Arthur Brooks is the poster child for an interesting and accomplished life. He has made it a practice to increase his career every decade. He played the French Hoorn for the Barcelona orchestra, is friends with the Dalai Lama and is the author of 14 books (including a co -author of Oprah Winfrey).
He is also a lucky evangelist and professor at the Harvard Kennedy School and Harvard Business School, where he gives a popular leadership and happiness course. Moreover, he is a columnist for the Atlantic Ocean, where he writes every week about the tools for building a happier life. But even he is struggling with his own happiness, that’s why he studies. Now he has collected his most popular essays in a new book, The Happiness Files: Insights on Work and Life (Harvard Business Review Press), which is for sale on 12 August.
Arthur Brooks [Photo: Jenny Sherman]
I made contact with Brooks on August 4 for an in -depth conversation, in which you learn:
- Why you worry about whether you feel happy is the wrong way to assess whether you are happy
- How you can stop doing the things you hate
- Why ambition often works as a counterpoint for happiness
The next transcript has been edited for length and clarity.
I know you have been asked this question a million times, but let’s determine a basic definition. What is happiness?
I start by defining happiness by what it is not, what a feeling is. People often say that I can’t define happiness, but I know that when I feel it, or it’s how I feel when I’m with the people I love.
That definition is the reason that most people are not as happy as they want. They have the wrong definition of happiness. There are feelings and emotions to give us signals about what is happening around us.
Happiness is something you can really study and become more achievement. It is similar to food, where you have to pass the scent of the food, what the feelings of happiness are, and to get more in the direction of the macronutrients who are the components.
The macronutrients of happiness are pleasure, satisfaction and meaning. To be happy, you have to understand what they are and your habits change to get more of it.
If happiness is not a feeling, how do you know that you are on the right track to achieve a happy life?
To begin with, this requires that you pay attention to something other than your feelings. Think of: how much do you enjoy your life? How much do you think your life has meaning? How much satisfaction do you take on your performance?
Aristotle spoke about Eudaimonia, which is good life, well lived despite your feelings. It has to be about that you are so good at understanding and practicing happiness that you can say: “I have had a terrible, terrible day today and I am an incredibly happy person.”
In the lucky files you write, we have to stop doing things we hate. How do you balance that with understanding that part of what you hate is an investment to live a happy life?
That’s right. There are things you do because they are needed, but you don’t like them. For example, nobody wants to wake up at 2 o’clock in the morning to be with their crying child. That is something that is not fun, but it is useful.
That is why the three components of happiness are so important. If the things you hate are not pleasant, they are not satisfactory and they are not useful, those are the things you have to eliminate if you can.
You can’t eliminate them all because life is life. But the best life is one that is not only looking for more pleasure, satisfaction and meaning. It is one where you leave the parts of your life that are none of those things, but you only did them because you thought you had to do that.
In many of your essays you point out that some of our suffering is because we are trapped in systems that hunt for our fear and fears. What do you tell people who are in these systems, but do not necessarily come true for some reason?
It depends on the system we are talking about. When we talk about a technological system where there is an excessive use of devices and social media, I will treat it in about the same way as I do with addictive substances and behaviors.
It is the same set of protocols for detoxifying the dopaminergic paths where your learning system is hijacked. You have to put together a series of habits in your life that will replace the things that you are trying to avoid. There are many ways to do this, but you must acknowledge that these systems work in the same way as any other addictive system.
What if these systems are built into our career development? For example, you said that the news is a whole industry that caught the fear of people to let them scroll. For many people, however, it is important to stay up to date with what is going on.
Staying informed is very, very different from constantly updating your information. News can be quite addictive, but only when it feeds fear, alarm or anger. These are answers based on amygdala, and the news media have become very good at feeding and using technology, so that you can maximize the time in the app.
That is actually predatory and unethical, but I can’t forbid it because I believe in a free society. The truth is that nobody has to consume news more than half an hour a day.
You are not going to stop reading news, but you have to put protocols around it. For example, I read the news once in the morning and I don’t update. I’m not going to learn anything. I just distract myself and the best thing you can do with these distracting technologies have been set up.
No more than half of your news can be political. If you read politically more than 10 or 15 minutes a day, you hurt yourself.
Even if you work in politics?
[Laughs] You shouldn’t work in politics. That is another way to hurt yourself.
But someone has to do it!
I know. I mean, it would be great if the representation of citizens was more positive to do. Local politics, which is not so controversial, is more about that, but there is this political entertainment company that is really disturbing at national level.
I think we can see this in addition to politics in many different industries, where the highest level is really competitive and can be part of a sick system that you operate. But what about people who want to be in the TopSechelons? Is it possible to be happy at the top?
It’s difficult. I struggled my entire career with this. The truth is that people at the top when CEOs are rarely very happy people. Part of the reason is because their dreams came true, and it turned out that they had the wrong dreams.
Look, I am happy that we have good leaders, and I know some who, despite being doing it very well. But nobody is doing really well in their happiness because of worldly success. They are doing really well in life, together with their worldly success.
The truth is that people who have big dreams to help other people, run organizations, to be a great leader, they must be very, very careful with other impulses and be very careful with other goals. And their goals may not include money, power, pleasure and fame. If they do that, they will end up incredibly unfortunate people.
You have had an incredible career. How did you implement these guardrails in your own life?
Sometimes bad, and it is one of the reasons that I studied this material because happiness did not come for me. It is not that I am miserable, it has been difficult, and I have very much chased the temptation of worldly success, and I had to understand what is really important to me.
One of the reasons why I am wide to the love and happiness of others is because I want to understand these things. I want to learn these things. I want to bring more of these ideas to the world.
The result is that it doesn’t crush me now, and when things go well, it doesn’t throw me that much. Now I can concentrate more on what I really care, namely to lift people and bring them together in ties of happiness and love, with the help of science and ideas. And I concentrate on that. And that is the kind of success I actually want, transcending myself and bringing a better life to other people.
Then I wake up on some days and I am “damn it. Nobody read my article today in the Atlantic Ocean.” And then my wife will say, “Are you going to read your research.”
What did you most surprise in your research into happiness?
The shocking truth is that we are not built for happiness. Mother Nature does not matter if we are happy. Mother Nature wants us to survive and pass on our genes and get calories. She also knows us with all these impulses to earn more money and acquire more things and to use people and to worship ourselves. It makes us miserable.
I thought that as food, or craving proteins after I have played, if I really have a natural desire for something, it is probably based on something very healthy. And it is not necessary when it comes to happiness. It turns out that mother nature lies against me, and I have to be at war with my impulses to become a happier person.
Philosophers have always said that there is an animal component for the human prefrontal cortex and a transcendent component for our consciousness. The animal component is your physical impulses, and the divine component is your moral ambitions, and going from one to the other, that is life in life. That’s the magic of everything
What are the biggest unanswered questions about happiness?
Oh, there are so many. First, why is it that happiness is so much more difficult for some people than for others? For example, my wife is of course so much happier than me. Why? Is it just brain chemistry? Is there something supernatural about it? Is it a different way of life? Don’t know. I wish I knew it. But if I can place the information that people have about their own self, they can at least have strategies to become happier.
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