ARTHUR BROOKS: The Science of Real Happiness

24:39There's all kinds of spaces in my life where my phone doesn't actually have to play a role. And the more that I realize that and start to practice purposively, you know, an awake use of technology in my life, the more that I realize I needed less than I thought I needed it is the way that that works. The same thing, by the way, is just paying attention to any of your activities that have become monotonic, automatic. Now, sometimes you have such a full-blown, you can have such a full-blown addiction that you have to take special measures of going on a dopamine fast. You know, which is another word for Alcoholics Anonymous.

25:15Yeah, that's good.

25:27Let's talk about family. And I'm thinking of the context today where it just seems like families are disintegrating. People are putting off parenting longer and longer. People are getting married later. A lot of people aren't even getting married. A lot of people don't want to have kids. You know, you've got a population or a depopulation problem in many countries. China is probably the worst, but, you know, it's even happening here. We're seeing declining birth rates. So let's just talk about the importance of family. What do you see there and how is it related to our happiness? The family relationships are directly neurophysiologically related to our happiness, vis-a-vis a neuropeptide in the brain called oxytocin.

26:07Most people know what oxytocin is. It's also known as the love molecule. And it's a bonding agent between the human beings. We are a kin-based hierarchical tropical species, we homo sapiens. And over the course of human life, we've evolved to have certain physiological properties that will help keep us alive. One of which is the desire to be together with our people. Now, again, I'm a follower of the gospel and cross of Jesus Christ. I believe that everybody's my people. I believe that we are all one human family, that we are all brothers and sisters made divinely with no exceptions. I believe that.

26:49But I also understand that I have a certain physiological union with people with whom I'm related. Either I've adopted, like the case of my adopted daughter and my wife that I married, or the people that are physiologically related to me or genetically related to me. And how actually do I experience that? I experienced that through this neuropeptide that functions as a hormone of the brain called oxytocin, meaning that when I have more contact with them, it's like 4th of July. You know, when your babies are born and you remember this, Michael, when your first child was born, you lay eyes on your first child.

27:21You're like, I would die for this baby. I don't know why. It's crazy. It's like magic. There is a physiological explanation for this. Evolutionary biologists say that's so you don't leave the baby on the bus or something. But the truth is, I believe it's a gift from God that we actually have this unique and especially magical set of relationships with those particular people. And if you don't actually exploit that, if you don't have that, you're not going to be as happy as you could be, as you should be, as you deserve to be. That's one of the reasons that it saddens me, distresses me so much that one in six Americans is not talking to a family member today because of politics.

28:01That's nuts. That is completely crazy. You're basically handing over your oxytocin and your happiness to some stupid political party or talking head on TV. Don't be an idiot. Don't fall for their snake oil, man. They want you to not talk to Aunt Marge because she votes for Trump or doesn't vote for Trump or whatever, right? Don't be an idiot. You know, your love should absolutely transcend ideological differences. And the whole line of argumentation that I hear today constantly, which is somebody who disagrees with me politically is denying my right to exist. That is complete nonsense. That is idiotic nonsense that somebody has tried to sell to you so that you will do their activist bidding.

28:46They don't care if you're unhappy. They just want power is the way that that works out. Don't fall for it. We all need oxytocin because we all deserve more love. And that's a unique bond of love that comes through the family. You know, it seems like in today's modern world, there's not the, I don't know, the biological impetus or imperative to have large families, right? I mean, it's kind of like we're living back on the farm and we need the labor. And so like I have five kids. And I remember when we had five kids, people were like, what are you thinking? And it's unusual today. But what can we do to fix that so that people get more enamored with family and we can kind of get back to more of these notions of family and connection?

29:33Yeah. So it's absolutely true that the environmental incentives have changed, by which I mean that, you know, you'll find huge families when there's a lot of child mortality. when the tendency is for some of your kids to die, you're going to have more kids. And when you actually use kids as labor because of a family operation, like a family farm, absolutely, people are going to have a lot more kids. And when those two things go away, oh, by the way, one more circumstance, when kids grow up and take care of their aging parents. And so if you take in really good medicine, which I'm glad about, a social security system, which I'm glad about, and the fact that we don't need our kids for child labor, which I'm kind of glad about, then you're going to have fewer kids.

30:16Then the people are going to have lots of kids just because they belong to religious groups like the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, aka the Mormons, or to a certain extent, really traditional Catholics and Orthodox Christian communities are going to see a lot more kids. But that's because, once again, they have a different set of incentives to do that. What do we need as a country? This is a big question that a lot of people, politicians, including politicians, are engaged in these days. Some will say, well, we need a big child tax credit, right? So you need a big incentive to make that possible.

30:48Some countries where it's absolutely disastrous, like Hungary has traditionally had the lowest birth rate, way below replacement levels all across Europe. And so the current leader of Hungary put in place a policy where if you have one kid, you get a permanent 25 percent exemption from taxation for the rest of your life. If you have four kids, you have 100%. You don't pay any taxes again for the rest of your life. I mean, that's a policy with teeth. But the truth is you need to change culture and you need a culture that says that kids are awesome. That's what you need. And there are cultures that do that.

31:24The reason that Catholics continue to have a lot of kids and the reason that my kids, I have three, but my kids all say they want to have six. And again, they were born around the year 2000. I was born in the mid-1960s. We're going in reverse in my home. Why? Because they're in a different culture than I was in. I was in a very modernist kind of 1980s, 1990s culture that said kids are a luxury item. And my kids grew up and they're more traditionally religious than the way I grew up. And they're more traditionally, their morals are more traditionally than mine. I mean, kids these days, right? They got to rebel in some way.

32:00And they're like, all their friends are going to have tons of kids and they want to have tons of kids. and babies are a blessing is the way they talked about. And that's what we need to proliferate if we want to have more kids. Because no joke, for the longest time, we labored under a complete misapprehension, an utter lie that we have a population explosion that's going to deplete all the resources and ruin the earth. That is wrong. That is straight up wrong. Paul Ehrlich's The Population Bomb has been completely debunked again and again and again. And the biggest threat to the prosperity of your grandchildren and great-grandchildren as population decline.

32:37That is the biggest threat that they face. We need more babies. That doesn't mean we need to misuse resources. We should be good and proper stewards of the resources, but we know how to do that too. And what we need is babies, babies, babies, babies. And the only way to do that is for us to start trying to change the culture in positive ways, not just in religious communities. Well, I don't want you to do this too much, but all this has an economic impact. But I also think it has a role in foreign relations or international law. You know, if you have, for example, China with its population, I don't know what you call it, deflation.

33:14You know, they're just like crazy. Population is imploding. And those people get desperate. And, you know, there's a reason to become all of a sudden, if you don't have enough population, you get very aggressive with other countries or your neighbors. Because you've got to have some mechanism for, you know, satisfying the labor and the needs of the people you do have. For sure. I mean, there's just nothing good that comes when a population is in decline. You have to be so radical to be wanting to decrease the population. You've got to be Ebenezer Scrooge, man, or some weird activist version of that for the 21st century to want to do this.

33:50It's just not a loving point of view, but it's also an impractical point of view in so many ways. economic growth is the rate of productivity times the rate of population. That's the economic growth rate in every country. So if you lower productivity or you lower the population growth rate, you're going to get less economic growth. And when you do that, you're going to have more competition for resources. You're going to have more conflict. You're going to have more war. You're going to have more violence. That's just the way it's going to be.

34:27Okay. Well, on that happy note, let's move to friendships. Yeah. Friendship is something I do an awful lot with because I work, you know, you said that you read from strength to strength when you had a health challenge. I wrote it for you, but I really mean that. I wrote that book for the highest achieving strivers that are seeing change in their lives. So if I could have written the introduction about Michael Hyatt reading this book, I would have accepted the book hadn't been written yet. So you're exactly the demographic of somebody I wanted to write that book for. No joke. I talk to very successful people in the second half of life all the time.

35:08And there's so much going right, but there's also a lot of challenges. The biggest challenge that I see is that they're lonely, high achievers, hard workers, strivers, leaders. They're the loneliest people I've ever met. That makes it weird. It's like, how is it possible? I mean, you're surrounded by people all day long. And the answer is it's simple. They have lots of deal friends and no real friends. That's what the people listening to, you know, the double win. That's the reason the double win. The single win is you're successful in your job. Congratulations. Yeah, the the double win is actually having love in your life and success in your and your job.

35:47And the love in your life is more important than success in your job. And if you don't have real friends, which is to say those that are not using you and you're not using them, I don't mean using it. I'm not casting aspersions. It's just that you don't need them to get ahead and they don't need you for their own personal prosperity. You need people who are useless, frankly, to be a happy person. Those are real friends. And that's why I write a lot and coach a lot and talk an awful lot about how to have real friends for people who haven't done it maybe since college. I love the distinction between real friends and deal friends because I think it's easy as a high-achieving executive to get confused by this.

36:29Yeah. You know, I used to be the CEO of a public company. And I had very long, 17 years, had very close relationships with the people at work. I saw him every day. We often went to lunch. We did a lot of things together. But then when I stepped down from that, we sold our company to HarperCollins. But when I stepped down from that, those people didn't call. And I didn't call them. And there was no malice on anybody's part. But we just didn't have the convenience of proximity. So you categorize those as deal friends? Yeah, yeah. And there's nothing wrong with deal friends. We're always going to have deal friends.

37:06You just can't have only deal friends. You want to be a happy person. So Aristotle, back to the ancient Greeks, was great on this. He talked about friendship being in sort of – there's three levels. At the lowest levels, he called these friendships of transaction. Or they were telic, as in the hemetilos. In ancient Greek, that means a goal of the friendship. And that's fine. I mean, your colleagues and your distributors and your subcontractors, they were your friends. They really were. But, you know, when you left the company or they left the company or something, there was nothing to talk about.

37:45You know, you didn't know their kids' names. You didn't know their birthdays, except maybe transiently. And those are transactional friendships. One level above that for Aristotle was friendships of beauty. They're based on admiration. And those are good, right? But they tend to be one-sided as well. And if the object of admiration goes away, so does the friendship. You know, the sense of humor, the success that you admire about somebody else, their beauty, whatever. At the highest level is what he called the perfect friendship, the friendship of virtue. That's the atelic. That's the useless friendship.

38:18They just love you. And what successful people all have a comment is they don't have time for that because that takes time. You know, your useless friends, you got to call them every week or they're not friends. They're not real friends. And there's nothing to talk about that's going to be a good use of your time financially. I mean, you can find something to do together in a deal. I mean, my best bud, he's in Atlanta and, you know, I sit on the board of his foundation and he was on the board of my company when I was a CEO. But those are just a pretext for us to talk on the phone about, so how's your grandkids, right?

38:52And, you know, how's your faith life and all the stuff that real friends talk about with each other, right? And by the way, how are the Red Sox doing? useless stuff in that way not not financially useful things it takes time and you have to take the time make the time is the point that's so good well and i think to just be aware of the distinction and not be confused or to assume that the deal friends are real friends and like you said nothing wrong with that but i need more real friends in my life if i'm going to be happy yeah That's what I hear you saying. Yeah, yeah, for sure. And again, you don't need 100.

39:29You can't do 100. It's too time-consuming. Yeah. You need somewhere between two and five real friends. That's a good goal. Okay, let's talk about the workplace. And I got some specific questions about this, but talk about the role of meaningful work and significance as it relates to our happiness. Yeah. So we have, you know, we set up our business school students with goals that are the wrong goals for happiness. And our students, they meet their goals, their dreams come true, and then they find out that they had the wrong dreams. I mean, woe be unto you if your dreams come true. Because if you have the wrong dreams, it's a big problem, is the way that this turns out.

40:08We tell our students, because Mother Nature tells us, that money, power, pleasure, and fame are going to make you happy. And so if you can get more of those things, then happiness will come on its own. And that's completely wrong. What you need to do is you need to aim for happiness and then you will be successful enough. Right now, that just the way I phrase that every single striver listening to us right now, they have panic in their hearts. Because what do you mean successful enough? You mean I'm going to settle? And everybody knows that settling is no good. No good. Because it doesn't actually, it doesn't scratch what the striver needs for the sense of satisfaction.

40:49I get it. I completely get it. Because I'm a striver too. I understand this. But the truth of the matter is that we have to understand that when it comes to work and real success, there's really two goals that will authentically and reliably bring joy from work. Those are the feeling that you're earning your success. So no joke. You can't feel as it's a reason that merit based systems are so superior to tenure and loyalty based systems. When I'm working with when I'm working with CEOs, I'm like, how do you reward people? And I know, man, I know all the signals. I wasn't born yesterday. I can tell when it's like you hang around here long enough, you're successful.

41:28That's a tenure based system. That's the post office. Or if you kiss up to me enough, you'll be successful. Lots of companies work that way. But loyalty and tenure based systems have horrible. morale. The best morale comes when it's merit-based and when it's actually fairly administered. And the reason is because, especially if you're a nice person about it, that then people can earn their success. They feel like they're creating value with their lives and careers, and they're creating value in the lives of their clients and colleagues, that they're being rewarded and recognized for their personal merit, hard work, and responsibility.

42:02There's nothing that... Look, I mean, you and our Christian guys, you know, we believe that earning your success is a reflection of being made in God's image. It really is. I mean, it's like, you know, Adam and Eve, before the fall, they were working in the garden. You know, it doesn't say in the book of Genesis that, you know, before the fall, Adam and Eve were like lounging around in the garden. No, no. They were working the garden. That was paradise. They were earning their success. They were generative. They were creative. They were industrious is the way that that works. But if you don't know whether your rewards are actually coming from that or something else, then it becomes a huge problem.

42:41And so most CEOs that I talk to, they earn their success and they get tons of satisfaction from it. To be a good CEO, you have to make sure that you set up systems so the people who work for you are also earning their success. That's really, really critical. That turns out to be the magic ingredient for having a happier workplace. And the second part that brings joy to work is serving other people, believing that people need you. People need me. I am serving other people. I am focused on other people. That's the basis of human dignity. And a lot of people get a lot of their dignity from what they actually do at work every day.

43:12So great CEOs need to be able to tell their clients, somebody really, really needs you. I talked to a client yesterday and he was blown away by the quality of your work. That goes so far, or better yet, bring in the client to thank your employee. That is just, it works like magic.

43:39So there's one question I've got to get to before we get into our final round here. And that is the difference between fluid intelligence and crystallized intelligence. Because it seems like, and correct me if I'm wrong, but if I understood from strength to strength correctly, kind of your strategy has to change as you get older or what you get satisfaction from. That's right. So I write an awful lot about the neuroscience and social science of two kinds of intelligence. We think of intelligence as being just basically cognitive horsepower, IQ. That's not the most interesting aspect of it when it comes to the lives of everybody listening to us right now.

44:18Raymond Cattell, the great British social psychologist in the 60s and 70s, wrote about the difference between fluid and crystallized intelligence, which are the two different manifestations of your ability as you get older. The fluid intelligence, which happens earlier, is based on your working memory, your incredible energy and focus, and your innovative capacity. That's your ability to solve problems faster than others, pay attention, get stuff done, crack the case. Usually it's what every striver is listening to us right now. That's the reason you got ahead when you were young. That's the reason that you got promoted before other people, that you got higher grades than other people, that you got bigger raises than other people.

45:01It's because you had higher fluid intelligence that you just then added, that you supercharged with your hard work and responsibility. That with your, it's just your horsepower, the sweat of your brow. That intelligence, that working memory and innovative capacity exists in every industry. particularly every industry where you use your brain, like I don't care if you're an air traffic controller or an opera composer, a financial advisor or a surgeon, same. That tends to peak when you're in your late 30s, which seems really early. It's like, wait a second. My intelligence is peaking in my late 30s?

45:40Well, yeah, actually. And nobody notices but you. But that's the reason that burnout tends to happen by people's mid-40s. the reason is because the only thing that gives us real satisfaction is progress that's what we want we're made for progress you can be really good at what you do but if you're not getting better it's no good it's no good and if you're really caring off a lot about your excellence and you're not making progress is very discouraging and a lot of people can't quite put their finger on it but they're like i don't like my job as much as i did a lot of dentists a lot of doctors and their mid-40s are like, man, I was passionate about this 10 years and I'm just not.

46:18I guess I'm bored. No, no, no, no. You're past your peak in fluid intelligence. And so therefore, you're not learning things as fast as you used to. Things are not as easy as they used to be. And that's really discouraging. Nobody else notices. If you're a dentist, you're not drilling the wrong tooth on somebody. But you notice. So that's the bad news. Now, the good news is there's a second kind of intelligence that comes in behind it. In your 40s and 50s and 60s, it gets higher and higher and higher. It stays high for the rest of your life in your 70s and 80s. That's crystallized intelligence.

46:52And that's very different. That's not based on working memory, which is worse. Everybody knows that. Your working memory is not as good when you get older. It's not based on innovative capacity. It's based on your ability to use everything that you see and hear and put it together into a coherent story. So here's really kind of how it works. You notice in your 50s that you have incredible pattern recognition. Everybody does. It's like, I mean, it's like I've never seen this before, but I feel like I've seen it before. That's crystallized intelligence. Where you can be like, if you're a mechanic, for example, you've never seen a particular machine, but you know how to fix it.

47:33That's crystallized intelligence. When you're 20, you can't do it. When you're 50, you can, because crystallized intelligence is high. Pattern recognition, the ability to take disparate things and put them into new ideas, the ability to explain things, the ability to use metaphor, the ability to teach. That's crystallized intelligence. So what everybody needs to do is to get from the fluid intelligence curve, goes up and goes down, to the crystallized intelligence curve, which comes in behind it, goes up and stays high. You want to walk from one to the other. You want to go from your innovator curve to your instructor curve.

48:09From your star litigator curve to your managing partner curve. That's the goal. And everybody can do it in their own way in their own life. And if they do that, they'll get happier as they get older. Well, it seems like a lot of people that are in that transition phase when they're going from the fluid intelligence to the crystallized intelligence, they desperately want to hang on to that fluid intelligence. And their self-worth begins. I've seen this with my coaching clients. Their self-worth begins to decline. Yeah. And they're not giving the same output that they used to give, but they're focused on the wrong thing, if I hear you correctly.

48:43Yeah, they're ego. They're ego-driven. And what happens is that a lot of your sort of justification for living and sense of value creation comes from the fact that you're the star. You're the innovator. You're the ninja, the cowboy, the soul warrior, right? That's what people get really, really used to. And you need to turn into the coach. you need to go from being the star quarterback to finding the next star quarterback. And if you don't want to do that because you don't care about other people, that you really only care about yourself and what you, that, that your own greatness, you're going to get, this is, you know, narcissism will get you stuck forever on your, on your first curve.

49:20This is one of the reasons that people who are really self-absorbed, highly egotistical, that they struggle so much as they get older. You may know him, Ian Cron, who does a lot of work with Enneagram. He wrote the road back to you. But he said to me at one point, he said, you've, you've lived in, you've lived in a highly fruitful life, but now your mission is transitioning. Now your mission is to grow fruit on other people's trees. Yeah. I mean, that's something I literally wake up with that sense every day that to measure my success by how successful I can make other people. I think that's why I like coaching as much as I do.

49:52Yeah. That's what you're, you're in the perfect crystallized period of your life and you're using it maximally, which is why you're happy. This is why you're really good at what you're doing is because you've actually walked from, you know, in your earlier CEO incarnation into a coaching incarnation. You know, most CEOs are, I mean, you can be a coaching CEO. That's great. But a lot who are just innovative CEOs are really fluid intelligence. And then they, if you can go into something, I mean, I left my CEO job and became a professor. Perfect. You know, I used to write academic journal articles that were so mathematically sophisticated.

50:26I can't read them today, Michael. I mean, they're too technical. And I wrote them. I'm like, who wrote this? It was me when I was 35. Now I write about science, but I didn't do the science. I'm reading the academic articles and I'm translating it into the story of how non-scientists can use it. And I have an average weekly readership of about 500 ,000 people. That's way more. That's way more impact than I could have had. But if I was continuing to try to do when I was 35. I wouldn't be as good at it. I wouldn't be as successful at it. And I wouldn't have an audience for it. And you wouldn't be as happy, right?

51:02Yeah. It's a total win-win if you're on the right curve. If you're on the right curve, you're going to have a win-win.

51:19Well, we could talk for hours, but you don't have time and I don't have time, but I want to get to the lightning round. Yeah, this has been delightful. It's everything I hoped and even more. So thank you, Michael. Me too. Good. Thank you. OK, so here's some of the standard questions we always ask. what's your biggest obstacle in getting the double win at this point in your life? Yeah, the biggest obstacle for me in getting the double win is pretty ironic, which is that the double win is work and life. And the truth is you shouldn't have to worry about work-life balance because that suggests that work and life are different and your work should be part of your life.

51:55But that means that your work is not your whole life. You know, you actually need a seamlessness between the different parts of your life, Your relationships and your work and it should all weave together and do that really, really well. For me, my work is so consuming that without paying attention to it, I start doing it to the exclusion of other things because I only have 24 hours in a day. And so the main barrier to me is that I am talking to people about strivers having a balanced life and I'm doing it so much that I'm a striver without a balanced life. Yeah, I get it. I mean, I struggle with that same thing.

52:32And it's exacerbated by the fact that I can see that the runway is shorter now. Yeah. And there's so much stuff I want to learn and so many different ways I want to contribute. But, okay, another question. How do you personally know when you're getting the double win? What are some of the clues? I'm happier, number one, right? I'm sleeping. And the big one is that the people that I love are happier. Because what's the double win? What I'm doing and who I love. That's really what it comes down to. I mean, the big win of life is love for the people in your life. And if you're crowding that out by working for things that are largely inanimate and rewarding mostly to you, then the people around you who you love and they love you, they're going to be less happy and you're going to know it.

53:22The best barometer for everybody listening to us and watching us who's married, how happy is your spouse with your work-life balance? Great question. I don't think we've ever had anybody ask that, but it's a great, great one. Thank you. Yeah. Okay. Finally, what's one ritual or routine that helps you do what you do? Yeah. So I'm super routinized and super disciplined. So I have a certain routine that I do every day. I wake up at 4.30. I work out from 4.45 to 5.45. I go to mass from 6.30 to 7. then I have coffee and I work and I have a good, I've been able to max, I've been able to optimize the flow of dopamine into my prefrontal cortex to give me maximum and time for creative product.

54:09But it's not just biochemistry that I'm talking about here. The main thing that I've been able to do to optimize the double win in my life is the way that I have put worship into my daily life. it's the most important thing that I do is I start the day exercising. But the first thing that I do in, you know, outside of my house is I go to mass. I go to mass every day, every day. And, and, and I finished the evening praying my rosary. So I start and I end the day in worship and communion with, with the Lord. And that has just been the, I mean, that, it reminds me who I am. I mean, cause otherwise I'm just like, a work machine.

54:55I'm just, or God forbid, I'm just another guy. But if I can remind, if the first thing in the morning and the last thing before I go to bed at night, and I go to, by the way, I go to mass with my wife and I pray the rosary with my wife. Beautiful. And so, because we're jointly metacognitively linking with our master to start the day and end the day. And in so doing, it's just the biggest reminder of who I actually am. Beautiful. Where can people connect with you? Of course, we're recommending the books. All that will be on the show notes. And we talked about it in the introduction. We'll talk about it at the end of this when Megan and I reconvene to get our biggest insights out of this.

55:35But where can people best connect with you? And what would you suggest their next step be? I appreciate that an awful lot. I have a website that's the eponymous website, arthurworks.com. And there you can actually find links to a lot of the different places where I write, speak and teach. I have a science of happiness workshop and I have all kinds of free resources, et cetera. But also it'll tell people how they can actually start reading my column. My Atlantic column comes out every Thursday morning called How to Build a Life. what new books are coming out what new appearance, what new happiness talks and keynotes and things that I've got coming up and that's the best way also to connect with me in case anybody wants to send me an email and tell me how they see life we'll have all that in the show notes Arthur, thank you so much, this has been a delightful conversation thank you Michael, I appreciate the work that you're doing, lifting people up and bringing them together it's an inspiration to see and I'm happy to be part of it today thank you so much

56:42So I know, Megan, you didn't get to participate in the conversation, but you got to hear it afterward. Yeah. And, you know, so we want to talk about our takeaways. And let me go ahead and start. You know, I think my biggest takeaway is him as a personality. Yeah. And I love the way that he lives his faith. Yeah, I do too. You know, it's not kind of this thing that makes you feel like there's a barrier or that you're excluded, but it's very inclusive, but he's also very committed. Yeah. You know, he goes to mass every morning with his wife. You know, they say the rosary every night before they go to bed.

57:17And they're really dedicated, but at the same time, he's open to other ideas. Yeah. And I love that. He brings his faith into his work, but not in a heavy-handed way, but I think in a way that literally anybody can process. And that's frankly what I aspire to do in all my work. I love that too. That's one of the things that I first really appreciated about him when I began reading some of his books. And I think that besides coming obviously from a place of personal conviction, which clearly it does, when he was talking about the four pillars of happiness, which are family, faith, friends, and work, when he's talking about that, there's really good research around the faith piece.

57:59And I think that it's an interesting angle to get into that conversation because we know in at least America and Western Europe that attendance at church and things like that is dramatically down in the last several decades, but I think in the last decade in particular. And I think it makes a good case for why we need to be pursuing those things in some way because it's actually really important to our flourishing or human flourishing or happiness. It's not just like a moral question. It's so much more than that. I think we all know we have a spiritual component to who we are and that needs to be expressed and that's really part of our happiness.

58:43Well, one of the things he said was that, and that resonated with me, is that this idea of transcendence is a key aspect of happiness. And I like the way he said it. He said, making oneself small in relation to the universe. And he opposed that with kind of being the star of your own psychodrama. Yeah. And that's a little bit of the problem. Not a little bit of the problem. A lot of the problem with social media is that you end up being the star of your own movie and you make yourself bigger than you really are. Or a lot of people make themselves bigger than what they really are. And that kind of negates the whole idea of transcendence.

59:16Well, and interestingly, it also negates the idea or undermines the idea of happiness because that's a pressure on a human being that was never intended to be there. You know, if narcissism could make you happy, for one thing, you know, we would see a lot of happy people around because we've got a lot of narcissists, I think, these days. but also the pressure of that. You know, I mean, I think when you look at those pillars of happiness, faith, family, friends, work, really none of those are singular endeavors. I mean, I think that's one of my takeaways is that every single one of those is intended to be done with other people.

59:54And, you know, I'm an introvert. I love time by myself. I don't give very much time by myself, but I love it. But we're meant to live in a context, in a community, in relationship with other people. And I thought it was so interesting how he contrasted those pillars of happiness with sort of the things we think are going to make us happy, like pursuing material wealth. Yes, I love that. You know, kind of a celebrity or a public recognition of who we are. And in fact, those things are just empty promises and they don't deliver, not in wealthy countries. I mean, certainly, I think he talks about there are gains and happiness to be made when people are living in poverty, primarily.

1:00:33you know, when your basic needs aren't covered, it's kind of hard to be too happy. But anyway, I thought that was fascinating. Well, I did too. And, you know, he contrasted that with sort of living in this consumeristic society where we've been indoctrinated into thinking that if we get more stuff, we'll be more happy. You know, if I can just get that dream home or I can just get that dream car or some other gadget or whatever. And I mean, as we're recording this, I was watching the Apple event yesterday where they were introducing the new iPhone 16. And the whole way they introduced that, and I'm not blaming Apple, but it's so attractive.

1:01:12It's like, if you have the iPhone 16, it will solve all of your problems. It will bring magic and wonder back into your world. And it's like, what's actually going to bring magic and wonder back into your world is sitting around a fire pit, talking to your friends, or going on a walk, or watching the sunrise, or snuggling with your kids, or serving someone in need. I mean, it's just so interesting because I've really been thinking a lot about the idea of contentment and just how the stuff that we have is a burden. And by the way, I'm not a minimalist. No one has ever one time in my life accused me of being a minimalist.

1:01:46My husband is a minimalist, but that's not me. But there is a wisdom to that because all that stuff has to be managed and it can be overwhelming. And happiness and freedom, I mean, they definitely go together. If you feel encumbered by your stuff, you're probably not going to be very happy. It's almost like a bell curve. On one side, you have poverty. I've met happy, poor people, for sure, but it's mostly misery. Then you start to get a little bit of material accumulation where you have the basics met, and then you start to achieve happiness. Not a direct correlation between that and your material standing, but you got to have some basic needs met in order to be And security.

1:02:30And security. Yeah. Right? But then it's like the other side of the bell curve is you start getting so much stuff that you're spending all your time managing your stuff. And you need people to manage the stuff. And then, yeah. And so then you become less happy. Yeah. And I've definitely met a lot of unhappy, very wealthy people. Right. There's not a correlation between wealth and happiness. Mm-hmm. Right? So your happiness is going to come as sort of a separate thing. I also like this idea, and this confirms something that I believed for a long time, and that is happiness is a journey. It's making meaningful progress toward a significant goal.

1:03:07It's not the attainment of the goal that brings happiness, but it's the pursuit of that thing that brings a happiness. It's funny because one of my big goals from this year was the renovation of our home. We discovered mold in our home in December of last year. We had to remediate that was a whole process. But then we ended up doing a pretty significant renovation. And I mean, it was so much fun to do stressful being out of our house. But it was so much fun because I love design and all the aesthetics and everything like that. And I was thinking last night, I was getting ready for bed and my updated bathroom and you know, so much to be grateful for.

1:03:40And, and I am extremely grateful for it. But I don't know that I'm measurably happier. You know, and I was thinking about all the things in my life that I wanted at one point. And now that I have like, am I immeasurably happier and I'm thinking mostly like material things like a new car or moving into a better house. Like, I don't think so. Like the truth is, I mean, they make my life better in all kinds of ways. But I don't know that I'm really happier. Like when I feel happier is when I am doing things like last night, I was doing kind of like a an evening ritual that included a bunch of yoga and I was had some great music on.

1:04:15And I just felt I felt happy after I did that. Well, that cost me zero money and I bought zero new things to make that possible. And I just think it's so counterintuitive. It's just a, it was a, it's a great reminder. And I think Arthur has just done some powerful work in helping us remember what does it really take to be happy? You know, he also mentioned, cause I asked him, uh, how in the world did Harvard let you teach a course on happiness? Cause that seems like the soft skill among soft skills. But he said he realized that most of these kids are getting no instruction in this. They're going out into the world.

1:04:50They think all the wrong things will bring them happiness. Especially at Harvard. I mean, if you think about what he says are the things that aren't going to contribute to your happiness. Yeah, exactly. You know, material wealth, whatever. And so he wanted to kind of set them up for success so they could actually, you know, achieve some level of happiness and not have to pursue this elusive thing that they never get by pursuing the normal things that society tells us will get us there. Well, guys, let me encourage you to buy the book, build the life you want, also from strength to strength, if you're a person of a certain age.

1:05:24That's a great book if you're over 50. Or even really over 40. Did you read it? Yeah, absolutely. I'm 44 and I felt like it was absolutely relevant and changed my thinking a lot about getting older and what the challenges are, but really what some of the opportunities are. Joel, my husband also read it and loved it. Yeah. That whole idea between the contrast between fluid intelligence and crystallized intelligence, really an important distinction. Yeah, it is. Okay. You guys can do us a big favor if you would, and we'd be so grateful if you would rate the podcast wherever you listen to podcasts and also write a brief review.

1:06:03And if you could do that, that would help us rise in the rankings and help the double win show get discovered so that more people can get exposed to this idea of winning at work and succeeding at life. We'll see you next week.