Harvard's Arthur C. Brooks on the Secrets to Joy in Your Career

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1:10Welcome to Harvard Business Review's The New World of Work. I'm Adi Ignatius, Editor-in-Chief of HBR, and each week on this show, I interview a CEO, a thought leader, or somebody who can inspire and educate us on the changing dynamics of the workplace. Our viewers come from all over the world. They work at everything from Fortune 500 corporations to fledgling startups, from family businesses to nonprofits. The aim of this show is to provide insights for everyone as they navigate this transitional moment in how we organize ourselves in the business world. So in today's episode, we have another great guest, Arthur Brooks, a best-selling author, Harvard University professor and an Atlantic Magazine columnist.

1:49So I'll come back in a second with a proper introduction. But first, let's hear from our good friends at KPMG, who are our sponsors for this season of The New World of Work. At KPMG, it's our people who make the difference for our clients. Talented teams leveraging the right technology to uncover insights that illuminate opportunity. Ready to make the difference together?

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2:53So on with it. My guest today is Arthur C. Brooks, a bestselling author, Harvard University professor, and a widely read Atlantic Magazine columnist whose writing draws from both science and philosophy and is aimed at providing insight and strategies on how we can live our best lives. He is the co-author with Oprah Winfrey of the forthcoming book, Build the Life You Want, The Art and Science of Getting Happier. It will be released in just a couple of weeks, and you can pre-order it now wherever you buy your book. So Arthur, welcome. Hi, Adi. How are you? I'm great, and I'm really happy that you're on the program.

3:27There's a lot to talk about. I realize the official launch of your book is still a couple of weeks away. I don't want to steal any thunder from the book tour, but I do want to talk about aspects of your research and insights, and particularly as they relate to the world of work. Yeah, for sure. Absolutely. And the truth is that the book is based on a lot of the things I've been teaching at the Harvard Business School, a class I teach called Leadership and Happiness, which is a very oversubscribed class. It has 180 in the seats, 400 in the waiting list, and there's even a secret Zoom link they think I don't know about.

4:00So I'm happy to talk about what I talk about with my students, with our wonderful viewers here on this cast. Yeah, well, I hope a few of them were just horrified to hear that you know about the Zoom link. But anyway, so let's set some context. All right, and start with some data. So, you know, the numbers show that despite a thriving kind of happiness industry, you know, people like yourselves who think about it, we're becoming less and less happy. Yeah, that's true. Right? So in the U.S. at least, the number of cases of depression are up. The number of people who self-report themselves to be happy is down.

4:33So I know it's impossible to say exactly why, but, you know, what's your hunch? What is going on here? Well, we actually do have a pretty good idea what's going on. You find that happiness started to go into a little bit of a malaise, a bit of a decline in the late 80s, early 90s. But then it took a real big dip when social media came along. Social media was catastrophic for happiness. And part of the reason is because we distract ourselves when we're lonely.

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5:52I think it's the equivalent of, you know, burgers and fries for social life. They give you lots of calories and not very much nutrition. There's a lot of neuroscience that actually goes in behind this. But everybody knows that when you're bored or you're lonely and you start looking at your devices and at your phone, you actually get more bored and you get more lonely. And this is a huge problem, especially for young adults. And then the coronavirus came along, and this was the most catastrophic event for public happiness that we've seen in a long time worldwide. Ordinarily, about 30 % of people would say they're very happy about their lives, and 15 % would say they're not happy.

6:23The rest are in the middle. Those are flipped. So now it's about 30 % who are not happy and 15 % who are very happy. And those trends have not actually turned around. So we know that it has everything to do with social life. It has everything to do with our love relationships. We know that the habits that bring the happiest life, your philosophical or your faith life, your family life, your real friendships and work that serves others in person, that these things have been in decline. And when those things go in decline, there's no tech that's going to solve the problem. Yeah. All right. Well, you know, you do have your finger on it.

6:58I want to focus mostly on the world of work, just given our audience. And by the way, if you're watching this, if you have questions for Arthur Brooks, please put them into the chat. I will get to as many as I can later on the show. So, yeah, so I think this is drawing from stats in the book. I think you say just 16 % of employees self-report that they're very satisfied with their work. I want to ask about that because this is, you know, we're spending half of our waking hours in the office, and yet we're not getting the kind of fulfillment and satisfaction that we deserve, I'd say. So, you know, what's happening here and how can we think about moving the needle?

7:39Well, there are a couple of things to think about. You know, I've been studying what brings work satisfaction for the longest time. And, you know, when I first started off, you know, a fresh Ph.D., I thought, well, let's see if for-profit versus nonprofit versus government work, which brings the most happiness. Turns out it's insignificant. So I said, well, high salaries versus low salaries. You know, above a certain level of subsistence, it's a wash. College educated, not college educated, white color, blue color, none of it matters. Two things show up on the happiest workers, the people who have the greatest happiness from work.

8:09They feel like they're earning their success, which is to say that they're creating value with their lives and with their work lives, that their accomplishments are moving the needle and they're being recognized for those accomplishments. And number two, they feel like they're serving people so that they're needed. These are the two big things. And so a lot of people are watching us right now who are employers. And I've been a CEO too. The number one thing that you can do for recruitment, for retention, the ultimate rewards that go beyond so far beyond money are making sure that you have a system where people are earning their success through their merit and personal accomplishment.

8:43They know it, they see it, and so do their friends. And where they actually feel like they're serving other people and they can see the faces of the people for whom they're creating value. These are the big things. Now, one more thing to keep in mind. Those things are easiest to do when we're in person. That's just it. So you said we spend, you know, half of our lives with, you know, with our co-workers at work. Well, I don't know, man. Not anymore. I mean, a lot of people are spending half of their lives in front of a Zoom screen where it's hard to earn your success. It's hard to feel like you're serving other people.

9:13And you don't even get to see your work buddies. That's tough stuff. So there must be, I mean, if you're right, then there must be some self-deception here. Because if you ask people, this is anecdotal rather than statistical, but I feel like I've seen numbers that back this up. you know, they like hybrid. They like working from home. They talk about it giving them a better work-life balance, all that we think would translate into fulfillment and happiness. But I mean, do you think we're fooling ourselves? Yeah. Well, to a certain extent, there's a set of biases that are at play here. So for example, one of the things that we find is that when you're really lonely, it impairs the executive centers of your brain.

9:52We know. This episode is brought

10:18This episode is brought to you by Palmolive. Family time isn't just the big moments. It's weeknight dinners, sitting around the table, everyone talking all at once. So when the plates are empty and the sink is full, use Palmolive Ultra. Palmolive's most powerful formula removes up to 99.9 % of grease, leaving your dishes sparkling clean. And the new convenient pump makes cleaning even easier, so you can spend less time tackling dishes and more time together. Shop now at palmolive.com. This is the reason that when you're really sad and lonely, you cocoon on the couch with a comfortable blanket, streaming Netflix and eating Haagen-Dazs.

10:55And what you should do is get up and go outside and get some vitamin D and ride your bike and call your friends. But you're impaired at that particular moment. And so what happened a lot during the coronavirus epidemic is that people, they started to become more isolated. They made the best of that isolation by creating lives that were very, very convenient, I have to say. Now, that said, some people do have a way better work-life balance because they want to spend all that time with their families. The problem is all of the people that are separated from their family and their friends and actually not seeing people at work.

11:27That's really catastrophic when it comes to happiness. So the book, if I had to sum it up, in many ways it's about agency, that happiness and fulfillment is not, you know, It's not based on external variables or things that happen to us, but it's all very much within our control. Now, the problem is it's very hard to take dramatic actions to reorder one's life. So, you know, I think my question is, you know, how do you get people who, yeah, I understand I should be doing this, I should be doing this, but who don't, who don't kind of make that leap? How do you make that leap to try to take care of some of these things?

12:05part of the problem is that, you know, a lot of people notice that they can manage their money and they can manage their company, but they can't manage their feelings or that they can manage their home and they can manage their family life, but they can't manage their emotions. And the reason is because emotional life is a different species of problem. The stuff around us in our work, these are complicated problems, meaning that, you know, they're hard to figure out, but once you do, you can master them and repeat the solutions over and over again. Life and your emotions, you know, the affairs of the heart and the feelings that you're getting, positive and negative, they're not complicated at all.

12:38They're what mathematicians would call a complex problem. That's a problem that's very easy to understand and that no amount of computational horsepower can solve it for you. You can only get in it and experience it and work with it in real time. So, you know, a cat is a complex problem. A toaster is a complicated problem. Your job is more like a toaster and your relationships are more like a cat. Your feelings are highly complex. And so the result is that, you know, I can master all these highly complicated things, but I can't get my mind around my feelings. The solution starts with understanding the science of human emotion.

13:14And this is really what I'm doing in a lot of my work. You know, this is when my HBS students come to me, these phenomenally talented and successful MBA students, really at the best business school in the world. and they'll say, my biggest problem is I can't manage how I feel and I feel like I'm really out of control. So the number one skill that we get is to treat your emotional system, the limbic system of your brain, like anything else that you would be managing. I mean, thinking about it as a complex system that you're participating in and using the techniques that we talked about in the class, which start with basically this idea of learning how to experience your emotions, not as they're delivered to you, but in the prefrontal cortex of your brain so that you can decide how to react, substitute emotions, and even disregard the emotions, but on purpose.

13:59And that's a specific set of techniques called metacognition that I walk through based on the most cutting edge neuroscience and anybody can do it. The problem is we don't teach kids to do this. We don't teach school kids to do this. We don't teach business people to do this. If I had my way, every business school, no, every high school would have this class. And when you came to work for a big company that they would have a class in metacognition and emotional self-management that you have to go through for the first week in orientation. So again, if you're watching this, if you have questions for Arthur Brooks about happiness and success at work, please put them into the chat.

14:31I want to follow up on what you're saying about teaching Harvard Business School students, because I think maybe in some ways they're a proxy for the audience that's tuning in today. And, you know, I'm interested. I assume these are, you know, as you said, incredibly successful by sort of any measure. This episode is brought to you by Google Chrome. You think you know a browser, but Gemini and Chrome, that's new. It can help you with practically anything on the web, like restoring a vintage motorcycle from a 50-page restoration block, or finally break down that long article you've had open for weeks.

15:04Gemini and Chrome is here for it. Ready to make anything online make sense? There's no place like Chrome. Check responses set up required, compatibility and availability varies 18+. This episode is brought to you by Palmolive. Family time isn't just the big moments. It's weeknight dinners, sitting around the table, everyone talking all at once. So when the plates are empty and the sink is full, use Palmolive Ultra. Palmolive's most powerful formula removes up to 99.9 % of grease, leaving your dishes sparkling clean. And the new convenient pump makes cleaning even easier, so you can spend less time tackling dishes and more time together.

15:41Shop now at palmolive.com. you know do they do they it probably there's probably a split but do you find they crave what you're teaching or that they come in skeptical of what you're teaching they they really crave it i mean probably the most skeptical ones are not taking the class it's an elective after all um you know the ones who are really skeptical are across the hall and you know supply chain management or something and you know but that you know the truth is that they really crave it and it's because they want it now my approach to this is basically this you can be happier but you have to understand the science.

16:15You need to use the science to change your habits and your lifestyle. And then you need to teach it to other people to make it permanent in your life. So it's called leadership and happiness because I want every leader to become a happiness teacher. I'm doing 175 talks a year outside of Harvard, talking to business audiences primarily. And I say, look, I'm going to show you a bunch of PowerPoints on the science of happiness. And what I want you to do is to take these slides, take my name off, put your name on, and I want you to teach it to somebody so that you permanently understand this technology and you don't forget it in your own life.

16:47And that's the way to get it done. And that's the way that we teach it at Harvard. And, and, and it really, really works. I'm telling you, Adi, I mean, I am, you know, I, I'm my own first patient in this work, quite frankly. And the reason is because I wanted to be happier as a social scientist. I applied my own toolkit to myself. I wanted to be a happier person. And, and since I've been writing about the science of happiness, guinea pigging it on myself. So everything that I suggest in my column in the Atlantic and to my students, I do myself first to make sure that I actually believe it works.

17:16I'm not just reading academic journal articles and then teaching it to other people. My happiness has risen by 60 % in the last four years, just in four years. Now, to be sure, it started at a kind of a low baseline, but 60 % is a lot based on the best measurement techniques for happiness. And so I know it works and I see the results of this every day among my students as well. Yeah, that's interesting. Well, let's keep you on the couch a little bit more. You come across as, yeah, as a positive, presumably happy person. I know first impressions can be off, but so even the sentence, my happiness is up 60%, I can't imagine really what you're measuring to come up with a specific figure.

18:00So what are some measurements? And maybe talk about how your numbers have changed and how. Sure. There are some general well-being surveys that people can take. They're all over the internet. And if they're created and they're psychometrically robust, they can do a good job. Really what I like to look at, however, is I pull apart with my students, I pull apart the negative and positive intensity levels in affect. Affect means mood. And what we find is that if you sort of have a little bit of a malaise, you're kind of a melancholic person, either your happiness levels are too low or your unhappiness levels are too high.

18:34Now, it seems like I'm splitting hairs here, but I'm not. A lot of people think that happiness and unhappiness are opposites, that if you're unhappy, it means you have a lack of happiness. That's completely wrong. Happy and happiness and unhappiness are positive and negative emotion. They actually, they largely, they exist in different hemispheres of the brain. They're produced for different reasons. The negative emotions of fear and anger and disgust and sadness, these are evolved to keep you alive. You should be very, very grateful for your negative emotions, but if they're too intense, they can hurt your quality of life.

19:05Your positive emotions of joy and love and interest in things, again, these are evolved and they're really good things to have. The problem is that some people, their happiness levels are too low. Other people, their unhappiness levels are too high. So I have a test that I administer to my students. I didn't develop it. It was developed by psychometricians about 20 years ago, but it's called the PANIS test, the positive affect, negative affect series. and it separates out the intensity of your positive and negative emotions. And so what happens is effectively that you have four different characteristics.

19:39You can be high positive and high negative. You can be low positive and low negative. This episode is brought to you by Google Chrome. You think you know a browser, but Gemini and Chrome, that's new. It can help you with practically anything on the web, like restoring a vintage motorcycle from a 50-page restoration block, or finally break down that long article you've had open for weeks. Gemini and Chrome is here for it. Ready to make anything online make sense? There's no place like Chrome. Check responses set up required. Compatibility and availability varies 18+. This episode is brought to you by Palmolive.

20:14Family time isn't just the big moments. It's weeknight dinners. Sitting around the table, everyone talking all at once. So when the plates are empty and the sink is full, use Palmolive Ultra. Palmolive's most powerful formula removes up to 99.9 % of grease, leaving your dishes sparkling clean. And the new convenient pump makes cleaning even easier, so you can spend less time tackling dishes and more time together. Shop now at palmolive.com. You can be high, positive, and low, negative. And of course, you can be high, negative, and low, positive. These are a quarter of the population each. High, high.

20:49This is a high affect person. It's called the mad scientist. This is somebody who's like, and that's me. So my problem with well-being is not that I'm unhappy or that I'm not happy enough. On the contrary, it just means that I need to manage my high levels of negative affect. Now, other people, they have different issues. You know, everybody wants to be high positive and low negative. That's called the cheerleader. It turns out cheerleaders have problems too. If two cheerleaders meet each other and marry, for example, they won't be able to bear any threat or listen to any bad news or think that anything might happen in the future and they'll spend all the money and go bankrupt.

21:25You know, cheerleaders, they tend to be pretty rocky CEOs because they will not listen to bad news and they tend to get wiped out by threats. High negative, low positive, these are poets. They tend to be extremely creative, but they suffer a lot from sadness and these negative emotions. They have to manage that. And last, low, low. These people are not horribly unhappy or low quality of life. They have low intensity affect. These are judges. These are people who are sober. They make great surgeons. They make great litigators and judges. They make great parents of teenagers, you know, high stress professions, et cetera, like that.

21:58But they tend to look a little unenthusiastic. So I give these tests to my students so they can know who to marry, how to manage themselves, how to build a management team around them that complements them. Boy, it's really, really instructive. And this is one of the ways that I measure my own happiness and the management techniques that I need using the neuroscience for my life and that I can apply to the lives of others. Let me ask, to what extent do we need to be happy at work? One approach to work could be I do it. I hopefully make decent money to be able to sustain myself. And I'm focusing my personal development, my happiness on what's not work.

22:39So obviously in an ideal world, we're happy and contented everywhere. But do we need to be happy at work? How critical is that? So that's an empirical question about whether or not people that have a high quality of life tend to be happy at work or it doesn't matter. And the truth is, if you're unhappy at work, you're probably unhappy in life. It's simple. I mean, it's like nobody works an hour a day. I mean, maybe you're one of these lucky people that can be on the four-hour work week. My friend Tim Ferriss wrote that famous book. And the truth is, a lot of people can get their work done in a lot less time than they do.