximize not just their brain health, but their quality of life through lucidity. Now, the way to think about that is that it's like anything else, your brain is part of your body. You have to take care of your brain the same way that you take care of your body. Now, there are a bunch of things that you can do, and it really has a lot to do with exercise and with sleep and with proper nutrition and especially being very careful with intoxicants. A lot of people in their 20s and 30s, they don't want to hear this, and I'm going to sound like the grumpy old guy, but let me tell you, this is the big mistake that I made. I drank way, way, way too much in my 20s. I was a classical musician. Everybody was drinking all the time around me. And I lost good years as a result of that. And I have the data now that shows that the number one predictor of relationship breakdown, which is the number one predictor of declines in happiness, is actually misuse of addictive substances and behaviors. You know, getting addicted to, by the way, getting addicted to work is really bad too. But getting addicted to gambling, getting addicted to pornography, getting addicted to drugs and alcohol, this stuff is going to wreck your relationship. So be very careful and it will degrade the quality of your brain, especially artificial intoxicants. So this is a key thing too. On top of that, you need to actually watch your weight. That's very important for both your gut health and your cognitive capacity. People are like, yeah, I can think just as, just as well if I'm overweight. You actually can't. It's very important that we take care of ourselves in this way. It's very important to exercise. Exercise is really a big part of unhappiness management. It doesn't make you happier, but it does mitigate the stress hormones and the sources of unhappiness in our lives. And so the basic rule is if you, if you want to get started on something like this, make sure that you're paying very close attention to your addictions, that you're walking for an hour a day and that you have your diet under control. These are the three things to actually start doing to give yourself maximum longevity. That will lead you to the kind of the best long term happiness plan.
- [22:24]
Hala Taha
Yeah, and I love that advice and it's so funny that you were just bringing up addiction and substances because one of the first thoughts that I had when I, when I learned about your work and learned about this concept of fluid intelligence was like, damn, I didn't, I wish I didn't party so much in my 20s. And I, like, started on this journey earlier. Is there any relationship to like, starting your career or your dream career later in life and keeping your fluid intelligence up? Because to your point, people get bored. I assume you're going to get bored later on if you started later.
- [22:54]
Arthur Brooks
Yeah, that's a good question. Because different people have different trajectories for finding their professional passion. There's basically four different trajectories, and they all relate to fluid and crystallized intelligence in different ways. The four basic ones are they're people who have kind of transitory careers that kind of bop from thing to thing to thing to thing to thing. And they just want to be doing the minimum to make the rent and something that's adequately interesting. But. But most of their passion comes from outside their career. That's not young and profiting listeners. Mostly. Yeah, we all know people like that that are still living in the old neighborhood, et cetera, et cetera. Their mothers are very worried about them, et cetera. Okay, but the three that we really see a lot now, again, fewer are going to be in this next category with your listeners as well is the steady state career. That's what your grandparents had. That's what my father had. He had one job with basically one employer all the way through his career. He was a college professor like me, but he was at one small liberal arts college in Seattle where I grew up. And he was there from the very beginning of his career almost to the very end in his 60s. He died young in his 60s, but, you know, he had, you know, 40 year career at the same place. And he didn't get big raises, he didn't have big advances in his career. He just kind of chugged along and did a little bit better and got better at what he was doing. Now the two big careers that your audience are going to have are what we call the linear career and the spiral career. The linear career is one where you're always going up, you change jobs only when it's promotion, only when it's more money, when it's more power, when it's more prestige, whatever it happens to be. And then you'll move, you'll stay. If you can make advances where you are, you'll move. If you can make Advances, but you're staying in more or less the same field, in the same discipline, same set of skills, just getting better and better. Better. A lot more people than they think are actually the spiral career. Well, you'll take a hit in salary to do something that's very, very interesting to you and you can develop new skills. These are people that go from, you know, I'm going to go work in a presidential administration, then I'm going to go work on Wall street and then I'm going to take a big salary hit. Cause I'm going to go work at a think tank. You know, I'm going to do this interesting stuff where I have this basket of skills that I take from thing to thing to try to create value, which is very meritorious. Now it looks like you're not going to get better at a particular job. What you're getting better at is particular fungible skills. In a whole world of different kinds of jobs. More people, I've got the data on this. Most people who are ambitious think they're linears. A lot of them are actually spirals. And when they're willing to say, I'm going to walk away, I'm going to have a 10 year career and then I'm going to go back to graduate school and I'm going to change and then I'm going to go to a different kind of a sector and it's going to cost me a bunch of money, but guess what? I saved up. Or maybe I'm just not wasting all my money having three cars when I can use one because I want to have a more interesting life. So that's worth giving people in their 20s and 30s. It's worth giving some thought if maybe, maybe, maybe you're a spiral like me.
- [25:47]
Hala Taha
By the way, I think I'm a spiral too. As you were explaining that, I was like, I think that's me because I definitely have kind of switched gears. And to everybody listening, I hope this is motivation if you're in your mid-20s to actually start on your career, because these are your best years to work and make money and be successful, so to speak. And then you can work on your second curve. So to kind of further elaborate on this first curve, second curve, let's go through some actual real life examples. You give a lot of great examples in your book. Let's take Bach and Darwin because I think they're both two very distinct, different examples of how your life can go.
- [26:24]
Arthur Brooks
Yeah, and again, I'm going to be talking about people who are either happy or Unhappy at the end of their life. One thing that's really worth pointing out is I've studied a lot of biography to see this question. You know, everybody, if you look at these high performers throughout history, you know these superstars, you know, the most famous people in history, you always, in their biographies, learn about the amazing things they do, but nobody ever asks were they happy when they died. And again, we gotta have goals. I mean, it's like, he who dies with the most toys wins. That's idiotic. It's he who dies surrounded by the people who love her wins. He who she or he who dies with great happiness and a sense of fulfillment wins. I mean, forget the toys, forget the money. None of us is so stupid to think that. And yet the world is kind of telling you that. So let's not be fooled. When you look at a lot of really successful people, a lot of them died very unhappy, as it turns out. And part of the reason is because of what I call the strivers curse. You find that about half of the population after age 70 gets happier and happier all the way to the end. And the other half gets unhappier all the way to the end. And it's. It's 50. 50, basically. Now, you'd think that the people on the upper branch are the people who were the most successful. It turns out that people who are most successful in worldly terms, they tend to be on the lower branch. And the reason for that is, number one, it's hard to live up to your own expectations. You know, people who are number one, usually you have parents who are like, like, holla. Yeah, you're an A student, you're a star performer, you're always going to get the best grades. And especially the people who are listening to us who come from really demanding sometimes, you know, immigrant families who came from nothing and are really working hard for their own kids. There's this tendency to put the kid on a pedestal, and the kid will have. Have a hard time living up to her or his expectations all throughout life. Well, what happens is, by the time you're 80, if you were identified as a high performer before 20, you're more likely to be disappointed with your life after 80. And the reason is because there's only one number one. And you're usually not going to be that. It's very disappointing when you're not. Second is if you do a ton with your life, when the party's over, you're going to know it. If you're killing it, you're going to Notice when the party inevitably ends. And that's very, very disappointing.
- [28:33]
Hala Taha
And the way people treat you when you walk into a room and all that kind of stuff.
- [28:37]
Arthur Brooks
Yeah, yeah, this is what I do all day long. You know, I'm working with people in the back half of their career. I mean, I'm getting 20 messages a day from people who run these major corporations, like, okay, buddy, I read your book. Now what do I do? What do I do? How do I design this thing? I've got it. And the answer is, the sooner you think about these issues, the more likely you're going to have the whole cadence of your life in order so you can be happy young, happy middle, happy end. And it requires all the same sets of decisions, all the same sets of investments. So if you look like somebody like Charles Darwin, I mean, look, if you've got the greatest natural scientist in history, he's one, two or three for you, that's just the way it is. And yet in the last 20 years of his career, he was trying to stay on his fluid intelligence curve of inventing new stuff, and he couldn't anymore. Part of it was that the science had gotten too sophisticated for him to understand in his own field. And so for the last 20 years of his career, he wasn't able to make any new innovations. And he was very depressed. You know, he wrote 11 books in the end of his life, but he thought that they were all just kind of repetitive and derivative and boring. And he wrote to his best friend. Nothing gives him joy. And a lot of people wind up that way. You know, they have these great careers and they're, they're noted. I mean, he's buried at Westminster Abbey as a hero, but he died thinking he was a disappointment. Now it doesn't have to be this way.
- [29:51]
Hala Taha
That's so sad.
- [29:53]
Arthur Brooks
Oh, yeah, totally. And it happens again and again and again. You find Nobel Prize winners in this category. I've got tons of them in my book that I talk about now. You look at other people. Like, I also give the case of Johann Sebastian Bach, the greatest composer of serious art music who ever lived. And most people listening to us, even if you don't care about classical music, you know who Bach is. He was the master of the high baroque and Bach man. I mean, that guy was a man fully alive. He was the. The greatest innovator of his generation. He was a super productive. He also had 20 kids.
- [30:24]
Hala Taha
Oh, wow.
- [30:25]
Arthur Brooks
Yeah, it's productive, isn't it? Yeah, it was amazing. But he was surrounded by love and he was really deeply into his religious faith. And he loved music. And then just like Darwin when he was about 50 years old, all of his innovative capacities seemed to evaporate, because it does, because you're not in your fluid intelligence curve. And so he redesigned his career as the greatest teacher of his generation. What Darwin should have done is like, yeah, I'm probably not going to come up with any interventions, so I'm going to bring along the next generation and I'm going to be revered and loved as a teacher. And that's what Bach did. He became the teacher at the. A church called the Thomas Kirche Leipzig in Germany. And, you know, he directed the choir, he taught the organ students. He was just beloved by.
- [31:07]
Hala Taha
He.
- [31:07]
Arthur Brooks
He was writing textbooks instead of these original manuscripts that was going to blow everybody's mind. He didn't think he'd ever be famous again. Turns out a hundred years after he died, his manuscripts were rediscovered. And now he's the rock star of the high baroque. He would be shocked by that. His kids, when he died, were way more famous than he was. I mean, Mozart said, bach is the father, we are the children. Referring not to the Bach that we know, but to one of Bach's kids. Oh, it's amazing, right? Yeah, yeah. He died in relative obscurity, but happy, surrounded by tons of kids and grandkids and students. And he was in love with his wife and, and life was just great because he was on his crystallized intelligence curve. And that's what we all got to look forward to because we absolutely can be killing it with success and happy. But you can't leave it up to chance. You got to design your life.
- [31:56]
Hala Taha
I love all of this. So let's back up a little bit. So I think we, we got a really good foundation of first curve, second curve. I want to talk about happiness in general. So let's talk about the definition of happiness, because you say happiness is not a feeling, and I always assumed happiness was a feeling. So if happiness is not a feeling, what is it?
- [32:17]
Arthur Brooks
So feelings are involved with happiness, just like Thanksgiving dinner has smells. You walk into mom's house on Thanksgiving, you're like, ah, it's going to be awesome. I can smell it from the street. But that smell of the turkey is not the Thanksgiving dinner. Happy feelings are not happiness. They're indication of happiness. Happiness is, is basically a combination of three things. The happiest people have three things. They have enjoyment, they have satisfaction, and they have purpose. These are not the same thing. Enjoying your life is a feeling of pleasure. That you actually can become conscious of and have memories of. So it's not just drugs and alcohol or filling your belly with a Thanksgiving turkey. It's the experience of doing things with people that you love. It's a conscious phenomenon. And you need enjoyment in your life. You need pleasure. Plus higher consciousness and memory and relationship with other people is super important. Satisfaction is the reward for the things that we want. You know, I wanted that thing. I got it. I wanted that promotion. I got it. I wanted that accomplishment, and I got it. The problem with satisfaction, which is intensely joyful, by the way, you know, when something happened, you probably, when you got your millionth download from the show, you're like, awesome. And five minutes later you were thinking about the second million. So it's very joyful. And a life must have it, but it never lasts.
- [33:35]
Hala Taha
Yeah, I'll be happy when.
- [33:36]
Arthur Brooks
Yeah, yeah. Mick Jagger saying, I can't get no satisfaction. But what he should have saying is, I can't keep no satisfaction. And young and profiting listeners, beware, because you're on this treadmill of more and more and more accomplishment, more and more stuff, more and more. When I get there, I'll finally be happy. No, you won't. You'll be happy for a minute and then off to the races. You have to learn to manage that. A big part of what I work on with highly ambitious people is how to manage their satisfaction, because they can become just as addicted with the same neurochemicals to the satisfaction dilemma based on accomplishments as can anybody with gambling or methamphetamine. And it's a really dangerous thing for ambitious people. And then the last part is meaning and purpose. If your life doesn't have meaning and purpose, if you can't answer the questions, why am I alive? And for what would I be willing to die? You're not going to be a very happy person. And the irony of this, I have to convince my students of this, is that the way you get it is not by having fun. And the way you get it is never by trying to avoid unhappiness. It's by actually embracing your suffering. It's by sacrifice and with challenge. Now, too much suffering is too much. I mean, clinical depression is a real deal, et cetera. But every life has suffering. And by the way, you don't have to go looking for suffering because it'll find you. But learning how to turn that into opportunity is critical because that will give you meaning and purpose. You'll grow from your trauma, you'll grow from your sadness. And that will give your. Your life contour and a sense of really what it's all about. I've got a lot of examples of that in my current research. My next book, by the way, is to how to start right in a life of happiness when you're in your 20s. So this is a lot about what I'm writing about right now. That's coming out next year.
- [35:12]
Hala Taha
Oh, perfect. I can't wait to have you back on for that. Can you actually dig deeper on how our suffering can actually lead to more happiness?
- [35:22]
Arthur Brooks
Yeah. We need to know the why of our life. And the why of your life never comes from that fantastic week at the beach in Ibiza. It doesn't. It comes from your ability to get over things that were difficult to find, your sense of resiliency, to understand, your inner strength. And all of that comes from challenges. When I talk to really successful entrepreneurs, I talked to Bernie Marcus, who started the Home Depot. I said, tell me your story. He doesn't tell me about, you know, the first billion. He tells me about going bankrupt a couple of times early on and what he learned from it. He talks about his failures. When you think about if you're in love, the meaning of what love is is not just the love you feel for your partner, but what you actually learned when your heart was broken in the past. This is very critical for us to understand. This is one of the reasons that some people, when they're trying so hard not to have their heart broken in romantic love, they're making a huge mistake of actually not getting their heart stomped on sufficiently to learn a lot and to feel that trauma and to learn the real meaning that comes from the true. Your true soulmate comes around. A big part of what I write about and a big part about what I teach is treating your life like a startup. The average Startup entrepreneur has 3.8 failures before their first success. And they learn from the failures. The success comes from the failures. If the success in your life has to do with your happiness and wellbeing, you gotta have failures in your happiness and wellbeing. You must have that to actually find the true source of meaning in your life.
- [36:54]
Hala Taha
Yeah, I think that makes total sense. It's just like your career, you know, if you don't have failures, if you don't try, then you don't learn the skills to actually build upon your career and your foundation.
- [37:04]
Arthur Brooks
Yeah, you gotta be. You gotta be. It's interesting. One more thing I'll point out about this. You know, there's a. As I was doing A I doing a speech about the startup life, and you gotta take risk, and you gotta take risk with your heart, because if the currency, you know, the explosive currency, you want to get rich in life, it's love, lots and lots of love. So you gotta take a risk. Every entrepreneur knows that. And I was saying it to a, you know, group of young people in their 20s, and this guy comes up to me. He actually. He recognized me on a plane a couple weeks later, and he says, are you Dr. Brooks? I said, yeah. He said, I can't get that startup life thing out of my head. I'm on my way right now to declare my love for a woman I've been secretly in love with for two years but too afraid to tell her because of you. I'm gonna go confess my love. And I'm like, dude, it was only a speech, you know? But then I ran into him a few months later. He hadn't told me how it turned out. I said, remember me? He's like, yes. I'm like, oh, what happened? I asked. And he says, I told her, and she wasn't in love with me. She was in love with somebody else. And it was the worst. The worst. And I said, I'm sorry, man. I didn't mean to. I was very contrite. I said, I didn't mean to hurt you. And he said, no. He said, I've been meaning to call you, and thank you, because that was literally the thing I was most afraid of in my life. And it happened, and I didn't die so young and profiting. If you want to profit in life, you got to put your heart on the line, not your money on the line. That means taking a risk with your heart, and generally speaking, that's romantic love. So here's my homework for you. If you're going to be a real entrepreneur, you got two weeks to tell somebody that you love her or him. And if it's not scary, it's not entrepreneurial enough, and feel it. If it doesn't work out, you will be stronger as a result.
- [38:45]
Hala Taha
I love that homework assignment. I'm gonna let you guys get that as a reminder in our outro. So let's talk about relationships. Since we're on the topic of relationships, I know that relationships are very important to your happiness. So most unhappy people I learned from your work are typically men, 60 years old, and they're unhappy because they don't have friends. They might not have a loved one.
- [39:07]
They're lonely.
- [39:08]
So talk to us about the importance of relationships related to happiness.
- [39:12]
Arthur Brooks
Yeah. You know, for the longest time, 60 year old men were the loneliest people in our society. That's actually started to change now. We're finding more and more young people. There are probably people listening to us who feel intensely isolated. And that's not an abnormal thing at this point. You know, I do a lot of work with the Surgeon General, the United States, Vivek Murthy. He's absolutely phenomenal and loves his country. And one of the things he's most worried about for public health is not just coronavirus and opioids and guns and climate and the stuff that people are talking about all the time. It's the isolation, the intense isolation that so many people are under. And it's that much worse during coronavirus and that much worse now that everybody's virtual in their work. And so the key thing to keep in mind is that happiness is love. I've got data over an 85 year period from men and women who were born in the, who are actually in college in the late 1930s and in the 40s. So they're super old. You know the sample, it's called the Harvard Study of Adult Development. I don't run it, but a very close friend of mine does. And one of the things that he has found, tracking people over who. It started with a sample of people who went to Harvard, which is not exactly diverse, but then he expanded to people who didn't go to college and their spouses and their kids. So it's all races, both genders, poor, rich, educated, uneducated. And what he finds is that there's a lot of things that people do who wind up happy. They tend to lifelong education. They tend to know how to not ruminate and keep their worry under control. They tend to have, you know, take care of their health in a not crazy way. They tend to walk a lot, for example. They don't become obese. They, they're very careful about smoking and drinking. They drink moderately or not at all, but very moderately at most. But here's the key thing. They have relationships. They all have relationships. They cultivate their critical love relationships. Now, I know a lot of people are trying to get ahead in their career. They're like, you can fall in love and get married later, but now keep your nose to the grindstone. I gotta tell you, that is a huge mistake. Get after it now. Time is of the essence. The earlier you do this, the better. By the way, the kinds of relationships that work the best are startups as opposed to mergers. We know the difference between startups and mergers. And the worst of all are hostile, hostile takeovers and acquisitions. But that's a whole other category of relationships.
- [41:24]
Hala Taha
Well, I want you to elaborate on that more. What do you mean?
- [41:27]
Arthur Brooks
Well, startups are people who are starting their lives together. They're partners in love who are starting their lives together. And my success is your success and your success is my success. I mean, my wife Esther and I, we were poor musicians. I mean, I had no health insurance. I was just like, will we make rent or won't we make rent? Started to get ahead a little bit because I joined a symphony orchestra. I actually moved to Barcelona from New York to take a job in the symphony orchestra. Not for the job, but because I was trying to. I had to learn Spanish to try to propose to this girl. She didn't speak a word of English, but I was hopelessly in love with a girl who didn't speak a word of English. So I moved to her country, literally and got down on one knee. It took me still a year and a half to close the deal anyway, so fantastic. But that was a startup life. We both changed careers. We all, we built our lives together. The sooner that you start building your life with another person and the more that you have the startup mentality about your partnership, the better off it's going to be. Because then you're going to change together. You're going to, you're going to celebrate each other's victories. Because you know, my wife Esther, when something awesome happens, it's happening to me, you know, in my work. My book is on the bestsellers bestseller list. Her book is on the bestseller list. That's because we were 24 years old together and now we're 58. Man. That is now again, not everybody gets that. Some people they meet in their 30s, some people in their 40s, but adopt the startup mindset as opposed to the 50. 50. We're going to do everything. 50. 50. 50. 50 is 0. 0 startup is a hundred hundred. And that's the basis for a great startup. Great young and profiting relationship.
- [43:04]
Hala Taha
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- [46:37]
I find that a lot of people who focus on their success, they end up losing all their relationships. Cause they don't prioritize it. They prioritize their career over their relationship. So take me, for example. I had, like, skyrocketing success two years ago. Everything just blew up. My company, my podcast. And at the same time, all my relationships plummeted because I didn't tend to them. I got so busy that a lot of my best friends didn't want to talk to me anymore. My relationship of 10 years kind of ended. I have a new relationship now. Everything's great. But that's because I'm proactive about it. For two years straight, I didn't care about my relationships, and now I'm paying for it, trying to get my best friends to talk to me again, all that kind of stuff. And so I'd love to hear your perspective, because as I was reading about you and reading your book, a thought kept coming to my mind, like, what's the balance, though? Because I don't regret building what I built. I do regret losing my relationships. But I kind of had to do it because I was riding this wave that would go away if I didn't capitalize on that moment. And to your point, I was in my fluid intelligence. Like, I capitalized on being really good at social media, and I'm at the height of my field. So what's the balance there in terms of capitalizing on the intelligence that you have to make a career for yourself at this age versus tending to your relationships?
- [47:55]
Arthur Brooks
Yeah, the truth is that we actually can do both, but it's. It's hard to do it because of our addictive behavior. So if I'd gone back, and I'm just going to take a guess, I could have taken that 14th hour on Instagram and I could have made it a phone call with one of your best friends, and it wouldn't have hurt you. A bit. But you were stuck on the Instagram because it was this thing is the shiny thing. It's like, blink, blink, blink, blink, blink. And it was making you nuts, right? And you and everybody else. I've made this mistake a bunch of times because I've had these moments where my career is absolutely blowing up and I've had to say, okay, buddy, eat your own cooking. I'm a happiness specialist. I can't. It's very embarrassing to me if my relationships meltdown. It's like, yeah, did you see Brooks? He gives good advice, but, you know, he's alone. So I don't want any of that. But the key thing is almost everybody who's having this intense period of ambition and success, they tend to get monomaniacally focused on that and then they'll act addictively at the margin. Now, what's the margin? It's the 12th hour of work, 13th hour of work, 14th hour of work where you're actually really, really unproductive, but you can't get the machine of success turned off. That requires a whole lot of self discipline to basically say, okay, I'm not going to get any more done today. So now I'm going to actually focus on the things that are these long term investments in my life. Now you're in your 20s or early 30s. It's pretty forgivable that you made these errors. The key challenge for you is making sure that you remember this. So when you're in a different part of enormous success at age 50, that you're not neglecting your husband and children when you're doing that, that you're basically able to say, yeah, this success is going to come. I can do that success on nine or ten hours a day. I don't have to do that. Success on 14 and 15 hours a just a habit.
- [49:37]
Hala Taha
I totally agree. Like, I wish I had this book earlier. I feel like these are such great lessons for everyone to kind of take with them. So let's move on to some other things. Let's do a quick fire segment.
- [49:51]
Arthur Brooks
Alrighty.
- [49:52]
Hala Taha
It's basically a lot of stuff that I wanted to cover that we don't have a lot of time to cover in detail. But I want people to get the highlights and also to go get your book, From Strength to Strength. It was a New York Times bestseller. It was an excellent read. He's going to touch on some things as a teaser, but you can get the detail in the book. So. All right, we alluded to this a little bit. How does suffering help us get Better at being happy.
- [50:15]
Arthur Brooks
Suffering helps us understand what our priorities are, what the significance of our life is, how we relate to other people and the people that we can actually count on. That's really what it comes down to. And when the suffering is over, when the clouds clear, you're like, got it. I learned a lot. And the result is you're that much happier if you did the work and you didn't try to avoid the suffering when you were suffering.
- [50:37]
Hala Taha
How about anger?
- [50:39]
A lot of people who are happy don't rage or ruminate on the past. How can people who are holding on to anger get better at getting happy?
- [50:47]
Arthur Brooks
So those are two different issues. Anger is a negative, a negative basic emotion. It's very normal. It's part of staying alive. You're. During the Pleistocene, your ancestors would have gotten eaten by a tiger or clubbed by some other member of some tribe unless you had anger. Anger is really, really important and very, very normal. The problem is when it manages you with all emotions, including positive emotions. You need to learn to manage your emotions so they don't manage you. How do you do that? The answer is, when you actually have negative or positive emotions, you need to become conscious of those emotions. This is a process called metacognition. I strongly recommend journaling your emotions, which will move the experience of those emotions from the automatic part of your brain to the executive part of your brain. And you will, almost overnight, become a better manager of your anger. And as such, you will learn how to manage it and do a lot better in life.
- [51:40]
Hala Taha
Cool. So then, since I mentioned two things, how about ruminating on your past? How do we improve that?
- [51:46]
Arthur Brooks
So rumination, what is it? It's actually an amazing human thing. You know, your dog can't ruminate because what it is, it's going. It's going back to a memory of something happened, and you turn it over and turn it over and turn it over in your mind. You're basically rehearsing different outcomes. You're saying, if I'd said this, I would have gone down this branch of the tree and it would have been different. What are you doing? You're training yourself not to make the same mistake again, which is unbelievable. You should be thankful for your ability to do that. The problem is that some people ruminate too much, and in so doing, they can become depressed. One of the characteristics of major clinical depression is that people who will ruminate on the past too much, a little bit is fine. Roll it over in your mind and be able to say, I have learned from that. And I will not make that mistake again. And I'm done. If you can't do that, then ordinarily you need to get some help. And there's a lot of ways for people to actually get you over the rumination problem so it's not a barrier to your happiness.
- [52:39]
Hala Taha
What are the top three things you think our young and profiters should do today to be happier tomorrow?
- [52:46]
Arthur Brooks
So, number one is, let's talk about what you're going to do tonight. Before you go to bed. I want you to take a piece of paper and I want you to write down the five things you're most grateful for. Okay? The five things you're most grateful for in life. It's very easy to forget those things. I know you're grateful. You're not a terrible person. But it's very easy to focus on the things you're not grateful for, the things that are annoying you. The five things you're grateful for, I don't care how shallow they are. Like this episode of Better Call Saul. Maybe that's on your list. Good for you. Whatever. It's just like I had a burrito I liked, or, let's have something like my grandma. Whatever it is, the five things. Then I want you to study that list every night for the rest of the week for five minutes before you go to bed. And next. This time next week, I want you to update it. At the end of 10 weeks, you're gonna be 25% happier. That's number one. Number two, here's another exercise. I want you to take a piece of paper, and I want you to Write down your 20 best friends. Okay? Can't think of 20. Fine. Your 10 best friends. Now, I want you to put Rs and Ds after their names. That's not Republican and Democrat, folks. That's real friend and deal friend. And you know the difference? Your deal friend is somebody who's useful to you in a professional way or in a. In a social way. They get you ahead in some way. Your real friend is somebody who can't give you anything. You just love them. If at least half of the people who are closest to you that you're dealing with the most are not real friends, it's time to actually start working on that problem. You will be isolated no matter how many people are in your life. If it's all deal, no real, and you know the difference. Number three. Here's exercise number three. I want you to think about yourself in five years. Say you're 27. Think about yourself at 32. I'm 58, so I'll be 63. That's very disturbing to me, by the way. Holla. That's very disturbing to me that I just thought of that. So I'm gonna try to get that outta my mind. Okay, so you're 27. You're actually 32 now. You're happy. You know what that means. You don't have to define it scientifically like I do with the macronutrients of enjoyment, satisfaction, or purpose. You know what it means for you to be happy. Okay, Imagine yourself now. Take a piece of paper and write down the five main reasons that you're happy in order. Number one, reason that you're happy. Number two, that you're happy. All the way to number five. Now come back to the present. How aggressively are you managing 1 and 2 versus 4 and 5? I could tell you what 4 and 5 are. It's money and success. What's number one and two? Love and friendship are going to be number two, probably. Look, your results may differ, as we like to say in the social science business, but everybody I meet, and then you got to ask yourself, why am I not most aggressively managing 1 and 2? And the answer is, ah, that'll take care of itself. News flash. No, it won't. Make a strategic plan for managing one and two, and you will get to that happy state when you're 32 or 63, in my case.
- [55:41]
Hala Taha
I'm so glad that I asked that question. It was like, totally on the fly. So, another on the fly question, because I do have a lot of listeners who are in their 40s, 50s, 60s. We have listeners of all ages.
- [55:52]
Arthur Brooks
That's great.
- [55:53]
Hala Taha
And I would love your best advice in terms of happiness for people who are 40, 50, 60, and on this whole crystallized wave of their life.
- [56:04]
Arthur Brooks
Yeah, number one, don't fight to stay in the past. I get it. You're listening to the super hot Millennial podcast. I get it. You want all the tips. And my guess is that you're. You feel younger than you are. I mean, I feel younger than I am, too. I feel better than I did when I was in my 20s, mostly. Cause I don't drink so much anymore, but you get the point. But that doesn't mean that your. Your natural intelligence and your natural strengths are the same as they would have been for the people who are in their 20s. Make sure you're on the right curve. The curve of service, the curve of wisdom, the curve of teaching. You'll be much happier. You'll be Much more successful. You can be just as ambitious, you can work just as hard, but you gotta be channeling it to the right purpose.
- [56:47]
Hala Taha
Yeah. All right, cool. So we're gonna start closing out the show. I always end with the same two questions and then we do something fun at the end of. So my last question is, what is one actionable thing we can do today to become more profiting tomorrow?
- [57:01]
Arthur Brooks
More profiting tomorrow. Okay. The most important thing that we can actually do to get more, to be more profiting tomorrow is to make sure that we get adequate rest and relaxation today. The biggest thing that's gonna be in your way is in for tomorrow is doing an all nighter. Do not do that, my friends. You gotta take care of the machine and your brain is part of the machine. Get to bed on time, not intoxicated.
- [57:27]
Hala Taha
Great advice. Couldn't agree more. And what is your secret to profiting in life? And profiting does not have to mean money, of course.
- [57:34]
Arthur Brooks
Yeah, the secret to profiting in life is a real easy one. You know the guy who ran that study, I talked about the study of the Harvard Study of Adult Development. He ran it for 30 years. And he's, he's asked near the end of his career, when he's retiring, how do you sum it up? Sum it up in five words? And he thought about it. He said, happiness is love, full stop. And that is absolutely true. Love is the secret to your happiness. Love should be the, the center of your actual ambition. Look, the happiest people, they're paying attention to their faith or life philosophy, their family life, their friendships, and serving other people with their work. In other words, their love, their love, their love and their. More love. The different manifestations of love are to get that done. That's the source of your prosperity.
- [58:17]
Hala Taha
And one more question related to that. I know the Dalai Lama taught you that love is an action. Can you explain that to us?
- [58:25]
Arthur Brooks
Yeah, it's funny. St. Thomas Aquinas, the great sage of the middle ages, in 1265, he wrote this super important text, so the Summa Theologica. And what he said, he defined love. And he defined it in a way that we all need to remember it today. He said, to love is to will the good of the other as other. Love wasn't a thing that you have. Love is a commitment that you make. It's an action that you take. It's a, it's a life course. It's a path that you set out on. That's what love is all about. And to love somebody else is to will their good. And here's the best part of all. It doesn't matter what you feel. You can make a commitment. You know, people's like, I don't feel it. It doesn't matter. Are you tough or not? You're not going to say, like, I don't feel like going to work, so I'm going to skip work. You're not going to do that. Young and profiting. You're killers. You should have the same attitude when it actually comes to love. And that's how love is actually an action. It's more even of a commitment than an action.
- [59:23]
Hala Taha
Yeah. And it goes back to the conversation we were have about having about relationships before. You have to proactively do the work to keep that love in your relationships. It doesn't just fall on your lap. And it can go away very easily.
- [59:36]
Arthur Brooks
It really can. And there's so much that you can do to make sure that it doesn't. It blows my mind. People who don't do the work to keep the thing that's most important in their lives.
- [59:45]
Hala Taha
Yeah. And I hope you guys take that as a big lesson. So, Arthur, this was one of my favorite conversations all year. I love your energy. I love your topics. So innovative. Not the same stuff that everybody keeps rotating around. So I appreciate your work. Thank you so much for being on this show. And where can everybody learn more about you and everything that you do?
- [60:04]
Arthur Brooks
Thank you, Hala. Thank you for what you're doing. This service that you're providing to give a community to people of ideas because this is really the energy for people who are young and they're trying to get ahead. It's ideas. We're an ideas society and this is really one of the epicenters for it and I thank you for it. My work is really easy to find. I write a column in the Atlantic on the science of happiness that comes out every Thursday morning called how to Build a Life. My books are really easy to find too. You know the one that we were talking about, but others as well about how we can treat each other with greater love and respect. And all the things that I write about and you can find all of it@arthurbrooks.com this kind of one stop shopping. You can even sign up for my newsletter which is just me stupidly cracking jokes that I think are funny in my dad joke kind of way if you have the stomach for it.
- [60:48]
Hala Taha
Well, I think you probably gained a lot of fans today. Thank you so much for your time, Arthur. It was an absolute pleasure.
- [60:54]
Arthur Brooks
Thanks Hala, thanks to you and thanks to all of our listeners. Keep profiting. Keep sa.