Arthur Brooks: How High Achievers Can Balance Success with Happiness | Mental Health | YAPClassic

22:09A 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 because 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.

22:39What 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.

23:13So 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, 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.

23:46You 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. 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.

24:16But nobody ever asks, were they happy when they died? And again, we got to 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 striver's curse.

24:53You 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 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 the 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.

25:24You'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 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. You're usually not going to be that.

25:53It'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. And the way people treat you when you walk into a room and all that kind of stuff. 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, OK, buddy, I read your book. Now, what do I do? What do I do? How do I design this thing?

26:23I'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.

26:51Part 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. 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 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.

27:23That's so sad. 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 producer 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 greatest innovator of his generation. He was a super productive. He also had 20 kids.

27:56Oh, wow. 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 new invention. So I'm going to bring along the next generation and I'm going to be revered and loved as a teacher.

28:27And that's what Bach did. He became the teacher at a church called the Thomas Kirche in Leipzig in Germany. And, you know, he directed the choir. He taught the organ students. He was just beloved by it. 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 100 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.

29:00referring 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 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. I love all of this. So let's back up a little bit. So I think we got a really good foundation of first curve, second curve.

29:37I 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? 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 an indication of happiness. Happiness is basically a combination of three things.

30:10The 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.

30:47You 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, and 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. Yeah. I'll be happy when. Yeah. Yeah. Mick Jagger's 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.

31:22When 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?

31:54And 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.

32:26You'll grow from your trauma. You'll grow from your sadness. And that will give your life contour and a sense of really what it's all about. And 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. Oh, perfect. I can't wait to have you back gone for that. Can you actually dig deeper on how our suffering can actually lead to more happiness? 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.

33:01It 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 talk to Bernie Marcus, who started the Home Depot. I say, tell me your story. He doesn't tell me about 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.

33:39This is very critical for us to understand. This is one of the reasons that 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.

34:14The success comes from the failures. If the success in your life has to do with your happiness and well-being, you got to have failures in your happiness and well-being. You must have that to actually find the true source of meaning in your life. Yeah, I think that makes total sense. It's just like your career. 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. Yeah, you got to be. It's interesting. One more thing I'll point out about this. I was doing a speech about the startup life and you got to take risk and you got to take risk with your heart because the currency, the explosive currency, you want to get rich in life, it's love, lots and lots of love.

34:52So you got to take a risk. Every entrepreneur knows that. And I was saying it to a group of young people in their 20s. And this guy comes up to me, he actually, he recognized me on a plane a couple of 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 going to go confess my love. And I'm like, dude, it was only a speech, you know? But then I ran into a few months later. He hadn't told me how it turned out.

35:22I said, remember me? He's like, yes. I'm like, uh-oh. What happened? I ask. 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 your risk with your heart.

35:57And 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. I love that homework assignment. I'm going to 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 the most unhappy people I learned from your work are typically men, 60 years old, and they're unhappy because they don't have friends.

36:37They might not have a loved one. They're lonely. So talk to us about the importance of relationships related to happiness. 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 of 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.

37:11It'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, 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.

37:49So 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'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.

38:27Now, 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 got to 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 takeovers and acquisitions, but that's a whole other category of relationships. Well, I want you to elaborate on that more. What do you mean?

38:59Well, 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? I 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 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.

39:33So 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 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 celebrate each other's victories because my wife Esther, when something awesome happens, it's happening to me. My book is on the bestseller list.

40:07Her book is on the bestseller list. That's because we were 24 years old together and now we're 58. Man, that is, and 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 100-100. And that's the basis for a great, great young and profiting relationship. up.

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41:48Young and profiterers. I know there's so many people tuning in right now that end their workday wondering why certain tasks take forever, why they're procrastinating certain things, why they don't feel confident in their work, why they feel drained and frustrated and unfulfilled. But here's the thing you need to know. It's not a character flaw that you're feeling this way. It's actually your natural wiring. And here's the thing. When it comes to burnout, it's really about the type of work that you're doing. Some work gives you energy and some work simply drains you. So it's key to understand your six types of working genius.

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44:54Disclaimer, results will vary. Not all bills or subscriptions are eligible. Savings not guaranteed. Paid membership with connected payment account required. See experian.com for details. Guys, this is real. I find that a lot of people who focus on their success, they end up losing all their relationships because they don't prioritize it. They prioritize their career over their relationships. 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.

45:31My 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.

46:06And 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 relationships? Yeah, the truth is that we actually can do both, but 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, it was this shiny thing.

46:44It'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 melt down. 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.

47:17And 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.

47:48So 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 10 hours a day. I don't have to do that success on 14 and 15 hours a day. that's just a habit. 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. Alrighty. 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.

48:30It 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? 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.

49:07How about anger? 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? 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.

49:43How 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. Cool. So then since I mentioned two things, how about ruminating on your past? How do we improve that? So rumination, what is it?

50:17It's actually an amazing human thing. You know, your dog can't ruminate because what it is, 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.

50:46One 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. What are the top three things you think our young and profiter should do today to be happier tomorrow? So number one is, let's talk about what you're gonna do tonight before you go to bed.

51:21I 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.

51:51Then 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 going to 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 R's and D's 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 social way.

52:30They 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. So 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. That's very disturbing to me that I just thought of that.

53:05So I'm going to try to get that out of 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, and 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 one and two versus four and five?

53:40I can tell you what four and five 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 one and two? And the answer is, ah, that'll take care of itself. Newsflash, 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. I'm so glad that I asked that question. It was like totally on the fly.

54:14So 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. That's great. 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? 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 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 because I don't drink so much anymore.

54:52But you get the point. But that doesn't mean that 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 got to be channeling it to the right purpose. Yeah. All right, cool. So we're going to start closing out the show. I always end with the same two questions, and then we do something fun at the end of the year.

55:24So my last question is, what is one actionable thing we can do today to become more profiting tomorrow? More profiting tomorrow. Okay. The most important thing that we can actually do to be more profiting tomorrow is to make sure that we get adequate rest and relaxation today. The biggest thing that's going to be in your way for tomorrow is doing an all-nighter. Do not do that, my friends. You got to take care of the machine and your brain is part of the machine. Get to bed on time, not intoxicated. 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.

56:04Yeah. The secret to profiting in life is a real easy one. You know, the guy who ran that study I talked about, the Harvard Study of Adult Development, he ran it for 30 years. And 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. He thought about it. that happiness is love, full stop. And that is absolutely true. Love is the secret to your happiness. Love should be the center of your actual ambition. Look, the happiest people, they're paying attention to their faith, their life philosophy, their family life, their friendships, and serving other people with their work.

56:39In 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. 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? Yeah, it's funny. St. Thomas Aquinas, the great sage of the Middle Ages, in 1265, he wrote this super important text, 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.

57:17Love is a commitment that you make. It's an action that you take. 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.

57:49It's more even of a commitment than an action. Yeah. And it goes back to the conversation we were 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. 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. 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.

58:22So innovative, not the same stuff that everybody keeps rotating around. So I appreciate your work. Thank you so much for being on the show. And where can everybody learn more about you and everything that you do? 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. is 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.

58:56My 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 at arthurbrooks.com. This is 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. Well, I think you probably gained a lot of fans today. Thank you so much for your time, Arthur. It was an absolute pleasure. Thanks, Hala. Thanks to you and thanks to all of our listeners.

59:26Keep profiting.