备注：以下笔记含ChatGPT的辅助整理

0. 资料

Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qRY-foz-ZAw&t=2463s

Arthur 相关书的 amazon 链接：Build the Life You Want : The Art and Science of Getting Happier

朋友的AI笔记：https://www.notion.so/Arthur-Brooks-21f6216c26b080f3b937fb7c935722f7#21f6216c26b080f083daea9be07b0a0e

1. 透视模型

自朋友AI笔记：https://www.notion.so/Arthur-Brooks-21f6216c26b080f3b937fb7c935722f7#21f6216c26b080f083daea9be07b0a0e

1.1 幸福模型表格

要素	定义	关键洞察	策略	示例
享受	愉悦结合社交和记忆，从大脑边缘系统（单纯愉悦）提升至前额叶皮层（完整的人类体验）。	单纯的愉悦（如糖、酒精）若无社交和记忆，可能导致成瘾和不快乐。	1. 与他人分享愉悦活动（如聚餐）。2. 创造有意义的回忆。 3. 避免孤立、强迫性愉悦行为（如过度使用社交媒体）。	与朋友一起喝酒庆祝比独自饮酒更有幸福感。
满足	通过克服挣扎和延迟满足获得的喜悦，强调进步而非终点。	到达谬误（认为达成目标即幸福）导致失望；满足来自进步，需管理“想要”。	1. 专注于过程和进步（如持续健身）。 2. 管理“想要”（满足 = 拥有 ÷ 想要）。 3. 接受挣扎作为幸福的必要部分。	创业者在克服挑战中找到满足，而非仅在财务成功时。
意义	包括连贯性（事情为何发生）、目标（生活方向）、重要性（存在价值）。	意义是生活的“为什么”，需内省和价值观对齐，年轻人常感迷茫。	1. 回答“我为何活着？”和“今天我愿意为谁/何而死？”。 2. 写下道德信念。 3. 练习冥想（如正念、感恩）。 4. 每天阅读15分钟智慧文本（如斯多葛哲学）。	通过播客服务他人，为生活赋予意义。

1.2 支持性支柱表格

支柱	定义	关键洞察	策略	示例
掌控感	相信自己能控制生活和未来，克服习得性无助。	掌控感与幸福和长寿相关，受害者心态降低生活质量。	1. 专注于内在控制（情绪、反应）。 2. 避免受害者心态。 3. 采取小行动增强控制感。	记录恐惧并制定应对计划以增强掌控感。
情绪管理（元认知）	思考自己的思考，理性处理情绪，减少负面情绪如焦虑。	情绪是大脑边缘系统的信息，元认知用前额叶皮层解读和管理。	1. 记录情绪（如列出恐惧原因）。 2. 用语言表达情绪以减弱焦虑。 3. 每天反思以对齐价值观。	每天写下焦虑来源，将其从杏仁核转移到前额叶皮层。
关系	深层、互补的关系（家庭、朋友、伴侣）提供幸福来源。	深层关系带来意义，早期恋爱可能因嫉妒等负面情绪降低幸福感。	1. 优先建立深层关系。 2. 选择互补的伴侣（如内向者与外向者）。 3. 实践同理心而非过度共情。	维持与五位密友的长期关系，提供持久意义。
情绪传染	幸福和负面情绪通过社交传播。	靠近快乐的人可提升25%幸福概率（Framingham心脏研究）。	1. 与积极的人为伍。 2. 限制负面情绪接触。 3. 成为“幸福传播者”。	靠近快乐的朋友提升幸福感，CEO的情绪影响公司文化。
道德一致性	按个人道德原则生活，保持自我尊重和完整性。	违背道德（如欺骗）导致内心冲突和不快乐。	1. 写下道德底线并定期审视。 2. 确保行为与价值观一致。 3. 避免自我破坏行为。	避免违背诚信的行为（如欺骗），以免内心冲突。
服务他人	通过道德行为（如善举）提升他人福祉，增强自身幸福。	善举比自我关怀更能提升幸福感（如志愿服务优于玩游戏）。	1. 定期参与志愿服务。 2. 关注他人需求而非自我。 3. 设定服务他人的目标。	帮助学生做数学作业比玩桌游带来更持久的幸福感。

1.3 目标设定建议表格

目标类型	描述	建议
避免的目标	金钱、权力、愉悦、名声（如减肥仅为外貌）。	这些目标易导致到达谬误，幸福感短暂。
优先目标	信仰、家庭、友谊、服务他人的工作。	这些目标可持续积累幸福，带来持久满足和意义。
示例	不要追求“腹肌”作为最终目标，而是通过每日锻炼提升健康和幸福。	设定一致性目标（如每天锻炼）而非短暂结果（如减5公斤）。

1.4 其他关键信息表格

方面	描述	关键洞察	策略/建议
遗传影响	幸福约50%由遗传决定（双胞胎研究）。	尽管遗传有影响，环境和行为改变可显著提升幸福感。	专注于可控的行为，如练习元认知或建立关系，而非纠结于遗传限制。
个性类型（PANAS测试）	1. 疯狂科学家（高正/负面情绪） 2. 啦啦队长（高正/低负） 3. 诗人（低正/高负） 4. 法官（低正/低负）	疯狂科学家适合创业但需管理负面情绪；啦啦队长乐观但可能忽视威胁。	根据个性调整策略，如疯狂科学家需通过锻炼管理焦虑，啦啦队长需关注潜在威胁。
内向 vs. 外向	内向者擅长深层关系，带来长期意义；外向者享受短期快乐。	内向者幸福更持久，外向者短期情绪更高。	内向者培养少数深层关系，外向者避免过度追求广泛但浅层社交。
社会趋势	自1990年以来，经合组织国家幸福感下降。	过度追求愉悦和缺乏挣扎导致幸福下降。	设定基于信仰、家庭、友谊和服务的目标，避免金钱、权力、名声等短暂目标。
寻找意义的协议	三步计划：道德基础、冥想、阅读智慧文本。	明确价值观和内省是意义的基础，需具体行动而非盲目寻找。	1. 写下道德信念。 2. 每天5-15分钟正念/感恩。 3. 每天阅读15分钟智慧文本（如《沉思录》）。

2. 采访原文

自Youtube字幕: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qRY-foz-ZAw&t=2463s

The Happiness Expert: Single Friends Will Keep You Single & Obesity Is Contagious!

Arthur Brooks’ Background and Work

Steve：

Arthur, what do you do?

Arthur Brooks: I am dedicated to lifting people up and bringing them together using the science and ideas around human happiness.

Host: Where did you teach?

Arthur Brooks: I teach at Harvard University.

Host: Are you a professor of happiness?

Arthur Brooks: Yeah, I’m a professor of leadership, technically, at the Harvard Kennedy School and the Harvard Business School, but my area is leadership and happiness. So, I’ve studied the science of happiness, which is a huge, growing, multidimensional field across social psychology, neuroscience, behavioral economics, and philosophy for a long time. What I try to do is bring it to future leaders in politics, policy, and especially business, and help them understand themselves as happiness teachers so they can be happier, more successful, and bring more happiness to the people they lead.

Host: What is the state of happiness? Can we quantify that? Where are we in terms of—are we getting happier as a people or more unhappy as a people?

Arthur Brooks: We can, we can’t. So, the United Nations and a lot of other places try to see the happiest country. You’ve seen those data a lot—the happiest countries, it’s always Denmark, it’s always the Nordic countries. You can’t do that. The way that happens is they go to 100 countries, survey a thousand people in each country, and say, “How do you evaluate your life?” That’s like asking people in every country how much you like the music in your country, and on the basis of the highest rankings internally, you say who has the best music. That doesn’t really make sense—it’s bad methodology. You can look at the average well-being across a population where people are having more or less the same experience. So, inside countries, inside communities, over time, I’m willing to look at that. That shows that in most of the OECD countries, including the United States and the UK, happiness has been in decline since about 1990.

Host: Since about 1990? Yeah.

Arthur Brooks: Yeah. Is that when you were born?

Host: 92.

Arthur Brooks: It’s not you, it’s us.

Personal Roots of Studying Happiness

Host: I always think when people commit their lives largely to a topic, that must have very personal roots with that individual. What are your personal roots with the subject of happiness?

Arthur Brooks: It’s hard for me. I’m not a naturally happy person. I’m way below average in happiness, and at least 50% of that is genetic, by the way. There’s a lot of research looking at identical twins. There’s a whole database of identical twins born between the mid-1930s and 1960s that were adopted into separate families at birth, then reunited as adults. This was not an experiment cooked up by some diabolical Harvard social scientist like me—it happened naturally. When they were reunited, they were given personality tests. You can see some of these meetings where they were reunited on YouTube, and they’re wonderful, joyful, and funny. You find that you have an identical twin you didn’t know about and find all these commonalities. But of course, there’s always a bunch of social scientists with clipboards, annoying them, like me, taking data. The personality tests all show that between 40 and 80% of your personality is genetic, and the rest is environmental, experiential, and circumstantial. Up to 80%—that’s a lot. That means your openness to experience, your conscientiousness as a person, your extroversion, agreeableness, neuroticism, and happiness is about 50% genetic. Your mother literally made you unhappy, Steve, or happy—your results may vary.

Host: Was your household a happy place?

Arthur Brooks: It was a complicated place, but it wasn’t terrible because my parents were good parents, and they loved each other and loved us. But my relationship, by the time I was a young adult, was cordial because they were busy with their issues. This is one of the things I talk about with a lot of people—nobody has a perfect childhood, and a lot of people are troubled by their childhood and feel doomed to repeat the circumstances of their childhoods, but they’re not. You can rewrite your own past history by looking back at what happened and deciding to change certain variables in the way you’re going to live your adult life. So, Steve, you’re going to get married and have children, and you need to look at your own childhood and say, “What are the things that I want to be the same, and what are the things that I want to be different?” I’m designing my life right now, not just on the basis of the things that went right but on the basis of the things that went wrong. I wasn’t close to my parents; they never lived close to me. My children, who are now growing up, never had an intense experience of a relationship with any of their grandparents. One side lived in Barcelona, the other side lived in Seattle, we were in New York and Washington, D.C. Now, I’m going to live near my kids. I’m a grandfather now. All three of my adult kids are hearing from me every day on FaceTime, whether they want to or not. I see my grandson as much as I can. Next week, I turned down a whole bunch of work because I get to babysit my grandson.

Hope and Survival

Host: Is there any research that proves people who have hope in their lives have greater chances of survival, whether it’s with illnesses or—I often think about this stereotype that when someone retires, or when their partner dies in old age, say both are 90 years old, when one partner dies, it seems the surviving partner has months left sometimes.

Arthur Brooks: That’s mostly true. When it’s not true, here’s the depressing statistic: if the husband dies, the wife is going to be fine. Really.

Host: Yeah?

Arthur Brooks: Widows are way happier than widowers. I told that to my wife, and she’s like, “Huh.” Widowers do really poorly. Generally, men do very poorly. Part of the reason is—these data are disputed, but more or less, they’re directionally correct—60% of 60-year-old men say their best friend is their wife, 30% of their wives say their best friend is their husband. Women have more relationships, closer or deeper love relationships with non-related kin and with adult children, typically, than the husband does. The husband’s most intense companion relationship typically is with the wife, and that’s why that’s an asymmetric stat. That’s what the data say. But yeah, for sure, hope is super critical—on illness, on everything. Hope actually affects all sorts of physiological processes. We know that when people lose hope, they give up, and when they give up, they don’t take care of themselves. They don’t do what they need to do, they don’t exercise like they should, they’re not as active, they’re not talking to other people, their minds are not stimulated, they don’t eat right, they might use substances in ways that they shouldn’t. All of those things compound, so just at the physiological level, you’d see degradation when there is no hope. When you’re 90, you can’t afford it. Actually, I’m 59—I can’t afford it either, and neither can you at 31. We all need hope. This is huge. To the extent that you can actually bring hope to people by showing them they can do something as an agent in their own future, that’s just giving them a longer, better, more successful life. That’s what I want to do with my work because I’ve seen so much. Since I’ve dedicated myself to this, I have very good protocols for measuring my own well-being, and I don’t game the numbers. There are macronutrients to your happiness—you have to take the different elements. It’s not a single measure thing, and there are micronutrients that you can aggregate up to it. I follow this very carefully, month by month, semester by semester, year by year. I take the same tests as my students do every year, and I am 60% happier than I was five years ago because of my work, because of the work that I’ve done on myself, and because of my work as a whole.

Host: Because of the work you’ve done on yourself or because of your work?

Arthur Brooks: Both. Here’s the deal: if you want to be happier, you need to understand the science, you need to apply it to your life, you need to share it with others because you won’t remember it and hold yourself accountable unless you’re teaching it. That’s why I teach people to be happiness teachers.

Host: Interesting.

Arthur Brooks: My guess is, how long have you been doing the podcast?

Host: Two years. We launched on YouTube three years ago.

Arthur Brooks: It’s probably having a big effect on your life.

Host: Huge.

Arthur Brooks: Because you’re talking about these ideas, and my guess is that in your private life, you’re talking about the ideas that you learned with other people. Every time you share these ideas, you imprint them, not just as liminal phantasms—they become you. You use them with the executive centers of your brain. The more that you learn, the more you talk about what you learn, the better off you get. You’re only talking about things that empower people and lift them up and make their lives better. These are the topics of what you do, right? Because you want people to be happier and more successful—that’s the point of the show, right? And that’s how you’re getting happier and more successful.

Agency and Happiness

Host: Is there research that shows this point of agency correlates to happiness and survival, like longevity?

Arthur Brooks: Yes. Agency essentially means the belief that you have control over your life and your future, in essence, that there are things you can do so you’re not helpless. Helplessness is the problem. This gets back to the work of Marty Seligman in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s. He’s the father of positive psychology; he created the whole field of positive psychology. He’s a great mentor and hero to me, done so much for me intellectually, in my career, and as a friend, just as a person. When he was doing his early work, he was doing animal studies and work on human beings to take away their agency. He would do things like people putting nickels into a slot machine and figuring out along the way that it didn’t matter if they pulled the handle or not—they were getting the same outcomes. He took away little tiny bits of agency. He had dogs in boxes where they would shock the floors of the boxes—this is hard to get through internal review boards now, but they would because it seems cruel. It wasn’t big shocks, but the whole point was that the dogs would step off the parts of the floor that were shocking them, but when they couldn’t do that anymore, they would just lie down and whimper on the shocking floor. They would give up. This is called learned helplessness. People will learn their helplessness when they realize, or conclude, or are told by politicians, media, activists, and everybody else that there’s nothing they can do and they’re a victim. When you take on the identity of a victim, you learn your helplessness, and that will degrade your quality of life, make you less successful, less happy, and a lot of studies say you won’t even live as long.

Host: This point of agency is so interesting. I had someone on the show at the very beginning, a guy called Mo Gawdat. You might know him. He said he crowdsources his book and gets 500 people to read his book before it comes out. He said when they got to the part in his book about personal responsibility, 8% of people drop off the Google Document because they don’t want to read it.

Arthur Brooks: Yeah, no, that’s spinach. It’s interesting because I have this column that comes out every Thursday morning in The Atlantic, 1200 or 1300 words on the science of happiness. About once every two or three months, I have a spinach column which says, “You want to be happy? Be humble. You want to be happy? Change your mind. You want to be happy? Don’t tell somebody if they disagree with you that they’re stupid and evil. Listen more than you talk.” Just what your grandmother told you about how to be a successful person, but it’s all about humanity, about humility. These are hard things in a society where all of our biases are “I’m right, you’re wrong, I don’t want to listen, la la la la la,” if it goes against my ideological biases. I’ll write a spinach column, and those are the ones that get way fewer readers.

Host: You know what’s interesting? As you were speaking, I was thinking that nobody thinks they’re a victim. They can spot victimhood in other people very successfully, but there’s no one listening to this right now that would say, “I am a victim.” So, how does one know if they are a victim?

Arthur Brooks: Well, a lot of people will say, “I am a victim of these institutional biases.” A lot of people really will say that. They’ll say, “I’m a victim of capitalism,” or “I’m a victim of powerful people,” or “I’m a victim of conspiracies, the Deep State,”λλο

Arthur Brooks: Whatever happens to be. That’s sort of the problem. Of course, we’re all victims of something, but we all have tons of power. The really interesting thing in life is to show people the levers of power that they have that don’t start with trying to change the outside world but start with the inside of their heads. That’s what I’m dedicated to doing—showing people that the hope they should have comes from the leverage they have over their circumstances, which starts with what they thought they had the least control over: their emotions, their happiness, their well-being, the love that they experience, because of the commitments they make.

Happiness as a Choice

Host: Is happiness a choice?

Arthur Brooks: Happiness is unattainable because it’s a direction, not a destination. Is being happier a choice? Yes, being happier is a choice on the basis of the commitment that you are going to make in your life, in your relationships, in the way that you manage yourself. Absolutely.

Host: Do you think there is a starting point to being happier?

Arthur Brooks: Yeah, it starts with recognizing that most of what society tells us about happiness is wrong.

Host: What’s wrong?

Arthur Brooks: It’s not a feeling. Happiness is not a feeling. On my first day of class, I have two sections of 90 MBA students at the Harvard Business School, and they’re taking this happiness science seminar. I’ve got 400 on the waiting list. There’s an illegal Zoom link they think I don’t know about. It’s the happiness class—it’s super fun. I love it. I love my students; they’re terrific. I cold-call them on the first day by saying, “What’s happiness?” I pick one, two, three, ten: “What’s happiness?” They’ll say, “It’s the feeling I get when I’m with the people that I love,” or “It’s how I feel when I’m doing what I enjoy.” Feelings, feelings, feelings, feelings. I say, “Wrong.” The biggest barrier to actually getting happier is believing that happiness is a feeling. It’s not. Happiness is evidence—or feelings are evidence—of happiness, like the smell of dinner is evidence of dinner. That’s how to understand feelings. Feelings are really, really important; your affect, your mood, is critically important, but happiness is something a lot more tangible.

You start getting happier—the beginning of happiness, of getting happier—because true happiness is not the goal. You have to have negative emotions. Negative emotions keep you alive. Negative experiences make you learn and grow. You don’t want pure happiness this side of heaven—it’s dangerous. You’d be dead quickly without a lot of unhappiness. But getting happier starts with this understanding that really what it is is the pursuit of three things: enjoyment, satisfaction, and meaning. Those are the three macronutrients.

Host: You and I are nutrition nerds, right? And what we all know—and I’ve heard people say on your show—is that most people get insufficient protein, and when you come to America, everybody eats way too many highly glycemic carbohydrates, right?

Arthur Brooks: Happiness is the same thing. We get the macronutrient profile wrong. We need more enjoyment, satisfaction, and meaning. We need to know how to get them in efficient and healthy ways, and we need them in balance.

Host: Can you define enjoyment, satisfaction, and meaning for me?

Arthur Brooks: Yeah, see, this is the problem because a lot of people think they know what these things are, but they don’t. This is the adventure because once you get into the details of this, then you’ve got real strategies for getting happier. The definition provides strategy.

Enjoyment

Let’s start with enjoyment. Most people think it’s the same as pleasure, but that’s wrong. Pleasure is a limbic phenomenon. You’ve had plenty of guests who talked about the limbic system of the brain—that’s the console of tissue deep inside the brain that’s been evolving over the past 40 million years. It takes signals from the brainstem and other rudimentary structures in the brain and translates them into information. All your emotions are is information. There’s no such thing as good and bad feelings—they’re all good. They might be maladapted, but the point is positive and negative emotions keep you alive. Especially the negative emotions—I talk about negative emotions all the time because they’re critical for survival. Anger, sadness, fear, and disgust, the big four negative emotions, have kept you alive thousands and thousands of times. That information is relayed onto the neocortex of the brain, specifically the prefrontal cortex, the bumper of tissue right behind your forehead, where you can figure out what these emotions mean and how you’re going to react to them. A lot of times, these signals are all goofed up, and we’re very reactive, which means we’re not letting our prefrontal cortex catch up with our limbic system. That’s a lot of the work that I do.

Back to enjoyment—enjoyment is not the same as pleasure because pleasure is limbic. It’s nothing more than a signal where the ventral striatum, the reward center of your brain, is getting tapped in the limbic system, saying, “That thing is going to be good for survival and passing on your genes.” That’s why it feels good—go do it. Sex and sugar, sex and sugar, sex and sugar. Gambling, which social media has a lot in common with slot machines, and all these little things get back to your primordial evolutionary past. I know you love evolutionary biology and psychology because this gives us so much information about who we are today. Look at the Pleistocene and see yourself. All of these things that give us pleasure are because they went back to survival and propagation of the species. All those pleasure-filled things, if you pursue them, you’re just sitting in your limbic system, and modern technology and society will engorge these things into incredibly unhealthy practices. We have natural endorphins that make us feel good and help us when we get hurt so we can get back to our cave. Of course, we’ve chemically altered them into fentanyl, which feels great until you die. Fentanyl is not a big thing in the UK, but it’s a huge thing here. We have 100,000 drug overdose deaths every year in the United States, mostly because of fentanyl. It’s unbelievable. We have other versions of that—stochastic experiences that happen occasionally and give us a reward unpredictably. We make slot machines that tap into that brain chemistry, or we want to propagate the species, so we turn it into pornography, which is unbelievably powerful and dangerous for the brain because it captures the brain and destroys relationships along the way. It’s just fentanyl in its way. All of these things are just pleasure. Anything that can be addictive, which pleasure-filled things typically can, if you do them compulsively over and over again, it will make you less happy.

But here’s the thing—when people ask me, “Does that mean I should never drink alcohol or gamble?” No, no, no. You need to add two things to turn them into enjoyment: people and memory. If you add people and memory to something, then you’re moving the experience into your prefrontal cortex. That’s when it’s fully human, not an animal experience. That’s a very important part of your happiness. So, the big question is, if something’s addictive and you’re doing it alone, you’re probably doing it wrong.

Host: What about sex? That’s pornography and masturbation—is that alone, and that’s not good for you?

Arthur Brooks: That’s the whole point. Reasonable people disagree, and some people might be like, “What’s this guy talking about?” But the data on pornography show that it captures the brain and, on average, doesn’t lead to happier lives because it truncates the reproductive experience at the level of pleasure and doesn’t take it all the way to enjoyment.

Host: Have you studied porn much as a subject?

Arthur Brooks: Sort of. Everybody in my field wades into it, but it’s not something I focus on that much because, you know, focusing on the research on pornography makes you look a little creepy at 59. It’s not a good look. So, people and memory turn pleasure into enjoyment.

Host: To enjoyment?

Arthur Brooks: That’s right. So, alcohol—Anheuser-Busch doesn’t put out advertisements of a dude alone in his apartment pounding a 12-pack. That’s how a lot of people use the product, but everybody knows that’s an irresponsible, dangerous thing to do that can lead to alcoholism. What they show is the same guy with his brothers and friends, clinking bottles together, having a great time. That’s pleasure—alcohol plus people plus memory equals enjoyment. That leads to happiness because they want to join their brand to happiness, not just to pure pleasure and certainly not to addiction. Same with Coca-Cola—all the Coca-Cola ads are like the World Cup with your friends in summer. That’s actually less addictive. The sugar and caffeine are certainly addictive, but they don’t have the same properties of brain capture in the same way because they don’t stimulate as much dopamine as alcohol does. They’re less likely to make you really addicted. The whole point is that it gives you a little bit of pleasure, but it makes you way happier if you get to enjoyment, and you only get that when you’re doing it with people.

Satisfaction

Satisfaction is the joy you get after struggle. You’re an entrepreneur; you understand this one really well. You’re deferring your gratification. All entrepreneurs, successful entrepreneurs, are good at deferring gratification, which means, “I’m going to do this hard thing, and it’s going to get a big payoff, and that payoff is going to be sweet.” That’s satisfaction. A really funny thing about humans is that we need struggle and suffering for us to actually get the joy that we seek. That’s a really important part of our happiness. You find that people who are better at deferring gratification get more satisfaction, and they’re happier.

There’s a lot of that—remember the marshmallow experiment? People have debunked it, but they actually haven’t. The marshmallow experiment took place in the late ‘60s, where Walter Mischel, a psychologist at Stanford, had a laboratory set up where he would sit down on one side of a table, and there was a kid on the other side, between four and eight years old. In front of the kid was a marshmallow. He says to the kid, “You want the marshmallow?” The kid’s like, “Yeah, yeah.” He says, “I tell you what, I have to go take a phone call in the back, but when I come back, if the marshmallow is still there, I’ll give you another one. Can you wait?” Every kid’s like, “Yeah, totally, totally worth it.” He comes back five minutes later or so—80% of the kids had eaten the marshmallow, 20% hadn’t. That’s a lot—80% of the kids could not defer gratification.

The real question is, who’s the 20%? It’s Steve Bartlett. These are the people who went on to do distinguished things. They did better in school, got better grades, had more job success, better relationships. That’s what they found—the most successful kids. Now, people fight about whether it’s nature or nurture—it’s probably 50/50, like everything else in life. But the bigger point is, good things come to those who wait, and when you wait, you suffer, and you need that suffering as part of the basic satisfying experience.

The bigger problem with satisfaction is that Mother Nature has a big lie at the end of it. Mother Nature says, “If you get it, you’re going to love it forever.” That’s not true. The brain works emotionally and physically in an environment of homeostasis. Homeostasis means that you always return to your baseline, physiologically and emotionally, because you can’t stay in an unusual physiological state. Unusual states are for reaction—you need to be ready to react. You step off the treadmill, your heart is elevated, it goes back to where it was so you’re not dead in a week. The same thing is true emotionally. Something really good or bad happens to you, you think it’s going to last forever so you have an incentive to avoid or approach the thing, but it doesn’t last forever, does it? That’s the problem. We actually think that if I get that billion dollars, it’s going to be really great. The first thing somebody who has a billion dollars says to himself is, “I guess I needed another billion.” Because of homeostasis, that puts you on something called the hedonic treadmill—more, more, more, more, more.

That’s the great conundrum of the striver—there’s never enough. I deal with people all day long who are incredibly successful but not happy. A lot of what I do is explain one simple equation that explains that but also gives you the solution: your satisfaction doesn’t come from all the things that you have, so “have more” is not the right strategy. Satisfaction is all the things you have divided by the things that you want—haves divided by wants. Successful people need to manage their wants even more than they need to manage their haves. They need to want less. That’s a whole kettle of fish—that’s spirituality, discipline, fitness, diet, a whole lot of things that go into that, and that will help you actually get enduring satisfaction.

Host: Sounds like a contradiction, though, doesn’t it? The striving and the struggle is going to make me happy, but I should want less?

Arthur Brooks: What people who crack this code—and a lot of Eastern traditions get into this—is not that striving is bad, but that striving in itself has a reward to it. The process, what you find out along the way, is that what you wanted was not arrival, what you wanted was progress. Then you start to get the reward from the progress itself. There’s a funny thing in the research on dieting—we all know it’s the most expensive, unsuccessful industry in the world, right? 95% of diets fail, which means within a year, people have gained back all the weight they’ve lost. But they’re successful insofar as almost everybody loses weight when they go on a diet. Here’s the thing about diets: every day you’re willing to forgo the food you like in exchange for the reward, which is the scale going down. When you hit your goal, it’s going to be so great, so great. You know what the reward is? You never again get to eat the things you like for the rest of your life. Congratulations.

That’s why you fail. The arrival fallacy, which is an identifiable phenomenon in my field, is that it’s going to be sweet when I get to the goal—it isn’t. What you’re going to have is homeostasis, frustration, and disappointment. Therefore, you need to want less. You need to think less about wanting these arrival experiences and get more satisfaction from the progress, from the journey. That’s really what it comes down to. People who crack that code, over the course of self-discipline, self-understanding, self-management, can actually experience remarkably higher satisfaction. The Dalai Lama—I’ve been working with the Dalai Lama closely for the past 11 years—and I asked him this question: “How can I get lasting satisfaction?” He said, “You need to want what you have, not to have what you want.” That’s what it comes down to—it’s the management of my wants, not my haves.

Host: On that point, we’re at the time of year now where so many people are thinking about diets. You mentioned that. For those people approaching that moment, setting their goals and stuff, what is a better goal to set if not a weight number or a financial number or whatever? What’s a better, more realistic goal to set that has more chance of success?

Arthur Brooks: It’s interesting because there are certain things that we can accumulate that won’t homeostatically return us to the baseline, that won’t throw us onto this hedonic treadmill over and over again. Those goals are the goals that actually do lead to the happiest life, and the more you have, the better off you are. More actually is better, but they don’t fall into the categories of money, power, pleasure, and fame, which are the typical kind of goals we get, or related goals like weight loss or whatever it happens to be. The four goals that really matter are faith, family, friendship, and work that serves others. Those are the four really great and transcendent goals that we can have.

There’s nothing wrong with money, power, pleasure, or fame, but only as intermediate goals to make it easier for us to pursue and accumulate deeper faith or philosophical life—I’m not talking about traditional religious faith necessarily—better family relationships, which are very mystical, poorly understood even in neuroscience in a lot of ways, deep friendship, which is hard for a lot of people, especially successful people, and work where you earn your success and serve other people. That’s what it comes down to. So, those are the right New Year’s goals that we need. This year, what am I going to do? How am I going to grow closer to the divine? How am I going to draw closer to my family and have a more intimate relationship with my family? How am I going to have deeper friendships this year? And how am I going to take my work and find it more meaningful and satisfying on the basis of serving other people?

Host: We haven’t got to meaning yet. You said the word there, but I want to make sure I close off on this point about a better goal because there’s still going to be a huge group of people that go, “Listen, I get it, I love it, I believe it, but I hate this belly fat.” This belly fat yo-yos every year.

Arthur Brooks: Those are intermediate goals, and there’s nothing wrong with those things. The problem is when they become satisfying and self-destructive, when that’s the final goal. By the time you get there, you think, “Why? That wasn’t as meaningful as I thought. That wasn’t as good as I thought.” That’s the arrival fallacy—that when I actually get rid of the belly fat, then I’m going to have a more wonderful life. That’s actually not true. The reason you’re doing that is because you want to live longer with your spouse and dandle your 11 grandchildren on your knee. That’s the reason you want to do this, because you need to do it for some intrinsic reason as opposed to an extrinsic reason, like “people will love me more.”

It’s amazing to me because I do a lot of wellness and fitness stuff as it interacts with happiness. I work with a lot of people who are very big in the longevity community because I have the happiness console, the science of the happiness console, that I put into those things. I meet a lot of people who are really into the fitness part, and a lot of guys will tell me they have these fitness goals like, “I’m going to put on 15 pounds of muscle this year and get rid of all my belly fat.” By September or October, they find they’re not getting any more attention or compliments from women, but a lot of dudes are going, “Looking good, dude.” They’re like, “That’s not what I wanted.” Part of the reason is the arrival fallacy—you build up this image of what will come from the satisfaction of hitting these intermediate goals. These aren’t the right final goals. You’ve got to have the right final goals, then set some intermediate goals along the way. But let’s not kid ourselves—when you think carefully about losing your last five pounds of belly fat so you can see your lower abs, which, by the way, is not necessarily that healthy, it’s not going to materially improve your life and your relationships.

Host: What’s a better end goal, then, as it relates to fitness? Would it be something more centered on health?

Arthur Brooks: Yeah, it’s something that’s actually sustainable and has to do with health and also with happiness. That’s the way this works. I work out 60 minutes a day. It’s not because I’m vain. Look, I’ve got a face for radio, Steve. I mean, it’s…

Host: I don’t know what you’re talking about.

Arthur Brooks: I know, but it’s age-adjusted. I look good, you know.

Host: I think you look good, period. I’m not, you know, I’ve got a girlfriend, but credit where credit’s due.

Arthur Brooks: Thank you, Steve. I appreciate that. You made my week. See, this was my goal.

Host: Yeah.

Arthur Brooks: But the reason I do this is because I find that for me, working out as much as I can is much harder than working out every day. Working out every day is much easier than working out as often as I can, right?

Host: Amen.

Arthur Brooks: Practicing my religion every day is much easier than practicing my religion when it comes naturally to me or when I find it convenient. Eating healthily is much easier when I do it every day. The result of that is that I find that with those particular routines, I program those things into my life, and I’m a much happier guy. It lowers my cortisol levels, which are naturally very high. I’m a very anxious person, and I understand anxiety, cortisol production, and how to manage it. This is one of my management techniques. The thing about fitness to understand is, when I say it makes you happier, it actually doesn’t—it lowers your unhappiness. Happiness and unhappiness, largely the experiences of happiness and unhappiness, which is to say positive and negative affect, they’re produced in different parts of the limbic system. So, you can be very high happiness and very high unhappiness. I have tests for that that I put my students through. You’re probably somebody who experiences both very high positive affect and very high negative affect. We’ve only met, but my guess is that you’re a mad scientist. That’s the profile.

Host: That makes sense.

Arthur Brooks: So, that means you have two strategies: you want to keep your positive affect high, and you want to manage your negative affect. One of the best ways to manage your negative affect is physical exercise, vigorous physical exercise. Today, for me, was leg day. I hate leg day, but I feel pretty good right now.

Host: Okay, that makes sense. I’ve got an answer there that I’m super clear on. I should be aiming at the end goal of happiness, ultimately, even if the intermediary goals are things like belly fat and these short-term things that are measurements of my progress towards the bigger goal. The real key here is consistency.

Arthur Brooks: This was the big unlock for my whole fitness thing because I was that person, which will be 90% of people listening now, who made the goal every year that I was going to change my life every year. It never worked because I was aiming at getting a six-pack for summer. When I arrived with the six-pack and summer came, it was great—I looked great, I got a couple of compliments, which was nice. However, the minute summer finished or the six-pack arrived, I could not find, for the life of me, the motivation. There’s no willpower that can muscle these things out unless they become a part of your life. Consistency, making my goal consistency, was the big unlock for me, for sure. Because then, okay, the goal becomes, if I go to the gym every day, if I make that part of my habits, I’m going to be healthier, happier, better at my job. Is there anything more important than that? Is that less important than a six-pack? That mindset shift changed my life for sure.

Meaning

Host: Meaning, then. Meaning was the last of the three.

Arthur Brooks: Meaning is the why of your life. This is the hardest for most people, especially young adults. It’s really, really hard. Meaning is a combination of three things: coherence, purpose, and significance. Coherence is “things happen for a reason.” Meaning in your life means you’ve got to have a theory about why things happen—like, “It’s one damn thing after another.” You’ve got to have some concept of why things happen. Purpose is “my life has direction and has goals.” That’s what purpose really is—I’m going in this direction toward these things without getting stuck on the arrival fallacy. Last but not least is significance, which is “it would matter if I weren’t here.” I’m significant. Those are the three parts of meaning in people’s lives, according to philosophers and social psychologists.

There’s a test that I give my students that encompasses these three ideas. You can remember them in two questions, and you have a meaning crisis if you don’t have answers to these questions that you believe. There’s no right answer—you just have to have your answers. Want to play?

Host: Yeah.

Arthur Brooks: Here’s the quiz. Question number one: Why are you alive? You can answer that in terms of who created you or what you’re on Earth to do, both.

Host: Why am I alive? That’s something that I get to answer every single day. I get to define that by what I choose to do this morning when I woke up. What was it? I went to the gym, I was on the running machine because I know I’m not going to be able to today, and then I came here and had this conversation with you.

Arthur Brooks: But why are you doing this conversation with me, Steve?

Host: The “I get” theory comes to mind when you ask that, which is it’s incredibly selfish. I learned a tremendous amount already just from this conversation, and I know that it pays it forward to other people who are going to learn from it as well, and that makes it feel worthwhile.

Arthur Brooks: So, you said two things: fun and service, right? Which is more important to you, transcendentally?

Host: It’s the service part.

Arthur Brooks: Good. That gives me all my worth. But the more you focus on that, the better it gets. Now we uncovered that. So, thinking about that, you put the order of operations into the podcast to say, “Does it serve? Is this guest going to serve? Is this question going to serve? Is this show going to serve? Is this sponsor going to serve the people who are watching this podcast?” Then suddenly, meaning starts to grow out of the soil. If it’s like, “Is it fun?”—yeah, good. So, my company that rides alongside what I do academically, everybody that works with me, we have an order of operations. The order of operations are these four goals, but they have to be in this order. You just told me that the order of operations is serve other people and have fun for your work. That’s what you basically said. It’s probably more like lift people up and have an adventure—an intellectual adventure. But the order of operations has to be right. If you’re having fun more than you’re serving other people, you’re not going to find your sense of meaning based on that first question. You see where we’re going with that, right?

Host: Yeah.

Arthur Brooks: The second question is harder: For what are you willing to die today?

Host: There’s a couple of people in my life that I’d die for. I’d die for my romantic partner, I’d die for my brothers and sisters, any of them. Interestingly, I don’t know if I’d die for my parents, which is interesting.

Arthur Brooks: Would you die for an idea? Would you die for your country?

Host: When you say for my country, do you mean to save the country?

Arthur Brooks: I don’t know. I mean, if you were called to, even if it were ridiculous, would you die because you love your country?

Host: It depends what you mean by that. What’s the cost if I stay alive?

Arthur Brooks: I know, everything is context-specific to a certain extent. But really, what I’m trying to see is your reaction to this, to see what’s there. There are good things in there. You are willing to die for your girlfriend, your brothers and sisters. Mom and Dad, it’s like, “Jury’s out.” Your mom listens to this podcast?

Host: They do, but I’m just being honest because I don’t know why I said that, but I just…

Arthur Brooks: No, for sure, this is good. This is really important. It’s worth thinking about. The worst answer is “I don’t know” or “nothing.” Those are the worst answers. That doesn’t mean it’s a problem—on the contrary, it’s a huge opportunity, a huge entrepreneurial opportunity to realize you don’t have answers to these questions. You don’t have to go get your PhD in philosophy or sit at the mouth of the cave with the guru in the Himalayas. You need to look for your answers to these questions—that’s the quest, the vision quest.

So, when you see somebody find these things—a lot of young adults are nowhere near where you are on your journey. You’re solid, Steve—this is good stuff. But I meet a lot of people like, “Why am I alive? ‘Cause an egg met a sperm.” Really? “And what are you willing to die for?” “Nothing, really,” or “I don’t know.” A lot of people, and then they uncover that they don’t have a why. That’s what it comes down to.

Host: Repeat the questions again.

Arthur Brooks: Why are you alive, and for what are you willing to die this very day? There’s no wrong answers.

Host: I have so many young kids, in particular, messaging me on Instagram with the same question, which is, I think society, Instagram quotes, all of that stuff has told them that they need to find their purpose. It seems that they’re in hunt of their purpose like it’s some Easter egg. The phrase itself, “find your purpose,” comes loaded with two assumptions: “find,” which means you’ve got to go search for it, and “purpose,” which is a singular word, means there’s one of them somewhere. The unhappiness that I sense because they’re unable to find this Easter egg somewhere that they’ve been searching for causes them to feel all kinds of inadequacy. What do you say to that?

Arthur Brooks: Part of it is what we call in business the “go find a rock” theory of leadership, where the CEO says to an employee, “Go give me a rock.” “Like what?” “Go give me a rock.” So, you go outside, bring a rock back in, and the boss says, “Wrong rock.” That’s not helpful. That’s “go find your purpose.” It’s like, “What rock? How? Where do I look? The world is full of rocks.” You need to be a lot more specific. Figuring out deeply why you believe you’re walking the Earth, why you actually are alive, besides just the mechanical explanation from 10th-grade biology—the real why, the deep why. And if push came to shove, “I would die for this thing.” That’s when you understand what your deepest values are. That’s when you can actually write your mission statement. That’s what it comes down to, not just platitudes on the internet like “go find your purpose.”

I spend a lot of time in Dharamsala in the Himalayan foothills, where the Dalai Lama lives in northern India. When I’m in Dharamsala—it was a little village until the Dalai Lama went there about 1960 when he was exiled from China, kicked out of Tibet. Now it’s not a metropolis, but there’s tons of people there. I meet a lot of Westerners there, seekers. I’m a seeker, man. I’m going to go to a place where I feel there’s a lot of positive spiritual energy. Don’t get me wrong—I’ve studied meditation with the Dalai Lama’s Tibetan Buddhist monks. I’m a much better Catholic on the basis of this; I’m a deeper Christian on the basis of this. But the idea of just going someplace and randomly looking, hoping that your purpose hunts you down, is misguided. You have to have a much better, more specific sense of what you’re looking for. These things—coherence, significance, and purpose—are part of meaning, and those two questions are a good way to get started.

Host: There’s going to be a huge group of people listening to this and thinking, “You know what? I don’t have anything that I would die for, and I don’t really know why I’m alive.” That’s just made me hugely…

Arthur Brooks: Good news! It’s incredibly good news because that’s the basis of your adventure—to find those things. In point of fact, there are things out there; you just don’t know them yet, and you haven’t been looking for them. You’ve been—who knows what you’ve been looking for, maybe even looking for what you like. There’s nothing wrong with that, but it’s not going to find the secret of meaning. What I enjoy is a different pillar of happiness. A lot of people will say, “If I figure out what I enjoy, then I’ll find my meaning.” No, those are different. You’re over on that branch of the tree, trying to get over to this branch of the tree—different questions.

Host: So, I’m that person now, and I don’t have answers to either. You tell me it’s a great place to be because it means the start of my adventure. What do I do? Put my shoes on and leave the house? What do I do?

Arthur Brooks: There’s a lot of different protocols you can start, depending on where you are in your life. One of the things I recommend is reading more—not reading garbage and dumb stuff, not even reading the news. I put people on a protocol of 15 minutes a day of real reading. There’s a three-part plan. Want to hear the three-part plan to actually start figuring out the answers to these questions?

Host: Yeah.

Arthur Brooks: You don’t have to answer the questions directly, but number one is start thinking to yourself, “What do I think is right and wrong? What are my moral principles? What are my moral non-negotiables?” That’s the moral basis of living; it’s the foundation of figuring out the answers to your questions. For me, that might be, “I think free speech is important,” or “treating people with dignity, equality.” Cool, right? This is going to change over the course of your life, too. You’re 28 years younger than me; when you’re my age, it’s going to be different. Saying to yourself, “That’s good, I want to change, I want to change,” means one of your non-negotiables is moral flexibility, perhaps. Really important that you’re able to evolve. The world doesn’t want you to evolve; the world wants you to be rigid because you’re a better soldier in the culture war when you’re not able to say, “Huh, what I thought probably isn’t right. Weird.”

That’s number one—the moral foundations. Thinking about that, I ask my students to take out a piece of paper and start writing things down that they think are right and wrong, the basis of the way they want to live. This is a very Jungian idea. Carl Jung said that the basis of happiness is figuring out what you believe and acting according to it. The basis of unhappiness is living not in accord with your own morals. In other words, “I believe these things are right and wrong, and I’m systematically violating them.” It’s so incredibly empowering when I talk to a young woman or man and say, for example, “What do you think is a decent way to treat a member of the opposite sex when you’re on a date?” They’ll tell me, and I say, “Are you acting according to that?” They’re like, “No.” I say, “That’s why you’re unhappy, according to Carl Jung, but also according to common sense.” Once you know what that is and say, “I’m going to start acting and living according to my own principles,” your life starts to change.

Host: Why is that so? Say someone right now is, for example, cheating on their partner, but they’re against cheating.

Arthur Brooks: Everybody’s against cheating, by the way. Betraying somebody you love—everybody’s against that. That’s natural law, if you believe there’s any natural law. Why is that making them unhappy? It’s making them unhappy because it’s doing violence to their own sense of propriety. You’re hurting yourself. The most ancient wisdom traditions and religious traditions—Islam, Christianity, Judaism, Hinduism, name the religion—there’s a concept of sin, right? Sin in almost every religious tradition is not offending God; it’s hurting yourself. It’s self-destructive behavior. You’re doing something not in accord with the way you want to live, and in so doing, you’re weakening yourself. You’re making it harder for you to understand yourself as a good person, as a person of integrity, as an upright person, which we actually need. There’s a lot of social psychology research on this—we need to see ourselves as good people.

Host: It goes back to your point about helplessness and agency. If I know that’s bad but I can’t seem to stop myself from doing it, I’m telling myself I’m low agency, I’m helpless, I’m a victim of my own sin.

Arthur Brooks: I’m a victim of my own weakness, my own impulses. This is one of the reasons people will say, “I hate how I eat.” What are they actually saying? They’re not saying, “I’m a sugar fiend, I just can’t get enough of it.” I don’t drink alcohol, but I drink tons of sugar—lots of sugar. I shouldn’t do it. It doesn’t offend my sense of propriety, to be sure, but I could get to the point where I’m so unhealthy that I hate that about myself because I’m hurting myself, being controlled by my impulses. Getting in line with your own views and making a plan—this is where the New Year’s resolutions about taking off the weight actually make sense. It’s not about the ab veins; it’s about being morally consistent with your own view of the person you want to be. But you can’t do it until you lay it out, until you put it in black and white. Write down your moral philosophy—I don’t care how dumb it is—write it down and make a plan to start living according to it. That’s the base of the pyramid.

There are two other parts. The second part is a contemplative tradition—contemplation. You need more contemplation so you can experience transcendence. There are a bunch of different ways to do this. This is why everybody wants to do mindfulness meditation—that’s basically sitting still without your phone and focusing on being alive. There are informal ways to do it. My colleague Ellen Langer—if you had her on the show, super interesting person—she brought the concept of mindfulness to the West about 30 years ago. She wrote a book called Mindfulness. She was the first woman tenured in the psychology department at Harvard. She’s phenomenal, and she says that mindfulness is best practiced if you’re sitting on the train, putting away your phone, putting your hands in your lap, and looking out the window.

Host: Can they listen to this podcast while they do that?

Arthur Brooks: No, you should listen to the podcast, but not during those periods. Start with five minutes of simple contemplation of life. There are other ways to do it—prayer is a really good way to do it, too. Religious traditions are excellent at it, but people in a distracted world don’t do that at all. You need to be in your head, stop distracting yourself, and systematically stop distracting yourself. In your default mode network, you’ll start to think about things that actually matter, including the fundamental moral basis you’ve started to formulate.

I was thinking about this last night—I don’t know why—but this is how weird I am. I was thinking about why I don’t pray anymore. I grew up in a Christian faith until the age of about 18.

Arthur Brooks: Are you still Christian?

Host: No. Every time we had dinner for my whole childhood, the family would sit around the table, one of us would pray, and we’d basically give thanks for things we’re grateful for. I stopped praying because I no longer have the Christian faith. But I was thinking last night, it doesn’t mean I need to give up the prayer, which is just an exercise in gratitude, to be thankful for the nature of my life. I don’t have to pray to something; I can just pray for gratitude.

Arthur Brooks: You can contemplate the source of your gratitude. Gratitude listing is a really important way to focus on—we’re resentful creatures because we have a negativity bias. We have a tendency to pay attention to the negative things in our lives disproportionately because that tendency serves us for survival. You pay attention to the worst thing that happened at the dinner, not the best thing, for a reason. We’ve evolved to the snap of the twig behind you—it doesn’t make you think, “Oh, bet that’s my friend.” That’s how we’re evolved. The way to not let that become maladapted is to contemplate the sources of your gratitude, which are incredibly abundant.

The reason you stopped praying is because you don’t believe there’s anybody on the other end of the line listening. You think it’s like the ghost phone in Japan after the tsunami, the earthquake and tsunami. A guy set up a telephone booth that’s not connected, and 30,000 people have gone and picked up the phone and talked to their dead relatives. That’s the ghost phone. That’s not satisfying for you with respect to prayer because your kid version of religion was the reason you’re doing that—you’re talking to God, you’ve got a direct transmission mechanism to God. Now you don’t think that’s actually the case, so you stop doing the contemplation. It’s probably worth rethinking an adult version of your faith as opposed to being put off by the kid version of your faith. It’s like, “Really? All that weird stuff doesn’t make sense.” Most likely, according to the data, you’re going to start becoming interested in your Christian faith again as you get older. It doesn’t mean you’re going to have the same faith that you had—on the contrary, you probably won’t. But you’ll start being like, “There’s certain things I miss about that, and life is messy, and there’s suffering that’s hard to explain, but there’s lots of things in life that are hard to explain, and maybe there’s something in there I didn’t understand before.” I’m not saying for sure, but be open to it.

The top is wisdom, and that requires reading or acquiring information in the wisdom tradition. Read the Stoic philosophers, read the Nicomachean Ethics of Aristotle, read the Bhagavad Gita, read the Quran, read the Bible—read, read, read. Start with 15 minutes a day of that kind of reading. You can go years saying, “I wish I read it,” and you don’t. It’s crazy—we’ll spend all this time scrolling Instagram when we could spend 15 minutes a day reading the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius or the letters of Seneca. They’re incredibly enriching. It’s like, “Whoa, boom.” Starting at 15 minutes a day—so do the work: what do I believe, spend some time in contemplation, and do the reading. Your life’s about to change. That’s the protocol, the Tibetan Buddhist protocol for starting to find meaning in your life. I’ve prescribed this to others, I’ve done it myself, and it really works. It helps you find the path to the answers to those questions.

Collaboration with Oprah Winfrey

**Host:**Build the Life You Want—it’s a book sitting in front of me here that has your name on it, and who’s this? Oprah Winfrey. I’d like to give you young authors a leg up. How did you meet Oprah?

Arthur Brooks: She called me. Turns out she’s a regular reader of my column in The Atlantic on Thursday mornings, “How to Build a Life,” which is a different area of the science of happiness every week. She read my last book, From Strength to Strength: Finding Success, Happiness, and Deep Purpose in the Second Half of Life, on the first day it came out. I went on her Super Soul podcast, and we were thick as thieves immediately because we have the same goals: to lift people up and bring them together in the spirit of happiness and love. She does it differently because she’s not an academic. She has an incredible platform—I’ve never seen a platform like she has. She says one thing, and people are like, “That’s a good thing to do.” She’s always looking for—she’s cracked the code. She has the money, power, and fame, and she uses them in service of other people. That’s her whole goal from the very beginning. She’s never said anything to disabuse me of that idea.

We started doing some things together, some podcasts together. She called up and said, “If I had my show still”—for 25 years, she had this iconic show on television in the United States called The Oprah Winfrey Show, and millions of people watched it every day. It went off the air in about 2014 or something. She said, “If I had my show, I’d have you on 30 times, and then you’d have your show. But I don’t have the show anymore, so let’s do a version of that and let me host a book.” So, we wrote the book together over the last winter, in the winter of 2022-2023. I went to Montecito, California, where she lives, got a house in Santa Clara, California, and we structured the thing at her place. We went back and forth, and it was a blast. It was about how to manage yourself. Once you’re able to manage your own feelings and emotions like a pro, you’ll no longer be distracted, and you can focus on the things that actually matter for your life. That’s how you build your life.

Host: You called me a mad scientist earlier. I’d have to take the test, but I think you nailed it. In the book, in the section about the unique mix of happiness and unhappiness, you talk about this PANAS score system. What are these categories, and why did you call me a mad scientist?

Arthur Brooks: The PANAS test is in the book, and it’s on the website at arthurcbrooks.com, where anybody can take it for free. It’s a personality test based on the intensity of your positive and negative affect, aka mood. Everybody’s got more or less the same emotions—everybody feels joy, interest, surprise, anger, sadness, disgust, and fear—but we have them in different intensities depending on who we are. There are really four kinds of people with these different intensities.

Mad Scientists: High positive affect, high negative affect. They have high highs and low lows. That’s a quarter of the population, by construction, because it’s above average on both.
Cheerleaders: High positive affect, low negative affect. They feel their positive emotions very intensely and their negative emotions very weakly. They’re not always happy, but they tend to be in a better mood, see the brighter side of things, downgrade threats, and think everything’s going to be okay. That’s a quarter of the population. Everybody wants to be that, but it’s not necessarily the best way to be. They don’t make the best CEOs because they have a hard time paying attention to threats, don’t want bad news, and have a terrible time giving bad news or evaluations. Working for a cheerleader CEO is great for a minute, but then it becomes frustrating because you hear them telling the incompetent idiot in the cubicle next to you that they’re doing an unbelievably good job. You’ve got to be realistic to be a good entrepreneur—you know there are lots of threats out there; you’ve got to take them seriously.
Poets: High negative affect, low positive affect. There’s a place in the limbic system called the ventrolateral prefrontal cortex—that’s the part that makes you a ruminator. Ruminators focus on problems, negative things, regret: “I can’t believe I said that thing, I feel so stupid, what does she really think of me?” It’s also the part of the brain you use when you’re highly creative. Comedians, for example—I pal around with a guy named Rainn Wilson, who played Dwight in the American version of The Office. He told me that comedians tend to be depressed, but they find out they’re funny and can substitute humor for sadness. It’s a metacognitive technique we talk about in the book. Poets tend to be high ruminators, so high negative affect—they focus a lot on negative things because of this hyperdeveloped part of their brain. They also tend to be really creative because it’s the same part of the brain you use when working on a business plan or a symphony. They tend to be romantic because infatuation is ruminating on another person. That’s the poet profile.
Judges: Low positive affect, low negative affect. They’re happy and unhappy, but they feel their moods less intensely than other people. They don’t freak out. These are really good surgeons, judges, Secret Service agents. You don’t want your surgeon to be like, “Oh my God!” when they cut you open.

Most great entrepreneurs are mad scientists because they want to feel things intensely. Everything is intense, and they do everything intensely. You don’t have many people who are super chill. Just having a deep conversation with you, I can see you have a lot of mad scientist characteristics. You feel things deeply—is that fair?

Host: It is fair. I resonate with that the most. I describe myself as being a bit intense. My team knows me—I think I come across as a bit intense. What’s your girlfriend like?

Arthur Brooks: I’m married to a cheerleader.

Host: Oh, really?

Arthur Brooks: Yeah. Cheerleaders can have the best of times, but they tend to struggle with the mad scientist. It’s like, “Why is everything so great for you? Why are you gloomy? Why can’t you look on the bright side of things? Why are you grouchy all the time? What’s wrong with you, Steve?” Like, “There’s a spelling mistake on our…” “Why is that bothering you?”

Host: Yeah, yeah.

Arthur Brooks: That’s a classic thing. Everybody can be with everybody else, but the complements are really important. The biggest mistake people make in dating markets is they look for their doppelgänger, their clone. You shouldn’t look for your clone; you should look for your complement. You’ll be happier when you complete each other. Very happy marriages often happen between an introvert and an extrovert if they learn to appreciate each other. It’s not hammer and tongs all the time for the differences. One of the reasons dating apps are so unsuccessful for giving people satisfactory dating experiences is that people have more and more choice, but they’re more likely to say they’re not satisfied with or attracted to the people they’re dating. It’s because they set up a dating profile saying, “I vote this way, I like this music, I live here, I like these things,” and they get somebody who’s their sibling, which, as my adult children remind me, is not hot. Difference is hot.

Host: It’s so true because I never would have said I want someone who is spiritual, really involved in spirituality, and believes in things you just can’t see. My girlfriend believes in all the chakras, these energies, and she just believes in it all. It’s funny because I never would have said that’s what I wanted, but I absolutely love it. She’s pulled me into her world; she’s made me more spiritual, made me believe in things I never would have believed before. She’s completing me in that regard.

Arthur Brooks: It’s really great. You cracked the code in that way. Finding all the ways that you’re different and celebrating those differences is key to a good relationship, not wishing the person were more like you. That’s a relationship killer—it’s just a form of egotism.

Host: Everyone tries to change their partner, though, don’t they?

Arthur Brooks: Yeah, well, it’s interesting. There’s the old axiom that women are frustrated because they thought they could change their husbands, and they can’t, and husbands are frustrated because they thought their wives would never change, and they do. There’s truth in that.

Love and Happiness

Host: Relationships and love—how important is this as a subject for happiness?

Arthur Brooks: It’s the number one area of interest for my students. My average student is 28 years old—MBA students, master’s students. They’ve gone through college, gone to work, and come back to the Harvard Business School. You have to have some business experience to get the business master’s degree. This is the number one thing they want to talk about. They want to learn about it scientifically, the neurochemical cascade of what’s happening in your brain and at what point you can’t control it anymore. We have a lot of case studies at the business school about CEOs who were dismissed for inappropriate relationships with subordinates. It’s a classic theme. The last line of the case study is the CEO looking out the window of the train after being dismissed, going, “I don’t know what happened.” We look at brain scans and say, “This is what happened.” You can see it in the brain, kind of. Somebody who’s really in love has brain activity that looks an awful lot like a methamphetamine addict’s brain scan. Your brain is captured.

At the beginning, when people meet, there’s a hormonal reaction with testosterone and estrogen, the sex hormones, obviously. When people see somebody who’s really attractive, that’s the ignition mechanism. After that, you see a big increase in noradrenaline, aka norepinephrine, and dopamine levels, so you have anticipation of reward and euphoria. That’s the second line of things that tend to happen in this chemical cascade when you’re falling in love. After that, you see a dip in serotonin, which is interesting. Serotonin, we think of as the neuromodulator of peace and happiness, which a lot of psychiatric drugs try to manipulate when they feel there’s an imbalance. People who are clinically depressed often get selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, meaning you maintain a higher level of serotonin. That’s all really controversial because we don’t understand it very well. But we do know that when people are falling in love, they’re more likely to be ruminative and infatuated. That part of the brain, the ventrolateral prefrontal cortex, that does rumination will be more active when serotonin is low. So, serotonin will be low, and you start ruminating on the other person. That’s when the infatuation part of the relationship kicks in. Then you get to the point of attachment, which involves oxytocin, a neuropeptide that functions as a hormone that makes you profoundly attached to the other person. That’s intensely pleasurable. The longer you let it go, the harder it is for your brain not to be really, really captured. You wouldn’t go to a methamphetamine addict and say, “Why did you buy methamphetamine? That’s illegal.” They’d be like, “I’m an addict, I’m a junkie.” It’s the same thing when somebody’s sleeping with a subordinate.

Host: Are people in love, in relationships, happier statistically?

Arthur Brooks: No, on the contrary. Being in love, especially in the early stages, is not associated with what we would call actual happiness because it has tons of jealousy, which is the rumination part when your serotonin levels are really low. It’s hard to say, “I feel so great.” You feel euphoric, and you like it in its own way, but if you stayed in that stage, you’d go out of your mind and be miserable. There’s jealousy, surveillance behaviors are really common. Nobody would say, “When I’m surveilling my intimate partner, that’s when I’m happiest.” Nobody likes that, but people tend to do that because their brain is saying, “I’m trying to figure out if this is somebody who’s going to betray me.” Back to evolution—is this somebody who’s going to wander off and raise somebody else’s kids? Is this somebody who’s going to be carrying somebody else’s baby? That’s how men and women express sexual jealousy in interesting ways. There’s a guy at the University of Texas at Austin who studies jealousy. The most jealousy-provoking thing for men is an image of their intimate partner having sex with somebody else. For women, it’s an image of their intimate partner saying “I love you” to somebody else. The reason is, evolutionarily, women have to worry that their partner is going to take care of somebody else’s children, and men have to worry that they’re not the actual father of the children, which, according to some estimates, is 15% of paternity worldwide, which is misattributed.

Host: Makes sense. That’s a lot.

Arthur Brooks: No, it makes sense. Fortunately, my kids look like me. Well, one’s adopted—she doesn’t look like me.

Focusing Less on Yourself

Host: This idea in chapter four of your book, focusing less on yourself leads to happiness. How can you prove that’s the case?

Arthur Brooks: There are a lot of experimental tests that show this using human subjects. One of the classic experiments—there’s a fabulous social psychologist at Northwestern named Adam Waytz. I don’t know if you’ve had him on your show before. He’s really impressive and innovative. He did an experiment where he took undergraduate students—you always use the undergraduate pool at your university because they’ll do anything for 20 bucks. He put them into three groups: one had to do moral deeds, random acts of kindness; one had to do moral thoughts, sit and think beautiful thoughts about other people; and one had to do self-focused, self-care things, go do something that makes you feel good. They looked at their happiness over a series of weeks with these interventions. They found that moral deeds were happier than moral thoughts, and moral thoughts were happier than self-care. That’s what they found. In other words, giving—sharable giving—if you’re lonely, the most important thing you can do is volunteer. If you give money away, statistically, you’re more likely to make more money next year. Incredible investment strategy. The reason is because you see yourself as an agent of positive change. You’re empowered when you’re helping other people. When you give love, you get love. That’s the bottom line. All these experiments find the same thing. If you put two randomly selected groups of people, one playing board games and the other helping sixth graders with their math, the ones helping sixth graders will have a mood boost for days afterward. Helping other people helps you not focus on the psychodrama inside Steve’s head and gives life a transcendent aspect. You get perspective, peace, and empirical confirmation that you are the person you want to be.

Emotional Contagion

Host: Is happiness or negativity contagious?

Arthur Brooks:

Yes, that’s emotional contagion. There’s a lot of literature on emotional contagion—it’s a virus, a mind virus. Negativity is a virus, but so is positivity. You can actually spread positivity as well. When I go into companies, which I do a lot these days, I teach happiness inside executive teams and corporations. When I walk into a company, I can pretty quickly ascertain which virus is going around. This is why the mood, emotional well-being, and emotional self-management of CEOs are so critically important. Everybody notices when the boss is having a hard time. They might think, “The boss got yelled at this morning at breakfast,” or whatever it is. People can see it, and the result is that the virus tends to pass around. A “this sucks” attitude is horrible inside families, and we see it transmit from one person to another to another to another. That’s why it’s hard to live with a high negative affect person—they spread a negativity virus. Even if you live down the street, it depends on how much contact you have with that person. That’s why you want your kids to hang out with positive friends. When my kids were little, they’d have that one friend who’s happy all the time—you love that kid. Then there’s the one kid who’s just bummed out all the time, and you’re like, “I don’t want my kid to be around that,” because it infects the attitudes of your children.

In the book, you mention that living within a mile of a friend or family member who becomes happier makes you 25% likelier to become happier too, if you have contact with that person. Obviously, it’s not going to transmit just through the air—it’s not the coronavirus—but you have to have contact with the person. The way they measured that is through the Framingham Heart Study, which was conducted in Framingham, a suburb of Boston. For many years, they were looking at the trajectory of people’s lives to study heart issues, but then they started measuring everything else. They found, for example, that obesity is highly contagious—when your friends become obese, you’re more likely to become obese. When your friends get divorced, you’re more likely to get divorced. But when your friends get happy, you’re more likely to get happy. The more proximity you have to them, measured geographically or in terms of the intimacy of the relationship, the stronger the transmission mechanism.

Host:

I think a lot about how we take on other people’s problems when they’re friends and family. What do you say to that, and does it matter that we take on other people’s problems?

Arthur Brooks:

Sort of. There’s a big distinction between empathy and compassion. The best way to be a parent, partner, or friend is to be compassionate, not empathetic. Our society overvalues empathy. Empathy is feeling somebody else’s pain—that’s taking on their problems. The worst parents of teenagers are highly empathetic people. It’s like, “Yeah, I feel your pain.” Why? Because you’re not actually helping. You’ve got to do things that they might not like. You’re not their friend; you’re their dad. That means being compassionate, not empathetic. The same thing is true on a broader level. I would argue that our welfare systems in our countries need to be more compassionate as opposed to simply empathetic. Being compassionate means being hard as steel and doing the things that people actually need because you love them, not just because you’re feeling their pain. In our families, we need to say, “What does this person that I love actually need, notwithstanding the feelings that they’re transmitting to me?” Sometimes that means you’ve got to care for your own happiness—like they say on the plane, “Put on your own oxygen mask first.” Take care of your own happiness so you’re not getting this negativity virus all the time, being paralyzed by somebody else’s pain. You’re not going to help them enough.

It’s almost never justified to cut off contact, except in cases of abuse. I only recommend family schisms when there’s actual abuse. Somebody being unhappy is not abuse. Political differences are really not abuse. It’s insane that one in six Americans is not speaking to a family member because of political differences. That’s simply insane and not a good reason to do that unless there’s actual abuse.

Sponsor Break

Host:

Quick one—if you’ve heard me speak on this podcast before about company culture and the secret to building a world-class company, you know that everything starts with people, which brings me to our sponsor on this podcast, which I’m very excited to announce today: LinkedIn Jobs. Entrepreneurs and business owners listening to this podcast will want to hear this one, so stay tuned for a second. Whenever I’m looking to hire, my first port of call is LinkedIn Jobs. Throughout all of my companies, this is our go-to method of hiring, and let me tell you why. Firstly, it’s super easy—it takes about five minutes to create a free job post on LinkedIn. Secondly, you can add a hiring frame to your profile picture, allowing others to know that you’re hiring. Lastly, you can set up screening questions, which is LinkedIn’s way of helping you find the best possible candidate that matches your needs. Today, I’m giving the Diary of a CEO community a free LinkedIn job post. Head to linkedin.com/doac now and let me know how you get on. Terms and conditions apply. That’s a free job post—go get it now.

Introverts vs. Extroverts

Host:

Who’s happier—introverts or extroverts?

Arthur Brooks:

The classic finding from tons of studies is that extroverts have more positive affect; they tend to have a higher mood. But introverts have special gifts—they have closer relationships and deeper emotional connections to other people. The result is that they have long-term friendships and marriage partners that sustain them in a way that extroverts don’t. Extroverts often get really lonely because they’re more focused on breadth than depth in relationships.

Are you an extrovert? It’s such an interesting question because you might not be, even though you’re a mad scientist.

Host:

I don’t think I am. When I’m at a party, I find that it sucks energy out of me. I just want to be alone.

Arthur Brooks:

So, when you’re at a party, do you find that it drains you?

Host:

I don’t go to the party.

Arthur Brooks:

Certainly, your baseline is introversion, but you have extroverted characteristics because you’re able to do what good entrepreneurs need to do. You run a podcast—if you were a true introvert, you’d be like, “I’ve got to meet Arthur Brooks? What a pain.” But you like deep conversations, not small talk.

Host:

Yeah, I don’t like small talk. I have close friends—the same five guys I’ve known for years, basically since college. No others, other than this slot here who I consider friends, but the same five I’ve known for 12 years. They’re real friends, not deal friends. They were there when I was shoplifting pizzas to feed myself.

Arthur Brooks:

That’s interesting. Extroverts tend to get more short-term happiness, and introverts tend to have more long-term happiness. Extroverts get more enjoyment, and introverts get more meaning.

Metacognition

Host:

You used the word “metacognition” earlier when we were talking about happiness. It sounds like almost an antidote to unhappiness in some respects. What is metacognition? Explain this like I’m a 10-year-old.

Arthur Brooks:

Okay, metacognition simply means thinking about your thinking and taking more time as you react to your emotions. Emotions are produced in the limbic system of the brain, an ancient part of the brain. You react to them and decide what they mean in the prefrontal cortex, the C-suite of your head. That takes time—those are not the same place. You need to experience your emotions in your conscious executive brain, the bumper of tissue right behind your forehead.

When your kids are little and they’re freaking out about something, you don’t say, “Don’t be so limbic.” You say, “Use your words.” What you’re saying is, “Be metacognitive. Allow yourself to explain this thing that you’re feeling.” In so doing, you’re using your prefrontal cortex as opposed to relying on the limbic tissue of your brain.

Writing it down is a phenomenal example. If you’re anxious—anxiety is unfocused fear—fear was adapted in the human species to be episodic and intense. The way fear is supposed to work is that something happens, it alarms you, it illuminates the amygdala of your brain, which sends a signal through the hypothalamus to the pituitary gland, which then signals the adrenal gland sitting above the kidneys to spit out stress hormones. This happens in 74 milliseconds from the perception of a threat in the occipital lobe of your brain, where your visual cortex exists. Boom—this thing happens really quick and has saved your life thousands of times, especially because you live in London and could get run over at any second. It’s crazy—actually, because I’m looking the wrong direction for oncoming traffic, that’s my problem.

Fear is supposed to work that way—very episodic, very occasional. The problem in modern life is that we have all these vague threats that are kind of half-illuminating our amygdala, giving us a little drip of cortisol into our brain all the time, and that’s unfocused and freaking us out. The way to solve that problem metacognitively is to say, “Okay, I’ve got to focus it.” Take out a piece of paper and write down the number one thing that you’re afraid of right now that’s giving you this anxiety, this discomfort. Why is it happening? What’s the worst thing that can happen, and what would you do if that happened? You’re literally moving the experience from the amygdala, the emotional center, to the prefrontal cortex, the logical center, the C-suite. That should kill the anxiety or greatly attenuate it, turning it into a logical kind of fear that’s the right reaction to these threats. It will change your life.

If you’re experiencing a lot of anxiety, focus it every day for 10 minutes. Write it down. I’m a very anxious person, so I have a running list of the things that I’m afraid of. I keep lots of lists because journaling is so critically important. I also have a failure list. What am I afraid of? I’m afraid of failure. I’m a total striver from the beginning—failure is a specter for strivers. When I write it down and focus it, I go, “Oh yeah, it’s true.” Failure is a specter, but when you look at it, it goes away. When you’re not looking at it, it’s there. Part of the reason is because your self-image is one of a successful person—you’re self-objectifying as a successful person. You’re success-addicted, meaning the ventral striatum of your brain gets tapped every time somebody says, “Steve, you got another 7 million downloads,” or something. That’s not inherently meaningful in that way because the metric is what taps your ventral striatum again and again. If that’s going in the wrong direction and you’re not making progress, it feels somehow not successful, which is like a phantasm. Focus it, look at it—poof, it disappears. It doesn’t entirely disappear; it turns into what it really is, which is a mouse, not a lion.

Reflections on the Book

Host:

Your book is fantastic. We could talk for so long because there’s so much more in it. There are some unbelievable stats I was reading about social media, like a study showing that teens who texted more often than their peers experienced more depression, anxiety, and poorer relationships. There’s stuff about laughter, how you can feel 35% happier using humor therapy, gratitude, and all these things we haven’t covered, but they’re all in this fantastic, unbelievably accessible book. For someone as smart as you and Oprah, it’s so approachable. Thank you for that, because happiness is a complex thing. There’s an industry out there trying to simplify it into three steps to happiness or one weird trick, but your approach provides the nuance and complexity that the subject matter deserves. That offers us a path toward being happier, as you talk about in the book.

Arthur Brooks:

That’s why I wrote it. I wrote it for you. It actually reads like you wrote it for me, but I imagine everyone who reads it will feel that way. I highly recommend everybody goes and gets this book ASAP. It’s a really, really beautiful book as well.

Closing Tradition

Host:

We have a closing tradition on this podcast where the last guest leaves a question for the next guest, not knowing who they’re leaving it for. The question is: What are we supposed to do about the things that we cannot control? What is your opinion on this?

Arthur Brooks:

The things that we can’t control are virtually all outside ourselves. We have to accommodate ourselves to the fact that we live in a world where there are many things we can’t control and focus on the things that we can. How do we deal with things we can’t control? By refocusing our attention on the parts of our life that we actually can control, thus giving us agency and a sense of peace and perspective about the truly uncontrollable.

Host:

Thank you so much, Arthur. It’s been so wonderful to meet you. You’ve energized me this morning, and we started pretty early for me—this is super early. I appreciate it so much.

Arthur Brooks:

Thank you, Steve. It’s wonderful to be with you. I’ve admired you for such a long time, and getting to meet you in person has been a joy.

Host:

That means the world to me. For someone as profound and smart as you to say that means a ton. Thank you so much, Arthur, from the bottom of my heart. Really, really appreciate it.

Arthur Brooks:

Thank you. You too.

[Music]

Sponsor Break (Continued)

Host:

As you’ll know if you’ve listened to this podcast before, I’m an investor in a company called Huel, I’m on their board, and they sponsor this podcast. I have a very exciting announcement to make. This product called Daily Greens is one of the most highly requested products at Huel, but it’s never been sold in the UK before—until now. It’s often difficult to get all the greens into our diet that we need to have a healthy gut microbiome and a healthy body. With Huel’s Daily Greens product, with one scoop every morning—a very, very delicious scoop—you can get 91 vitamins, minerals, and whole food source nutrients into your diet. The most important point here is I genuinely believe it tastes delicious. It’s my favorite Huel product ever for all the reasons I’ve described. If you want access to this product, the link is in the description below. It launches in the UK in January, and because of the demand, I’m pretty sure it’s going to sell out.

Do you need a podcast to listen to next? We’ve discovered that people who liked this episode also tend to absolutely love another recent episode we’ve done, so I’ve linked to that episode in the description below. I know you’ll enjoy it.

Arthur C.Brooks 采访-学习笔记

0. 资料

1. 透视模型

1.1 幸福模型表格

1.2 支持性支柱表格

1.3 目标设定建议表格

1.4 其他关键信息表格

2. 采访原文

The Happiness Expert: Single Friends Will Keep You Single & Obesity Is Contagious!

Personal Roots of Studying Happiness

Hope and Survival

Agency and Happiness

Happiness as a Choice

Enjoyment

Satisfaction

Meaning

Collaboration with Oprah Winfrey

Love and Happiness

Focusing Less on Yourself

Emotional Contagion

Sponsor Break

Introverts vs. Extroverts

Metacognition

Reflections on the Book

Closing Tradition

Sponsor Break (Continued)

发表评论取消回复

0. 资料

1. 透视模型

1.1 幸福模型表格

1.2 支持性支柱表格

1.3 目标设定建议表格

1.4 其他关键信息表格

2. 采访原文

The Happiness Expert: Single Friends Will Keep You Single & Obesity Is Contagious!

Personal Roots of Studying Happiness

Hope and Survival

Agency and Happiness

Happiness as a Choice

Enjoyment

Satisfaction

Meaning

Collaboration with Oprah Winfrey

Love and Happiness

Focusing Less on Yourself

Emotional Contagion

Sponsor Break

Introverts vs. Extroverts

Metacognition

Reflections on the Book

Closing Tradition

Sponsor Break (Continued)

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