Arthur C. Brooks

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0:33When one thinks of the Harvard Business School, one thinks of strategy, investments, technology. But actually, one of the most popular professors at the Harvard Business School now is Arthur Brooks, who teaches a course on happiness. I had a chance recently to sit down with Arthur to talk about how he became a leading expert on happiness and how he came to write a book on the subject with Oprah Winfrey. So you are a professor at Harvard. Right. And you're teaching, among other things, happiness. Can you really teach happiness? Because isn't happiness something you kind of were born with or maybe you acquire in life?

1:06But in a course, can you really learn how to be happy? Well, you can learn how to pursue happiness through basically three mechanisms. Number one, you need to understand what it is and what the science says about it, which is contrary to a lot of what we hear growing up. Most people have a lot of misconceptions about happiness. You have to change some habits, change your life a little bit, and then you have to teach it to other people to become responsible for it, which is like anything else. If you want to become a good golfer, you have to understand golf, you have to play golf, and it's even better if you explain golf to somebody.

1:36That's the algorithm, basically, for getting better at any subject. Suppose I am a grumpy person by nature. Is this true, David? Well, just assume I'm a grumpy person by nature. I always find you lovely. And let's suppose I take your course. Am I going to go from being grumpy to happy by virtue of taking a course? No. And this is really not just about emotional transformation. One of the things that my students learn is emotional self-management. Emotions are misunderstood by almost everybody. They think about good feelings and bad feelings. There are no such thing. Emotions are nothing more than reactions to stimuli that we have sensed by our primitive brains turned into the universal language of emotions, fear, anger, disgust, sadness, interest, joy, et cetera, in the limbic system of the brain to give us a signal about what's going on.

2:25If you have particularly acute negative emotionality, which is called negative affect, high negative affect, and by the way, people watching Bloomberg tend to have high negative affect. How do I know this? 25 % of the population has especially high positive and negative affect. They're high affect people. 65 % of CEOs and entrepreneurs. So this is one of the things that a lot of people watching us, yeah, you're still going to be grumpy, but you're going to understand the meaning of the grumpiness and use it to learn and grow. In life, is there anything more important in the end than happiness?

2:57That's a debate that philosophers and scientists have been having for millennia, as a matter of fact. Aristotle talked about that. Thomas Aquinas in 1265 said, does anybody desire anything other than happiness, I say that he does not. But it depends on what happiness means. And so if you're thinking about it as a positive feeling, then there's lots of things that are more important than that. If you define it correctly, maybe not. In a sentence that's been called the most famous sentence in the English language written by Thomas Jefferson in the Declaration of Independence, he ends it by saying that what people should want is life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

3:33He didn't really define happiness, but were you surprised or are you surprised that he would put pursuit of happiness is among the most important things in the world? It's revolutionary, as a matter of fact. Those words were cribbed from the Virginia Declaration of Rights written by George Mason some years earlier. And Mason talked about in the Virginia Declaration about life, liberty, and the pursuit of property. Well, almost certainly in a conversation with Benjamin Franklin, we don't know for sure, but this is the supposition because Benjamin Franklin was behind all of this interesting and sort of subversive language about the new American Republic.

4:06He substituted in this pursuit of happiness, and this idea that you are the captain of your own destiny in this new nation. You get to define what this means and then go after it, and we're going to be about opportunity without any guarantees. And by the way, that's the country I still want to live in. What are the key elements to being happy? Let's suppose I'm a person who wants to be happy. What are the key things that make somebody happy? Stop thinking it's a feeling. It's not a feeling. People define it as I can't quite put words to it, but I know when I feel it. No, you can't. Feelings are evidence that your limbic system is working properly, and you can have a lot of negative emotions and be a very happy person.

4:46In the same way, by the way, that the smell of your turkey is not your Thanksgiving dinner, feelings are evidence of happiness. They are not happiness itself. So stop looking for feelings, number one. Number two, figure out what happiness actually is. So if I say, what is your Thanksgiving dinner. There's lots of ways to define that. But one way is protein, carbohydrates, and fat. Those are macronutrients. That's the decomposition of all food for better longevity and health, which is another big interest in area of research of mine. So what are the macronutrients of happiness? They are enjoyment, satisfaction, and meaning.

5:19Those are the three things to pursue. Let's go through each one. Enjoyment. What does enjoyment mean? Enjoyment is not pleasure. That's a big mistake that people often make, which is just feeling good. That's a limbic phenomenon. It's parts of your brain, ventral tegmental area in the ventral stratum are tapped to make you feel good. That's not it. If you're looking for that as your life's goal, you'll wind up in rehab if you're lucky. What enjoyment is, is it takes pleasure and adds two things to make them fully conscious and mediated by the prefrontal cortex. Pleasure plus people plus memory.

5:51That's what you want. And that's the kind of life you need. You need to be able to manage your pleasures in a way that's social and memorable so that you can have a life that's in an ongoing way, something that you would consider to be enjoyable. That's macronutrient number one. All right. Number two is what? Satisfaction. Satisfaction is the joy that you get from an accomplishment after struggle. You've struggled a lot. I mean, you've had a lot of ups and downs over the course of your career, but the great source of satisfaction is after all that struggle, the sweetness came with all the stuff that Carlisle's done, all the stuff that this show has done.

6:23But if it actually had been easy, it wouldn't be sweet, which is one of the funny things about humanity. My dog doesn't want to struggle for his rewards. He'd eat lying down if he could. We, on the other hand, you know, when I go to a great entrepreneur like you, and if I were doing the interview and you were the interviewee, and I said, okay, tell me the secrets to all this. You'd tell me hard things that had happened and setbacks that had happened and disappointments that had happened because the hardness, the difficulty, the suffering is actually part of the sweetness, that satisfaction. What's the third element?

6:51Meaning, and that's the big one. That's the next book that I'm writing. It's called The Meaning of Your Life, Finding Purpose in an Age of Emptiness, because that's the crisis of today, particularly for adults under 35, is that their life feels empty and meaningless, and this is what lies behind the mental health crisis. Now, you've written that younger people today are not as happy as their parents were. That's correct. That's in part because of social media and things like that makes people isolated. So it's a complicated thing, but there's basically a climate and weather problem that we find.

7:23And I don't mean that literally. The climate of happiness is all about faith and philosophy in life, about family life, about friendship, and about seeing your life as a calling, your work as a calling that is meaningful and serves other people. And all of those have been in decline. That's the climate of happiness that's been ticking down since about 1990. Then the weather, the hurricanes and happiness have been really threefold. Number one was the advent of social media and screens in everybody's lives in 2008, 2009, 2010, which has just raised absolute havoc in the brains of everybody under 35 years old.

7:57That's what my new meaning book is about, is about how we use our brains differently, and it's vacating the parts of our brain that we need to assess questions of meaning. The second is polarization, where baby boomers have tried to conscript young adults into their culture war, particularly on campuses. You should feel aggrieved. You're a victim. Everybody's trying to ruin the world. You need to be angry and afraid. And last but not least, of course, is what happened with the really misbegotten reaction to the coronavirus epidemic, which is to send everybody home, make sure that people don't interact socially.

8:29And that was catastrophic for happiness. Then you wrote a book on happiness. During the coronavirus epidemic, it was my COVID project. That was Strength to Strength? From Strength to Strength, which comes from the 84th Psalm, Michael El-Chayel in Hebrew. may you go from strength to strength, which is an ancient Judaic blessing, of course. And it became a number one New York Times bestseller? Yeah, that was unexpected. So somebody calls you about this. She read the book and said, why don't we do a book together? Right. That was Oprah Winfrey. That was Oprah Winfrey. Had you ever met her before?

9:01No, no, no. And what happened was that she was reading my column during the coronavirus epidemic every Thursday in the Atlantic. And she never left her place in Montecito, California for a couple of years. But she was learning and reading. She's a voracious reader. And she said she was learning a lot from it. She wanted to meet that guy. So when the book came out from Strength to Strength in February of 2022, she literally read it on the first day and called me. Hello, this is Oprah Winfrey. And I said, yeah, and this is Batman. I mean, turned out it was Oprah Winfrey. The book came out and it also was a number one New York Times bestseller.

9:33Yeah. And its title is? It's Build the Life You Want, The Art and Science of Getting Happier. So you have another book coming out very shortly, probably by the time this airs, it'll be out, called The Happiness Files. What is that about? That's an edited volume of my 35 most popular columns in The Atlantic about work and life. So the whole idea, it's being put out by the Harvard Business Review Press, is that your life is a startup. That's the most important enterprise. People think of a company as a startup, but that's just an extension of who you are as a person. It's a cultural phenomenon and a behavioral phenomenon, as a matter of fact.

10:05The way to think about it, to live the best life, is to say, you're David Incorporated. Your startup, the enterprise is your life. And that means you need to take risk appropriately and be in search of the true fortune, which is love and happiness. If you treat your life like a startup, your life gets better and it becomes more successful. And it's 35 essays that talk about exactly how to do that. Every chapter, it's intended to be read over about a month because it's about 35 essays. And each chapter gives you the science, the idea and the science. and then it says, do these three things, which is about behavioral change.

10:39All of them I have tried. Every column I write, I'm 10 weeks ahead of my Atlantic column, and I'm trying all the things that I suggest to make sure that they're sound. I'm my own guinea pig. And if it doesn't work, I don't write it. I don't publish it. You're thoughtful about where your money goes. You've got your core holdings, some recurring crypto buys, maybe even a few strategic options plays on the side. The point is, you're engaged with your investments, and Public gets that. That's why they built an investing platform for those who take it seriously. On Public, you can put together a multi-asset portfolio for the long haul.

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11:49Complete disclosures available at public.com slash disclosure. How does somebody who's an expert on happiness grow into that? Let's talk about your background for a moment. So where were you born? Spokane, Washington. And what did your parents do? My father was a lifelong college professor. He was a mathematician, a PhD biostatistician. So he was a quant guy. And your mother, what did she do? She was an artist. My mother was a good amateur musician and serious about that. But really, she was a watercolorist of some renown in the Pacific Northwest. And when you were growing up, did you say, I want to be an expert on happiness?

12:22Or what did you want to do as a boy? I wanted to be the world's greatest French horn player. That's what I wanted. I was naturally good at music. and I learned this by about the age of four. I learned to read music before I learned to read words, and I had a natural aptitude for it. Started on piano at four after a little bit of violin, and then by eight, I started the French horn. I was really good at it. I got a lot of acclimation. I got some praise and appreciation from my parents, and I realized I liked getting attention from adults, positive attention from adults, so I stuck with it. And did people say this guy is going to be one of the great French horn players of all time?

12:54Well, I certainly hoped so, And a lot of people had a lot of faith that I had a tremendous amount of potential. So I was going to go to a conservatory and then go pro. That was the idea. So you graduated from high school and you said to your parents, I guess I'm not going to college. I'm going to go be a French horn player. What did your academic father say? Well, I went to college for a year. I went to the California Institute of the Arts where I was going to study with my teacher, somebody I had met in previous summers, a great French horn player, one of the great soloists of the time. And it didn't really work out.

13:25It turns out that the right strategy for college is not to drop all your required classes. I try to tell my kids that at this point. But the result is I was, well, dropped out, kicked out, splitting hairs at this point. I made it 10 months. All right. You made it 10 months. Then did you say to your parents, guess what? I'm going to be a French horn player for life? Yeah. So I was actually transferring to the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia, which is sort of the elite music conservatory. I was very, very lucky to get a spot. Great place. It is a great place. And during the summer before I was going to go there, I was playing at the Marlboro Music Festival with Rudolf Serkin and some of the great chamber musicians at the time.

13:58And I was offered a job playing chamber music with a brass quintet out of Maryland. And so I took the job instead of going back to school and went pro at 19. And then you ultimately moved to Spain? Yeah. So I was on tour. I did that for about six years, making very little money, but having a great time and learning a lot. I also toured for a couple of years during that time with a great jazz guitar player named Charlie Bird, who was the American originator of the Bossa Nova style, et cetera. So I was on a concert tour playing chamber music in the Burgundy region of France in the summer of 1988.

14:30And I met a girl who was also studying music and actually at a concert. I was playing the concert and there was a girl in the front row smiling at me. And I thought, well, that's not normal. I should check that out. So afterward, I introduced myself. Turned out she didn't speak a word of English and she wasn't French. Turns out she was Spanish, Catalan, as a matter of fact, from Barcelona. I learned that. Not a word of English. We didn't have a word in common. So I did the right thing and asked her out. And we... How did you know if she said yes? Well, because I got a translator who said, yeah, she'd love to have dinner with you.

15:00And so that was an odd dinner full of gesticulations and hand gestures, et cetera. But we were 24 years old. And then I went home and I called my dad and I said, I think I met the girl I'm going to marry. And he said, really? That's great. Can't wait to meet her. I said, I have some difficulties here. I mean, she doesn't speak a word of English. She doesn't live in the United States, and she has no idea we're going to get married. He said, well, you better get a plan, son. And so I did. I was living in New York at the time, barely making ends meet. And I started looking at different opportunities.

15:31And through sheer serendipity, I was offered a couple of months later a job in the Barcelona Symphony as the associate principal French horn. And I said, ah, sign from God. I moved to Barcelona and worked on closing the deal. Still took me two years to convince her though, David. So did you get married two years later or so? Yeah. Yeah. Two years later, It took me, I was, you know, I had to work on it a long time. After all, Europeans are very modern and they don't believe in marriage. So it took a good deal of convincing. I should point out, you're still married to her. Yeah. How many years are you now married?

16:0134. 34. Parents of three. In a couple of months, grandparents of four. Is having a relationship with another person more likely to produce happiness or more likely to produce divorce? Well, it depends on the relationship. Your results may vary, as they say in the ads for financial products and pharmaceuticals. The truth is that a good marriage is the single biggest predictor of the happiest possible life. But a bad marriage works in the other direction, to be sure. And so that's why it's, that's the most important investment decision anybody watching us will ever make. Where did you start teaching academically?

16:35I started in Georgia State. So I finished my PhD in 1998. Georgia State University in Atlanta was the first place that hired me. And I did three years there, and then I moved to Syracuse, which was, in public policy, was and arguably still is the top school in public policy in the country. Maxwell School. The Maxwell School, exactly. All right, so you teach there for 10 years? I taught at Georgia State for three and Syracuse for seven and a half. Seven, okay. So you're 10 years as an academic, 10 and a half years, Maxwell. Then somebody decides they want you to be the head of AEI, but why would you be qualified to be the head of the American Enterprise Institute?

17:09I was not qualified. And I was clearly not qualified for that job. And I was sort of the last chance saloon, I think, for the board of directors at the American Enterprise Institute at the time. I was a visiting scholar at AEI. And I had always aspired to do more. AEI is the greatest think tank in America. It's based on the idea that the free enterprise system has done more to lift people up from the margins of society than any other single idea in human history. And that the United States, at its best, is a gift to the world. All right. So you took that job. You became the CEO. And you stayed there for 10 years?

17:3711. Almost 11. 10 and a half. So after 11 years, you say, okay, I now want to do something else. Why do you decide to do something else? After 11 years, it's going very well. I had figured out by that time that my career is best when I take it down to the studs every decade and start again. That's when I'm most interested. That's when I can fudge the skills that I have as a leader, as a professional, as a person in my soul, I can take them to the next thing and do really well with a lot of inspiration. But most people, before they leave a job, they already have another job lined up. Yeah. You left AEI when you were at the top of your game, but you didn't have anything lined up?

18:10Not really. I mean, I had some ideas. Maybe I'll go back to academia. But the whole point is basically this. I had a heart-to-heart conversation. One of my best friends is your partner, Dan Daniello at Carlyle. And I said to him, look, I'm feeling a little, I'm itching a little bit. I'm thinking about new things. And how do you think about your career as a CEO? How do you think about finishing your career as a CEO? I was 55 years old, 54 years old at the time. And he said, he thought about it, and he said something very wise to me. That's probably useful for people watching us right now. He says, when it comes to ending, finishing up as a leader, especially as a business leader, you've got two choices.

18:44You can leave before you're ready, or you can leave on somebody else's terms. You choose, choose wisely. And I thought to myself, yep, I'm not ready. And that means it's time to go. What did you teach initially at Harvard? So I came in and I taught in the first semester of the Kennedy School, non-profit management, which is something that I've taught a lot about. I've written a textbook on that. And that's really about how to create societal change, how to create a better society on the basis of non-governmental, non-profit activity. But it's really about how you're going to transform society outside of the world of government or for-profit businesses.

19:17And that went really well. But then when I went over across the river to the business school for my first semester there in the spring, I introduced, I created a class called Leadership and Happiness. And that really took off because that was where my heart was. You're teaching this course and all of a sudden people by word of mouth say this guy is interesting and maybe we can learn how to be happier. And so the class goes from a few people to a lot of people, right? Yeah, we filled it the first time. I think we had 72 people as a full class the first time. But it was clear that even by the second year we could fill two sections of 90 even with a waiting list because it's a different kind of class than what they typically get.

19:51On the first day of class I say, look, you think that if you have money, power, pleasure, and fame, then you'll get happiness for free. And it's a lie and you know it. The right solution is for you to search for happiness and then you'll have the success that you truly crave. That's what this class is all about. But if you are a person who's an expert on happiness, you can't ever be grumpy. I mean, you ever get in fights with people because you're not in a good mood or you have to be happy all the time? Well, one of the reasons that I study happiness is because I want to lash myself to the mast.

20:20I want to hold myself accountable to be the person that I want to be. Not that I'll have to be happy, happy all the time, but it's not right for me to display my unhappiness in such a way that brings other people down. That's an unethical thing to do. So being a jerk in an airport, that's truly off brand for me. And it's something that I try to make sure that I never do. Well-being is a combination of happiness and unhappiness. And they're not opposites. They're actually mediated in different parts of the brain because they have different purposes. My problem is not low happiness. My problem is high unhappiness, which is often the case with people in my line of work, or for that matter, your line of work.

20:59So for me, my particular challenge is making sure that I'm very serious about managing my negative affect every single day. And I do that with the science that I've been studying over the past, well, decades at this point. Do you ever get mad and somebody just yell and lose your temper or you don't do that? Well, I don't do that very often. And part of that is because I've learned how to manage my limbic system so it doesn't manage me. That's getting as much space as I can between what I feel and what I do. That's called metacognition. Many people put themselves forward as leaders. Presumably, they want to be a leader because it makes them happy to be a leader rather than a follower.

21:35But how do you define leadership? And does leadership, if you have it, make you happier than if you're a follower? So that's a good question. And it's a complicated question because there are a lot of leaders in business who are actually unhappier after they ascend to the corner office. I see this constantly. The number one emotion that people feel in the first two years as a brand new CEO is anger, which is not what people expect. It's like, you know, hey, man, if I get the CEO job, I'm finally going to have achieved everything I've always wanted. And it turns out that it's really, really tough.