Hi everyone, I'm Katie Couric and this is next question. Today. We're going to be exploring happiness because we seem to be obsessed with that as a culture.
Just look to hire ed.
Some of the most elite universities tap courses on happiness, the science of it, the value of it, the history and future of it. There are podcasts about happiness, whole genres of Ernest's TV shows built to temporarily evoke it. I'm looking at you, Ted Lasso. Why are we all so smitten with happiness? Is it because the world is burning, because we're doom scrolling, because the Internet makes us want
what we can't have. Let's find out. My guest today is none other than happiness expert and one of those aforementioned happiness scholars, Arthur C.
Brooks.
Arthur also writes a regular column for The Atlantic on happiness, and his most recent book is called From Strength to Strength, Finding Success, Happiness, and Deep Purpose in the second half of Life. Here's our conversation, with all due respect, Arthur, what.
Makes telling me?
What makes you qualified? And what makes you an expert on happiness?
Yeah?
So, I am a PhD social scientist and I have studied behavioral economics and social psychological principles my entire career. I started off by studying beauty and why people admire things, why people love and are attracted to beauty. Later, I was studying philanthropy and charitable giving, why people voluntarily serve other people, And I kept finding that in those two areas, the tap root was happiness. The tap root was trying
to live a better life. And so I thought to myself as I as I got to the middle part of my career, you know, I'm going to study the main thing, the main thing that everybody wants. You know, I have the skills to look at these things. You know, I'm trained and applied statistics and all of these things that people suffer through and they're getting their PhDs. But it's very easy to get kind of stuck, you know,
studying marginal things. And when I started talking about the science of happiness, which there really is a huge science. I'm really bringing in the neuroscience and the social science and the philosophy of happiness and using my academic skills to bring these things together. I found everybody wanted to know more. And this is the magic part of it, Katie, You know, we're all we all have skills, you know, we've all worked hard to be good to what we're doing.
The real question for us in our careers is the why. And I got to the point in my life when I said, you know what, the why of my career is to lift people up and bring them together. And the way that I can do that is using my knowledge and my skills to help them pursue their happiness. And so I decided I was going to do that for the rest of my life.
Do you think happiness is the wrong word for what we're all searching for? Because it can be so fleeting and so elusive, and I'm not sure if it is even accurate in terms of what you talk about in your book.
Right, Yeah, No, So that's actually that's the first issue that I raise in my class. I teach a class in the Science of Happiness at the Harvard Business School, and I have one hundred and eighty students and about four hundred on the waiting list. I mean, it's it's a class that obviously, hey, kids, free candy. I mean they I mean happiness is something that they think I want.
And one of the ways that I reasons I use the word happiness is to bring people in, and then when we're talking with more precision, we boil it down a little bit more So on the first day of class, I say, okay, you spent all your elective points to get into the happiness class. You obviously must know what it is. So what is it in a cold column, which is you know? You go out and you say you, okay, you know what's happiness? And they'll say, that's the feeling I get when you know, I see my family on
Thanksgiving or something and they'll talk about their feelings. And I say, now, that's not right. That's like saying that your Thanksgiving dinner is the smell of the turkey. You wouldn't say that. I mean that the smell of the turkey is evidence of Thanksgiving dinner, and your feelings of happiness are evident of something deeper, more profound or real
phenomenon that you can study and practice and share. And then we start to develop the idea and the truth is that happiness is really a combination of three things. It's a combination of enjoyment, satisfaction, and purpose. Those are the big three things that people are looking for. And the truth is you need all kinds of experiences and emotions. You even need unhappiness to get those things. You need a full life, fully alive, And the science actually brings
out all those ideas. So you're right, we got to get people's attention. But happiness is a much deeper phenomenon than just hey, I feel happy.
I think of words like contentment, fulfillment, and inner piece. Even as happneyed as that phrase is when I think about what one's goal should be, right.
So the way to think about that, so contentment is really important. That's part of satisfaction with life. And so the key thing is that all the happiest people they haven't and think about it kind of like the macronutrients. You know, when you say dinner is protein, carbohydrates, and fat. I mean, it's kind of a clinical way to look at dinner. It's not very romantic, but you know it's like,
join me for dinner of protein, carbohydrates and fat. It's not that great, But the truth is, if you want to be healthy, you need all those three things in balance and abundance. Happiness basically is a way that we need to understand how to enjoy our lives. You know, from moment to moment, and which is not pleasure. It's it's something much deeper, something much more human than than than pleasure, and that there's a whole science behind that. Satisfaction is is the piece that you get when you
you achieve something that you've really worked for. That's the sense of contentment with your life because you've met your goals.
Now that can be a curse too.
Yeah, we'll talk about that later because I know I'm dying to talk to you.
Satisfaction as a real killer, but it can be. But then there's purpose and meaning and that's the that's really the deepest of all. You know, what is my life all about?
You know? How?
What's the coherence? What's the the general direction of my life? Why am I alive? And that takes a whole lot of work and a whole lot of suffering for people to understand the answer to that question. And nobody wants to suffer, and we don't need to look for it. It will, in point of fact, find all of us. And so those three things altogether, they encompass so many things and so many skills. And that's what's my privilege to write and teach.
But I'm curious.
What about our society today has made people have this yearning to learn more, to do more. I think if I told my parents when I was growing up, yeah, you know, I want to be happy and what can we do to be happy? I mean, it does sound marginally or moderately, I guess self indulgent to say it to our parents' generation. I think, but what is happening right now in the culture where people need this and they want it and they're yearning for it.
Yeah.
A couple of different things have happened along the Waymber, I was having a conversation with my dad. I changed careers. I was a classical musician for a long time in my late twenties. I knew I was going to have to change careers and I told my dad I was going to do it. He said, what, You're successful? Things are going well, he said. He said, why do you want to do that? And I said, Dad, I'm not happy? And he said, what makes you so special?
Yeah?
Yeah, right, totally, totally, Yeah, I get it. Well, A couple of things have happened.
Number one is happiness as a science has really exploded. And two generations ago, or even one generation ago, people didn't realize that. They really thought it was a nice to have, you know, good luck, live right, play by the rules, try to get lucky, you know, when it comes to happiness. And we actually know a lot more
than we did about that. In many ways, it follows the advent of care for mental illness or for even mood disorders, where you know, in nineteen fifty or even nineteen sixty, people just had to suffer, and now we know that there's a lot that you can do. The happiness science is not trying to get you from behind the line of scrimmage to you know, functioning adequately. It's going for you know, people who are functioning pretty well
to to be kind of fitness, you know, junkies. It's sort of people who are in good health, but they really want to work by going to the gym and getting better at that. Another thing that my parents' generation thought was completely crazy. Here's the other problem. That's actually why there's been such an explosion of interest. Happiness is declining.
We've seen actually happiness and decline since about nineteen ninety and you know, you and I were you know, as like young adults and these and you know, in those days and I mean, that's pretty extraordinary that it would be declining at a time when income is going up, when standard of living is going up, literacy is going up, child mortality is going down. Most indicators of what a good life is are going in one direction, but happiness is going in the other direction.
So you got to ask what's actually.
Going on and when people are I mean, you don't study air unless you don't have enough of it, and so that's a little of what's happening too.
I think, well, I thought.
That there were a lot of things that weren't going up. You know, a lot of people younger generation don't feel that they'll be as successful as their parents. They I think, worry about climate change, They worry about sort of the economy, there's so many They worry about democracy. So are these things really as good as you say they are?
Well, part of the is the difference between things getting better and what we're worried about, what we're worried about the future. And the key thing that we all know from our own lives is things can be pretty good, but if you're in bad shape for your happiness, you're going to be very worried about the future. And you're only going to see the negative side of everything. So this is a lot of what we see. Look, there are concerns, there are all kinds of things that we
need to do differently to. We do need to work on a democracy, we do need to work on all sorts of social issues to make our world better. But when people are very fired up, and quite frankly, there are a lot of people that are our age that are trying to conscript young people as kind of child soldiers into a culture war and kind of a baby boom more culture or on right and left, let's make everybody as afraid and angry as they can possibly be. But they're willing to join up forces like that when
the happiness is too low. When people are in a good place, they're less likely to say, look, I understand those problems, but life is pretty good. And when they say no, everything's rotten, you know we're all going to be in trouble. You know, the truth is that young people today they have as much opportunity and actually more prosperity than people have ever had before.
But it's hard to see.
The good things when you don't actually feel the happiness in life around you.
Well, let's talk about that. Why is happiness on the decline? If in fact things are pretty good and the world is humming along and things are as good as you say they are, why has happiness declined.
It's not as if it's great for everybody. I mean, it's like, as they say, your results may vary in almost anything, and so there's some people who truly are suffering, and so we don't want to make minimize that.
Even if things are going in the right direction in terms of trends.
We don't you know, individuals might have been having a hard time and there's still lots to do. So we have to emphasize the fact that things aren't perfect and we all have an opportunity to make things better.
So that's really good.
But what happens is when things are on balance, pretty prosperous and pretty free, but we don't see it. You have to look to other kinds of forces, and what we find is basically that we have a world that's been kind of torqued towards these idols that a lot of young people are falling prey to.
Now.
One of the great blessings of people our age Ktie is that there was no social media when we were young, and that means that we didn't have the kind of social comparison pressures, we didn't have the kind of materialistic pressures. We didn't have a sense that everybody's life was great and ours wasn't so good.
But that's a broader.
Case of people being induced toward these idols of money and power and pleasure and the admiration of strangers. Whereas the one of the great things that we find in the science of happiness is there's really four big habits that the happiest people have that are not consistent with those idols, and those are faith or a life philosophy, or something that gives you a sense of the why of life. It doesn't have to be a traditional religious faith. It has to be something that's bigger than you. Family
life and you decide what family life means. But these are the ties that bind and don't break, and often you don't choose, and God knows you wouldn't in many cases. But there are the people who take the two am phone call friendship as in real friends, not deal friends. And last but not least, it's work where you can serve others. And our society is pushing people away from faith, family, friends, and work, and toward a kind of self worship around money, power, pleasure,
and fame. And those are just unhealthy things. And that's really what explains a good deal of why it's so hard to just find happiness on your own.
You say, happy people love people and use things. Unhappy people use people and love things. That's right, which is basically their values and priorities are clearly not in the right place.
Yes, that's a more concise way of saying. You know, use people, love things, money, power, pleasure, and fame. Use things, love people, faith, family, friends, and work.
The service.
Yeah, other than social media, what do you think has caused a decline in happiness? Is it loneliness and isolation? I know that you started writing during the pandemic, your column for The Atlantic. You know what other factors are contributing to a decline of happiness.
One is a big cultural phenomenon that's very interesting that philosophers have been writing about for many centuries, which is that you can get a culture of fear. Now, fear and love are the opposite emotions. We often think that hatred and love are opposites, but hatred is a function of fear, and we find when we look at the neuroscience of fear, it occupies it. It's the most prominent negative, basic emotion produced by the limbic system of the brain.
Everybody's heard of the amygdala. It's the part of the brain that actually the almond shape little things on either side of your brain in the limbic system that they stimulate a lot of stress hormones, fight or flight or freeze. And what they do is they dominate all of the emotions. Well, the opposite most basic positive emotion is love. Fear and love are opposites. And you can have either polarity in
a company, or a family, or a whole country. And we've been for quite a long time in a fear polarity in our policy, in our culture, and that's hugely problematic. Look you and I, I mean, we're established, you know, we have our families. There's a lot that we can rely upon. But even people our age have been falling prey to this. Young people, on the other hand, they're quite vulnerable to the culture of fear and.
What foments it.
It's politicians that are you know, it's interesting, I'll tell young people, you know, but you are an unwilling soldier. If you hate because somebody's trying to tell you that you must hate and you must be afraid. You know that person does not have your best interest at heart. They're profiting You're not, as you know, I tell this
in every university campus that I go to. Don't be a willing participant in the baby Boomer culture war with canceling people you disagree with, you know, with actually weakening the fundamentals of our democracy. What you're doing is you're standing up for somebody else's values and you're falling prey to this fear. So fear in our culture is one of the biggest problems that we have, and it especially affects young people.
Well, I would say that that cancel culture movement was born on college campuses, not necessarily in the baby Boomer generation where people who didn't agree with you basically were I mean, where there's not a free and fair debate on all these issues that you're marginalized, canceled, or whatever you want to call it, you know, really ostracized if you have a different point of view. So I'm not sure I agree with this baby Boomer culture war that you ascribe to.
Well, what I find is is, you know, sitting on a college campus that it is largely it's a lot of people my age that have been promoting these ideas for a very long time. And you know, and in creating the environment where the people who are canceling are not the people who actually have been promoting these theories for a long time. I mean, these ideas took a long time to take root. True, we go across generations in this, and you know, cancel culture, which by the way,
it transcends campuses. You know, it's interesting if you're if you're somebody with very progressive politics and you're sitting in an evangelical church, for example, cancel culture is going to come for you too. If you're you know, if you're trying to get ahead in very populous Republican circles and you have more moderate conservative viewpoints, you're going to find cancel culture as well.
It's just really acute on college.
Campuses, and most ironic because this is supposed to be the marketplace of ideas. You know, we're all ide You're not supposed to feel safe on a college campus intellectually. You're supposed to be like, ah, I have heard something I really disagree with and now I'm.
Going to engage. And that's it's especially.
Troublesome when on a college campus we will have this particular campus culture. But it's the young people that can actually solve this problem.
How do you fight against the forces of fear and hate? Because I know that you write that happiness takes work, right and discipline and focus. You can't expect it to just happen. And so for us on a day to day basis, how do we try to get out of that kind of angry, enraged state that seems to be part and parcel of our daily existence.
Yeah, it's such a great question. And here's the good news.
There's actually a way to do this that all of us can practice in our own lives, and we can do it to you know, make manifest in our country and or make our world a little bit better. You know, there's a famous, you know, Bible verse that says perfect love drives out fear. But that's an ancient idea. Five hundred years before that was in you know, the New Testament of the Bible. Lausu, you know, the founder of
Taoist philosophy, said exactly the same thing. And what they were talking about is what we have learned as social scientists and people in the world of neuroscience have found that these are neutralizing factors on each other. That fear will neutralize love, but love will neutralize fear as well. We don't have to fight against fear. We simply need to have more love.
All right, Give me an example, because this does sound sort of woo woo to me, Arthur like, so, so play this out in real time, in real life.
Yeah, So this is what I do when I go on college campuses.
I say, look, do you want to do you want to weaken the forces of fear in your life and on your campus. You need to make friends with somebody with whom you disagree.
You need to go on social media and.
Say five loving things where other people are expressing hate. To go out of your way like a missionary, bringing love on purpose, even when it's uncomfortable. And then I take it up a notch, right, because one of the things that you see in a fear based culture. Very interestingly, people in their twenties today are a third less likely to say they're in love than you and I did when we were that when we were that age in the nineteen eighties, So what's up with that? And the
answer is fear is driving out love. So what I do is I say, Okay, do you want to treat your life like an entrepreneur, like a real startup, then the currency of the explosion of wealth in your life is actually love, and that means you need to take a risk, just like an entrepreneur does.
So I'll assign him.
I was doing a graduation speech not long ago, and I said, here's your homework. Friends, you got two weeks. You need to go tell somebody that you I have to say I love you. And again, maybe it's a family member with whom you've become a strange maybe somebody you're secretly in love with. Maybe it's a friend and you just don't talk to each other that way. If
it's not uncomfortable and scary, it's not entrepreneurial enough. And the crazy thing is I get tons of feedback saying game changer, game changer in my relationships, in my life, and in the lives of the people that I'm touching. We need more people that are willing to say, get you know what, I love you.
Well, that's one thing to say to someone in your family or your spouse or your friends who you don't see. But what about someone who is angry and mean and throwing arrows and daggers into your heart?
How do you?
I do agree with you that that comes from fear, This anger comes from fear or hate.
But how do you neutralize that?
So that's a very good question that Martin Luther King answered, And you gave a very famous sermon in nineteen fifty seven, So I want to turn your attention to this subject loving your inemy November seventeenth, nineteen fifty seven, of the Dexter Street Baptist Church, Montgomery, Alabama.
What's that purse you good to them?
That very famous sermon on the Gospel of Matthew, chapter five, verse forty four, famous one.
Love your enemy.
Something that we talk about and has not man an emotional something, loves, creative, understanding, good wills at all.
It is a refusal to any individual.
Because that's the question you're asking me, Katie, how do you love your enemies?
And here's what he said. Here's what doctor King said.
Weird, right, Jesus didn't say like your enemies because to like is a sentimental something, and there's lots of people we all don't like. Those are the people insulting you on social media. Those are the people who are wishing you ill. Those are people who are unfair and uncivilized.
I got it.
I got it in my life. You got them in your life. Everybody watching us or listening to us has them in their lives. But to love is a decision, it's a commitment. It's the only way that we can actually create some redemption. So the famous philosopher Thomas Aquinas he said that to love is to will the good of the other.
He didn't say it feel anything.
You cannot make the decision to like somebody, but you can make the decision to love somebody, because that's an action and you have to act in a particular way.
It's hard. This is the hard teaching.
But we're really up for it because what you find on all of the research on this is when people start to act out of love, even when they don't feel it, they actually start to do it on their own. The Dalai Lama one time told me, you know, I asked him, how do I love when I don't feel love?
He basically told me to fake it.
Fake it till you make it.
The Dali Lama.
Look, he's the world's most respected religious figure, and he's completely full of love. If the Dalai Lama says that we can fake it till we make it when it comes to love, I gotta believe it.
After the Break, it's Striver's Anonymous Arthur shares how to break a striver's cycle and find a new kind of fulfillment. That's right after this. I want to talk to you about your book because as a sixty five year old who has enjoyed some success in my life, I'm fascinated about sort of how to continue to find fulfillment. And I'm the confession Arthur, what's that. I'm Katie and I'm a striver. I know you are, and I am sort of the quintessential person that you talk about in your book,
someone who always is looking for the next thing. And when I saw you give that talk at the Aspen Ideas Festival.
I realize this is not all me.
A lot of it is sort of my brain and dopamine and adrenaline that causes me to want more and more and more, to keep succeeding, to keep striving, but to keep accomplishing right, And it's striving me crazy.
Yeah, I know, I know, you and me both.
I mean, it's like like you've had this legendary career which you continue to have and and everybody says, look, if I could be if I could be half as successful as Katie Kurk, i'd automatically be happy.
But here's the thing. Here's the crazy thing.
Everybody thinks they want to be happy and successful, but if they can only be one, they should be successful because then the automatically be happy, and that is incorrect. On the contrary, if you're happy, you'll feel successful and you get both. Here's the problem with that. Our world doesn't do that. Remember, money power pleasure fame. Money power pleasure fame is that it's and if you start to
get to some success, your brain changes. A little bit of brain science and you've heard me talk about this and it's not very complicated, but it's worth pointing out that when people are really addicted to success, their brain does more or less the same is when they're getting addicted to gambling or methamphetamine. You become very good at producing dopamine, which is it's called a neuromodulator. And what dopamine does is it doesn't give you pleasure, it gives
you anticipation of a reward. That's why when people get addicted to drugs or alcohol, or gambling or pornography or any of these bad things that takeover people's lives and hurt them, it's because they have all this anticipation and they get craving. Now, when people are really successful, money power, pleasure, fame, their brain gives them dopamine in anticipation of those rewards. And when you get really good at it, because I don't know, just hypothetically, let's say you're Katie Curic.
Well, then guess what happens. A little is not enough.
Your threshold keeps getting more and more and more and more.
Right, the treadmill starts going at terrifying speed.
You call it the hedonic treadmill.
Exactly right now.
There's a process in the brain called homeostasis. It's a complicated word with a simple idea. That is to say, your brain resets, I'm going to be so happy when I get that car. I'm going to be You're so happy when I get that watch or that shirt, of that relationship or that achievement. And then you reset almost immediately. You think your brain tells you because mother nature lies
that you're going to actually be satisfied forever. You're actually satisfied for a minute or maybe a week or I don't know, ten days on the outside, and then it's off to the races again.
Run, run, run, run run. That's what we all have to dominate.
And people who've had a lot of success, that's great because these are the people. I mean, look, think of all the good things you've done for me, because I've been watching you for a year, you've informed me you've made my life better. But that doesn't mean that along the way that has made you happy. So what we all need to do with our own kind of success addiction And nobody's watching you right now, nobody's going to be watching your show. Who's not a little bit of
a striver. I know your audience that we all can actually dominate the system by not going with the flow. Your brain says, go more, do more, hit the lever, hit the lever, get the cookie.
You need to stand up to that and behave in a different way. You need to do the opposite thing.
That's what the research says, and so that's probably what we need to talk.
About, right What is the opposite thing.
The opposite thing is not to have more. The opposite thing is to want less. Now, I know it sounds weird, but here's the way to think about it. Satisfaction finally scratching that itch, finally being satisfied is not doesn't just come from having more, doing more, seeing more, getting more.
It's what you have divided by what you want. Now, everybody remembers a little tiny bit in the recesses of their mind about their high school fractions, and you remember that if you've got halves divided by wants, there's two ways to increase that number. Increase the halves or decrease the wants. Here's the deal. We actually have the power to want less. We don't have to become a Buddhist monk. I mean, if you want to, that's great. You know, go study in the cave. That's fantastic, or go to
you know, a hill land retreat. I've done it. I recommend it. It's fantastic, But you don't have to do it. The key thing is to think about your wants to not be managed by your wants.
I have a.
Reverse bucket list. The bucket list is all about halves. The reverse bucket list is all about wants, and when I do on my birthday, Katie, and I recommend everybody's I make a list of all my cravings. All I'll finally be happy if I have this. I'll finally be happy if my book sells this number and I have or I do this thing on TV, whatever it happens to be. Everybody's got their thing. I get the car, I get whoever. You make a list of all those cravings, and you say I might get it and I might not.
Easy companies you go. That's moved the appetite, the craving, the desire from your automatic brain to your human brain to call the prefrontal cortex, and there you can manage your cravings. If you're conscious of them, you can manage them. It's not perfect, but you'll be amazed at how much more satisfying you will find ordinary life when you looking at the small things.
And look. I follow you on social media, and you know.
You're putting on social media pictures from your garden.
I love that, like your flowers and your garden, Katie.
I love that it's so beautiful on Instagram that you do that. That's you enjoying the small. Now to do that more, you actually have to be conscious of your worldly wants and manage them in that particular way. It's unnatural, but we all can do it.
It's interesting because you talk about preparing for the second half of your life, finding success, happiness, and deep purpose in the second half of your life is the subtitle from Strength to Strength. And I think you posit that you really are your most successful really by the time you're forty or say fifty, that you have fluid intelligence then and then you move to something called crystallized intelligence.
Explain that Earth, because I know what you mean, but I think for people who haven't read the book, explain what you mean.
Yeah, so there are two kinds of basic intelligen So the world tells you you get one big act. That's the world tells you get really really good at what you do, be really successful at what you do, and if you're lucky, you can keep it going forever.
You can't keep it going forever.
Now, if you're an athlete, you know that, right, If you're you know, you're Tom Brady, maybe you can keep going forever. But the rest of us mortals can't keep you know going. And you know, I actually have interviewed Olympic athletes and talk to people, and they're they're very much in touch with the fact that they can't keep going on forever.
But it's still really painful.
Now. The interesting thing that the research finds is that that thinking professions, knowledge professions, whether a doctor or a lawyer, or a financial professional or an electrician or lots of things that you tend to get better and better and better through your twenties and thirties and then max out and then you're not quite as good as you used
to be. And that's what burnout actually comes from. You know, your dentist, who suddenly, weirdly at age forty five, says, I think I'm going to take Fridays off to golf, Like what the heck?
You loved being a dentist. It's like, I don't know, I'm just less interested.
That's because your dentist isn't progressing and can't put her finger on why she's not as good a dentist.
Thank you for making my dentist a woman.
Yeah, I mean, it's like, my dentist is a woman and she's phenomenal. Right, I don't know if she's actually I don't think she's forty five yet. But the point is, I hope she reads my book. I'm gonna take her copy.
And so this is this is an important thing to keep our to keep our eye on, because a lot of people start panicking at this point and think, oh, oh no, Well, the truth is this is the time to celebrate because there's another intelligence that comes in behind it that's not about hard work and focus and and you know, living on the edge of the curve, innovative capacity, working memory, all the.
Stuff that made you good at what you did. It's about wisdom.
It's about knowledge about how to explain ideas, is how to teach. It's to go from innovator to instructor. And everybody can do that in their own way. I've seen you do this in your career. This is the most interesting thing. What are you now, your teacher? This is what we're doing. You're introducing your audience to big ideas that can act actually enrich them.
What are you?
You're your professor curic Now this is you've naturally moved on to this crystallized intelligence curve, and everybody can. There's a transformation if you're willing to take it. The people who are unhappy or living in the past. The people who are happy, they jump onto this wisdom curve. I'm going to teach, I'm going to mentor I'm going to lead teams. So if you're a startup entrepreneur and that's
fluid intelligence. If you're a venture capitalist, crystallized intelligence. If you're a star litigator, fluid, if you're a managing partner, crystallized You know, I used to do highly mathematical research papers on my flud intelligence curve. Now I write for The Atlantic and I talk to you crystallized intelligence, and I'm happy. I'm happier than I've ever been because I'm on the right curve.
I think about professional athletes, I think about CEOs, I think about honestly, President Obama, like how do they shift from sort of being in the epicenter, the white hot center of everything, where they have huge responsibility and all eyes are on them and then shift into a different mode without feeling that their best years are behind them? Because I do think about, you know, like, how do people manage that?
Yeah, yeah, it's very hard. The more success you have, the harder it is. And for a couple of different reasons, you're not quite sure that second curve is there. I mean, you're taking it on faith from a Harvard professor. That's one thing, actually jumping, that's something else. The second is you know a lot of people just love that first curve. And the reason they like it is because they get all these honors, They get all this they get all this admiration, they get all this prestige from it.
And the more successful and famous.
You are, the harder it is actually to say goodbye to those particular things. But the happy people are actually able to make that shift. They have the presence of mind.
Now.
One of the things that makes it much easier is they tend to be accompanied by somebody who loves them.
This is one of the things that you actually find.
And so whether it's a best friend, whether it's a spouse, whether it's your adult children, you need somebody who takes you by the hand and says, you know what, and this is you know, my wife did this for me.
My wife esther.
We've been already thirty one years now, and and you know she said I was retiring. It was a CEO, you know, But I did this research and I had to stop because I saw the writing was on the wall. I was not getting better at what I was doing, and so I said, I got to get on the second curve. I know it's out there. And she took me by the hand and said, it's okay. I love you. You're the father of my children and the love of my life, and whether you're successful in worldly terms or not,
I love you all the same. And that is so critically important because a lot of people were stuck on that fluid intelligence curve. On that first curve, They're like, I'm nothing, I am dead. If I'm not number one, if I'm not the striver, if I'm not the homo economicus, you know, if I'm not the.
Hardest marker in the room. Right, you need people who love you. That's really really critical.
I'm wondering, though, if you're inadvertently contributing to the last acceptable ism in society, and that's agism. You know, I know that the CEO of Target just said, I'm sixty five. I'm not retiring. And I wonder if with this second phase of life, if you're sort of saying to the world, Arthur, you know, if you're not under fifty, you don't have fluid intelligence, you're not at the top of your game. You need to go into this second stage of life and you need to leave leave the stage.
I mean, do you think about that?
I do?
But you know what, I actually I'm feathering my own nest as I get older. I'm fifty eight years old, and I want to be working for a long time, but where I'm best suited to work.
So this is the key thing. Here's what I have this view, Katie.
You know what, I look at these Silicon Valley firms, these tech firms and social media firms and all that, and they're making all these errors that older executives just shake their heads, like how do they make that error? The reason is because all fluid intelligence, no crystallized intelligence.
In other words, it's all brains, no wisdom.
And that's a big problem because they're making all the mistakes that all the older guys and women they made a thousand years ago in their careers. My view is that we need way more people in positions of leadership or over seventy that's my view, using their crystallized intelligence, not relying on their fluid intelligence.
You know, that's what we need.
I think every executive team, every C suite needs somebody over seventy.
Every marketing team, every product team, these.
Social media companies, they need old people who actually can say so. My view is that no, on the contrary, this is the permanent employment plan for us, as long as we're actually doing it right and not trying to live in the past.
Is the way that it works.
The infetus, I guess for this book was when you were sitting in an airplane and you were listening to a really sad and upsetting conversation an older gentleman talking to his wife saying, my life is over. I kind of wish I were dead, and you take it from there.
Yeah, So, you know, I was kind of in a tender point in my life. You know, I had been running this think tank in Washington, d C. It had been going really, really well, but I was wondering, you know, what is the cadence of my own life?
Where am I going? Where does this? I just do it again and do it again, and do it again and.
Then stop and they just hope for the best, and you know, hanging around the house, I don't know, you know, ten years, fifteen years from hour is going to go. And I was kind of contemplating it existentially, and when I heard this conversation. I overheard it. Now, as a
behavioral social scientist, my laboratory is the overheard conversation. So for everybody watching and listening to us right now, if you're behind me in a Starbucks confessing that somebody broke your heart, keep your voice down because I might write a book about it anyway. So I hear this conversation with this couple behind me on the plane, in this key moment in my own life. And you know, he's kind of mumbling by here, his wife saying, oh, don't say it would be better if you were dead, And
I'm like, holy moly, I wasn't I'm not eavesdropping. But this is big and and and she's trying to console him, and he's really unconsolable the fact that nobody cares about him, nobody's listening to him. Okay, so we land at the airport. This is a night flight. We land at the airport at our destination. Everybody stands up and the lights go on and and we turn around. I wanted to see him. I just wanted to see his face. And it was one of the most famous successful men.
In the world.
This is somebody that everybody knows now what. He's a hero from decades past. Is not some controversial actor you know, or you know, a politician, No, no, no, this is this is somebody who did big things that we all admire. And and you know it's in his late eighties, and and and.
And he's he's confessing this thing.
So we're walking out of the airplane, and the pilot, you know how, they all stand by the cockpit door thing, thanks for flying United folks. And he stops the guy who's right behind me blowing my mind at this point because you know, the whole model of success is wrong.
Okay.
If I could half as successful as that guy, I'd be automatically happy over the moon. Right, No, wrong, okay. So he sees the guy, the hero on the plane and he says, sir, you've been my hero since I was a little boy. And I turn around and he's beaming with pride. And I asked myself, so which is it? Is it this one or the one half an hour ago? And I thought to myself, our model of success and happiness is wrong. In truth, the data are very clear.
The people who tend to be most disappointed with their lives after seventy and eighty are the ones who are most successful early on, and the reason is because they can't live up to their own standards. They're addicted to success and now the party's over and they if you look, if you don't do anything with your life, you won't know when the party's over. But boy, oh boy, if you do a lot, you're really gonna know. And I said, I'm going in search of the secret to be both successful and happy.
And that's what this book is. It's the book that I needed in my life. I wrote it for you too.
I'm actually writing a book right now about the things I wish I I knew when I was twenty five, which is the Science of Happiness for the Young Driver that's coming next. But I didn't get that book because that book hadn't been written yet. And I've really lived according to it. And you can be successful and happy, but you can't leave it up to chance. I mean, mother nature is not going to take you in that direction.
And so what do you think the guy sitting behind you in the airplane did wrong.
What he was doing was he was reliving past glory and wishing that he could keep that alive forever. And it turns out that's very common. In the book, I talk about the case of Charles Darwin, you know, the great naturalist, and everybody knows what a hero, what a great figure he was. He'd bury at Westminster Abbey because he's such a national hero. He died an unhappy man, and the reason is because he kind of got to the end of his fluid intelligence.
He wanted to stay on that curve.
He never moved curves, and he spent the last twenty five years of his life kind of regretting the fact that he couldn't make any more progress, and he didn't enjoy his research, and he felt kind of washed up and kind of like a loser. Charles Darwin, one of the greatest naturalists scientists who's ever lived, died unhappy for
the same reason that so many people do. If I could talk to any of these people, I would talk about the structure of the brain, that how the fluid intelligence goes to the crystallized intelligence, and happiness is right in front of them if they're willing to grab it and change their own lives.
How do they recognize, or how does anyone recognize when it's time to jump to the second curve? That your fluid intelligent is drying up right, and you need to go for the crystallized intelligence, and you need to make that shift not only in your head, but in your heart and in your habits.
To begin with.
It's a really good idea to understand this before you need it, right, And.
Not all of us do, I mean not all of us have.
Been able to have that, but you know everybody's listening to us who's thirty and as a striver and you know who you are right to start thinking, I'm doing this right now and I'm in this a great party. But while with the crystallized version of what I'm good at, what might it look like? Just to kind of visualize it a little bit, because twenty years from now you might want to be thinking about that.
You don't have to change careers.
Necessarily, although that's not out of the question either, but what might it look like?
What's your flight of fancy? What would give you joy to think about? This?
Really a crystallized kind of kind of skill, that's number one. But the key thing is that that that that people need to they'll see that the fluid intelligence hasn't declined way before anybody else does, and the tell is burnout. That's the tell. You know, when people start saying, I used to like this more than than I do. Now this used to excite me more than it does now, that means you're not making progress. People are wired for progress. Human beings get no pleasure from the status quo. We're
not wired for It's very interesting, you know. One of the things that I've studied is is you know diets. Diets have a ninety five percent failure rate, right, I mean, what industry can continue to exist? It exists on hope, not results. Now here's the thing. Dieting is pretty easy,
but keeping weight off is near impossible. The reason is because you're perfectly willing to forego the food that you love as long as the scale is going down, because you know that the happiness from the scale going down is higher than the unhappiness from not eating scones or donuts or something like that.
But then when you reach your goal weight.
The reward is you never get to eat ever again what you like. That's not a very nice reward, and so people abandon the diet. That's all about progress. People love progress, but the state is quo is terrible. So you're going to notice, you know, maybe forty forty five, fifty, whatever happens to be, I like it less. That's when it's time to start thinking about that second curve. That's when it's time to start thinking about the reverse bucket list.
So you're not adding adding adding, that's when it start. It's time to actually think about who's going to hold me by the hand, who is in part of my root system. That's when it's time to start thinking, what are the friendships that I actually need? What are the spiritual relationships that I can actually cultivate? And if you do these things, that's why I wrote the book, this could be the greatest, most joyful adventure in life.
This is the best time of life.
But if you don't do it, it's like walking through a forest at night with no guide and no flashlight.
What are things every person can do to kind of have a more fulfilling, purposeful life that has more love than fear, right, and that that can just sort of feed you in a way with all the right things and not all the wrong things.
Yeah.
No, The couple of things to keep in mind. The first is that all these things that I write, all these things that I teach, that I'm privileged to be able to talk to you about all these things are accessible to everybody. You don't need to be a nerd with a phdu teaches at Harvard to actually learn about these ideas. I write about this in the Atlantic because I want to bring the these ideas to millions of people in relatively non technical terms. You don't have to
be a technical specialist to understand that. But you got to do the work. Wishing is not enough. Just wishing you were happier will make you unhappier because you'll focus on your unhappiness. But if you do the work that's habits, not hacks, committing yourself to living in a better way, in a newer way, this is magic. That's part one. Part two is this. You got to practice these things. You can't just learn about these You got to practice
these things in your life. I can teach you that gratitude is one of the greatest tricks, but it's not enough.
For to be a trick. It's got to be a way of life.
And so practice these things and committing yourself to doing it is like going to the gym, not once, it's going to the gym five days a week or four days a week or whatever happens to be, and then you start to see a transformation, you enjoy it. In a last but not least, you got to share these ideas. Look, we've talked about a whole bunch of science and very accessible terms. Here's what I would wish that will really help a lot of people who are watching us to
make these ideas come to life. Find three people that you love and if you need to watch our conversation again and take notes and go teach these things. You know what that'll do is it'll move them from an impression to the executive center of your brain. You know, becoming a teacher is the best possible way to absorb ideas. My father was a mathematician. He said, I only understood math when I had taught calculus fifty times, you know. And the truth is, we can all be happiness teachers.
And the more that we are bringing these secrets in a spirit of love and sisterhood and brotherhood to everybody we possibly can, the happier we're going to get. In other words, understand practice and share a.
Lot of this is in the book. You talk about living in the present, but that takes discipline. You know, and I think you say. Someone said we shouldn't be called homo sapiens, we should be called homo prospectives.
That means we're always in the future and we're not really presient right now. Yeah, exactly. And that takes, you know, take it takes a little bit of effort. There's a whole mindfulness meditation movement going on out there, but it really isn't that complicated.
You got to you have.
To be alive now, you know, when you're washing the dishes, say I'm washing the dishes. Now, don't distract yourself from everything. When you're on the train, look out the window and actually be on the train at that particular moment. That's the real magic of mindfulness that I've found. And it's really quite transformed my life. Katie's when I found because I saw theoretically in the literature is going to make me happier, and now.
I do it.
I go on these walks for an hour with no devices, and I smell the morning air and I stop when I look at flowers. I'm telling you, I mean, it's just it sounds so dumb. I'm a fifty eight year old man. I should know this at this point, it's just the best.
When I read about that, I also thought, Yes, I want to live in the moment, but I also want to care about the future. Yeah, I want to be a concerned citizen who is focused on helping people preserve the planet. Right, So, how do those things work in tandem?
You're much better at actually thinking clearly about a better future when you're fully.
Present right now.
The reason is because your love relationships blossom you appreciate the things that you're actually seeing. You don't have a full appreciation for the people and the things around you unless you're fully mindful right now, and as such, you won't be able to create a future. You won't be able to envision a future that actually is better than the status quo. Here are the best news about being here now. It makes you better in the future as well.
A big thank you to my guest Arthur C.
Brooks.
You can find many of his happiness insights at The Atlantic and go check out his book From Strength to Strength to start living your best life now. Next Question with Katie Kirk is a production of iHeartMedia and Katie Kirk Media. The executive producers are Me, Katie Kirk, and Courtney Ltz. The super producer as Lauren Hanson, Associate producers Derek Clements and Adriana Fazio. The show is edited and
mixed by Derek Clements. For more information about today's episode, or to sign up for my morning newsletter, wake Upcall, go to Katiecuric dot com. You can also find me at Katiekuric on Instagram and all my social media channels. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.