Speaker 1: Hi everyone, I'm Katie Couric and this is next question. Today.
Speaker 1: We're going to be exploring happiness because we seem to
Speaker 1: be obsessed with that as a culture.
Speaker 2: Just look to hire ed.
Speaker 1: Some of the most elite universities tap courses on happiness,
Speaker 1: the science of it, the value of it, the history
Speaker 1: and future of it. There are podcasts about happiness, whole
Speaker 1: genres of Ernest's TV shows built to temporarily evoke it.
Speaker 1: I'm looking at you, Ted Lasso. Why are we all
Speaker 1: so smitten with happiness? Is it because the world is burning,
Speaker 1: because we're doom scrolling, because the Internet makes us want
Speaker 1: what we can't have. Let's find out. My guest today
Speaker 1: is none other than happiness expert and one of those
Speaker 1: aforementioned happiness scholars, Arthur C.
Speaker 3: Brooks.
Speaker 1: Arthur also writes a regular column for The Atlantic on happiness,
Speaker 1: and his most recent book is called From Strength to Strength,
Speaker 1: Finding Success, Happiness, and Deep Purpose in the second half
Speaker 1: of Life. Here's our conversation, with all due respect, Arthur, what.
Speaker 3: Makes telling me?
Speaker 1: What makes you qualified? And what makes you an expert
Speaker 1: on happiness?
Speaker 3: Yeah?
Speaker 4: So, I am a PhD social scientist and I have
Speaker 4: studied behavioral economics and social psychological principles my entire career.
Speaker 4: I started off by studying beauty and why people admire things,
Speaker 4: why people love and are attracted to beauty. Later, I
Speaker 4: was studying philanthropy and charitable giving, why people voluntarily serve
Speaker 4: other people, And I kept finding that in those two areas,
Speaker 4: the tap root was happiness. The tap root was trying
Speaker 4: to live a better life. And so I thought to
Speaker 4: myself as I as I got to the middle part
Speaker 4: of my career, you know, I'm going to study the
Speaker 4: main thing, the main thing that everybody wants. You know,
Speaker 4: I have the skills to look at these things. You know,
Speaker 4: I'm trained and applied statistics and all of these things
Speaker 4: that people suffer through and they're getting their PhDs. But
Speaker 4: it's very easy to get kind of stuck, you know,
Speaker 4: studying marginal things. And when I started talking about the
Speaker 4: science of happiness, which there really is a huge science.
Speaker 4: I'm really bringing in the neuroscience and the social science
Speaker 4: and the philosophy of happiness and using my academic skills
Speaker 4: to bring these things together. I found everybody wanted to
Speaker 4: know more. And this is the magic part of it, Katie,
Speaker 4: You know, we're all we all have skills, you know,
Speaker 4: we've all worked hard to be good to what we're doing.
Speaker 4: The real question for us in our careers is the why.
Speaker 4: And I got to the point in my life when
Speaker 4: I said, you know what, the why of my career
Speaker 4: is to lift people up and bring them together. And
Speaker 4: the way that I can do that is using my
Speaker 4: knowledge and my skills to help them pursue their happiness.
Speaker 4: And so I decided I was going to do that
Speaker 4: for the rest of my life.
Speaker 1: Do you think happiness is the wrong word for what
Speaker 1: we're all searching for? Because it can be so fleeting
Speaker 1: and so elusive, and I'm not sure if it is
Speaker 1: even accurate in terms of what you talk about in
Speaker 1: your book.
Speaker 4: Right, Yeah, No, So that's actually that's the first issue
Speaker 4: that I raise in my class. I teach a class
Speaker 4: in the Science of Happiness at the Harvard Business School,
Speaker 4: and I have one hundred and eighty students and about
Speaker 4: four hundred on the waiting list. I mean, it's it's
Speaker 4: a class that obviously, hey, kids, free candy. I mean
Speaker 4: they I mean happiness is something that they think I want.
Speaker 4: And one of the ways that I reasons I use
Speaker 4: the word happiness is to bring people in, and then
Speaker 4: when we're talking with more precision, we boil it down
Speaker 4: a little bit more So on the first day of class,
Speaker 4: I say, okay, you spent all your elective points to
Speaker 4: get into the happiness class. You obviously must know what
Speaker 4: it is. So what is it in a cold column,
Speaker 4: which is you know? You go out and you say you, okay,
Speaker 4: you know what's happiness? And they'll say, that's the feeling
Speaker 4: I get when you know, I see my family on
Speaker 4: Thanksgiving or something and they'll talk about their feelings. And
Speaker 4: I say, now, that's not right. That's like saying that
Speaker 4: your Thanksgiving dinner is the smell of the turkey. You
Speaker 4: wouldn't say that. I mean that the smell of the
Speaker 4: turkey is evidence of Thanksgiving dinner, and your feelings of
Speaker 4: happiness are evident of something deeper, more profound or real
Speaker 4: phenomenon that you can study and practice and share. And
Speaker 4: then we start to develop the idea and the truth
Speaker 4: is that happiness is really a combination of three things.
Speaker 4: It's a combination of enjoyment, satisfaction, and purpose. Those are
Speaker 4: the big three things that people are looking for. And
Speaker 4: the truth is you need all kinds of experiences and emotions.
Speaker 4: You even need unhappiness to get those things. You need
Speaker 4: a full life, fully alive, And the science actually brings
Speaker 4: out all those ideas. So you're right, we got to
Speaker 4: get people's attention. But happiness is a much deeper phenomenon
Speaker 4: than just hey, I feel happy.
Speaker 1: I think of words like contentment, fulfillment, and inner piece.
Speaker 1: Even as happneyed as that phrase is when I think
Speaker 1: about what one's goal should be, right.
Speaker 4: So the way to think about that, so contentment is
Speaker 4: really important. That's part of satisfaction with life. And so
Speaker 4: the key thing is that all the happiest people they
Speaker 4: haven't and think about it kind of like the macronutrients.
Speaker 4: You know, when you say dinner is protein, carbohydrates, and fat.
Speaker 4: I mean, it's kind of a clinical way to look
Speaker 4: at dinner. It's not very romantic, but you know it's like,
Speaker 4: join me for dinner of protein, carbohydrates and fat. It's
Speaker 4: not that great, But the truth is, if you want
Speaker 4: to be healthy, you need all those three things in
Speaker 4: balance and abundance. Happiness basically is a way that we
Speaker 4: need to understand how to enjoy our lives. You know,
Speaker 4: from moment to moment, and which is not pleasure. It's
Speaker 4: it's something much deeper, something much more human than than
Speaker 4: than pleasure, and that there's a whole science behind that.
Speaker 4: Satisfaction is is the piece that you get when you
Speaker 4: you achieve something that you've really worked for. That's the
Speaker 4: sense of contentment with your life because you've met your goals.
Speaker 3: Now that can be a curse too.
Speaker 1: Yeah, we'll talk about that later because I know I'm
Speaker 1: dying to talk to you.
Speaker 4: Satisfaction as a real killer, but it can be. But
Speaker 4: then there's purpose and meaning and that's the that's really
Speaker 4: the deepest of all. You know, what is my life
Speaker 4: all about?
Speaker 3: You know? How?
Speaker 4: What's the coherence? What's the the general direction of my life?
Speaker 4: Why am I alive? And that takes a whole lot
Speaker 4: of work and a whole lot of suffering for people
Speaker 4: to understand the answer to that question. And nobody wants
Speaker 4: to suffer, and we don't need to look for it.
Speaker 4: It will, in point of fact, find all of us.
Speaker 4: And so those three things altogether, they encompass so many
Speaker 4: things and so many skills. And that's what's my privilege
Speaker 4: to write and teach.
Speaker 2: But I'm curious.
Speaker 1: What about our society today has made people have this
Speaker 1: yearning to learn more, to do more. I think if
Speaker 1: I told my parents when I was growing up, yeah,
Speaker 1: you know, I want to be happy and what can
Speaker 1: we do to be happy? I mean, it does sound
Speaker 1: marginally or moderately, I guess self indulgent to say it
Speaker 1: to our parents' generation. I think, but what is happening
Speaker 1: right now in the culture where people need this and
Speaker 1: they want it and they're yearning for it.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 4: A couple of different things have happened along the Waymber,
Speaker 4: I was having a conversation with my dad. I changed careers.
Speaker 4: I was a classical musician for a long time in
Speaker 4: my late twenties. I knew I was going to have
Speaker 4: to change careers and I told my dad I was
Speaker 4: going to do it. He said, what, You're successful? Things
Speaker 4: are going well, he said. He said, why do you
Speaker 4: want to do that? And I said, Dad, I'm not happy?
Speaker 4: And he said, what makes you so special?
Speaker 1: Yeah?
Speaker 3: Yeah, right, totally, totally, Yeah, I get it. Well, A
Speaker 3: couple of things have happened.
Speaker 4: Number one is happiness as a science has really exploded.
Speaker 4: And two generations ago, or even one generation ago, people
Speaker 4: didn't realize that. They really thought it was a nice
Speaker 4: to have, you know, good luck, live right, play by
Speaker 4: the rules, try to get lucky, you know, when it
Speaker 4: comes to happiness. And we actually know a lot more
Speaker 4: than we did about that. In many ways, it follows
Speaker 4: the advent of care for mental illness or for even
Speaker 4: mood disorders, where you know, in nineteen fifty or even
Speaker 4: nineteen sixty, people just had to suffer, and now we
Speaker 4: know that there's a lot that you can do. The
Speaker 4: happiness science is not trying to get you from behind
Speaker 4: the line of scrimmage to you know, functioning adequately. It's
Speaker 4: going for you know, people who are functioning pretty well
Speaker 4: to to be kind of fitness, you know, junkies. It's
Speaker 4: sort of people who are in good health, but they
Speaker 4: really want to work by going to the gym and
Speaker 4: getting better at that. Another thing that my parents' generation
Speaker 4: thought was completely crazy. Here's the other problem. That's actually
Speaker 4: why there's been such an explosion of interest. Happiness is declining.
Speaker 4: We've seen actually happiness and decline since about nineteen ninety
Speaker 4: and you know, you and I were you know, as
Speaker 4: like young adults and these and you know, in those
Speaker 4: days and I mean, that's pretty extraordinary that it would
Speaker 4: be declining at a time when income is going up,
Speaker 4: when standard of living is going up, literacy is going up,
Speaker 4: child mortality is going down. Most indicators of what a
Speaker 4: good life is are going in one direction, but happiness
Speaker 4: is going in the other direction.
Speaker 3: So you got to ask what's actually.
Speaker 4: Going on and when people are I mean, you don't
Speaker 4: study air unless you don't have enough of it, and
Speaker 4: so that's a little of what's happening too.
Speaker 3: I think, well, I thought.
Speaker 1: That there were a lot of things that weren't going up.
Speaker 1: You know, a lot of people younger generation don't feel
Speaker 1: that they'll be as successful as their parents. They I think,
Speaker 1: worry about climate change, They worry about sort of the economy,
Speaker 1: there's so many They worry about democracy. So are these
Speaker 1: things really as good as you say they are?
Speaker 4: Well, part of the is the difference between things getting
Speaker 4: better and what we're worried about, what we're worried about
Speaker 4: the future. And the key thing that we all know
Speaker 4: from our own lives is things can be pretty good,
Speaker 4: but if you're in bad shape for your happiness, you're
Speaker 4: going to be very worried about the future. And you're
Speaker 4: only going to see the negative side of everything. So
Speaker 4: this is a lot of what we see. Look, there
Speaker 4: are concerns, there are all kinds of things that we
Speaker 4: need to do differently to. We do need to work
Speaker 4: on a democracy, we do need to work on all
Speaker 4: sorts of social issues to make our world better. But
Speaker 4: when people are very fired up, and quite frankly, there
Speaker 4: are a lot of people that are our age that
Speaker 4: are trying to conscript young people as kind of child
Speaker 4: soldiers into a culture war and kind of a baby
Speaker 4: boom more culture or on right and left, let's make
Speaker 4: everybody as afraid and angry as they can possibly be.
Speaker 4: But they're willing to join up forces like that when
Speaker 4: the happiness is too low. When people are in a
Speaker 4: good place, they're less likely to say, look, I understand
Speaker 4: those problems, but life is pretty good. And when they
Speaker 4: say no, everything's rotten, you know we're all going to
Speaker 4: be in trouble. You know, the truth is that young
Speaker 4: people today they have as much opportunity and actually more
Speaker 4: prosperity than people have ever had before.
Speaker 3: But it's hard to see.
Speaker 4: The good things when you don't actually feel the happiness
Speaker 4: in life around you.
Speaker 1: Well, let's talk about that. Why is happiness on the decline?
Speaker 1: If in fact things are pretty good and the world
Speaker 1: is humming along and things are as good as you
Speaker 1: say they are, why has happiness declined.
Speaker 4: It's not as if it's great for everybody. I mean,
Speaker 4: it's like, as they say, your results may vary in
Speaker 4: almost anything, and so there's some people who truly are suffering,
Speaker 4: and so we don't want to make minimize that.
Speaker 3: Even if things are going in the right direction in
Speaker 3: terms of trends.
Speaker 4: We don't you know, individuals might have been having a
Speaker 4: hard time and there's still lots to do. So we
Speaker 4: have to emphasize the fact that things aren't perfect and
Speaker 4: we all have an opportunity to make things better.
Speaker 3: So that's really good.
Speaker 4: But what happens is when things are on balance, pretty
Speaker 4: prosperous and pretty free, but we don't see it. You
Speaker 4: have to look to other kinds of forces, and what
Speaker 4: we find is basically that we have a world that's
Speaker 4: been kind of torqued towards these idols that a lot
Speaker 4: of young people are falling prey to.
Speaker 3: Now.
Speaker 4: One of the great blessings of people our age Ktie
Speaker 4: is that there was no social media when we were young,
Speaker 4: and that means that we didn't have the kind of
Speaker 4: social comparison pressures, we didn't have the kind of materialistic pressures.
Speaker 4: We didn't have a sense that everybody's life was great
Speaker 4: and ours wasn't so good.
Speaker 3: But that's a broader.
Speaker 4: Case of people being induced toward these idols of money
Speaker 4: and power and pleasure and the admiration of strangers. Whereas
Speaker 4: the one of the great things that we find in
Speaker 4: the science of happiness is there's really four big habits
Speaker 4: that the happiest people have that are not consistent with
Speaker 4: those idols, and those are faith or a life philosophy,
Speaker 4: or something that gives you a sense of the why
Speaker 4: of life. It doesn't have to be a traditional religious faith.
Speaker 4: It has to be something that's bigger than you. Family
Speaker 4: life and you decide what family life means. But these
Speaker 4: are the ties that bind and don't break, and often
Speaker 4: you don't choose, and God knows you wouldn't in many cases.
Speaker 4: But there are the people who take the two am
Speaker 4: phone call friendship as in real friends, not deal friends.
Speaker 4: And last but not least, it's work where you can
Speaker 4: serve others. And our society is pushing people away from faith, family, friends,
Speaker 4: and work, and toward a kind of self worship around money, power, pleasure,
Speaker 4: and fame. And those are just unhealthy things. And that's
Speaker 4: really what explains a good deal of why it's so
Speaker 4: hard to just find happiness on your own.
Speaker 1: You say, happy people love people and use things. Unhappy
Speaker 1: people use people and love things. That's right, which is
Speaker 1: basically their values and priorities are clearly not in the
Speaker 1: right place.
Speaker 4: Yes, that's a more concise way of saying. You know,
Speaker 4: use people, love things, money, power, pleasure, and fame. Use things,
Speaker 4: love people, faith, family, friends, and work.
Speaker 3: The service.
Speaker 1: Yeah, other than social media, what do you think has
Speaker 1: caused a decline in happiness? Is it loneliness and isolation?
Speaker 1: I know that you started writing during the pandemic, your
Speaker 1: column for The Atlantic. You know what other factors are
Speaker 1: contributing to a decline of happiness.
Speaker 4: One is a big cultural phenomenon that's very interesting that
Speaker 4: philosophers have been writing about for many centuries, which is
Speaker 4: that you can get a culture of fear. Now, fear
Speaker 4: and love are the opposite emotions. We often think that
Speaker 4: hatred and love are opposites, but hatred is a function
Speaker 4: of fear, and we find when we look at the
Speaker 4: neuroscience of fear, it occupies it. It's the most prominent negative,
Speaker 4: basic emotion produced by the limbic system of the brain.
Speaker 4: Everybody's heard of the amygdala. It's the part of the
Speaker 4: brain that actually the almond shape little things on either
Speaker 4: side of your brain in the limbic system that they
Speaker 4: stimulate a lot of stress hormones, fight or flight or freeze.
Speaker 4: And what they do is they dominate all of the emotions. Well,
Speaker 4: the opposite most basic positive emotion is love. Fear and
Speaker 4: love are opposites. And you can have either polarity in
Speaker 4: a company, or a family, or a whole country. And
Speaker 4: we've been for quite a long time in a fear
Speaker 4: polarity in our policy, in our culture, and that's hugely problematic.
Speaker 4: Look you and I, I mean, we're established, you know,
Speaker 4: we have our families. There's a lot that we can
Speaker 4: rely upon. But even people our age have been falling
Speaker 4: prey to this. Young people, on the other hand, they're
Speaker 4: quite vulnerable to the culture of fear and.
Speaker 3: What foments it.
Speaker 4: It's politicians that are you know, it's interesting, I'll tell
Speaker 4: young people, you know, but you are an unwilling soldier.
Speaker 4: If you hate because somebody's trying to tell you that
Speaker 4: you must hate and you must be afraid. You know
Speaker 4: that person does not have your best interest at heart.
Speaker 4: They're profiting You're not, as you know, I tell this
Speaker 4: in every university campus that I go to. Don't be
Speaker 4: a willing participant in the baby Boomer culture war with
Speaker 4: canceling people you disagree with, you know, with actually weakening
Speaker 4: the fundamentals of our democracy. What you're doing is you're
Speaker 4: standing up for somebody else's values and you're falling prey
Speaker 4: to this fear. So fear in our culture is one
Speaker 4: of the biggest problems that we have, and it especially
Speaker 4: affects young people.
Speaker 1: Well, I would say that that cancel culture movement was
Speaker 1: born on college campuses, not necessarily in the baby Boomer
Speaker 1: generation where people who didn't agree with you basically were
Speaker 1: I mean, where there's not a free and fair debate
Speaker 1: on all these issues that you're marginalized, canceled, or whatever
Speaker 1: you want to call it, you know, really ostracized if
Speaker 1: you have a different point of view. So I'm not
Speaker 1: sure I agree with this baby Boomer culture war that
Speaker 1: you ascribe to.
Speaker 4: Well, what I find is is, you know, sitting on
Speaker 4: a college campus that it is largely it's a lot
Speaker 4: of people my age that have been promoting these ideas
Speaker 4: for a very long time. And you know, and in
Speaker 4: creating the environment where the people who are canceling are
Speaker 4: not the people who actually have been promoting these theories
Speaker 4: for a long time. I mean, these ideas took a
Speaker 4: long time to take root. True, we go across generations
Speaker 4: in this, and you know, cancel culture, which by the way,
Speaker 4: it transcends campuses. You know, it's interesting if you're if
Speaker 4: you're somebody with very progressive politics and you're sitting in
Speaker 4: an evangelical church, for example, cancel culture is going to
Speaker 4: come for you too. If you're you know, if you're
Speaker 4: trying to get ahead in very populous Republican circles and
Speaker 4: you have more moderate conservative viewpoints, you're going to find
Speaker 4: cancel culture as well.
Speaker 3: It's just really acute on college.
Speaker 4: Campuses, and most ironic because this is supposed to be
Speaker 4: the marketplace of ideas. You know, we're all ide You're
Speaker 4: not supposed to feel safe on a college campus intellectually.
Speaker 4: You're supposed to be like, ah, I have heard something
Speaker 4: I really disagree with and now I'm.
Speaker 3: Going to engage. And that's it's especially.
Speaker 4: Troublesome when on a college campus we will have this
Speaker 4: particular campus culture. But it's the young people that can
Speaker 4: actually solve this problem.
Speaker 1: How do you fight against the forces of fear and hate?
Speaker 1: Because I know that you write that happiness takes work,
Speaker 1: right and discipline and focus. You can't expect it to
Speaker 1: just happen. And so for us on a day to
Speaker 1: day basis, how do we try to get out of
Speaker 1: that kind of angry, enraged state that seems to be
Speaker 1: part and parcel of our daily existence.
Speaker 3: Yeah, it's such a great question. And here's the good news.
Speaker 4: There's actually a way to do this that all of
Speaker 4: us can practice in our own lives, and we can
Speaker 4: do it to you know, make manifest in our country
Speaker 4: and or make our world a little bit better. You know,
Speaker 4: there's a famous, you know, Bible verse that says perfect
Speaker 4: love drives out fear. But that's an ancient idea. Five
Speaker 4: hundred years before that was in you know, the New
Speaker 4: Testament of the Bible. Lausu, you know, the founder of
Speaker 4: Taoist philosophy, said exactly the same thing. And what they
Speaker 4: were talking about is what we have learned as social
Speaker 4: scientists and people in the world of neuroscience have found
Speaker 4: that these are neutralizing factors on each other. That fear
Speaker 4: will neutralize love, but love will neutralize fear as well.
Speaker 4: We don't have to fight against fear. We simply need
Speaker 4: to have more love.
Speaker 1: All right, Give me an example, because this does sound
Speaker 1: sort of woo woo to me, Arthur like, so, so
Speaker 1: play this out in real time, in real life.
Speaker 3: Yeah, So this is what I do when I go
Speaker 3: on college campuses.
Speaker 4: I say, look, do you want to do you want
Speaker 4: to weaken the forces of fear in your life and
Speaker 4: on your campus. You need to make friends with somebody
Speaker 4: with whom you disagree.
Speaker 3: You need to go on social media and.
Speaker 4: Say five loving things where other people are expressing hate.
Speaker 4: To go out of your way like a missionary, bringing
Speaker 4: love on purpose, even when it's uncomfortable. And then I
Speaker 4: take it up a notch, right, because one of the
Speaker 4: things that you see in a fear based culture. Very interestingly,
Speaker 4: people in their twenties today are a third less likely
Speaker 4: to say they're in love than you and I did
Speaker 4: when we were that when we were that age in
Speaker 4: the nineteen eighties, So what's up with that? And the
Speaker 4: answer is fear is driving out love. So what I
Speaker 4: do is I say, Okay, do you want to treat
Speaker 4: your life like an entrepreneur, like a real startup, then
Speaker 4: the currency of the explosion of wealth in your life
Speaker 4: is actually love, and that means you need to take
Speaker 4: a risk, just like an entrepreneur does.
Speaker 3: So I'll assign him.
Speaker 4: I was doing a graduation speech not long ago, and
Speaker 4: I said, here's your homework. Friends, you got two weeks.
Speaker 4: You need to go tell somebody that you I have
Speaker 4: to say I love you. And again, maybe it's a
Speaker 4: family member with whom you've become a strange maybe somebody
Speaker 4: you're secretly in love with. Maybe it's a friend and
Speaker 4: you just don't talk to each other that way. If
Speaker 4: it's not uncomfortable and scary, it's not entrepreneurial enough. And
Speaker 4: the crazy thing is I get tons of feedback saying
Speaker 4: game changer, game changer in my relationships, in my life,
Speaker 4: and in the lives of the people that I'm touching.
Speaker 4: We need more people that are willing to say, get
Speaker 4: you know what, I love you.
Speaker 1: Well, that's one thing to say to someone in your
Speaker 1: family or your spouse or your friends who you don't see.
Speaker 1: But what about someone who is angry and mean and
Speaker 1: throwing arrows and daggers into your heart?
Speaker 2: How do you?
Speaker 1: I do agree with you that that comes from fear,
Speaker 1: This anger comes from fear or hate.
Speaker 2: But how do you neutralize that?
Speaker 4: So that's a very good question that Martin Luther King answered,
Speaker 4: And you gave a very famous sermon in nineteen fifty seven,
Speaker 4: So I want to turn your attention to this subject
Speaker 4: loving your inemy November seventeenth, nineteen fifty seven, of the
Speaker 4: Dexter Street Baptist Church, Montgomery, Alabama.
Speaker 1: What's that purse you good to them?
Speaker 4: That very famous sermon on the Gospel of Matthew, chapter five,
Speaker 4: verse forty four, famous one.
Speaker 3: Love your enemy.
Speaker 2: Something that we talk about and has not man an
Speaker 2: emotional something, loves, creative, understanding, good wills at all.
Speaker 3: It is a refusal to any individual.
Speaker 4: Because that's the question you're asking me, Katie, how do
Speaker 4: you love your enemies?
Speaker 3: And here's what he said. Here's what doctor King said.
Speaker 4: Weird, right, Jesus didn't say like your enemies because to
Speaker 4: like is a sentimental something, and there's lots of people
Speaker 4: we all don't like. Those are the people insulting you
Speaker 4: on social media. Those are the people who are wishing
Speaker 4: you ill. Those are people who are unfair and uncivilized.
Speaker 3: I got it.
Speaker 4: I got it in my life. You got them in
Speaker 4: your life. Everybody watching us or listening to us has
Speaker 4: them in their lives. But to love is a decision,
Speaker 4: it's a commitment. It's the only way that we can
Speaker 4: actually create some redemption. So the famous philosopher Thomas Aquinas
Speaker 4: he said that to love is to will the good
Speaker 4: of the other.
Speaker 3: He didn't say it feel anything.
Speaker 4: You cannot make the decision to like somebody, but you
Speaker 4: can make the decision to love somebody, because that's an
Speaker 4: action and you have to act in a particular way.
Speaker 3: It's hard. This is the hard teaching.
Speaker 4: But we're really up for it because what you find
Speaker 4: on all of the research on this is when people
Speaker 4: start to act out of love, even when they don't
Speaker 4: feel it, they actually start to do it on their own.
Speaker 4: The Dalai Lama one time told me, you know, I
Speaker 4: asked him, how do I love when I don't feel love?
Speaker 3: He basically told me to fake it.
Speaker 2: Fake it till you make it.
Speaker 3: The Dali Lama.
Speaker 4: Look, he's the world's most respected religious figure, and he's
Speaker 4: completely full of love. If the Dalai Lama says that
Speaker 4: we can fake it till we make it when it
Speaker 4: comes to love, I gotta believe it.
Speaker 1: After the Break, it's Striver's Anonymous Arthur shares how to
Speaker 1: break a striver's cycle and find a new kind of fulfillment.
Speaker 1: That's right after this. I want to talk to you
Speaker 1: about your book because as a sixty five year old
Speaker 1: who has enjoyed some success in my life, I'm fascinated
Speaker 1: about sort of how to continue to find fulfillment. And
Speaker 1: I'm the confession Arthur, what's that. I'm Katie and I'm
Speaker 1: a striver. I know you are, and I am sort
Speaker 1: of the quintessential person that you talk about in your book,
Speaker 1: someone who always is looking for the next thing. And
Speaker 1: when I saw you give that talk at the Aspen
Speaker 1: Ideas Festival.
Speaker 2: I realize this is not all me.
Speaker 1: A lot of it is sort of my brain and
Speaker 1: dopamine and adrenaline that causes me to want more and
Speaker 1: more and more, to keep succeeding, to keep striving, but
Speaker 1: to keep accomplishing right, And it's striving me crazy.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I know, I know, you and me both.
Speaker 4: I mean, it's like like you've had this legendary career
Speaker 4: which you continue to have and and everybody says, look,
Speaker 4: if I could be if I could be half as
Speaker 4: successful as Katie Kurk, i'd automatically be happy.
Speaker 3: But here's the thing. Here's the crazy thing.
Speaker 4: Everybody thinks they want to be happy and successful, but
Speaker 4: if they can only be one, they should be successful
Speaker 4: because then the automatically be happy, and that is incorrect.
Speaker 4: On the contrary, if you're happy, you'll feel successful and
Speaker 4: you get both. Here's the problem with that. Our world
Speaker 4: doesn't do that. Remember, money power pleasure fame. Money power
Speaker 4: pleasure fame is that it's and if you start to
Speaker 4: get to some success, your brain changes. A little bit
Speaker 4: of brain science and you've heard me talk about this
Speaker 4: and it's not very complicated, but it's worth pointing out
Speaker 4: that when people are really addicted to success, their brain
Speaker 4: does more or less the same is when they're getting
Speaker 4: addicted to gambling or methamphetamine. You become very good at
Speaker 4: producing dopamine, which is it's called a neuromodulator. And what
Speaker 4: dopamine does is it doesn't give you pleasure, it gives
Speaker 4: you anticipation of a reward. That's why when people get
Speaker 4: addicted to drugs or alcohol, or gambling or pornography or
Speaker 4: any of these bad things that takeover people's lives and
Speaker 4: hurt them, it's because they have all this anticipation and
Speaker 4: they get craving. Now, when people are really successful, money power, pleasure, fame,
Speaker 4: their brain gives them dopamine in anticipation of those rewards.
Speaker 4: And when you get really good at it, because I
Speaker 4: don't know, just hypothetically, let's say you're Katie Curic.
Speaker 3: Well, then guess what happens. A little is not enough.
Speaker 1: Your threshold keeps getting more and more and more and more.
Speaker 4: Right, the treadmill starts going at terrifying speed.
Speaker 1: You call it the hedonic treadmill.
Speaker 3: Exactly right now.
Speaker 4: There's a process in the brain called homeostasis. It's a
Speaker 4: complicated word with a simple idea. That is to say,
Speaker 4: your brain resets, I'm going to be so happy when
Speaker 4: I get that car. I'm going to be You're so
Speaker 4: happy when I get that watch or that shirt, of
Speaker 4: that relationship or that achievement. And then you reset almost immediately.
Speaker 4: You think your brain tells you because mother nature lies
Speaker 4: that you're going to actually be satisfied forever. You're actually
Speaker 4: satisfied for a minute or maybe a week or I
Speaker 4: don't know, ten days on the outside, and then it's
Speaker 4: off to the races again.
Speaker 3: Run, run, run, run run. That's what we all have
Speaker 3: to dominate.
Speaker 4: And people who've had a lot of success, that's great
Speaker 4: because these are the people. I mean, look, think of
Speaker 4: all the good things you've done for me, because I've
Speaker 4: been watching you for a year, you've informed me you've
Speaker 4: made my life better. But that doesn't mean that along
Speaker 4: the way that has made you happy. So what we
Speaker 4: all need to do with our own kind of success
Speaker 4: addiction And nobody's watching you right now, nobody's going to
Speaker 4: be watching your show. Who's not a little bit of
Speaker 4: a striver. I know your audience that we all can
Speaker 4: actually dominate the system by not going with the flow.
Speaker 4: Your brain says, go more, do more, hit the lever,
Speaker 4: hit the lever, get the cookie.
Speaker 3: You need to stand up to that and behave in
Speaker 3: a different way. You need to do the opposite thing.
Speaker 4: That's what the research says, and so that's probably what
Speaker 4: we need to talk.
Speaker 1: About, right What is the opposite thing.
Speaker 4: The opposite thing is not to have more. The opposite
Speaker 4: thing is to want less. Now, I know it sounds weird,
Speaker 4: but here's the way to think about it. Satisfaction finally
Speaker 4: scratching that itch, finally being satisfied is not doesn't just
Speaker 4: come from having more, doing more, seeing more, getting more.
Speaker 4: It's what you have divided by what you want. Now,
Speaker 4: everybody remembers a little tiny bit in the recesses of
Speaker 4: their mind about their high school fractions, and you remember
Speaker 4: that if you've got halves divided by wants, there's two
Speaker 4: ways to increase that number. Increase the halves or decrease
Speaker 4: the wants. Here's the deal. We actually have the power
Speaker 4: to want less. We don't have to become a Buddhist monk.
Speaker 4: I mean, if you want to, that's great. You know,
Speaker 4: go study in the cave. That's fantastic, or go to
Speaker 4: you know, a hill land retreat. I've done it. I
Speaker 4: recommend it. It's fantastic, But you don't have to do it.
Speaker 4: The key thing is to think about your wants to
Speaker 4: not be managed by your wants.
Speaker 3: I have a.
Speaker 4: Reverse bucket list. The bucket list is all about halves.
Speaker 4: The reverse bucket list is all about wants, and when
Speaker 4: I do on my birthday, Katie, and I recommend everybody's
Speaker 4: I make a list of all my cravings. All I'll
Speaker 4: finally be happy if I have this. I'll finally be
Speaker 4: happy if my book sells this number and I have
Speaker 4: or I do this thing on TV, whatever it happens
Speaker 4: to be. Everybody's got their thing. I get the car,
Speaker 4: I get whoever. You make a list of all those cravings,
Speaker 4: and you say I might get it and I might not.
Speaker 4: Easy companies you go. That's moved the appetite, the craving,
Speaker 4: the desire from your automatic brain to your human brain
Speaker 4: to call the prefrontal cortex, and there you can manage
Speaker 4: your cravings. If you're conscious of them, you can manage them.
Speaker 4: It's not perfect, but you'll be amazed at how much
Speaker 4: more satisfying you will find ordinary life when you looking
Speaker 4: at the small things.
Speaker 3: And look. I follow you on social media, and you know.
Speaker 4: You're putting on social media pictures from your garden.
Speaker 3: I love that, like your flowers and your garden, Katie.
Speaker 4: I love that it's so beautiful on Instagram that you
Speaker 4: do that. That's you enjoying the small. Now to do
Speaker 4: that more, you actually have to be conscious of your
Speaker 4: worldly wants and manage them in that particular way. It's unnatural,
Speaker 4: but we all can do it.
Speaker 1: It's interesting because you talk about preparing for the second
Speaker 1: half of your life, finding success, happiness, and deep purpose
Speaker 1: in the second half of your life is the subtitle
Speaker 1: from Strength to Strength. And I think you posit that
Speaker 1: you really are your most successful really by the time
Speaker 1: you're forty or say fifty, that you have fluid intelligence
Speaker 1: then and then you move to something called crystallized intelligence.
Speaker 1: Explain that Earth, because I know what you mean, but
Speaker 1: I think for people who haven't read the book, explain
Speaker 1: what you mean.
Speaker 4: Yeah, so there are two kinds of basic intelligen So
Speaker 4: the world tells you you get one big act. That's
Speaker 4: the world tells you get really really good at what
Speaker 4: you do, be really successful at what you do, and
Speaker 4: if you're lucky, you can keep it going forever.
Speaker 3: You can't keep it going forever.
Speaker 4: Now, if you're an athlete, you know that, right, If
Speaker 4: you're you know, you're Tom Brady, maybe you can keep
Speaker 4: going forever. But the rest of us mortals can't keep
Speaker 4: you know going. And you know, I actually have interviewed
Speaker 4: Olympic athletes and talk to people, and they're they're very
Speaker 4: much in touch with the fact that they can't keep
Speaker 4: going on forever.
Speaker 3: But it's still really painful.
Speaker 4: Now. The interesting thing that the research finds is that
Speaker 4: that thinking professions, knowledge professions, whether a doctor or a lawyer,
Speaker 4: or a financial professional or an electrician or lots of
Speaker 4: things that you tend to get better and better and
Speaker 4: better through your twenties and thirties and then max out
Speaker 4: and then you're not quite as good as you used
Speaker 4: to be. And that's what burnout actually comes from. You know,
Speaker 4: your dentist, who suddenly, weirdly at age forty five, says,
Speaker 4: I think I'm going to take Fridays off to golf,
Speaker 4: Like what the heck?
Speaker 3: You loved being a dentist. It's like, I don't know,
Speaker 3: I'm just less interested.
Speaker 4: That's because your dentist isn't progressing and can't put her
Speaker 4: finger on why she's not as good a dentist.
Speaker 2: Thank you for making my dentist a woman.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I mean, it's like, my dentist is a woman
Speaker 4: and she's phenomenal. Right, I don't know if she's actually
Speaker 4: I don't think she's forty five yet. But the point is,
Speaker 4: I hope she reads my book. I'm gonna take her copy.
Speaker 4: And so this is this is an important thing to
Speaker 4: keep our to keep our eye on, because a lot
Speaker 4: of people start panicking at this point and think, oh,
Speaker 4: oh no, Well, the truth is this is the time
Speaker 4: to celebrate because there's another intelligence that comes in behind
Speaker 4: it that's not about hard work and focus and and
Speaker 4: you know, living on the edge of the curve, innovative capacity,
Speaker 4: working memory, all the.
Speaker 3: Stuff that made you good at what you did. It's
Speaker 3: about wisdom.
Speaker 4: It's about knowledge about how to explain ideas, is how
Speaker 4: to teach. It's to go from innovator to instructor. And
Speaker 4: everybody can do that in their own way. I've seen
Speaker 4: you do this in your career. This is the most
Speaker 4: interesting thing. What are you now, your teacher? This is
Speaker 4: what we're doing. You're introducing your audience to big ideas
Speaker 4: that can act actually enrich them.
Speaker 3: What are you?
Speaker 4: You're your professor curic Now this is you've naturally moved
Speaker 4: on to this crystallized intelligence curve, and everybody can. There's
Speaker 4: a transformation if you're willing to take it. The people
Speaker 4: who are unhappy or living in the past. The people
Speaker 4: who are happy, they jump onto this wisdom curve. I'm
Speaker 4: going to teach, I'm going to mentor I'm going to
Speaker 4: lead teams. So if you're a startup entrepreneur and that's
Speaker 4: fluid intelligence. If you're a venture capitalist, crystallized intelligence. If
Speaker 4: you're a star litigator, fluid, if you're a managing partner,
Speaker 4: crystallized You know, I used to do highly mathematical research
Speaker 4: papers on my flud intelligence curve. Now I write for
Speaker 4: The Atlantic and I talk to you crystallized intelligence, and
Speaker 4: I'm happy. I'm happier than I've ever been because I'm
Speaker 4: on the right curve.
Speaker 1: I think about professional athletes, I think about CEOs, I
Speaker 1: think about honestly, President Obama, like how do they shift
Speaker 1: from sort of being in the epicenter, the white hot
Speaker 1: center of everything, where they have huge responsibility and all
Speaker 1: eyes are on them and then shift into a different
Speaker 1: mode without feeling that their best years are behind them?
Speaker 1: Because I do think about, you know, like, how do
Speaker 1: people manage that?
Speaker 4: Yeah, yeah, it's very hard. The more success you have,
Speaker 4: the harder it is. And for a couple of different reasons,
Speaker 4: you're not quite sure that second curve is there. I mean,
Speaker 4: you're taking it on faith from a Harvard professor. That's
Speaker 4: one thing, actually jumping, that's something else. The second is
Speaker 4: you know a lot of people just love that first curve.
Speaker 4: And the reason they like it is because they get
Speaker 4: all these honors, They get all this they get all
Speaker 4: this admiration, they get all this prestige from it.
Speaker 3: And the more successful and famous.
Speaker 4: You are, the harder it is actually to say goodbye
Speaker 4: to those particular things. But the happy people are actually
Speaker 4: able to make that shift. They have the presence of mind.
Speaker 3: Now.
Speaker 4: One of the things that makes it much easier is
Speaker 4: they tend to be accompanied by somebody who loves them.
Speaker 3: This is one of the things that you actually find.
Speaker 4: And so whether it's a best friend, whether it's a spouse,
Speaker 4: whether it's your adult children, you need somebody who takes
Speaker 4: you by the hand and says, you know what, and
Speaker 4: this is you know, my wife did this for me.
Speaker 3: My wife esther.
Speaker 4: We've been already thirty one years now, and and you
Speaker 4: know she said I was retiring. It was a CEO,
Speaker 4: you know, But I did this research and I had
Speaker 4: to stop because I saw the writing was on the wall.
Speaker 4: I was not getting better at what I was doing,
Speaker 4: and so I said, I got to get on the
Speaker 4: second curve. I know it's out there. And she took
Speaker 4: me by the hand and said, it's okay. I love you.
Speaker 4: You're the father of my children and the love of
Speaker 4: my life, and whether you're successful in worldly terms or not,
Speaker 4: I love you all the same. And that is so
Speaker 4: critically important because a lot of people were stuck on
Speaker 4: that fluid intelligence curve. On that first curve, They're like,
Speaker 4: I'm nothing, I am dead. If I'm not number one,
Speaker 4: if I'm not the striver, if I'm not the homo economicus,
Speaker 4: you know, if I'm not the.
Speaker 3: Hardest marker in the room. Right, you need people who
Speaker 3: love you. That's really really critical.
Speaker 1: I'm wondering, though, if you're inadvertently contributing to the last
Speaker 1: acceptable ism in society, and that's agism. You know, I
Speaker 1: know that the CEO of Target just said, I'm sixty five.
Speaker 1: I'm not retiring. And I wonder if with this second
Speaker 1: phase of life, if you're sort of saying to the world, Arthur,
Speaker 1: you know, if you're not under fifty, you don't have
Speaker 1: fluid intelligence, you're not at the top of your game.
Speaker 1: You need to go into this second stage of life
Speaker 1: and you need to leave leave the stage.
Speaker 2: I mean, do you think about that?
Speaker 3: I do?
Speaker 4: But you know what, I actually I'm feathering my own
Speaker 4: nest as I get older. I'm fifty eight years old,
Speaker 4: and I want to be working for a long time,
Speaker 4: but where I'm best suited to work.
Speaker 3: So this is the key thing. Here's what I have
Speaker 3: this view, Katie.
Speaker 4: You know what, I look at these Silicon Valley firms,
Speaker 4: these tech firms and social media firms and all that,
Speaker 4: and they're making all these errors that older executives just
Speaker 4: shake their heads, like how do they make that error?
Speaker 4: The reason is because all fluid intelligence, no crystallized intelligence.
Speaker 3: In other words, it's all brains, no wisdom.
Speaker 4: And that's a big problem because they're making all the
Speaker 4: mistakes that all the older guys and women they made
Speaker 4: a thousand years ago in their careers. My view is
Speaker 4: that we need way more people in positions of leadership
Speaker 4: or over seventy that's my view, using their crystallized intelligence,
Speaker 4: not relying on their fluid intelligence.
Speaker 3: You know, that's what we need.
Speaker 4: I think every executive team, every C suite needs somebody
Speaker 4: over seventy.
Speaker 3: Every marketing team, every product team, these.
Speaker 4: Social media companies, they need old people who actually can
Speaker 4: say so. My view is that no, on the contrary,
Speaker 4: this is the permanent employment plan for us, as long
Speaker 4: as we're actually doing it right and not trying to
Speaker 4: live in the past.
Speaker 3: Is the way that it works.
Speaker 1: The infetus, I guess for this book was when you
Speaker 1: were sitting in an airplane and you were listening to
Speaker 1: a really sad and upsetting conversation an older gentleman talking
Speaker 1: to his wife saying, my life is over. I kind
Speaker 1: of wish I were dead, and you take it from there.
Speaker 4: Yeah, So, you know, I was kind of in a
Speaker 4: tender point in my life. You know, I had been
Speaker 4: running this think tank in Washington, d C. It had
Speaker 4: been going really, really well, but I was wondering, you know,
Speaker 4: what is the cadence of my own life?
Speaker 3: Where am I going? Where does this? I just do
Speaker 3: it again and do it again, and do it again and.
Speaker 4: Then stop and they just hope for the best, and
Speaker 4: you know, hanging around the house, I don't know, you know,
Speaker 4: ten years, fifteen years from hour is going to go.
Speaker 4: And I was kind of contemplating it existentially, and when
Speaker 4: I heard this conversation. I overheard it. Now, as a
Speaker 4: behavioral social scientist, my laboratory is the overheard conversation. So
Speaker 4: for everybody watching and listening to us right now, if
Speaker 4: you're behind me in a Starbucks confessing that somebody broke
Speaker 4: your heart, keep your voice down because I might write
Speaker 4: a book about it anyway. So I hear this conversation
Speaker 4: with this couple behind me on the plane, in this
Speaker 4: key moment in my own life. And you know, he's
Speaker 4: kind of mumbling by here, his wife saying, oh, don't
Speaker 4: say it would be better if you were dead, And
Speaker 4: I'm like, holy moly, I wasn't I'm not eavesdropping. But
Speaker 4: this is big and and and she's trying to console him,
Speaker 4: and he's really unconsolable the fact that nobody cares about him,
Speaker 4: nobody's listening to him. Okay, so we land at the airport.
Speaker 4: This is a night flight. We land at the airport
Speaker 4: at our destination. Everybody stands up and the lights go
Speaker 4: on and and we turn around. I wanted to see him.
Speaker 4: I just wanted to see his face. And it was
Speaker 4: one of the most famous successful men.
Speaker 3: In the world.
Speaker 4: This is somebody that everybody knows now what. He's a
Speaker 4: hero from decades past. Is not some controversial actor you know,
Speaker 4: or you know, a politician, No, no, no, this is
Speaker 4: this is somebody who did big things that we all admire.
Speaker 4: And and you know it's in his late eighties, and
Speaker 4: and and.
Speaker 3: And he's he's confessing this thing.
Speaker 4: So we're walking out of the airplane, and the pilot,
Speaker 4: you know how, they all stand by the cockpit door thing,
Speaker 4: thanks for flying United folks. And he stops the guy
Speaker 4: who's right behind me blowing my mind at this point
Speaker 4: because you know, the whole model of success is wrong.
Speaker 3: Okay.
Speaker 4: If I could half as successful as that guy, I'd
Speaker 4: be automatically happy over the moon. Right, No, wrong, okay.
Speaker 4: So he sees the guy, the hero on the plane
Speaker 4: and he says, sir, you've been my hero since I
Speaker 4: was a little boy. And I turn around and he's
Speaker 4: beaming with pride. And I asked myself, so which is it?
Speaker 4: Is it this one or the one half an hour ago?
Speaker 4: And I thought to myself, our model of success and
Speaker 4: happiness is wrong. In truth, the data are very clear.
Speaker 4: The people who tend to be most disappointed with their
Speaker 4: lives after seventy and eighty are the ones who are
Speaker 4: most successful early on, and the reason is because they
Speaker 4: can't live up to their own standards. They're addicted to
Speaker 4: success and now the party's over and they if you look,
Speaker 4: if you don't do anything with your life, you won't
Speaker 4: know when the party's over. But boy, oh boy, if
Speaker 4: you do a lot, you're really gonna know. And I said,
Speaker 4: I'm going in search of the secret to be both
Speaker 4: successful and happy.
Speaker 3: And that's what this book is. It's the book that
Speaker 3: I needed in my life. I wrote it for you too.
Speaker 4: I'm actually writing a book right now about the things
Speaker 4: I wish I I knew when I was twenty five,
Speaker 4: which is the Science of Happiness for the Young Driver
Speaker 4: that's coming next. But I didn't get that book because
Speaker 4: that book hadn't been written yet. And I've really lived
Speaker 4: according to it. And you can be successful and happy,
Speaker 4: but you can't leave it up to chance. I mean,
Speaker 4: mother nature is not going to take you in that direction.
Speaker 1: And so what do you think the guy sitting behind
Speaker 1: you in the airplane did wrong.
Speaker 4: What he was doing was he was reliving past glory
Speaker 4: and wishing that he could keep that alive forever. And
Speaker 4: it turns out that's very common. In the book, I
Speaker 4: talk about the case of Charles Darwin, you know, the
Speaker 4: great naturalist, and everybody knows what a hero, what a
Speaker 4: great figure he was. He'd bury at Westminster Abbey because
Speaker 4: he's such a national hero. He died an unhappy man,
Speaker 4: and the reason is because he kind of got to
Speaker 4: the end of his fluid intelligence.
Speaker 3: He wanted to stay on that curve.
Speaker 4: He never moved curves, and he spent the last twenty
Speaker 4: five years of his life kind of regretting the fact
Speaker 4: that he couldn't make any more progress, and he didn't
Speaker 4: enjoy his research, and he felt kind of washed up
Speaker 4: and kind of like a loser. Charles Darwin, one of
Speaker 4: the greatest naturalists scientists who's ever lived, died unhappy for
Speaker 4: the same reason that so many people do. If I
Speaker 4: could talk to any of these people, I would talk
Speaker 4: about the structure of the brain, that how the fluid
Speaker 4: intelligence goes to the crystallized intelligence, and happiness is right
Speaker 4: in front of them if they're willing to grab it
Speaker 4: and change their own lives.
Speaker 1: How do they recognize, or how does anyone recognize when
Speaker 1: it's time to jump to the second curve? That your
Speaker 1: fluid intelligent is drying up right, and you need to
Speaker 1: go for the crystallized intelligence, and you need to make
Speaker 1: that shift not only in your head, but in your
Speaker 1: heart and in your habits.
Speaker 3: To begin with.
Speaker 4: It's a really good idea to understand this before you
Speaker 4: need it, right, And.
Speaker 3: Not all of us do, I mean not all of
Speaker 3: us have.
Speaker 4: Been able to have that, but you know everybody's listening
Speaker 4: to us who's thirty and as a striver and you
Speaker 4: know who you are right to start thinking, I'm doing
Speaker 4: this right now and I'm in this a great party.
Speaker 4: But while with the crystallized version of what I'm good at,
Speaker 4: what might it look like? Just to kind of visualize
Speaker 4: it a little bit, because twenty years from now you
Speaker 4: might want to be thinking about that.
Speaker 3: You don't have to change careers.
Speaker 4: Necessarily, although that's not out of the question either, but
Speaker 4: what might it look like?
Speaker 3: What's your flight of fancy? What would give you joy
Speaker 3: to think about? This?
Speaker 4: Really a crystallized kind of kind of skill, that's number one.
Speaker 4: But the key thing is that that that that people
Speaker 4: need to they'll see that the fluid intelligence hasn't declined
Speaker 4: way before anybody else does, and the tell is burnout.
Speaker 4: That's the tell. You know, when people start saying, I
Speaker 4: used to like this more than than I do. Now
Speaker 4: this used to excite me more than it does now,
Speaker 4: that means you're not making progress. People are wired for progress.
Speaker 4: Human beings get no pleasure from the status quo. We're
Speaker 4: not wired for It's very interesting, you know. One of
Speaker 4: the things that I've studied is is you know diets.
Speaker 4: Diets have a ninety five percent failure rate, right, I mean,
Speaker 4: what industry can continue to exist? It exists on hope,
Speaker 4: not results. Now here's the thing. Dieting is pretty easy,
Speaker 4: but keeping weight off is near impossible. The reason is
Speaker 4: because you're perfectly willing to forego the food that you
Speaker 4: love as long as the scale is going down, because
Speaker 4: you know that the happiness from the scale going down
Speaker 4: is higher than the unhappiness from not eating scones or
Speaker 4: donuts or something like that.
Speaker 2: But then when you reach your goal weight.
Speaker 4: The reward is you never get to eat ever again
Speaker 4: what you like. That's not a very nice reward, and
Speaker 4: so people abandon the diet. That's all about progress. People
Speaker 4: love progress, but the state is quo is terrible. So
Speaker 4: you're going to notice, you know, maybe forty forty five, fifty,
Speaker 4: whatever happens to be, I like it less. That's when
Speaker 4: it's time to start thinking about that second curve. That's
Speaker 4: when it's time to start thinking about the reverse bucket list.
Speaker 4: So you're not adding adding adding, that's when it start.
Speaker 4: It's time to actually think about who's going to hold
Speaker 4: me by the hand, who is in part of my
Speaker 4: root system. That's when it's time to start thinking, what
Speaker 4: are the friendships that I actually need? What are the
Speaker 4: spiritual relationships that I can actually cultivate? And if you
Speaker 4: do these things, that's why I wrote the book, this
Speaker 4: could be the greatest, most joyful adventure in life.
Speaker 3: This is the best time of life.
Speaker 4: But if you don't do it, it's like walking through
Speaker 4: a forest at night with no guide and no flashlight.
Speaker 1: What are things every person can do to kind of
Speaker 1: have a more fulfilling, purposeful life that has more love
Speaker 1: than fear, right, and that that can just sort of
Speaker 1: feed you in a way with all the right things
Speaker 1: and not all the wrong things.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 4: No, The couple of things to keep in mind. The
Speaker 4: first is that all these things that I write, all
Speaker 4: these things that I teach, that I'm privileged to be
Speaker 4: able to talk to you about all these things are
Speaker 4: accessible to everybody. You don't need to be a nerd
Speaker 4: with a phdu teaches at Harvard to actually learn about
Speaker 4: these ideas. I write about this in the Atlantic because
Speaker 4: I want to bring the these ideas to millions of
Speaker 4: people in relatively non technical terms. You don't have to
Speaker 4: be a technical specialist to understand that. But you got
Speaker 4: to do the work. Wishing is not enough. Just wishing
Speaker 4: you were happier will make you unhappier because you'll focus
Speaker 4: on your unhappiness. But if you do the work that's habits,
Speaker 4: not hacks, committing yourself to living in a better way,
Speaker 4: in a newer way, this is magic. That's part one.
Speaker 4: Part two is this. You got to practice these things.
Speaker 4: You can't just learn about these You got to practice
Speaker 4: these things in your life. I can teach you that
Speaker 4: gratitude is one of the greatest tricks, but it's not enough.
Speaker 3: For to be a trick. It's got to be a
Speaker 3: way of life.
Speaker 4: And so practice these things and committing yourself to doing
Speaker 4: it is like going to the gym, not once, it's
Speaker 4: going to the gym five days a week or four
Speaker 4: days a week or whatever happens to be, and then
Speaker 4: you start to see a transformation, you enjoy it. In
Speaker 4: a last but not least, you got to share these ideas. Look,
Speaker 4: we've talked about a whole bunch of science and very
Speaker 4: accessible terms. Here's what I would wish that will really
Speaker 4: help a lot of people who are watching us to
Speaker 4: make these ideas come to life. Find three people that
Speaker 4: you love and if you need to watch our conversation
Speaker 4: again and take notes and go teach these things. You
Speaker 4: know what that'll do is it'll move them from an
Speaker 4: impression to the executive center of your brain. You know,
Speaker 4: becoming a teacher is the best possible way to absorb ideas.
Speaker 4: My father was a mathematician. He said, I only understood
Speaker 4: math when I had taught calculus fifty times, you know.
Speaker 4: And the truth is, we can all be happiness teachers.
Speaker 4: And the more that we are bringing these secrets in
Speaker 4: a spirit of love and sisterhood and brotherhood to everybody
Speaker 4: we possibly can, the happier we're going to get. In
Speaker 4: other words, understand practice and share a.
Speaker 1: Lot of this is in the book. You talk about
Speaker 1: living in the present, but that takes discipline. You know,
Speaker 1: and I think you say. Someone said we shouldn't be
Speaker 1: called homo sapiens, we should be called homo prospectives.
Speaker 4: That means we're always in the future and we're not
Speaker 4: really presient right now. Yeah, exactly. And that takes, you know,
Speaker 4: take it takes a little bit of effort. There's a
Speaker 4: whole mindfulness meditation movement going on out there, but it
Speaker 4: really isn't that complicated.
Speaker 3: You got to you have.
Speaker 4: To be alive now, you know, when you're washing the dishes,
Speaker 4: say I'm washing the dishes. Now, don't distract yourself from everything.
Speaker 4: When you're on the train, look out the window and
Speaker 4: actually be on the train at that particular moment. That's
Speaker 4: the real magic of mindfulness that I've found. And it's
Speaker 4: really quite transformed my life. Katie's when I found because
Speaker 4: I saw theoretically in the literature is going to make
Speaker 4: me happier, and now.
Speaker 3: I do it.
Speaker 4: I go on these walks for an hour with no devices,
Speaker 4: and I smell the morning air and I stop when
Speaker 4: I look at flowers. I'm telling you, I mean, it's
Speaker 4: just it sounds so dumb. I'm a fifty eight year
Speaker 4: old man. I should know this at this point, it's
Speaker 4: just the best.
Speaker 1: When I read about that, I also thought, Yes, I
Speaker 1: want to live in the moment, but I also want
Speaker 1: to care about the future. Yeah, I want to be
Speaker 1: a concerned citizen who is focused on helping people preserve
Speaker 1: the planet. Right, So, how do those things work in tandem?
Speaker 4: You're much better at actually thinking clearly about a better
Speaker 4: future when you're fully.
Speaker 3: Present right now.
Speaker 4: The reason is because your love relationships blossom you appreciate
Speaker 4: the things that you're actually seeing. You don't have a
Speaker 4: full appreciation for the people and the things around you
Speaker 4: unless you're fully mindful right now, and as such, you
Speaker 4: won't be able to create a future. You won't be
Speaker 4: able to envision a future that actually is better than
Speaker 4: the status quo. Here are the best news about being
Speaker 4: here now. It makes you better in the future as well.
Speaker 1: A big thank you to my guest Arthur C.
Speaker 3: Brooks.
Speaker 1: You can find many of his happiness insights at The
Speaker 1: Atlantic and go check out his book From Strength to
Speaker 1: Strength to start living your best life now. Next Question
Speaker 1: with Katie Kirk is a production of iHeartMedia and Katie
Speaker 1: Kirk Media. The executive producers are Me, Katie Kirk, and
Speaker 1: Courtney Ltz. The super producer as Lauren Hanson, Associate producers
Speaker 1: Derek Clements and Adriana Fazio. The show is edited and
Speaker 1: mixed by Derek Clements. For more information about today's episode,
Speaker 1: or to sign up for my morning newsletter, wake Upcall,
Speaker 1: go to Katiecuric dot com. You can also find me
Speaker 1: at Katiekuric on Instagram and all my social media channels.
Speaker 1: For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
Speaker 1: or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.