YAPClassic: Arthur Brooks, The Science of Happiness and Fulfillment

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0:01:20 Hey, app fam!
0:01:25 For today’s app classic, I am dusting off my interview with Arthur Brooks, one of the
0:01:27 world’s leading happiness experts.
0:01:34 He’s a Harvard professor, PhD social scientist, and a number one best-selling author.
0:01:39 And Arthur combines science and philosophy to help people live their best lives.
0:01:43 The episode with Arthur first aired in October last year and we spoke about his book “Build
0:01:48 the Life You Want,” which he co-authored with Oprah Winfrey.
0:01:52 In this episode, Arthur digs deep on the science of happiness, including the importance
0:01:56 of enjoyment, satisfaction, and meaning in our lives.
0:02:00 And I’m sure his actionable strategies will inspire you to find greater happiness and
0:02:01 purpose.
0:02:09 So, without further ado, here’s my conversation with Arthur Brooks.
0:02:14 So when I was doing research, I found out that you’re not naturally a happy person.
0:02:19 You actually say that naturally you’re anxious and gloomy.
0:02:24 And so you actually started looking into happiness to sort of solve your own problem.
0:02:28 So can you talk to us about how you first got interested in the work of happiness?
0:02:29 Yeah, sure.
0:02:30 Absolutely.
0:02:31 Thanks, Hala.
0:02:32 I appreciate that.
0:02:33 I’m a college professor.
0:02:35 I’m a social scientist.
0:02:36 I study human behavior.
0:02:39 My PhD is in behavioral economics.
0:02:46 And I always applied it toward public policies and how to design systems that had good incentives
0:02:47 and all that kind of stuff.
0:02:51 Somewhere along the way over the past 30 years, I realized that I’m kind of missing the boat.
0:02:55 I read all this work on human happiness, but why don’t I actually put a strategy together
0:02:59 using my expertise so I can actually become a happier person?
0:03:04 The truth is that I always kind of found happiness as something you observe like astronomy.
0:03:06 You study the stars, but you can’t affect the stars.
0:03:08 But happiness really isn’t like that.
0:03:12 The truth of the matter is there’s a ton of neuroscience and social science and a lot
0:03:16 of evidence out there that shows that if you have some knowledge and if you change
0:03:19 your habits, you can actually get happier as a person.
0:03:23 So I thought, huh, you know, and that was really, I mean, it shouldn’t have taken me
0:03:24 this long.
0:03:29 But what I did was I was, some years ago, I was a CEO of a big nonprofit organization
0:03:30 in Washington, DC.
0:03:31 And I wasn’t very happy.
0:03:35 And I thought, you know what, I’m going to throw all my intellect at this thing.
0:03:37 I’m going to see if I can actually become a happier person.
0:03:39 So I left my job.
0:03:41 I quit my job.
0:03:42 I moved back to the university.
0:03:43 I took a job.
0:03:47 I teach happiness at Harvard University and I apply all these things to my life and I
0:03:52 write about it every single week in the Atlantic that says, here’s how you can use science
0:03:53 to become a happier person.
0:03:54 And you know what?
0:03:56 I’m 60% happier than I was five years ago.
0:03:57 It actually works.
0:03:58 Wow.
0:03:59 I love that.
0:04:05 And so like you mentioned, you changed your career at 55 years old to focus on this work
0:04:09 of happiness and to learn more about it and teach other people how to be happy.
0:04:11 Talk to us about some of the work that you’ve done and the research that you’ve done in
0:04:13 this area so far.
0:04:17 One of the things that a lot of young people find, and I teach this in my happiness class
0:04:21 at the Harvard Business School, is a lot of people think that their career is just going
0:04:23 to be this straight line going up.
0:04:27 But a lot of people are actually more spiral patterned people, which is to say that they’re
0:04:31 like, they’re going to be happiest if they have a set of mini careers.
0:04:32 That’s certainly the case with me.
0:04:34 A lot of people figure that out too late.
0:04:38 So I’ve had four different 10-year careers is really what it comes down to.
0:04:43 I was a musician for a decade, a professional classical musician, most of it in Barcelona,
0:04:44 in the symphony in Barcelona.
0:04:48 Then I went away and got my education, got my PhD, and I was a college professor for
0:04:49 10 years.
0:04:50 And then I left all that behind.
0:04:52 I was a CEO for 10 years.
0:04:56 And so now I get this 10 years where I can actually write, speak, and teach, do research
0:04:58 on the science of happiness.
0:04:59 This is a 10-year block.
0:05:00 Who knows?
0:05:01 Maybe longer than that.
0:05:04 So what I do in this is I teach a class.
0:05:06 I teach classes on happiness at Harvard.
0:05:08 I write an article every week.
0:05:13 I write a column on the science of happiness at the Atlantic for about 500,000 people.
0:05:18 I do about 175 speeches a year all over the country speaking about the science of happiness.
0:05:22 And then I write a book every two years on some big new topic in happiness.
0:05:25 Last time you and I talked, I’d written about how to get happier as you get older.
0:05:31 And now I’ve got this book coming out about how you can actually build a happy life on
0:05:35 fundamental pillars of what the science says are the pillars of true happiness.
0:05:37 So that’s kind of how I structure my work.
0:05:41 And the best part, Hala, is that the mission is I want to lift people up and bring them
0:05:45 together using public education about love and happiness.
0:05:48 And that makes me plenty happy.
0:05:49 I love that.
0:05:53 And I love this concept of, I think you call it a spiral career that you just mentioned.
0:05:55 There’s a method to the madness.
0:05:57 You’re not just like picking a random career.
0:06:01 And can you talk to us about how you’re actually leveraging skills from your past experiences
0:06:06 for this new endeavor that it’s not like you’re just totally starting from scratch, right?
0:06:07 Yeah, for sure.
0:06:10 The best way to think about this, and this is what I teach my students, is that there
0:06:12 are four kinds of career patterns.
0:06:16 The linear career patterns, you get out of school, you get a job, you only quit that
0:06:18 job when you get a better job.
0:06:22 And that better job uses all the skills that you have and you go up in sort of a stair step
0:06:24 fashion for the rest of your career.
0:06:25 That’s what strivers do.
0:06:29 However, the other three career patterns, one is called the expert career pattern where
0:06:31 you’re not going up like a rocket.
0:06:32 You’re going up little by little by little.
0:06:33 Why?
0:06:38 Because you want a job that can support your hobbies and your relationships, and you want
0:06:39 a lot of security.
0:06:40 That was my dad.
0:06:41 You know, my dad was a college professor.
0:06:45 He was at the same college for 40 years and just little by little by little, he maybe
0:06:49 got a one or 2% salary increase every year, but he was super secure and he knew what was
0:06:50 going to happen.
0:06:51 That’s the second pattern.
0:06:56 The third pattern is called the transitory, and that’s what everybody’s parents, all of
0:06:58 our viewers and listeners are worried.
0:07:02 Their parents are worried because when they change jobs, it’s kind of lifestyle jobs.
0:07:07 It’s like, I’m going to work as a waiter in Tucson and then a mover in North Carolina.
0:07:10 And then I think I’m going to, who knows, then I’m going to go work for the Forest Service
0:07:11 for a little while.
0:07:16 And it’s just because I want to see different things or maybe I met a girl or whatever that’s
0:07:18 going to make me move someplace.
0:07:19 Those are lifestyle jobs.
0:07:22 That’s not people watching young and profiting.
0:07:26 The real big bulk of the audience that people don’t really know about, they think they’re
0:07:29 linear, but they’re not happy on this kind of drive upwards.
0:07:36 The spiral career where all of your skills actually build into the next flight of fancy,
0:07:38 your next career, we’re going to do something big.
0:07:41 Now, this might mean that sometimes you take less money.
0:07:44 It might mean that for 10 years, you step back and you work part-time while you raise
0:07:48 your kids and then you go back into a new career when you come out of it.
0:07:52 But you build the career and here’s the spiral lifestyle.
0:07:54 Your life is your startup.
0:07:55 Your company’s not a startup.
0:08:01 Your life is a startup and if you have a company, it’s an extension of the enterprise of you.
0:08:05 And you got to think about your life creatively and dynamically and build it the way that
0:08:06 you want to build it.
0:08:08 That’s the spiral life.
0:08:09 I love that.
0:08:10 I think I fit into that category.
0:08:12 And I know that work has a lot to do with happiness.
0:08:14 We’ll talk about that in a bit.
0:08:16 But first, how did you meet Oprah?
0:08:19 How did she find out about your work and how did you end up writing this book together?
0:08:20 Yeah.
0:08:25 So Oprah Winfrey and I have been working together for more than a year at this point.
0:08:30 And the reason is because she reads my call in The Atlantic and there’s half a million
0:08:31 people reading it.
0:08:33 So you don’t never know who’s reading your call.
0:08:37 During the coronavirus lockdown, she was locked out like everybody else and she really got
0:08:40 really interested in the science of happiness and started reading my call pretty carefully
0:08:42 every single week.
0:08:46 Then the last book came out, which you and I talked about about a year ago from strength
0:08:49 to strength about building a life where you get happier and happier and happier as you
0:08:50 get older.
0:08:52 She read that in the first couple of days.
0:08:54 It was published.
0:09:00 And she called and she said, I have a, I mean, she didn’t, her podcast team called anyway.
0:09:01 It’s not like she called them.
0:09:02 This is Oprah Winfrey.
0:09:03 And I’m like, yeah, and I’m Batman.
0:09:04 It’s not like that.
0:09:09 So she called and asked me to come on her podcast, Super Soul, which talks about books.
0:09:11 She’s a huge reader.
0:09:15 And I went on her podcast, we talked about the book and then I went on a web show that
0:09:18 she’s got through Oprah Daley and we were like a house on fire.
0:09:20 I mean, we see the world in the same way.
0:09:24 I mean, our careers are here to lift people up and bring them together.
0:09:26 And neither one of us is a kid.
0:09:29 And we actually know what we want to do with our lives and we’re doing it just from different
0:09:30 ways.
0:09:35 Her and mass media and me and this more academic world of science and ideas.
0:09:40 And we kind of, we got together socially a couple of times and finally she came up with
0:09:44 the idea, why don’t we get this material, what’s your teaching your class at Harvard
0:09:48 in front of millions of people, you know, millions of people who can realize that they
0:09:53 can build a life they want with knowledge and changes in their habits.
0:09:56 And so we wrote it over the past nine months or so.
0:09:59 What a thrill, you know, passing chapters back and forth.
0:10:03 She came up with a title, you know, we made a bunch of changes along the way and we read
0:10:04 it in the studio.
0:10:07 So anybody who wants to get this thing on audio, Oprah and I will read you to sleep
0:10:08 with it.
0:10:09 Oh my God, I love it.
0:10:12 I didn’t realize that Oprah is part of the audiobook.
0:10:13 That’s awesome.
0:10:14 Oh yeah.
0:10:15 Yeah.
0:10:16 We both, we read our parts of the book for sure.
0:10:17 And we go back and forth on it.
0:10:21 She introduces things and we intersperse our, you know, it’s really super fun.
0:10:22 That’s awesome.
0:10:23 And who’s the book written for?
0:10:24 Who’s the target audience?
0:10:29 The target audience is anybody who actually is willing to build a life that they want.
0:10:33 A lot of people, they say they want to get happier, but they don’t act that way.
0:10:36 Anybody who wants to be in the serious business of building a better life.
0:10:41 It’s all of these people, all these spirals and all these other people who realize that
0:10:45 the enterprises themselves and the currency is not money in the enterprise of you.
0:10:47 It’s love and happiness.
0:10:49 That’s the currency of your startup.
0:10:53 And if you want to get richer, that means you need to get happier and have more love.
0:10:55 And that’s who this book is written for.
0:10:57 This is not a, you know, a PhD dissertation.
0:11:01 There’s a, there’s literally a thousand links in the end notes.
0:11:06 So it doesn’t bother anybody to all of these super long-haired neuroscience journals and
0:11:10 all that stuff that I do is not going to bother the reader at all.
0:11:11 This is completely accessible.
0:11:13 We have lots of people read it and say, yeah, I get it.
0:11:14 Yeah, I get it.
0:11:15 Right.
0:11:18 But it’s only for people who want to learn about the serious business of themselves and
0:11:20 take themselves on as a project.
0:11:25 And the guarantee is if you do this stuff, the science doesn’t lie and my life doesn’t
0:11:27 lie and Oprah has done it too.
0:11:29 And this stuff really, really works.
0:11:30 I love it.
0:11:34 Can you talk to us about the struggle that Americans have with happiness?
0:11:35 Like why is this a problem?
0:11:38 Yeah, it’s a problem to begin with.
0:11:42 You know, we see bad trends in happiness in the United States and in many developed countries
0:11:43 around the world.
0:11:45 Most rich countries are getting unhappier.
0:11:50 It’s been a slight downward ticking trend since the late 1980s, early 1990s, and then
0:11:52 it just tanked around 2008.
0:11:55 And that was not really because of the financial crisis.
0:11:58 It was because too many people were on social media.
0:12:00 And social media just doesn’t give you happiness.
0:12:01 It makes you lonely.
0:12:04 It sets you up for social comparison with other people.
0:12:11 You get a real deficit of a hormone, a neuropeptide that functions as a hormone called oxytocin,
0:12:13 which is a hormone of bonding.
0:12:15 You get a huge deficit of it.
0:12:19 And so you tend to binge the social media because you want more, but you’re not getting
0:12:20 enough.
0:12:22 And so it’s kind of like filling up on burgers and fries.
0:12:26 You can actually become overweight and malnourished simultaneously.
0:12:28 That’s what happens with social media.
0:12:31 It’s the junk food of social life.
0:12:34 And so that really drove it down, especially among young women, actually.
0:12:35 That was the worst.
0:12:41 And then, of course, coronavirus came and coronavirus just tanked happiness even further
0:12:43 and happiness hasn’t come back.
0:12:45 So the real problem is that we have a happiness crisis.
0:12:51 The second thing is that most people don’t understand even what happiness is.
0:12:54 They think it’s a feeling, which it’s not.
0:12:55 Feelings are evidence of happiness.
0:12:57 They’re not happiness.
0:13:01 That’s like the smell of the turkey is evidence of Thanksgiving dinner, but they’re not the
0:13:02 same thing.
0:13:03 That’s feelings and happiness.
0:13:04 And so they need to understand it.
0:13:09 And last but not least, too many people think that happiness is their destination and it’s
0:13:10 not.
0:13:11 It’s getting happier.
0:13:14 As Oprah says, the goal is happiness.
0:13:16 You got to make progress all along the way.
0:13:18 That’s really what the goals have to be.
0:13:20 So let’s dig deeper on this.
0:13:21 Happiness is not a feeling.
0:13:25 I know we talked about it last episode, but in case people didn’t listen to it, why is
0:13:27 happiness not a feeling?
0:13:32 Well, happiness is not a feeling because that would kind of leave it up to absolute chance.
0:13:35 And it does have this vaporous quality to it.
0:13:39 Happiness is the feeling I get when I’m doing the things that I enjoy or when I’m with the
0:13:40 people that I love.
0:13:42 Those things are true, but that’s not the happiness.
0:13:45 That’s actually evidence that you’re experiencing happiness.
0:13:48 And happiness is something you can actually define.
0:13:50 Happiness is a combination of three distinct phenomena.
0:13:56 And we know this because in the scientific research, we’ve been able to measure self-evaluations
0:14:00 of people’s happiness that are living in different ways and they have different levels of these
0:14:01 phenomena.
0:14:04 Think of happiness as having three macro nutrients.
0:14:09 So a lot of people who watch this podcast, they know that if you want to get healthy,
0:14:14 you have to get abundance and balance of protein, carbohydrates, and healthy fats.
0:14:15 That’s what they know.
0:14:17 Those are the macro nutrients of all food.
0:14:22 The macro nutrients of happiness are enjoyment, satisfaction, and meaning.
0:14:23 And that’s what we have to maximize.
0:14:28 And it turns out that all three of those things are super important and none of them are straightforward.
0:14:30 We make tons of mistakes.
0:14:33 And any one of those three, I can tell you about the mistakes that people make.
0:14:37 And so that’s what we talk about in the book is how not to make those mistakes so that we
0:14:42 can focus on enjoying life more, getting more satisfaction, and getting a life full of meaning.
0:14:47 And when we do that through emotional self-regulation and walk away from trying to get the feeling
0:14:52 of happiness all the time, then we’re not so distracted and then we can focus on the
0:14:56 building blocks of a happy life, which we also talk an awful lot about.
0:14:59 So let’s dig into macro nutrients since you already brought it up.
0:15:01 Let’s start with enjoyment.
0:15:03 You make it clear in your book that that’s not pleasure.
0:15:06 So what’s the difference between enjoyment and pleasure and why do we have to make that
0:15:08 distinction?
0:15:09 Great question.
0:15:12 So pleasure is what we call a limbic phenomenon.
0:15:16 Now the limbic system is a part of the brain that was evolved before the prefrontal cortex.
0:15:20 The prefrontal cortex is the bumper of brain tissue right behind your forehead.
0:15:24 It’s the most evolved conscious human executive part of your brain.
0:15:26 It’s your CEO inside your head.
0:15:29 So that’s when Hollis says, this is the way I’m going to get to work today because I
0:15:30 see this traffic.
0:15:32 This is the guest I’m going to have on my show.
0:15:35 Those are all prefrontal cortex kind of decisions.
0:15:36 Now what motivates it?
0:15:38 What motivates you to want to make decisions?
0:15:44 And the answer is inputs, information, largely emotional information that’s coming to you.
0:15:46 And that comes from your limbic system.
0:15:52 Your limbic system is all about giving you emotions, anger, fears, sadness, disgust, joy,
0:15:58 a sense of affection, surprise, interest, interest as a primary emotion.
0:16:02 And all of that’s evolved so that you’ll survive and pass on your genes.
0:16:03 It’s all evolved.
0:16:06 But here’s the thing, the big mistake that a lot of people make, I don’t want to have
0:16:07 bad feelings.
0:16:08 Oh, yeah?
0:16:09 Well, you’re going to die.
0:16:11 You’re going to die unless you don’t have bad feelings.
0:16:12 Why?
0:16:13 Because they keep you alive every single day.
0:16:18 You need fear, you need grief, you need sadness, you need anger.
0:16:19 You need all these things.
0:16:21 Now, they can be maladapted.
0:16:23 You don’t need fear when you open up Twitter.
0:16:24 That’s stupid.
0:16:25 I get that.
0:16:28 But the whole point is when a car is barreling toward you and you’re in a crosswalk, you better
0:16:32 feel fear through the amygdala of your brain, which is part of your limbic system, and jump
0:16:33 out of the way.
0:16:36 So back to the conversation at hand.
0:16:41 Pleasure comes from your limbic system because it sends a signal saying that’s a good thing
0:16:45 to give you calories, to give you sexual partners, to give you all that kind of stuff.
0:16:49 It gives you inputs on how to survive and pass on your genes.
0:16:53 That’s not the secret to happiness because that’s the secret to addiction.
0:16:57 That’s the secret to hitting the lever of pleasure again and again and again.
0:17:02 To get enjoyment, which is a true source of happiness, you need the source of pleasure
0:17:05 plus people plus memory.
0:17:06 Why?
0:17:07 Because you need relationships and memory.
0:17:12 You need to have the experience of that pleasure in the prefrontal cortex of your brain, in
0:17:14 the executive center of your brain.
0:17:17 Here’s the way to think about it without all the neuroscience.
0:17:21 If there’s something that gives you pleasure, don’t do it alone.
0:17:24 If you’re doing it alone again and again and again, you’re going to do it compulsively
0:17:26 and it will lead to addiction.
0:17:29 That nobody has ever said, “You know the secret to my happiness?
0:17:30 Methamphetamine.”
0:17:32 Nobody’s ever said that.
0:17:33 Nobody’s ever said that.
0:17:38 Anything that you do behaviorally or chemically, the rule of thumb is add people and memories.
0:17:43 You don’t have to get rid of anything, but add people and add good memories that you’re
0:17:46 making and then you’ll get into a healthy lifestyle that give you enjoyment and that
0:17:47 leads to happiness.
0:17:51 A good example is don’t eat ice cream alone.
0:17:56 If it gives you pleasure, go and have an ice cream date with a friend instead.
0:17:57 Exactly right.
0:18:01 If you eat ice cream alone, you’ll eat three times as much because you want the pleasure,
0:18:03 the pleasure, the pleasure of hitting the lever.
0:18:07 There’s a neuro modulator in the brain called dopamine that we’ve all heard about.
0:18:10 That’s this anticipation of reward.
0:18:13 When you’re by yourself looking for pleasure, you’ll hit that lever again and again and
0:18:14 again and again.
0:18:16 When you’re with people, you don’t.
0:18:17 You actually don’t do that.
0:18:19 Now, by the way, there are exceptions to this.
0:18:25 Never drink alone, of course, but also make sure all your friends are not drunks because
0:18:29 that’s the special case of where doing it together might actually make it worse.
0:18:35 By the way, if you do that, you probably won’t have memories, so maybe I’ll just take this
0:18:36 step.
0:18:37 Awesome.
0:18:39 Well, the next one is satisfaction.
0:18:43 What needs to happen for people to actually feel satisfied and what are the common reasons
0:18:47 for people to feel unsatisfied with their life?
0:18:50 Yeah, so satisfaction is the joy you get after struggle.
0:18:56 Now, young and profiting, you know what this is all about because you can defer gratification.
0:19:00 If you want to be a successful person, you know how to defer gratification.
0:19:05 I bet you everybody of the hundreds of thousands of people who are regular listeners to this
0:19:07 podcast, they defer gratification.
0:19:10 They’ve been doing it since they were kids.
0:19:11 That’s why they’re listening to this particular podcast.
0:19:12 I don’t have to tell you to do that.
0:19:17 The problem is, and you’ll get the joy, the problem is it doesn’t last.
0:19:18 That’s the problem with satisfaction.
0:19:21 So Mick Jagger, I was saying, “I can’t get no satisfaction.”
0:19:22 He’s actually still singing that.
0:19:23 He’s like a hundred.
0:19:29 That song has been popular literally since I was one and I’m 59 years old.
0:19:30 That’s an old song.
0:19:33 That’s a popular song because it speaks this truth.
0:19:36 But the real truth is not that you can’t get no satisfaction.
0:19:40 The real truth is you can’t keep no satisfaction.
0:19:42 The problem is you get it and it goes.
0:19:45 I get the promotion and then I’m struggling again.
0:19:49 I get the raise and the day I enjoy it is the day I find out about it.
0:19:52 Not even the day it shows up in my check.
0:19:55 I think that if I get that relationship, it’s going to give me satisfaction forever and
0:19:57 I’m actually kind of bored two weeks in.
0:19:58 What’s wrong with me?
0:19:59 And the answer is nothing.
0:20:04 Your brain is not evolved to let you enjoy things forever because if you did enjoy things
0:20:07 forever, you wouldn’t actually stay on the wheel.
0:20:08 You wouldn’t keep running.
0:20:12 You’d end up admiring something wonderful and beautiful in your life while a tiger
0:20:15 sneaks up behind you and makes you lunch.
0:20:17 You’ve got to be ready for the next set of circumstances.
0:20:23 So nature makes you think you’re going to enjoy things forever, but you don’t and you
0:20:24 never figure it out.
0:20:26 So here’s the workaround.
0:20:30 Here’s that glitch in the matrix that we can exploit.
0:20:33 Real satisfaction is not about having more.
0:20:34 That’s the formula most people have.
0:20:35 More, more, more.
0:20:36 How do I get satisfied?
0:20:37 More, simple, right?
0:20:39 No, no, no.
0:20:44 Efficient is all the things that you have divided by the things that you want.
0:20:45 Now think about that.
0:20:47 Everybody remembers their high school fractions.
0:20:50 You got a numerator, you got a denominator.
0:20:55 If you want the number to go up, the inefficient way to do it is to increase the numerator.
0:21:00 The really efficient way to increase the number is to decrease the denominator.
0:21:03 You don’t need to manage more, more, more, more, more.
0:21:06 That’ll take care of itself, young and profiting strivers.
0:21:08 You need to want less, less, less, less, less.
0:21:12 You need to want less strategy in life.
0:21:13 Ready for that?
0:21:14 That’s not a bucket list.
0:21:17 That’s a reverse bucket list that we’re talking about.
0:21:20 And if you even think about that, your life is going to start to change and you’re going
0:21:22 to start to get happier.
0:21:24 That’s satisfaction.
0:21:26 Let’s hold that thought and take a quick break with our sponsors.
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0:26:10 The third macro nutrient is purpose, and you say this is the most important one.
0:26:14 You say that we can make it to you without enjoyment and even without satisfaction, but
0:26:15 without purpose.
0:26:16 We’re utterly lost.
0:26:18 Why is that?
0:26:20 Yeah, people are made for meaning.
0:26:26 This is sort of the divine element in human life, is that we have to have a sense of why
0:26:31 we’re here, of why things happen in our lives, the direction that our life is going so that
0:26:32 we can make progress.
0:26:34 Otherwise, we’ll just kind of go in circles.
0:26:39 And last but not least, we need this feeling like it would matter if we weren’t here, that
0:26:40 sense of significance.
0:26:44 Now, a couple of things about meaning.
0:26:49 Meaning to find a sense of meaning in life requires a lot of pain, and this is the biggest
0:26:51 mistake that a lot of young people make.
0:26:54 If you went back to 1969 to Woodstock, I wasn’t there.
0:26:59 I was a little kid, you know, I was like four, and my parents wouldn’t let me go because
0:27:01 they were squares, right?
0:27:05 The hippies used to say if it feels good, do it, right?
0:27:07 That’s awful life advice.
0:27:11 That’s like life ruining life advice because you’re hitting a pleasure lever over and over
0:27:12 and over and over again.
0:27:16 And a lot of hippies wound up ruining their lives, but we’ve got an equally anti-hippie
0:27:21 message today that’s equally dangerous, which is if it feels bad, make it stop.
0:27:26 If I’m suffering, there’s something wrong with me and I got to go get treated immediately.
0:27:27 Now, I got it.
0:27:30 There are certain things with anxiety and depression that people have to take care of,
0:27:33 but the truth is suffering is really normal.
0:27:37 And if you’re trying to do hard things and you’re trying to live your life like an enterprise,
0:27:42 you’re going to suffer a lot and you got to suck it up because that’s the only way that
0:27:43 you’re going to find meaning.
0:27:48 It’s the only way you’re going to get strong and resilient is by going, bring it on.
0:27:49 That’s super important.
0:27:53 The second thing that’s worth keeping in mind is that people don’t know the questions to
0:27:56 answer to find their sense of meaning.
0:27:59 And so they’re just kind of hoping that meaning will find them and it’s not true.
0:28:04 So I actually have a little test to see if somebody has a sense of meaning in their life
0:28:08 and I have a project for everybody watching us if they want their life to have more meaning.
0:28:09 Okay, you ready?
0:28:10 Yeah.
0:28:11 Okay.
0:28:14 Because my average student is 28 years old and I bet you the average age person who’s
0:28:16 watching and listening to us right now is 28.
0:28:18 So this is like, you’re perfect.
0:28:19 Okay.
0:28:22 You need answers to two questions.
0:28:23 Here’s the quiz.
0:28:26 If you don’t have answers that you really believe to these two questions, there’s a meaning
0:28:31 problem, but that’s actually an opportunity for you to go on a quest, a vision quest to
0:28:33 find your answers to these two questions.
0:28:37 So I’ll go slow because I know people are getting out pencils on this, the two question
0:28:38 test.
0:28:40 There’s no right answers, but you have to have answers.
0:28:42 Question number one, why are you alive?
0:28:47 You’ve got to have an answer and a lot of people are like, I don’t know, sperm and an
0:28:48 egg.
0:28:49 I don’t know.
0:28:51 You know, stork beats me.
0:28:52 Why am I alive?
0:28:55 And there’s two ways to answer that either.
0:28:56 Why were you created?
0:28:59 What cosmic entity created you or what are you on earth to do?
0:29:03 There’s two ways to answer that question, but you’ve got to have one answer the other.
0:29:04 Here’s the second question.
0:29:05 Now it gets heavy.
0:29:09 For what would you be willing to die today?
0:29:13 This is a showstopper for a lot of people because a lot of people is like, nothing really is
0:29:16 like, I wish there was something, but I don’t know.
0:29:20 I mean, and you can make stuff up so you look good and noble, but you know, this is an internal
0:29:21 question.
0:29:23 It’s really a question that’s written on somebody’s heart.
0:29:29 So then if you don’t have answers, real answers, there’s an issue, but it’s a huge opportunity.
0:29:32 These are the questions to find your answers to.
0:29:33 You got to go look it.
0:29:34 You got to discern this.
0:29:38 You know, I’ve seen this with my kids, you know, my kids are in their 20s.
0:29:39 My middle son, his name is Carlos.
0:29:41 He’s a good dude.
0:29:42 He’s all about it.
0:29:45 But you know, in high school, he was like a lot of, you know, teenagers, he was kind
0:29:51 of looking for himself and he wasn’t even having fun, which is the problem, right?
0:29:53 And the reason is because he didn’t have a sense of meaning in his life.
0:29:57 So when he’s graduating from high school, I did what I do with all of my kids, which
0:30:00 is your life is an enterprise.
0:30:01 You’re the startup entrepreneur.
0:30:03 I’m VC, right?
0:30:05 And since I’m VC, I get a business plan.
0:30:07 If I’m going to invest, I get a business plan.
0:30:08 So go write your business plan.
0:30:10 It’s super fun being my kid, right?
0:30:13 How I bet your West is like, too bad Brooks is not my dad yet, right?
0:30:14 No.
0:30:16 And I made them when they were juniors in high school, write their business plan.
0:30:19 And that was going to be really what they thought the next 10 years of their life was
0:30:20 going to look like.
0:30:24 No actual business sticks to its business plan, but you have to have a business plan
0:30:26 so you have intention is the whole point.
0:30:29 And if it was not original enough, I sent it back for revision.
0:30:34 So Carlos’s business plan goes back for like six rounds of revisions because, you know,
0:30:35 he was like, I don’t know.
0:30:36 I guess I’ll go to college.
0:30:38 And I’m like, no, you’re not, no, you’re not.
0:30:39 You hate school.
0:30:40 I mean, you go to college.
0:30:43 I didn’t go to college till I was 30.
0:30:46 So I know that it’s fine, but I need something original.
0:30:50 He’s like, you know, I want to find the answers to those questions.
0:30:54 And I think I’m going to find those alone outside, working with my hands.
0:30:56 I said, okay, I’m listening.
0:30:58 And so I knew his business plan when he was going to be a farmer.
0:31:06 Now there’s no farmers in my family for like 125 years or college professors or musicians.
0:31:07 You know, it’s like farming.
0:31:10 So he gets a job as a dry land wheat farmer in Idaho.
0:31:14 I think he’s picking rocks out of the soil.
0:31:20 He’s making 15 bucks an hour, but he’s working so many hours mending fences, driving a combine.
0:31:21 He’s making a bunch of money.
0:31:23 And then the second part of his plan kicks in.
0:31:26 He joins the Marines at 19.
0:31:27 Boom.
0:31:30 I mean, it goes to basic training and infantry training battalion.
0:31:35 And then, you know, then he becomes a scout sniper, which is a branch of the special forces.
0:31:43 And now my son, 23 years old, married, Corporal Carlos Brooks, scout sniper, US Marine Corps.
0:31:44 And I asked, yeah, I know.
0:31:45 And it’s like, that’s all him.
0:31:46 It’s not me.
0:31:50 It’s like, I’m not a military guy, but I asked him and he’s got his answers.
0:31:51 It’s not my answers.
0:31:52 Why are you alive?
0:31:54 Because God made me to serve.
0:31:56 For what would you be willing to die?
0:32:01 He says, for my faith and for my family and for my friends and for the United States of
0:32:02 America.
0:32:03 Boom.
0:32:04 Mic drop.
0:32:08 And again, people watching us, you might be like, yeah, that guy’s drinking the Kool-Aid.
0:32:09 Okay.
0:32:11 But those are his answers.
0:32:16 And he’s, Holla, he’s happy because he found his answers.
0:32:21 So something, as I was reading these macro nutrients and learning more about them, I
0:32:25 realized that you’re really a proponent of hard work and not cutting corners, right?
0:32:26 This isn’t easy.
0:32:30 Again, it’s not pushing the pleasure button and getting a dopamine rush.
0:32:33 This is about hard work and doing the work.
0:32:34 Is that right?
0:32:35 Yeah, for sure.
0:32:36 For sure.
0:32:37 And everything in life is really about that.
0:32:39 But the whole point is, I don’t have to convince your audience.
0:32:43 I mean, I have to convince a lot of, a lot of audiences, I don’t have to convince your
0:32:46 audience that hard work is awesome.
0:32:47 Hard work is the best.
0:32:48 It’s so fun.
0:32:50 It’s so satisfying.
0:32:52 It’s such a big payoff.
0:32:55 And furthermore, the discipline is the kind of thing where you get just so much better
0:32:56 at it.
0:32:59 And so one of the things that I do with a lot of young people is I really work on their
0:33:04 discipline so they can get into the space where hard work gets more fun and is more
0:33:05 interesting.
0:33:07 And I’ll give you an example of how I do this.
0:33:12 For almost everybody, you have to divide up your day between grunt work and creative
0:33:13 work.
0:33:17 And for you, for sure, you have this big popular podcast.
0:33:21 And part of your day is stuff that you can do without a lot of creativity.
0:33:24 And part of your day, you need tons of creativity and ideas.
0:33:27 Put the creative part of your work from 8 to 11 in the morning.
0:33:28 And here’s how to do it.
0:33:33 Here’s how I actually had it neurochemically set yourself up for this with pure discipline.
0:33:39 If you want a three-hour window of pure creativity, you have to maximize the dopamine to your prefrontal
0:33:40 cortex.
0:33:45 This is the neurotransmitter of the anticipation of reward and focus and creativity.
0:33:48 It’s an amazing thing, but you have to optimize it.
0:33:51 The way to do that, if you’re going to do that at 8 o’clock or 7.30 in the morning,
0:33:54 which is the best time to do it, get up at 4.45.
0:34:00 I kid you not, 4.45 in the morning every day, work out usually resistance training from
0:34:03 5 to 6 without taxing your creativity.
0:34:06 Don’t listen to me giving a neuroscience lecture while you’re working out.
0:34:08 Plus, actually, when you’re doing lifts, your blood pressure will go up too much and you
0:34:11 won’t be able to concentrate and you’ll miss the most important parts.
0:34:17 5 to 6, take a shower, do your meditation or your prayer or whatever your concentrated
0:34:20 spiritual or philosophical work is.
0:34:22 Maybe you’re reading the Stoic philosophers.
0:34:24 That’s when you use that particular time.
0:34:26 Then take your caffeine.
0:34:29 Make sure you haven’t had any caffeine until that point.
0:34:32 Tank up on caffeine and you will be in the zone.
0:34:34 Phone off.
0:34:35 No distractions.
0:34:38 You’ll get three solid hours.
0:34:41 People will be like, “How are you getting all this done?”
0:34:44 The answer is that.
0:34:46 That’s actually how you do it.
0:34:52 Discipline leads to hard work, leads to results, leads to great fun and good times.
0:34:54 I love that morning routine.
0:34:58 Another key concept in your book is happiness is a choice.
0:35:02 You give a story about your mother-in-law, I believe.
0:35:05 Can you please tell us that story?
0:35:07 My mother-in-law, she died last year at 93.
0:35:08 Oh, sorry.
0:35:13 She had a good long life, but it didn’t look like things were going to go really well for
0:35:14 her.
0:35:17 Early on, she grew up in Spain.
0:35:18 She’s Spanish.
0:35:19 My wife is Spanish.
0:35:21 All of my in-laws are in Spain.
0:35:24 She experienced the Spanish Civil War up close and personal.
0:35:28 Her father was a surgeon for the Republican side of the Spanish Civil War, which was the
0:35:31 people that were fighting the fascist dictatorship.
0:35:33 Their side lost.
0:35:35 He was a battlefield surgeon.
0:35:36 He was accused of something.
0:35:39 Anyway, he spent a bunch of time in prison after the war in the Canary Islands, which
0:35:42 is where my mother-in-law wound up growing up.
0:35:43 Sounds sad.
0:35:44 Sounds hard.
0:35:49 It turns out, tons of people around, lots of, you know, her parents loved each other.
0:35:51 They saw their father every day, even though he’s in prison.
0:35:54 She had a super great childhood despite these adverse circumstances.
0:35:56 Okay, good news so far.
0:35:57 Okay.
0:36:02 It turns out that because of her father, that the guy in the next jail cell over introduced
0:36:06 my mother-in-law, when she was a teenager, to a guy she fell in love with, who became
0:36:07 her husband.
0:36:08 Even better, right?
0:36:11 Turns out he wasn’t a super good husband, and this is an old story.
0:36:16 So, the Spanish Civil War doesn’t set back her happiness, but getting married does.
0:36:22 So, he runs off multiple times, finally leaves definitively with another woman when my wife
0:36:24 is six.
0:36:27 No child support, poverty, and the lights are shutting off.
0:36:28 It’s just the worst.
0:36:32 And furthermore, she was, for whatever reason, still in love with the guy.
0:36:35 So my wife said that when she was a little girl, she would see her mother at the window
0:36:36 crying.
0:36:37 She might see him as he went past.
0:36:38 It was just awful.
0:36:42 She said, “Okay, so this goes on for a number of years until,” and I learned about this later
0:36:45 for my mother-in-law because she and I were really, really close.
0:36:48 I was as close to my mother-in-law as to my own mother.
0:36:49 I loved her so much.
0:36:52 And I knew her for, I’ve known her for, I’ve been married 32 years.
0:36:54 So, of course, I knew her for decades.
0:37:00 She said that when she was 45 years old, she woke up one day and she had this flash of
0:37:01 realization.
0:37:06 She had been hoping and waiting for the whole outside world to change so that she could
0:37:08 get happier.
0:37:10 She said, “I can’t do that.
0:37:11 I can’t change the whole world.
0:37:14 I can only change one thing, me.”
0:37:19 So she started thinking to herself, “What could I change about me that would change my circumstances?”
0:37:20 She thought about it.
0:37:25 She thought, “Well, you know, the problem is I am still stuck on being an appendage to
0:37:27 that guy and he’s gone.
0:37:29 I need to actually become independent.”
0:37:31 So she went back to college.
0:37:32 She got her teaching degree.
0:37:37 She became a teacher in the public schools, teaching super marginalized immigrant kids
0:37:41 in like the worst neighborhood in Barcelona where they lived at that time.
0:37:46 And the result is over the next few decades, she had a career she loved, kids she loved,
0:37:49 women that adored her that she worked with.
0:37:52 And about 14 years later, she’s a weird thing, Hala.
0:37:57 Her husband wanted to come back and the reason is because she was different.
0:38:00 She was like independent and she had it going on.
0:38:01 He’s like, “Can I come home?”
0:38:04 I’m sure that the other woman had thrown him out, by the way.
0:38:09 Anyway, when I come home and she thought about it, she’s like, “I don’t need this,
0:38:10 but I want it.”
0:38:14 And she invited him home and their marriage was great until the end.
0:38:17 He died in ’89 and by the end, her health was terrible.
0:38:18 So she was bedridden.
0:38:20 He was doing all the cooking.
0:38:21 He would lift her into bed.
0:38:22 He loved her.
0:38:23 He took care of her.
0:38:29 And so she said, in the end, she said, “You know, we had 54 really wonderful years of
0:38:30 marriage.
0:38:32 Of course, we were married 68 years.
0:38:36 But it was pretty rough for those 14 when he was gone.
0:38:41 But the 54 years that we had that were really beautiful, especially the last ones were wonderful.
0:38:47 That was because she built the life that she wanted around four basic pillars, her faith,
0:38:52 her family life on her terms, including her marriage, her friendships, which were her
0:38:57 friends, and getting a job where she served other people and earned her success.
0:39:01 And those are the four pillars that all of us need to build our lives on as well.
0:39:04 So I hope we get to touch a little bit on those pillars.
0:39:08 I know we did touch on the work pillar earlier in this conversation.
0:39:11 Really by the end, we get time to talk about the other three, but first I want to talk
0:39:16 about some tactical ways that we can improve our happiness right away.
0:39:19 One of the ways you say is learning how to better manage our emotions.
0:39:24 So first of all, why is it important for us to be more aware of our negative feelings
0:39:25 and emotions?
0:39:29 And why are those negative feelings and emotions actually not a bad thing?
0:39:30 Yeah.
0:39:32 So to begin with, you die without them.
0:39:35 You die without the bad feelings because your bad feelings are alarms that something’s
0:39:39 going on that you got to pay attention to, but they’re maladapted in modern life.
0:39:45 We have the same physiological stress reaction to being chased by a tiger and getting a really
0:39:46 bad tweet.
0:39:51 I mean, that’s not normal that we have the same, but because we’re very kind of rudimentary
0:39:54 creatures and we’re not adapted to the modern environment very well.
0:39:58 So that means that we don’t need to regret our bad feelings, our bad emotions or our
0:39:59 negative emotions.
0:40:05 What we need to do is to understand them, to manage them so we can learn and grow from
0:40:06 them.
0:40:07 That’s the goal.
0:40:09 The goal is not to eradicate them because we don’t want to die and we actually need
0:40:13 them, but we got to make sure that we have enough knowledge so that when they’re maladapted
0:40:19 or they’re becoming a source of rumination and even mental illness that we have the knowledge,
0:40:23 the self-knowledge and practice and techniques that we can actually treat ourselves a little
0:40:27 bit without feeling so helpless all the time or God forbid turning the substances which
0:40:30 so many people do to numb themselves.
0:40:34 So that’s really why emotional self-regulation is so critically important.
0:40:36 Now here’s basically how it works.
0:40:38 We already talked about the limbic system and emotions.
0:40:43 These are simply, they’re signals that come to the very ancient part of your brain, you
0:40:48 know the brain stem and all that that says something’s moving around you, you smelled
0:40:53 something, you heard something, that sends a signal to your limbic system that that should
0:40:58 turn into an emotion which is a machine language that will deliver to your prefrontal cortex
0:41:00 so that you can react.
0:41:02 It’s a relay, this limbic system.
0:41:07 If you don’t actually use the relay, if you don’t actually figure out what your emotions
0:41:11 are so you can react the way you want, then you’ll just be a limbic, you know, you feel
0:41:16 angry, you yell, you feel sad, you cry, you see something funny, you burst out laughing.
0:41:17 It’s like a little kid.
0:41:18 Is that monkey brain?
0:41:20 Is that the same thing as monkey brain?
0:41:24 Well monkey brain is one that just can’t focus on anything for any period of time.
0:41:28 That’s really not here all the time, but it is a monkey brain for sure.
0:41:32 I mean the whole point is it’s kind of like emotions are ghosts and the ghosts are running
0:41:36 the show or maybe it’s, you know, the CEO’s in front but the CEO’s not paying attention
0:41:40 and you know the workers are running around the company doing whatever they want without
0:41:41 a leader.
0:41:46 So the way to deal with this is you need to move the experience, you need the emotions
0:41:50 but you need to move the experience of the emotions into the prefrontal cortex of the
0:41:52 brain and there’s a bunch of ways to do that.
0:41:57 That’s called medic cognition, being aware of your own thinking, being aware of your
0:41:59 own emotions, medic cognition.
0:42:01 How do we do it?
0:42:05 Number one, you got to put time between your emotions and your reactions and you have to
0:42:08 experience them in the executive centers of your brain.
0:42:12 That’s why when you learn to meditate, one of the things you’ll do, and I’ve studied
0:42:16 meditation for years and years and years and years and one of the classic meditation techniques
0:42:20 is to say, I’m going to look at myself as if I were another person.
0:42:24 So you sit in meditation in the quiet of your room and you say, Hala is feeling sad right
0:42:25 now.
0:42:27 Why is Hala feeling sad right now?
0:42:28 Nothing happened.
0:42:29 Oh yes, indeed.
0:42:30 Well, that’s an interesting feeling, isn’t it?
0:42:33 I think that’s actually an overblown feeling.
0:42:35 You might be related to something else and you look at yourself analytically.
0:42:41 That’s a really good way to use sitting in meditation, journaling, outstanding.
0:42:44 You can’t write something unless it’s in your prefrontal cortex and so writing about your
0:42:49 feelings just yourself and then burning the notes if you need to, super important.
0:42:52 I mean, there’s all kinds of ways.
0:42:53 Therapy is supposed to do this.
0:42:57 If you have a therapist who says, I’m going to teach you about you, two thumbs up.
0:43:01 If you have one who says, I’m going to solve your problem, run because that’s actually
0:43:02 not going to be useful to you.
0:43:04 Prayer is incredibly useful.
0:43:10 People who have traditionally religious practices sitting in prayer and asking God to help you
0:43:14 with your emotions is moving them into the prefrontal cortex of your brain.
0:43:17 And then once in your prefrontal cortex, you’ve got choices, man.
0:43:20 I mean, you can decide how to react.
0:43:22 You can substitute one emotion for another.
0:43:26 You can decide to disregard emotions by simply observing the outside world.
0:43:30 You got a whole repertoire of ways that you can manage yourself.
0:43:33 Metacognition to me is very, very interesting.
0:43:37 So basically you’re observing things as if they’re happening to somebody else.
0:43:39 You mentioned journaling, right?
0:43:43 So let’s talk about that because I thought that was a really cool strategy to try to do
0:43:44 this.
0:43:49 How can we learn from traumatic experiences through journaling?
0:43:52 The problem with a lot of traumatic experiences for people is that they’re a ghost in the
0:43:54 brain.
0:43:55 They’re unsupervised.
0:44:02 The memories, the sensations, they’re purely limbic and they’re uncomfortable so the natural
0:44:04 tendency is to want to make them go away.
0:44:09 Now some people make them go away by numbing them with drugs and alcohol or other kinds
0:44:13 of behaviors that are compulsive and addictive and not good.
0:44:18 Other ways to do that are to kind of accept them but never really to analyze them very
0:44:23 much at all to kind of identifying oneself as a victim to get kind of the victim identity.
0:44:27 This is a very unhealthy thing to do that leads to a lot of misery.
0:44:30 By the way, when you’re a victim, you tend to make a lot of misery around you.
0:44:35 That’s when you go into the, you get radical politics and you spend too much time on social
0:44:39 media and it’s like, “Don’t do that,” then you’re going to spread your misery around.
0:44:44 The way to deal with this, and sometimes it’s very important to have the help of a therapist
0:44:48 to do this, is to say, “I want to understand these feelings that I’m actually having.”
0:44:52 It doesn’t mean you have to recreate the feelings, no, there are plenty there, but to look at
0:44:54 these things from a certain remove.
0:44:58 To say, “This thing is really, really on my mind.”
0:45:01 What exact, to name the emotion that you’re actually feeling, it’s like, “I’m feeling
0:45:05 residual fear every time this thing comes up.
0:45:08 I’m feeling real sadness about something that happened to me.”
0:45:13 And to say, not to think about the event but to think about the sadness itself, to really
0:45:17 think about the fear itself, to think about how it makes you feel in the pit of your stomach,
0:45:21 that it raises your blood pressure and your cortisol and your stress markers, that is
0:45:24 doing all this stuff and really notice that.
0:45:27 You don’t need to go over the source of your fear because you’ve gone over that a billion
0:45:30 times, but to go over the sensation itself.
0:45:35 Then actually, you’re understanding that feeling in your executive centers, and that’s
0:45:39 your CEO being alerted that your leader needs to be a leader.
0:45:45 We’ll be right back after a quick break from our sponsors.
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0:50:10 I want to talk about mirrors, because that was one of the most fascinating things that
0:50:15 I read in your book, was the fact that we need to be more about other people and less
0:50:17 focused about ourselves.
0:50:21 You say to avoid mirrors and even digital mirrors, like Googling ourselves, Self View
0:50:25 on Zoom, social media mentions and things like that.
0:50:26 I thought that was really interesting.
0:50:27 Can you tell us about that?
0:50:28 Yeah.
0:50:32 There’s a lot of philosophical work and even work from Buddhism and other religions about
0:50:39 what’s called the “I-self” and the bliss that actually comes when we decide, metacognitively,
0:50:44 to disregard all of the inputs, all of our feelings and of themselves, so that we can
0:50:47 be in the state of looking outward.
0:50:50 There’s a phrase in the New Testament to the Bible, the Christian Bible, “judge not
0:50:52 lest ye be judged.”
0:50:58 That basically is when you’re going around saying, “This coffee is bitter and crummy,
0:51:02 and this traffic is terrible,” and you’re just judged, judged, judged, judged.
0:51:08 You’re basically giving the world and you’re giving permission to everybody to be judged.
0:51:13 It’s all social comparison, and then it’s looking in mirrors, and it’s just life is
0:51:15 misery.
0:51:20 The way to get around this is to have a strategy of actually not thinking about yourself or
0:51:25 referring to yourself, and the right way to start is by manually getting rid of the mirrors
0:51:26 in your life.
0:51:31 I work with a guy, pretty consistently now, he’s a pretty well-known guy, who in an earlier
0:51:37 part of his life, until his late 20s, he was a fitness influencer and a fitness model.
0:51:44 I mean, this is serious, to do that, you have to have discipline beyond what is actually
0:51:50 even healthy, to be sure, because single-digit body fat all year round, really high muscle
0:51:51 mass all year round.
0:51:55 He didn’t want to take PEDs, meaning he never could eat anything that he wanted.
0:51:56 He always had to have his fitness on point.
0:52:01 I mean, he was in social media, and he was in magazines and the whole deal, and he was
0:52:02 completely miserable.
0:52:07 He went 10 years not eating anything that he liked, and I was feeling grumpy and feeling
0:52:08 sort of sad.
0:52:13 And the truth is, you will mess up your hormones if you sit at single-digit, men, if men sit
0:52:17 at single-digit body fat, or women are under 18% body fat for extended periods of time,
0:52:20 you’re going to mess up your hormones, and that’s going to mess up your emotional life,
0:52:21 and that was what was going on for him.
0:52:26 So he figured out that what he needed to do was to get away from this addiction to his
0:52:27 image.
0:52:31 He was addicted to his image, and so many people are, they’re like, “I’m going to check my
0:52:32 mentions.”
0:52:33 That’s dopamine, by the way.
0:52:34 It’s a dopamine hit.
0:52:38 Did people like my post, you know, whatever happens to me, did I get new followers?
0:52:41 Yadda, yadda, yadda, that’s the way that whole thing works.
0:52:42 So here’s what he did.
0:52:45 He actually, he’s a fitness influencer, mind you.
0:52:46 He got a new job.
0:52:52 You know, he actually got a job that didn’t require that he be naked all the time, basically.
0:52:57 And he took all of the mirrors out of his house, 100% of the mirrors out of his house,
0:53:00 and then he showered in the dark for a year.
0:53:03 So he didn’t know if he had abs.
0:53:07 For a lot of people watching this, they’re like, “Yeah, yeah, yeah, I don’t have that
0:53:08 problem.”
0:53:09 Well, you do.
0:53:10 You do.
0:53:12 It’s probably the mentions on your social media, and you’re hitting the app too much.
0:53:16 And so probably you need to get the app off your phone, make it harder to look at, and
0:53:20 put a moratorium on looking at any of your mentions, and then limit your social media
0:53:23 to a total of 30 minutes a day across all platforms.
0:53:27 And trust me, your outlook on life is going to change because you’re going to be focused
0:53:31 outward and not inward so very much, and you’re going to get happier.
0:53:33 And it sure as Hall and I are sitting here.
0:53:34 You’re going to get happier.
0:53:35 Yeah.
0:53:39 So I guess a part of that is a little bit confusing to me because I always feel like
0:53:42 when you look your best, you dress your best, you’ve got like for girls, you put on your
0:53:45 makeup, you feel confident, you feel happy.
0:53:48 So for me, also, isn’t there a balance?
0:53:52 Because if you totally don’t care about that, could you also be unhappy because you’re not
0:53:55 presenting yourself in the best way?
0:53:56 Yeah.
0:53:58 I recommend presenting yourself in the best way, but not looking at yourself.
0:53:59 That’s what it comes down to.
0:54:00 Not looking at yourself.
0:54:01 Yeah.
0:54:02 Not looking at yourself.
0:54:03 Yeah.
0:54:04 I mean, it’s like, sure, I’m going to put on a nice suit and I’m going to go out and I’m
0:54:05 going to give a speech.
0:54:08 You know, I’m going to make sure that my shoes are shine just because I want to make a good
0:54:09 impression on people.
0:54:11 I want to make a professional impression on people.
0:54:15 But let’s also think about what we’re trying to do to not go too far.
0:54:19 If you’re a married person, you shouldn’t be trying to do everything you can to attract
0:54:22 a person that’s not your spouse.
0:54:23 It’s kind of productive.
0:54:26 All it is is sheer ego and mirrors is what it comes down to.
0:54:30 So absolutely, look your best to be productive and so you can feel professional and you
0:54:33 can feel kind of spiffed up and that’s great.
0:54:36 But stop looking at yourself is the whole idea.
0:54:40 You’re going to go crazy doing that and furthermore, you’re going to miss life.
0:54:41 You’re going to miss everything.
0:54:44 You’re going to be looking in the mirror and it’s like, you know, Haley’s comet is going
0:54:45 past.
0:54:48 Here’s like a little story to remember about this.
0:54:50 There’s this old Zen Buddhist koan.
0:54:52 A koan is a riddle.
0:54:57 The Zen Buddhist monks will train their junior monks by giving them these like perplexing
0:54:58 little stories that they’re supposed to think about.
0:55:01 And that’s how they learn Zen Buddhism based on these riddles.
0:55:02 There’s one that does this.
0:55:07 There’s a story of a junior monk is walking down the road by himself, a path in the forest,
0:55:10 and there’s a senior monk, an old man coming toward him and he recognizes him.
0:55:14 And the junior monk says, “Where are you going?”
0:55:16 And the senior monk says, “I’m on a pilgrimage.”
0:55:20 Pilgrimage, young man says, “Wow, where’s your pilgrimage taking you?”
0:55:23 And the senior monk says, “I don’t know.”
0:55:26 And the junior monk says, “Why don’t you know?”
0:55:31 And the senior monk says, “Because not knowing is the most intimate form of knowledge.”
0:55:34 Now, here’s the key thing.
0:55:35 Here’s the point.
0:55:41 Not knowing where your life is going to take you requires that you be looking outward and
0:55:43 being open to adventure.
0:55:46 And if you’re looking in the mirror, checking your mentions and like me, me, me, me, me.
0:55:49 First of all, it’s boring, boring, boring.
0:55:51 But the second thing is you’ll go mad.
0:55:55 And third and last but not least, you’re going to miss the most interesting things in life
0:55:57 because not knowing is the most intimate.
0:55:58 Yeah.
0:56:02 So it’s important to observe life, but you also say it’s important not to judge.
0:56:07 Can you define what judging is and how we can avoid it if we have that bad habit?
0:56:08 Yeah.
0:56:10 Judging is actually not outward.
0:56:12 Judging looks like you’re looking outward.
0:56:16 Judgment is all inward because when you judge something, it’s your opinion.
0:56:19 It’s your cast on what you’re looking at, right?
0:56:22 So if you can go an hour, just try, it’s super hard.
0:56:25 You go an hour and not say, I hate this traffic.
0:56:26 This traffic is terrible.
0:56:31 Say, the traffic is unusually heavy today, no judgment, right?
0:56:34 This coffee has a strong bitter flavor.
0:56:35 Not I hate this coffee.
0:56:36 What crummy music.
0:56:38 Say, I haven’t heard this music before.
0:56:42 It’s not the kind of music I usually listen to.
0:56:43 Observe without judgment.
0:56:47 Because basically when you observe with judgment, it’s just like looking and looking at your
0:56:50 reflection and the thing that you’re staring at.
0:56:53 And then here’s the best part that you get when you judge less.
0:56:58 You will judge yourself less because everything that you’re doing is giving yourself permission
0:57:00 and others permission to judge you.
0:57:04 And that’s all social comparison and that’s just the thief of joy.
0:57:07 That’s just misery is how all that social comparison, you can go through life.
0:57:12 No, if you can go through a day, if you can go through an hour just by walking down the
0:57:17 street and just looking outward at the majesty of the universe and not judging anything.
0:57:19 It’s going to blow your mind.
0:57:20 It’s going to change your brain chemistry.
0:57:23 And if you practice that every day, things are going to start to change.
0:57:28 Yeah, I feel like those are the two areas that I could work on most, the mirrors and
0:57:31 the judgment and just reframing everything.
0:57:34 So in your book, you have four pillars for happier lives.
0:57:36 We alluded to that previously.
0:57:41 Could you at a high level in our last 10 minutes together go over the four pillars, family,
0:57:44 friendship, work, and faith?
0:57:48 There’s a million practices of the happiest people is what you find, but basically it
0:57:51 comes down to four big areas.
0:57:55 There are four big areas to put a deposit in in your life.
0:57:58 This is your happiness 401K plan.
0:58:02 You need to make an investment in four accounts every day if you want to get happier.
0:58:05 Now people don’t do it because they’re so distracted by their emotions.
0:58:09 So if you do the stuff that we talked about before, then you won’t be distracted so you
0:58:13 can focus on these four things more every single day.
0:58:18 Your faith, your family, your friends, and your work that serves other people.
0:58:22 So quickly we’ll go through them because it’s very easy to misunderstand these ideas.
0:58:24 Faith does not mean my religious faith.
0:58:25 I’m a Catholic.
0:58:29 It’s super important to me, but as a scientist, I will tell you that it’s the transcendental
0:58:36 walk in ideas and concepts every single day that are bigger than you and blow your mind.
0:58:37 That’s what you need.
0:58:38 Why?
0:58:39 Because you need to get small.
0:58:40 Smaller needs to be little.
0:58:43 And if you don’t, then you’re going to be focused on yourself and you go crazy.
0:58:46 I mean, it’s the whole mirror thing again and again and again.
0:58:51 The best way to zoom out is to expose yourself to amazing things.
0:58:56 Maybe that’s religion, maybe that’s a meditation practice, maybe that’s walking in nature for
0:58:59 an hour before dawn every day without devices.
0:59:05 Maybe that’s studying the great works of Johann Sebastian Bach and learning all of the cantatas.
0:59:07 But whatever it is, it has to zoom you out.
0:59:11 Maybe it’s reading the Stoics, like my friend Ryan Holiday, he has all these books about
0:59:12 the Stoics.
0:59:14 That’s a great way to do it, but you need that.
0:59:15 That’s what I mean by faith.
0:59:19 That means not me, the whole thing, and I’m little.
0:59:20 Second is family life.
0:59:24 That’s the most mystical kind of love because it’s super intense, but you didn’t choose
0:59:25 it.
0:59:28 And God knows you wouldn’t have chosen it and certain in so many cases because they
0:59:29 drive you crazy.
0:59:35 But if you sacrifice family love for anything besides abuse, you’re making a mistake.
0:59:38 And political differences of opinion are not abuse.
0:59:39 This is super important.
0:59:43 A lot of problems with people who are Gen Z and millennials is they’ve been conscripted
0:59:47 into a culture war that baby boomers started.
0:59:52 Do not be a conscientious objector to the political polarization and the culture wars
0:59:54 of people my age because they just want to use you.
0:59:58 The media and politicians want to use you to fight their battles and the way that they’ll
1:00:01 do it is turning you against your uncle or whatever.
1:00:03 It’s a mistake for your happiness.
1:00:05 Third is your friendships.
1:00:09 And there’s two kinds of friendships out there, real and deal.
1:00:12 Deal friends, those are super useful.
1:00:16 And everybody that’s a fan of young and profiting has a lot of deal friends, useful people.
1:00:19 And that’s fine, but those are different than your real friends.
1:00:21 Your real friends are useless.
1:00:25 You don’t need them to get you forward and to help your career.
1:00:26 They might help you, but that’s not the point.
1:00:29 You love them no matter if they can help you or not.
1:00:33 And a lot of young people today have fewer and fewer real friends.
1:00:37 Put a line down the side of a paper, write down the 10 people that you see the most or
1:00:41 closest to you every day, and then write real or deal after their names.
1:00:42 And you know the differences.
1:00:45 And if it’s all deal and no real, you’ve got work to do.
1:00:46 And you’ve got to do the work.
1:00:48 And last but not least is your work.
1:00:49 We’ve talked about work.
1:00:51 We talked about work in the last time that we got together and we talk about work.
1:00:53 I talk about work all the time.
1:00:57 Work to be a source of joy doesn’t have to be high paying.
1:00:58 It doesn’t have to be high prestige.
1:01:00 It doesn’t have to be a lot of power.
1:01:05 It’s earning your success through your hard work, personal merit, and responsibility.
1:01:08 And being acknowledged and rewarded for your hard work.
1:01:13 So get a job where you can get ahead on the basis of working hard and being good and you
1:01:14 get rewarded for it.
1:01:15 That’s number one.
1:01:16 And number two is you serve others.
1:01:20 You get dignity from people actually needing you, which is the source of dignity.
1:01:23 And you know who they are and you can see it.
1:01:24 Those are the way that you can actually be happy.
1:01:28 And so faith, family, friends, and work, as we’ve defined it here, if you’re putting
1:01:30 deposits in those accounts every day, you’re getting happier.
1:01:33 As sure as I’m sitting here, I promise it’s true.
1:01:34 Okay.
1:01:37 Before we go, I do have to bring up gratitude.
1:01:41 So talk to us about why gratitude is so important and how we can use gratitude to substitute
1:01:43 a lot of our negative emotions.
1:01:44 Yeah.
1:01:48 Gratitude is a substitute emotion that actually substitutes for our natural evolved tendency
1:01:49 to see the negative.
1:01:53 Now, a lot of people who are watching this, they’re like, “I’m just such a negative person.
1:01:57 I feel like I go through the whole, you know, through the whole day and I only see the negative.
1:02:02 You mean everybody because evolution gives you the negativity bias.
1:02:03 That’s why you’re alive.
1:02:06 If you went through life whistling down the street, only seeing the nice things, you’d
1:02:08 be eaten by a tiger so fast.”
1:02:09 Right?
1:02:12 I mean, your ancestors would not have made it past the Pleistocene.
1:02:13 Trust me.
1:02:18 The negativity bias means that you see somebody sweetly smiling at you, nice, but somebody
1:02:22 frowning at you pay attention because that’s a threat.
1:02:26 You pay attention to threats because it’s urgent that you do so, and that leads you to a negativity
1:02:27 bias.
1:02:31 Now, in modern life, that’s maladapted because we have a lot more to be grateful for than
1:02:38 resentful about or fearful about, and that means we need to calibrate our emotions consciously.
1:02:40 Knowledge is power on this.
1:02:44 You can choose the emotion of gratitude when you feel resentment.
1:02:48 Resentment is the natural emotion, but gratitude is the chosen emotion.
1:02:49 How?
1:02:51 By saying to yourself, “I’m feeling a lot of resentment right now, but the truth of
1:02:55 the matter is I have a ton to feel happy about.”
1:02:56 It’s so easy for me to do this.
1:03:01 It’s so easy for me to be like, “Yeah, my book is not selling as much as I like.
1:03:04 I got a book with Oprah Winfrey.
1:03:05 I should be grateful.”
1:03:09 It’s so easy for me to forget, and I’m the professor of this stuff, and I forget.
1:03:13 The way that you do that is doing it on purpose and being really, really conscious of it is
1:03:18 basic realism that counterposes against your natural evolutionary tendency.
1:03:20 Think about it that way.
1:03:25 Talk to us about how we can become more gracious if that’s not naturally who we are, if we’re
1:03:27 more of a realist.
1:03:31 In the book, we actually have a test called the PANIS test.
1:03:37 The PANIS test is, it tests the intensity of your negative and positive emotions.
1:03:41 You can be high, emotionally positive, and high, emotionally negative in intensity.
1:03:43 That’s called the mad scientist.
1:03:45 That’s somebody who’s super high affect.
1:03:47 That’s probably you, Hala.
1:03:49 Either you’re a cheerleader or you’re a mad scientist.
1:03:52 A mad scientist feels intense positive and intense negative.
1:03:57 A cheerleader feels intense positive and low negative.
1:03:58 You’re one of those two.
1:03:59 I can tell that right now.
1:04:00 You’re one of those two.
1:04:01 Probably a cheerleader, yeah.
1:04:02 You’re probably a cheerleader.
1:04:03 That’s great.
1:04:04 Everybody wants to be a cheerleader, right?
1:04:05 Because it sounds like you’re happy.
1:04:07 That’s actually not perfect in a marriage.
1:04:10 You don’t want two cheerleaders together because cheerleaders hate bad news.
1:04:13 If that’s the case, they never see threats.
1:04:16 What they do is they all spend all the money.
1:04:20 If it’s a cheerleader married to a cheerleader, spend, spend, spend, spend, spend.
1:04:23 We didn’t know we were going to go bankrupt by running up the credit cards.
1:04:24 That’s a problem.
1:04:28 Anyway, then you have on the other side people who have high negative and low positive.
1:04:30 Those are poets.
1:04:33 They tend toward gloominess, but they’re very realistic.
1:04:35 They’re very realistic about the world.
1:04:39 Or you can just be a low affect person, low positive and low negative.
1:04:41 Those are the people who just kind of like, they don’t get perturbed.
1:04:42 They’re sort of unflappable.
1:04:43 Yeah.
1:04:44 I love that.
1:04:45 I want to look up that.
1:04:48 Are there ways in your book or an exercise in the book?
1:04:49 Yeah.
1:04:50 It’s in the second big chapter.
1:04:52 It’s called the Positive Affect, Negative Affect Series.
1:04:56 After you look at it, after people get the book and read about it, they go to my website,
1:04:59 arthurbrooks.com, and take the quiz.
1:05:03 Once they actually take the quiz on my website or any place else that you find it, you can
1:05:07 figure out which one you are, and then it’s going to start making probably a lot of things
1:05:09 in your life are going to start making a lot more sense.
1:05:10 Awesome.
1:05:12 I’m going to close out with this.
1:05:15 You say that even if you could get rid of your unhappiness, it would be a huge, huge
1:05:16 mistake.
1:05:21 Why do you believe that the secret to the best life is to accept your unhappiness?
1:05:22 You need unhappiness.
1:05:24 You need sacrifice.
1:05:26 You need difficulty.
1:05:31 You need negative emotions and negative experiences, because you need to be fully alive.
1:05:35 You need enjoyment, which means you have to defer your gratification.
1:05:40 You need satisfaction, which means you need to temper your wants and not just your haves.
1:05:43 Most of all, you need meaning, and meaning requires resilience.
1:05:44 It requires experiences.
1:05:49 It requires learning and growing from the bad things that happen in your life as well.
1:05:54 People who try to avoid unhappiness paradoxically, they wind up avoiding their happiness.
1:06:00 This is the most important way to be profiting in the business of the startup of your life
1:06:05 is to take it all, to wake up in the morning and say, “Man, this stuff’s going to happen
1:06:06 today.”
1:06:10 All I can say is I’m going to learn and grow from everything that happens, so bring it
1:06:11 on.
1:06:12 Awesome.
1:06:18 The one actionable thing our Younger Profiters can do today to become more profiting tomorrow.
1:06:23 The one thing they can do to become more profiting tomorrow is to think about somebody that you
1:06:29 love and they may not know it and call them up or write them an email or a text that says,
1:06:33 “I don’t know if you know this, but I love you and see what happens.
1:06:39 You’re going to start a series of events that might be pretty unpredictable, but that’s
1:06:41 the basis of entrepreneurship.”
1:06:42 I love that.
1:06:44 What is your secret to profiting in life?
1:06:47 You don’t have to bring up anything we talked about in today’s conversation, just anything
1:06:48 that comes to mind.
1:06:50 What is your secret to profiting in life?
1:06:56 The secret to profiting in life for me really is loving more and not pushing love away.
1:06:57 This is really the key.
1:07:00 Remember that faith, family, friends, and work, that’s the love of the divine, that’s the
1:07:03 love of your family, that’s the love of your friends, and it’s expressing your love for
1:07:06 all of humanity by the way you earn your daily bread.
1:07:21 If you remember one single thing about happiness is that happiness is love, full stop.
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