Pushkin.
Hey, it's doctor Laurie Santos here. The science says that giving a dollar away can make you feel happier than spending on yourself, and if you're in the mood to make every dollar you donate count this holiday season, the Happiness Lab has teamed up with GiveDirectly dot org. If we all pull together, we can make a huge difference to one African village in twenty twenty four.
Kibobo, I think is a great place if people want somewhere to support people there are living in really desperate situation. They lack almost everything.
Rory Stewart from GiveDirectly dot org says money from Happiness Lab listeners will go directly to the people of Kebobo in Rwanda, who'll be loved to decide on their own how to best spend it to improve their lives.
Getting a little bit of cash is what will allow you to fix your house, buy a cow which could provide milk for your family, get a relative who's ill to the local hospital. These things that are genuinely life transforming.
So if you can spare just a few bucks and want to join me and other fans of the show to help the folks in Cabobo, then go to this website give directly dot org slash happiness. That's give directly dot org slash happiness. Just a few dollars can make.
A huge difference.
Happy Giving, Hey Happiness Lab Listeners, Today we're bringing you an extra special treat. It's an episode from another podcast that I think you'll like a lot. It's the new Build the Life You Want series from Oprah's SuperSoul. In the series, Oprah and Harvard professor Arthur Brooks offer listeners a better understanding of the science behind happiness, which is something that we constantly aim for on our show. Check out the episode because you'll walk away with tips on
how to make your own lives happier. You can also listen to the Build the Life you Want series on Oprah's SuperSoul wherever you get your podcasts. Now here's the episode.
Thanks to the Heart for supporting this special bonus episode of SuperSoul. So Arthur Brooks, Arthur, welcome back, Thank you, and I'll started right here. During the pandemic, I came across a column in the Atlantic magazine and noticed that I started to look forward to reading it every week.
It's called how to Build a Life by Arthur Brooks.
I knew I had to meet the man who wrote such insightful advice, So, Arthur Brooks, it is my great pleasure to meet you.
I am such a huge fan of yours.
Arthur Brooks is a world renowned social scientist.
Happiness is really a combination of three things, enjoyment, satisfaction, and meaning.
The author of many books, including the number one New York Times bestseller From Strength to Strength.
I'm a big fan of how to Build a Life column in The Atlantic. I find myself sharing with my kids all the time.
And a professor at Harvard Business School who's course onhappyess is so popular there's always a long wait list thought.
About it and I thought, it's not about them. It's not about Harvard. This is about everybody who needs the science of happiness. The whole world is of the waiting list for this class.
This year, Professor Brooks and I teamed up to co write a book we call Build a Life You Want The Art and Science of getting Happier, and I am very happy to say a debuted at the top of the New York Times bestseller list.
We cooked up the whole book here in this room. It's really it's it's incredibly gratifying, And isn't it gratifying?
Also?
I mean I was really excited to hit number one on the New York Times Bestsellers. I mean, one of the reasons why it's so gratifying is because, first of all, number one is always gratifying.
R a nice number.
It's a nice, nice ring to it.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, I love that. But it also means that the work that we conceived in this room was well received, right, yeah.
You remember we talked about it. We discussed not what's going to be the book, but the why of the book. This was the big thing that we did here. We said, okay, what's the point. What are we trying to do? And it was lift people up and bring them together with science and ideas.
So we decided to do a three part series y'all to dive further into the book here on Super Soul, because my intention for this platform has always been to enhance the human experience and to bring you information that will open up your life. So I know that you listeners are interested in learning new ways to explore a life with meaning and purpose, which is what you, Arthur, are all about and before we get started, I think you should tell everyone actually about your day job or what you do.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, So my day job is I'm a teacher. I'm a college professor. I teach the science of happiness at the Harvard Business School. I also teach at Harvard Kennedy School, which trains people to go work in government. And I research and think and teach about behavior, human behavior, what motivates people to do what they do. I'm a social scientist.
Yes, I was going to say, you don't just teach there you are Actually.
Yeah, I'm a yeah so, and I've been a social scientist for the past thirty years. That's what I've been doing with my life, EHD social science indeed, indeed, and so that's and I teach. People ask ask you know, you're a professor. I say, yeah, Harvard Busines School. They say, what do you teach accounting, finance, marketing, supply chain management, you know, something really practical like that. I say, no,
I teach happiness. And they think I'm lying, Yeah, but it's it's I teach happiness with the same seriousness that you would teach supply chain management. Look, your your life is an enterprise your life is your startup. Treat it as such, treat it with seriousness, you know, treat the inside of your head the same way you would treat your p and L statement. Yeah, is the bottom line.
Your life is your startup, the biggest startup you're ever going.
To have, totally is the best enterprise you could be part of, and the most serious one of that.
Yeah.
So on this series, we're exploring the ideas in the book where Arthur the author for science based practices and wisdom that anybody can use to become happy.
I call it happier nest.
It was so good that you coined that helpful to me because for the longest time, people would say, you know, the goal is happiness, and I would say, no, it's getting happier, but that doesn't have a ring to it. And I told you that for the first time and you said, so, the goal.
Is happier nes happierness.
It's the right word.
Yeah.
Yeah, I love it, uh huh. And now people are saying it.
My students are saying, yeah, we need a T shirt.
Yeah.
Before we dive into the book, let's talk about your own journey though, because people want to know your story, because you are the professor of happiness and how did you get here?
At age fifty five?
You left a very successful career and you were chief executive of a think tank, and now then you started studying happiness. Was it to bring greater happiness to yourself?
For sure and other people? You go through kind of a not necessarily a dark night of the soul, but at certain points of your life they're hinge points when you have to ask yourself, why am I doing what I'm doing? And what is mission of my own life? And the truth is, as I thought about it and prayed about it and talk to the people I love about it, it was very clear the mission of my life is to lift people up and bring them together and ideas of love and happiness using this.
Well, you were also doing that with the think tank, right, I.
Was trying, But it was good. It was good. I was grateful for having done that. I did that for eleven years, but it was time for somebody else to do that. And at fifty five, I still had plenty of still had plenty of gas in the tank, and I wanted to use everything that I knew for other people and quite frankly for me too. I wanted to dig into this thing called that we now call happierness and see whether or not it was achievable in my own life, and if it was, could I bring it to others.
Well, you know, studies are showing that America is in a happiness slump. I don't think you even need a study to figure that out. You just look around you, or you turn on your computer, you look at your phone. I mean, the news, the conspiracy theories, what is going on.
Yeah, no, it's true. I mean the data are unambiguous and the experience that we all have that it feels like people are less happy. It's true. And there's kind of two things that we need to understand there. You could say that there's problems in the climate and problems in the weather. The climate has been changing for happiness for decades now, since the late eighties, maybe the early nineties. People have been gradually getting a little less happy year
after year after year, just a little tiny bit. And that has to do with the fact that people are less likely to live a spiritual or religious life or find a life of meaning in those institutions. They're less likely to have a close relationship with their families. People have fewer and fewer friends who know them well. People have less of a sense that they're serving others with their work. That's the climate, and that's been a problem
for a long time. Then there's weather storms. There have been two big storms in the past couple of decades that we have to pay attention to. The first was around two thousand and eight, two thousand and nine. Now, I know everybody watching us is like, oh, obviously the financial crisis, that wasn't it.
I thought it was.
It was social media. Same time. That's when everybody started looking at social media. Everybody, right, just nine.
That's when I got on what used to be Twitter.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, the artist formerly known as Twitter. Yeah yeah, yeah, yea yeah, yeah, exactly right. And that's when when and a couple of things were happening. So so Twitter, for example, became a platform for people to be intensely negative. Instagram is not the same way. It's more of a platform where people compare themselves to others. But that had a big impact, especially on young people, especially on women and
girls fifteen to twenty five years old. It created a new kind of culture that was intensely comparative and problematic.
So social media actually, where people think it's bringing you closer together and you're communicating up Facebook, it's actually made people less happy.
Lonelier, lonely. Here's the weird thing. It's when you're super hungry and it's like, oh, man, I haven't eaten, you know, I haven't eight hours an hour and there, and you passed by a fast food place. Yeah, you're like, good, Yeah, that'll get the job done. And so you gorge yourself and your stuff. You do feel so good. An hour later, you're hungry again. What's what happened? The answer is you
didn't meet your nutrient needs. All you metage your caloric needs, and so the result is you stay hungry even though you don't need the calories. Social media is the junk food of social life. It's like getting all of your calories.
That is a tweetable moment, but we don't tweet anymore.
We x call it.
But so that's that's like getting all your meals at seven eleven.
Social media is the junk food.
Of social life. Social media is the junk food or social life. You'll get too many calories and not enough nutrients. That's the reason you'll binge and get Lonelier. Yes, that's a problem. Yes, And a lot of young people have never developed in a way where they can finally figure out how to use it responsibly.
What's going to happen to the generation that was born at that time, and that's all they've ever known.
We don't know. That's a big social experiment. That's a massive social experiment.
Now we're in the midstuff right now.
Yeah, it's not as if social media is all evil. I mean you can use it responsibly.
Absolutely.
If you would not let somebody into your house who bears you ill will you shouldn't let them into your head. And that means you shouldn't be looking at the social media where somebody can be tweeting at you or exing at you or yeah, and telling you that you know some you're that. Frankly, that's a big problem. That's the storm, that's the short of a century.
Wow, So let's get happier.
Let's do that.
Let's get happier.
On page five, you say happiness is not a destination, Happiness is a direction. I know that was a shift in mindset for many who are reading this book.
Can you expand a little bit on that?
Yeah, And you know, this is the problem with happiness is such a funny thing because we all want it. Every philosopher and theologian has talked about it. Everybody. I mean, how many times have people said that on your show?
I know that's what I say in the beginning of the book that thousands of times. Well, I became interested in the subject because every time I would sit with the audience and I'd say, what do you want? Everybody would always say multiple people would answer, I just want to be happy. I just want to be happy. But yet when you ask them, what does that look like for them? Hard to define for sure.
And part of the reason is because it's not something that you can define in any meaningful way. We think it's a feeling, we think it's a destination. It isn't either. You know, happy feelings are nothing more than emotions, and emotions are nothing more than information that we need in reaction to the outside environment. And as a destination, what would you why would you want to be completely happy
as a destination? You'd be dead in a week. Because you actually need negative emotions and experiences to train you to keep you vigilant, to keep you safe, and to be happy.
Yeah, to keep you alert, to keep you, to keep you on it.
Yeah, yeah, I mean maybe when I dine I'm in heaven, I see the face of God, the beatific vision will be pure happiness. But on earth, I'm telling you, I need my negative emotions to keep me alive and safe. I need my negative experiences to learn and grow. And so that's what people. They want to stay alive and safe, but they don't want the feeling that keep them alive and safe. And that's this conflict that they have, which is why they feel so unsettled.
Okay, So I think, particularly in this world of social media, people think if I just get that, I mean I see people toasting on private jets, and I see them, you know, on beaches and you know, hair their hair blowing in the wind and all that, and people think, well, if I just had that, I could be happy.
But we know.
You have the science to back it up that they're really four pillars, and if you don't have all of those pillars working in your life, you will eventually end up feeling not necessarily sad, but lonely or distanced or disconnected.
So the four pillars, there.
Are four pillars. There's kind of the four pillars you think that you need, and those four pillars that you really do need. The idols, the things that look right but aren't, or money, power, pleasure and fame. Those are the things that mother Nature said, you get those, you're going to be happy.
Money, power, pleasure and fame.
That's right. But she lies. Mother Nature lies. She lies a lot because she wants us to keep running, run and run and run and run it right.
Because is my mother nature telling us that?
Or is society telling ussel? Well, so I think mother nature is telling us that. It's the four pillars.
Well, mother nature gives us these imperatives because she wants us and wants us to be hungry, you know, and she wants us to survive and pass on our genes. Yes, and the way that you do that is money, power, pleasure, and fame, right, And she doesn't want us to figure out that those things never really satisfy, so that we'll keep running and running and running. That's called the hedonic treadmill.
What we really want, and this is backed up by a lot of psychology, neuroscience, behavioral economics, all the research that we want is that there's kind of four things that are the virtuous things that we should be looking for. The Mother Nature doesn't necessarily tell us but that if we take the divine path in life religious are not religiously understood. A better path in life will be happy.
And those are our faith, family, friends, and work that serves. Now, if you give any teenage kid the choice between money, power, pleasure and honor or faith, faith, family, good friends and good times and a work that serves others, I mean you're going to take yeah, right, I mean our society does aid in a bed. Mother Nature's lie. Yeah, because you know, the marketing colossus tells us that if you
get that car man, you're gonna be really happy. If you get that job, you get that money, if you get that one hundred thousand Instagram followers or whatever your number happens to be, it's never high enough, by the way, you're gonna be happy. But that's a lie, is the bottom. There's nothing wrong with those things. Yeah, But if you get those things, if we are so lucky to get those things, they should only ever be in service of the Big Four, the Good Four. They should only ever
be in service. They should be intermediate goals or rest stop in the New Jersey Turnpike, Manhattan. Where you're trying to get is faith, faith, and by that, Yeah, how do you.
Use that money, power, pleasure in fame to enhance your faith, family and work and friendship and friendships.
Basically your love, Yes, your love and your life and the love and the lives of the people around you. That's really what those those worldly goals should be used for if you want to have any shot it through happiness. Yeah.
I know we have a lot of questions from our readers, readers, people who have already read the book.
I'm so excited. Yeah, Okay. Eric from Denver, Hello, Hi, I'm.
Eric, and I learned from this book that you can't be happy, but you can be happier and that really resonated with me because it makes happiness feel like a thing I can incrementally work towards every day versus this big place to arrive.
My question is for you, Oprah.
I'm wondering how as you've gotten older, your approach to getting happier has changed.
Thank you for noticing that I've gotten older, Eric, Thank you. I think that's actually I like that.
Question, Eric, because as I've gotten older, and one of the reasons why I was so excited about working with Arthur here is because Arthur you confirmed my belief system.
So I have been. I have known since I was.
A kid that life is better when you share it, and I learned that with my first three Musketeers bar Because growing up poor, I so seldom got candy. I would save it until like cousins came by, so because it tasted better when I could share it.
And now I know Eric.
That that is one of the principles of enjoyment, which is what actually defined happiness, enjoyment, satisfaction, and purpose.
And so being able.
So to answer your question, I would say that now that I know that the science actually backs me up on life is better when you share it, I want to share it more so it used to be I would just love doing a random act of kindness or doing something meaningful for somebody that would help them in their lives or enhance their lives.
Now I make it a habit.
It's a part of my spiritual practice to include the enjoyment for myself of making other people happier. So I would say, as I've gotten older, that's what I've actually learned about how to enjoy happiness, not just for myself, but how to spread it to other people. So one of the things we talk about in the book is how enjoyment and satisfaction and purpose are the macro nutrients of happiness. So let's talk about enjoyment first and the difference between pleasure and enjoyment.
Yeah, this is a big mistake that a lot of people make. I mean, one of the things that we do in the book is we disabuse people of mistake and notions of happiness. Happiness is not a feeling. Happiness is not a destination. It's a direction or a happy eriness, etc. And another one has to do with this idea that I'm going to be happy if I can just hit the pleasure level over and over and over again. Yes, here's some words that have never been uttered. I'm really
happy because of methamphetamine. Nobody's ever said that. That is not what people say. And the reason is because if you use illicted drugs and drugs of abuse, you're going to hit the pleasure lever. It's going to feel good, but it's not going to make you happy. It's going to lead to addiction. It's going to lead to a super physiological level of dopamine in your brain. And all that does is gives you a tiny little reward and then goes away, tiny little reward and it goes away.
That's why you have to keep getting more and more and more and it doesn't.
Yeah, and then what happens is because that becomes an incredibly isolated thing.
And that's regardless if it's methamphetamine, or if it's your work, or if it's shopping, or if it's whatever it is on this that's just giving you pleasure for sure.
I mean that can be gambling, that can be that can be eating, that can be all kinds of things that whatever your thing is. Yeah, and here's how you know if it's a problem. Yeah, if you're hitting the pleasure lever over and over and over again and you're alone, then you know there's a problem. That's what it is. And that actually there inside the diagnosis, there is the solution. That's why you know. That's why Vandheuser Busch doesn't have a beer commercial of a guy alone in his apartment
pounding a twelve pack. That's why that's not the ad. That's because that doesn't lead to happiness, that leads to problem, doesn't.
That looks sad and pitiful.
Yeah, yeah, for sure. No, what they have is a guy with his buddies making a memory, the guy with his friends or his family making a memory. And therein lies the answer to this is not that you've got.
To because lots of advertising does that totally.
That's all the beer commercials do because they want you to be happier when they use their when you use their product, and the reasons they want you to have enjoyment, not just pleasure. Now, a lot of the problems that we have in kind of a puritanical culture about this would say that the solution is if you're hitting the pleasure lever repeatedly by yourself, get rid of the pleasure lever. But that's not necessarily the.
Solution, because the pleasure has its pleasures.
Totally, you need to add two things you need to add in order to have enjoyment. Exactly, you have to the source of pleasure plus people that you love plus memories. Now, what you're doing is you're moving the experience of the pleasure from the limbic system of your brain, which is deep down evolved over a forty million year period. All it is sending signals to you about how to survive.
I have the perfect example of this.
So all my life, from the moment I was working in Baltimore making twenty two thousand dollars a year, my first vacation I spent on going to a spa.
So I love a spa ying.
So I've been to mini spas by myself, were you know, massages, the whole pedicare, manicure, or the whole thing walking around in Europe. And this past April I went spa ing. I did a thing that when the first spy I went to, there was a very wealthy woman there. I remember a Getty I think was her name, and she was there with all of her friends, and I thought, wow, what would that be like to have enough money to
go with all of your friends for fun? It looks certainly more fun than me walking around alone in my bathroom. And this past April I did that with dear friends. And it's the most fun I ever had at.
A spat because you took the pleasure, yeah, added the people and made the memories. And we made the memories exactly right. That's enjoyment. Now. That means you don't have to forego the sources of pleasure. You have to add the people in the memory.
Now you got to take the plus memory people makes it exactly, makes it enjoyment.
Pleasure plus people plus memory. Now you can mess this up, right, You can have all your friends can be drunks, you know, and they can kind of then you can kind of go into a cycle like, yeah, a lot of people, you know, So I drink too much and he drinks too much, and we all drink too much and we all get really drunk together. Yeah. So I mean, obviously there are exceptions to this, but that's the basic rule of phone. You don't have to do less, you have
to add more. This is not a subtractive formula. This is an additive formula. Almost everything in the science of happiness is additive. You've got to add more ingredients to make it good.
So I think this is so great whatever it is you So this is this is an easy formula. Whatever it is you take pleasure in, yeah, find a way to add other people into that pleasure, and it becomes more enjoyable when you're making and you're making memories, babe, that's right.
And so you know, I'm not saying don't go to Vegas, just don't go alone. Four o'clock in the morning, going by yourself. No, no, no, no, go with your buddies, go with your spouse, go with your friends. And by the way, if you're being compulsive, they're going to say, dude, really, yeah, can you afford that?
Yeah?
And you're going to want to have more fun with the company, as opposed to compulsively pulling the lever again and again and again to get that little spritzer of dopamine onto the nuclear succumbence of your brain giving you that little relief, and that just goes away and you're still by yourself.
So enjoyment is one of the components. And in order to enjoy you've got to add other people and make it more conscious. Exactly right, Okay, Monica, what's your question from Michigan?
Hi, my name is Monica.
And when you talked about the difference between pleasure and enjoyment in the book, that really struck me and I realized that I tend to seek pleasure to cope with disappointment or sadness or anger. So I would love to hear some examples from both of you, Arthur and Oprah, around how to disrupt that pattern when, as you say, pleasure is easy and enjoyment is hard.
That's good disruption, right, I mean the whole idea is you get it. She knows. I mean, by the way, the first she's good. Yeah, Monica is good because Monica realized she already has got knowledge about this. The basis of getting happier is knowledge. Yeah, you know, this is the thing. A lot of people are just like, I'm gonna feel let me feel something different.
No, no, no.
The Dali Lama says, think more, feel less, okay, which is really important. So that's why we wrote a book that has a lot of science in it because people need this particular knowledge. And she's really really on her way, and she understands that there's a cycle and hitting the lever to get the pleasure, hitting the lever to get the pleasure, you have to disrupt that cycle. That gets back to just what we were talking about before. You disrupt that cycle with love with another person, with people
that you care about. You add the person who disrupt that that little relationship, and you talk to people who suffer from addiction. Yeah. One of the things that I always talk about is that the addiction was like it was like my closest relationship you know it was it was like.
It was like my way. They were consumed by it.
Yeah, for sure, it was my lover. It was my best friend. And you know, I wanted to go away with my best friend, which was booze or whatever it happened to be, gambling the want I wanted to I wanted to go away with them. You disrupt that by adding a real, living human being. That's how you disrupt the cyclist at a person you love and.
Also accepting unhappiness. You say, without unhappiness, you wouldn't survive, learn or come up.
With good ideas.
Even if you could get rid of your unhappiness, it would be a huge mistake. The secret of the best life is to accept your unhappiness so you can learn and grow and manage the feelings that result. I think that's hard for people because what does that mean? To accept the unhappy? When you say accept, it often feels like, so, I'm just supposed to like do nothing. I'm just supposed to accept it. I'm supposed to surrender to it. I'm unhappy.
Yeah, No, that's that's not It's not the idea. The truth is that you need to accept it as normal. And this is A big part of our culture today is that we think that if we feel unhappiness or pain, there's something wrong with us, that there's evidence that something's broken. If you feel unhappy, you know, you go to if you're in college, you go to campus counseling and say, I'm really feeling anxious and I'm really feeling depressed. And
you know, my university it's a really hard university. If you're not anxious when you're at Harvard University, that's the problem. That means you're not working hard enough. Maybe that's when you need therapy. Quite frankly, you know, And I talk to young people and says, feeling really anxious about my studies. Of course you are. That's a normal thing. That's the acceptance, the acceptance of the fact that you have feelings, including negative feelings, and you'd be dead if you didn't.
Who's walking around at Harvard not feeling anxious?
Totally totally mean, by the way, including the faculty. Yeah, yeah, tell, it's like my students don't quite figure out that I'm like freaking out too.
Gane from Atlanta has a question about regret. Jane hi oprah hi Artha.
I'm Jane build the life you want has been the gift that I didn't even know that I needed. On page twenty, when I read that people who do not regret tend to make the same mistake over and over again, I thought, that's me. When I was eighteen years old, I failed an exam that would enable me to get into the university and my dad said, no, crying, move forward.
And I didn't.
Now my question is, how do I today begin to use regret as a tool when my African upbringing has dictated that I move forward and get on with it.
I love that.
It's a great question.
That is great.
It really is good because that's a lot of advice that we give our children. You know. It's like suck it up, suck it up, yeap, you know, and like move on, move on, move on. Now there's there's like ajournal of I mean, good for her father, because what he was really telling her was not forget about everything had happened. What he was telling her was don't ruminate on it, don't you know, go over it again and again and again and and have it, you know, create
a constant source of sadness in your life. On the contrary, you got to you got to keep moving. And that's true. But here's the thing. Rumination is not the same thing as understanding what you want. When something bad happens to you, you benefit from it tremendously if you analyze it like a scientist. Yes, so that's one of the reasons that I tell my students they keep a failure journal like a disappointment that we talked about in the book. Absolutely,
we talked about how you can do it. Yes, when something bad happens, you write it down and think about it. Don't ruminate on it. Don't have it be kind of like a ghost, you know, around haunting your the limbic system of your emotions. Then's use it as an opportunity to think about what actually happened. And when you do that, by the way, when you think about it as if you were analyzing a problem that somebody else had, this is something we're talking a lot about in the book,
then you will learn and grow. So the point is, don't ruminate. Understand. That's the way that you can actually use the information. Take the time to understand these things appropriately and learning grow.
The second macro nutrient of happiness satisfaction is that thrill from accomplishing a goal you work for.
Is what you say? Why is satisfaction also the key to getting happier.
We're made to make progress. Human beings are made to make progress. We're you know, we want to achieve. The funny thing is that people always think, when I get to my goal, then I'm going to be finally happy. But that commits that. That's this incredible fallacy that's called the arrival fallacy. You know, like you and I are doing high fives because the book hit number one in New York Times bestseller list. But if we're like, okay, now Oprah and Arthur are going to be happy forever,
we're kidding ourselves. No, next week we're going to be in doing a new project, doing a new thing. That's the truth. The arrival fallacy is once I finally get the money, once I finally get the marriage, once I finally get the car of the house to boat, then all will be well. The truth is that the greatest joy comes from the progress toward the accomplishment, even in spite of the fact that it requires a lot of struggle. Yeh, Satisfaction is that moment that you hit it, which is
a real moment of joy. Now the paradox in that is it doesn't last, and it can't last if you actually, if you know.
That's why you couldn't get no satisfaction.
Yeah, that's right. And the truth is you can't keep no satisfaction. That's the real problem. I mean, Mick Jagger had it almost right.
That's what I was thinking. Jagger couldn't get no satisfaction.
That's right, I mean, and the truth is, if you couldn't get it, you wouldn't keep trying and trying and trying. Like he says. The problem is you can't keep no satisfaction. And that's what seems kind of like a bitter fruit with a satisfaction dilemma. You need to struggle. If you don't struggle. By the way, there is no satisfaction. If my students cheat on my exam and they get an A,
there's no satisfaction, satisfaction. They do an all nighter and they work really hard and they get an A, they're like, yes, and you know how it feels. I mean, you and I were we worked hard on this book. Yeah, I mean it was it was. It was a quick job, but real quick turn.
And we were yeah, from the time that it Yeah, it's miraculous from the time we decided.
Chapter I don't know, and it was, but then boom and this satisfaction. Then the problem is thinking that once we arrive, it's going to be good forever, and then having a little the frustration that comes from the satisfaction is dispelled and there's a way to fix there's a way to a round that. But once again, you got to fight mother nature.
Okay, So you need enjoyment, you need satisfaction, and you also need purpose.
Those are the macro nutrients, like.
The protein, carbohydrates and fat.
Okay, and and how okay, so explain to people how the macro nutrients fit into the pillars.
Yeah. So the macro nutrients are basically the elements that we find that you need in balance and abundance. You can't just have a life of enjoyment. You also need satisfaction, you need goals, you need to struggle, and you need meaning, which is the why, the essence of your life. You need those things. The happiest people have those three things and they work on them. They take them seriously, and we spend tons of time about how to actually do that.
Yeah, then this is why this is so great. For y'all, and I mean y'all meaning myself too, because when I me and yeah, when we figured it out. I mean, those are the that's the baseline. You need enjoyment, you need satisfaction, and you need meaning and purpose, right, And let's talk about what meaning and purpose means because I think people get all confused about the purpose.
It like I don't know my purpose. I don't know my purpose. Yeah.
So those macronutrients are just like the macronutrients of food, the component parts of food. Yeah, and then you got the dishes and the dinner, which are the pillars that we'll talk about later, Okay, the things to actually be focusing on the things that you're working on. But the last macronutrient is meaning or purpose. Meaning is the essence
of your life. You know, who am I? It's this whole finding yourself thing, right, Like I gotta find myself and people from the beginning of time, it's like who am I? Right? And that's a that's no, that's no joke. That's a hard thing to do. I mean some people believe that you could discover it because of your essence precedes your existence. Yes, I mean most religious people, you know, people raised in the Christian faith like you and me.
I mean, we believe that we're made in God's image and that's our essence and it precedes us.
Right.
Other people think that they can create their own essence. This is you know, different philosophies believe. That's a tricky one, right. Some people believe there is no essence. That's a real problem, right. But the truth of the matter is that to do that And we talk about this in the book a little bit, that there's a quiz that you've got to give yourself and you have to have real sincere answers to two questions. Now, if you don't have them, it
means there's a crisis of meaning in your life. But that's a good thing to know that because then you have the opportunity to go in search of just the answers to just two questions. Yeah, question number one, why are you alive? And again I can't tell you that. I mean, it's like you gotta have your own answer to that, Yes, go in search of that answer. In the second for what are you willing to die today? And the answer probably shouldn't be no food, right, There's
got to be something. And once you actually find the answers to those questions. It's extraordinary, Oprah. You know when you see this my you know, you know a lot of my family not my family, and one my son, you haven't met yet because he's still an active duty marine. He's a scout sniper in the US Marine Corps. And you know he struggled in high school because meaning you know, it's like he was goofing off and he wasn't even having fun because he's like, who am I? So I
I'm a business school professor. I make my kids do a business plan when they're a junior in high school, you know, a business plan because the enterprise of life. Yeah, and they're entrepreneurs. I'm VC, I'm venture capital, so I deserve a business plan. I realized it's pretty nerdy, but there you go.
I like it.
Yeah, and so they and if it's not original, I send it back for revisions. Those are my son, Carlos. He's a good boy, and carl is like his business plans kind of. I don't know. I don't believe it. So I say, you need to find the answers to these questions. How are you going to find the answers to these questions? So in his business plan, he says, I'm not going to college, which is fine. I didn't either until I was thirty. You know, I took me a long time to get through college too. I wasn't ready.
He went to work on a farm. He spent two years on a dry land wheat for in Idaho. Then he joined the Marines. And he's twenty three. Now he's married, and he's got to going on and he's got answers to those two questions. And I asked him, Carlos, why were you born? Why are you alive? He said, because God made me to serve. For what are you willing to die today? He says, for my family, for my faith, for my friends, and for the United States of America.
Boom boom. And you know that's not everybody's answers were watching us. Yeah, but that boys got answers at three, at twenty three, and his life is different than it was. His life is meaning it's beautiful. As a father, I couldn't be prouder. I couldn't be prouder of the enterprise that he's building of his life. M he because you know he's becoming a good man.
Yes, yes, yes, yes, I love that you're the venture capitalist and bringing the plane.
Yeah all right, business school, Yeah, okay.
Chapter two is entitle the power of metacognition and what I call field to feel and then take the will explain medicognition. I think this is just one of the biggest, biggest, biggest contributions to people getting happier in their lives once you get the metacognition.
It's changed my life. Yeah, it's just changed my life. And part of the reason is because people go through life relatively unexamined in their emotions and just hoping that their emotions will get better, and with a complete inability to separate their own essence from their emotions. And that's a crazy thing to do. You're not your emotions. Look, I'm not my hand, you know. If it's it's I'm not my my hand is not completely independent. It was
like it's like one of the whole horror movies. But that's how people are with their emotions, where their emotions are controlling them. Metacognition is thinking about thinking. It's it's the ability to look at your own self with a certain intellectual remove at a distance. It's putting distance between your feelings and your reactions and doing it on purpose. When you have that ability, your life isn't going to
be the same. It just isn't because you're not going to wonder like, is something bad gonna happen to tomorrow? By the way, answer, yes, am I going to feel bad about it? I'm going to decide how I'm gonna work on this. I'm going to decide my reactions. I'm going to substitute emotions that are more appropriate for what I'm doing. Now, you have emotions for a reason, you're
not going to block them out. But once you have metacognitive skill where you can put space between the emotions that are simply signals from your brain about what's going on around you.
And the emotions are there to tell you that something's off, is just and you need to do something. It's it's just that your emotions are just information.
They are.
You can get that, and if you.
Can separate yourself from the thing that you're feeling, feel the feeling and then take control exactly right.
And the way that you do that is by putting space between the emotions and your reactions. Tell us how to do that, So you do that by by studying yourself.
Now, no don't you that Also by observing the feeling exactly as though it were happening, is somebody else's how you do you identify what this feeling as you say, oh, gosh, I'm feeling so sad right now, I'm feeling so put upon, I'm feeling so betrayed, whatever it is. But you separate that feeling from yourself. You're observing all those feelings inside your body so that you see that the feeling is really different from you.
You're in control of the feeling.
Exactly way, and you're you're able to react in an appropriate way. I mean, it's that we're so maladapted to the way that our feelings occur to us. I mean I talk to people all the time where once again back to social media, Yeah, I got a bad tweet and what are to do?
It?
It raised your stress hormones or through the roof. You've got butterflies in your stomach and the whole thing. The reason for that is because nature wants you to run away from a saber tooth tiger by injecting stress hormones in your system when you think there's a threat but or you don't want to wander the frozen tundra and
die alone. But you know, folks, look around, no tundra, Twitter's not ton And so the result is metacognition is very important so that we can we make it feel like it sure, And if you don't have an examined life, yes, then you're not going to be able to make those distinctions.
And so you can actually laugh at yourself when you're actually observing your own emotions at a certain remove, as if they were happening to another person, and you see yourself freaking out because of a tweet, you will start laughing. You will start You'll be like, really, Arthur, really really, Yeah, you're you're really I mean, it's like you're a grown man. You have a PhD or social scientist. You're supposed to
know all this stuff. And somebody said a mean thing to you on Twitter, and you're acting as if you know an axe murder is chasing you. Come on, man, and it's just funny and life gets better. And that's what metacognition can do for all of us if we have the right techniques.
Okay, so let's explain the emotional caffeine metaphor you mentioned on page seventy one.
We all love this the first time we heard it.
Tell us about it. So emotional caffeine. This is just a metaphor. Most people of something like ninety five percent of Americans use caffeine on a regular basis. I'm crazy about coffee. I lived. I grew up next to the first Starbucks in the world in the nineteen seventies. There was one Starbucks. My house was near it. I've been drinking in Seattle. Yeah. I grewu to Seattle on in the queen An neighborhood and he us to walk down to Pike Place mart. Yeah, the first one. Yeah. I've
talked to Howard Schultz about this. He thinks it's quite charming. But I've been drinking caffeine, I mean taking caffeine regularly since I was seventh grade, which means I have the most enervated adrenal system. And who knows. I mean, it's like the autopsy is going to be a fun time anyway. So, but what happens with your brain is you think it PEPs you up because it gives you all this energy. Is not what it does. Is it blocks another neurotransmitter
called a dentisine. A dentisine is a neurotransmitter that's floating around your brain that goes into these certain receptors and it mellows you out. So it makes you when you have time to be tired, time to lower your energy. Whatever it is. The problem is you got too much of it, Like in the morning, you're feeling kind of lethargic, too much a dentisine feeling those receptors. You get this caffeine where the molecule is the same size and shape and it goes into the parking spots for the a
dent scene blocking it. So it just can't mellow you out. That's what caffeine does. It blocks the neurotransmitter that you don't want. That's what it's doing. So it's not up, it's not it's preventing you from being perked down. That's that's not an expression. Is it to mellow you out? You don't want to be too much.
There's happierness. We can be perked down too, creating language.
I love it. So so that's what it's. And so the reason I use that particular metaphor, and you and I talk about this metaphor in the book, is because that's what you can do once you're a metacognitive and you're aware of your own emotions, and you're studying your own emotions. So many times throughout life you've got a particular emotion, but it's not the emotion you want. Choose another one, choose.
So you should have a store, like a little storage of better emotions, repertoire.
You need a better repetoi.
That's right, a repertoire better emotions.
So when you're in a funk, when you're perked down, you can go to something that.
Perks you up, exactly right. You can actually block the anxiety and depression.
Give me an example.
So, and it's an example from a mutual friend of ours, Rain Wilson. You know, the actor who is in the office. Yeah, he I noticed, you know, just through basic observation, that a lot of professional comedians are depressed. So I said, hey, man, what is it about professional comedy that bums you out so much? That makes you melancholic? And he said, no, no, you got it wrong. It's the opposite, is that we tend toward depression and we make a joke when we
feel down, and that solves the problem. That's emotional caffeine. When you make a joke and other people laugh. Life gets better. You lighten somebody else's load, and you lighten your own load, and you get relief. You get a little cup of Starbucks dark roast at that moment.
Is it also sort of like you know when I every time anybody knows this too. I'm sure this happens to you. You go to the doctor, the blood pressure cuff goes on. My blood pressure immediately goes up when I see the blood pressure cover coming.
I got the way. I definitely have the white coat syndrome.
I've literally I go to Cleveland clinic like once a year and they leave me in the room for a few minutes before so I can calm myself down because I got the white coat syndrome. And I start thinking about every happy thing. Walking in the woods with my dogs. I've always loved water sprinklers on a green lawn, you know, when you're walking and you can see the rainbow in the water.
So I start I have like this little storage, just a little place.
Yeah, a little repertoire of things to calm me down to think about.
So is that what emotional caffeine.
Emotional caffeine works exactly that way, And the key thing is thinking about the things, the things that the bew you know, the particular experiences that you have that are the problematic emotions that are that are maladapted. They're not exact, they're not the wrong emotion, they're just the emotion. It's just information. Yeah, But you can have another emotion that's
also extremely appropriate and choose that. If you're studying yourself and you've got distance between your reaction and to what you're feeling. If you're very reactive, if you're like a little kid, you know, you're angry, you yell, you're sad, you cry without thinking about it. On the contrary, when you're something is, it's and and it's fine. I mean, we like spontaneous people, but that's no way to live,
you know, when when you have little kids. When my kids were little, my wife and I would say, use your words. Let's say being metacognitive. That's what that really means, because when you use your words, you've moved the experience of the emotion into your prefrontal cortex, into your executive brain, and there you can make decisions like emotional caffeine. You can you can decide on on on different emotions that are more appropriate to the circumstances. So here's a you.
Can think of better thought.
You can think a better thought, and you can think.
A better thought if you have a repertoire, a thought to go to to think. It's hard to think a better thought when you're in the midst of the if you're all down.
So give yourself some space, get some space in there and say, okay, huh, I'm gonna go to the library. I'm gonna pick out that one. Here's a classic one that you do all you do super well, I've seen it.
You do it again and yeah, yeah, yeah, right, you're talking about.
Talk about ut Yeah.
Yeah.
So we feel resentment and we feel bitterness or we feel anger a lot, and the reason is because we're evolved to have those as dominant emotions. This is called the negativity bias. The negativity bias is that, you know, we actually have more brain space dedicated to producing emotions that are negative than positive, because negative emotions on the place to scene keep you alive. Yeah, somebody smiling sweetly
at you in the tribe, that's great. Somebody frowning at you might be a big problem when you step outside, and you.
Will remember that frown longer than you remember the twelve people who smiled.
Oh yes, oh yeah, because that's evolved to keep you alive. The problem is hugely maladapted and what it'll ruin big parts of our lives. Yeah, because we're so we're negative all the time. It's also unrealistic, the truth.
It's why in the beginning of the Oprah Show, when we were still just you know, taking phone calls and people were writing real letters by snail mail, if somebody wrote something negative or said something, I would track them down.
I'd get a thousand great letters.
I wouldn't respond but oh that's nice, that's nice, that's nice, and one negative thing. I would track them down. I'd find them in Louisiana.
Alabama, wherever you were. I'm gonna and.
Then call them up and say, excuse me, this is Oprah calling and they're like, what I know.
It's like I know, yeah, yeah, it's crazy. But you know, there's a there's a lot of literature on this. Social scientists and looks at us a lot. If you're out for dinner with your friends having a great old time and there's one point of disagreement, that's what you remember from the whole night that's.
The thing saying stays with you.
Right Thanksgiving dinner when you know Aunt Mabel, yeah something, you know, she she she went after you know, her nephew Jake because you know they disagreed about President Trump or something like that. And that's what everybody's like, Oh, that was the Thanksgiving or Aunt Mabel went berserk about politics or something. That's what you remember about.
Because we can't invite An Mabel again.
Yeah, because of that thing happened. You had a great time for three hours or four hours, and it was like three minutes. But the negativity bias, man, that's like a blinking life and.
We are so you're saying we're born that way.
We're born that way. Absolutely, we're born that way. And sometimes it's great because it saves your life. But a lot of times it just embitters beautiful things and it's unrealistic. It's not even right. Yeah, you know the truth is a lot of the times we're feeling resentment because it's like,
can you believe the quality of this airline food. It's like, dude, you're getting all the way across the country in six hours on your middle class salary and you're complaining about the fact that you don't like the food it's nuts, or it's like can you believe it's it's a little bit too cold on this plane, or you know whatever it happens to be.
That that we say that people just allow themselves to be absorbed by that.
Yeah. I mean, we have this incredibly privileged lives. I get it that we also have problems and we have suffering and not everything is perfect and all that, but on balance in modern life most of the time is pretty good. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, And this is the point that we can actually get that. I've seen you do this a bunch of times.
Oh. The gratitude thing is huge.
And I know it's been since you were a little kid. Yeah, right, that you basically, when you feel the resentment welling up inside you, when you feel the anger, even when you feel fear, that's when you start to That's when you start to reflect on the sources of heath and not.
Just reflect because it's not not enough sometimes just to like think about it. I actually I have volumes of gratitude journals.
Right, this is a really good thing because this is the.
Volumes of gratitude journals.
And now I hear like everybody talking about it, and I see these reels where people are talking about gratitude. I've been doing it for years and years and years.
Yeah, and when you write it down, by the way, it can't stay in your limbic system. Then it's in your prefrontal cortex. The act of writing something down and putting it into words puts it into the executive centers in your brain and it sits there. I mean, this is in your memory banks. At this point, you're really going to use it, and you have it in the most conscious, metacognitive way possible. This is the mac Gratitude journals are great. Everybody should keep a gratitude journal. I
the failure journal is fantastic. We talk about it in the book and all ways that you can take your sources of disgust and discontent and turn them into learning and growth.
Yeah.
But the gratitude journal is a must for everybody, and there are a lot of ways to do it. You know. The easiest way is every Sunday night, write down five things you're grateful for. It doesn't matter how stupid they are. It's like my team one, right, I ate a three Musketeers bars with my cousins. Yes, like you said, right, yeah, whatever it happens to be that delights your heart a little bit. And then you know, Monday through Saturday, look at those things and ponder them a little bit, give up,
maybe a word of thanks, maybe a little prayer. Sunday update it. The data say that on average, after ten weeks you'll be twelve percent happier.
I believe that, yeah, And I believe that in the moment when you are feeling the worst, if you can just take a deep breath and go to the thing that first of all, grateful for your breath, right, and start you know, actualizing for yourself. And you're saying writing down is more important than just thinking about it. The things you're grateful, you can feel your own vibration change.
Yeah, yeah, for sure, Yeah absolutely.
But for me also a walk in nature too.
Yeah, there's a lot of work on that. It's really interesting to begin with. That's a that's almost a form of worship for a lot of people.
It is for me.
You and I have walked here and and it was sort of magic. I remember that we were working super hard on cooking up this book and we walked all they were really really super time and then we took a long walk on twilight.
Yeah.
It was so beautiful, right, yeah, because everything was crazy.
Is a picture of that?
Yeah, there is a picture of that. Yeah, yeah, that's right. And it was somebody took a picture of us. It wasn't us, but it wasn't staged. Yeah, and it was it was I remember, it was relaxed and it was nice. And some researchers are asking what it is about the experience of touching nature and that you can even get more if you're barefoot. That's a that's a whole thing called grounding that I've heard of that, you know, as a social scientist, I'm like, but you know, it's funny.
The data are actually quite compelling that.
There's there's some truth to that.
There appears to be that, you know, your feet on the grass and soil, I mean, actually touching the grass and soil has a particularly profound impact physiologically on the what we're experiencing.
That's really interesting because I enjoy walking outside barefoot on the grass. But I thought it was because that's the way I was raised, you know, back to your Yeah, Mississippi. I thought it was like dirt road, Mississippi, and you're just just like a primal thing.
I didn't know that it was.
Yeah, no, there's there's there's work on that. And I do a lot of people, a lot of us remember when we were kids that you know, out in the backyard or you know, in the neighborhood and running around with our bare feet, and it brings us back to those particular times. You can smell certain things from your childhood, but there is more to it than that. There scientists believe that there is more to the experience of touching
nature than that. A lot of times I wind up giving a lot of counsel and support to young people who are in their twenties and they feel quite lost, and I get it, you know. There they don't they don't know the why their life. They haven't haven't read our book yet, you know, and uh. And so one of the things that I'll tell them to do is to go on a process of discernment about their life
to understand meaning of life. And one of the best ways to do it, I recommend to everybody, but not just young people, is to get up before dawn it's hard for some people and walk for an hour as the sun comes up. There's something profoundly mystical. It's cooler, it's quiet. You're alone with your thoughts, no devices, no podcasts except this one. Do that, just with with the with the sounds in your head, with the music of I.
Know somebody who does that every day.
It's super important to do that. That's actually one of the ways that you can satisfy the you know, the spiritual element of what a good and happy life actually needs. A transcendent life, one that transcends your day to day Quotitian ordinary, boring, you know, work.
Existence, because you get to see how small you are and compared to the largeness of everything else.
I'm alive, Yeah, I'm alive. I don't know what the stay will bring. I don't know, And that's okay. I'm just really grateful to be alive, to stay and to be walking on this road at this moment and to see the sun rising. It puts you in a state of awe. It puts you in a moment of peace. And if that becomes a product, and by the way, you get ten thousand steps, that's a good thing to do too.
Okay. So that's a good place to end, right.
That's all the happiness we can squeeze into our first episode. We've only just begun. Remember that song I did, We've only just begun?
Who saying it? Carverringers, thank you.
I mean, it's like I was a classical musician growing up. It's like I was raised there. I know, I know, but I was like every freaking wedding for every no I know, you know who knows we play bock at our wedding.
Okay, So my gratitude to you and to all of our readers for their thoughtful questions. Guys, and we so appreciate that you're reading the book. I think I just want to say this. I think this is a great gift idea for your loved ones. There's something in here for everybody. I am not just saying that, I think I actually today sent three copies off to people that
I know and I think will benefit from it. So next up episode two of our three part build a Life You Want series, and we'll be discussing chapters four and five specific strategies for you to start taking action and building what matters to you. So thank you, Arthur, thank you Oprah, See y'all next time.
Thanks to our episode sponsor, the Hartford