A Bit of Optimism - Happier-ness with author Arthur Brooks

Episode Date: September 12, 2023

You’ll never achieve perfect happiness. This might sound like bad news, but it’s actually a good thing. Because being happy is not a final destination, it’s an ongoing practice. In short, it’s happier-ness.That’s a term Arthur Brooks and Oprah Winfrey coined in their new book “Build the Life You Want” where together they lay out a blueprint for a better life. And they would know: Arthur has studied the science of happiness for over 25 years, and I have never had a conversation with him that I haven’t left with a life-changing perspective on what it means to live a meaningful life. This conversation was no different.This… is a Bit of Optimism.For more on Arthur and his work check out: https://www.amazon.com/Build-Life-You-Want-Science/dp/0593545400arthurbrooks.com2

The only way to become successful at something is if we are willing to put in the effort. We practice our hobbies. We train at the gym to get stronger. We gain experience at work. Happiness is the same. It's something we have to constantly work towards. And there is no better trainer than Arthur Brooks. Arthur has studied the science of happiness for over 25 years, and I have never had a conversation with him where I didn't learn something new that made me just a little happier. So it came as no surprise to me that Oprah sought him out and wanted to write a book with him. And they did. It's called

Build the Life You Want. And that's exactly what we talked about. The dangers of pursuing success and the joys of pursuing happierness. This is a bit of optimism. Arthur Brooks, it's so good to see you again, my old friend. You look extremely well, I'd like to add. Thank you very much. Although, you know, it's that I don't ordinarily wear a tie, but I had the lecture this morning at Harvard. So full disclosure, that's what was going on in my life today. So the last time I talked to you on the podcast, your last book had just come out. Right. And I'm curious what road that book took you on that you got to the point that Oprah Winfrey

wanted to write a book with you. It's a great country, isn't it, Simon? Did you know Oprah prior? No, no, no, no. So here's kind of how it went. I wrote the from strength to strength, the book that we talked about last year, because it came out in 2022. During the Coronavirus. Brilliant, brilliant book. Thank you. I appreciate that means a lot because I think I stole all my ideas from you. So I wrote that book during the lockdowns because I had, you know, a lot of time. And I was

also writing my column in The Atlantic, which comes out every Thursday morning. It turns out one of my readers was Oprah Winfrey. She's really into the science of happiness. I did not know that. You know how it is. You write things, you don't know who's consuming them. You have this popular podcast. I mean, for all we know, Barack Obama is listening to you every week. I mean, he should. But you find that out at the weirdest times who's actually a consumer of your product. So she is reading the column, realizes there's a book from strength to strength and gets it in the first, on the first day it's on the market and reads it immediately and calls. Wow. I mean, she didn't call me. It's like, this is,

hello, this is Oprah Winfrey. And I'm like, yes, and this is Batman. I mean, that's not how it went, obviously. But the reason is because she has a podcast about books called Super Soul, which is a phenomenal podcast. And she's literally the best interviewer in the world. And she wanted me on the cast. And I said, of course. And when we were doing the podcast, she was quoting from my book by memory as a reader of the book. It was extraordinary. It was really amazing. And we hit it off like a house on fire. I mean, it was like we were separated at birth or something. It was the craziest thing about all the ways that we see the world, the concept of if you want to be loved, go love somebody.

I mean, all of these ideas and the way that she's tried to live her life and the way that, which is, by the way, she's like a master class in doing things right on happiness personally and professionally. And after that, we just kind of kept talking. You know, I did a web show of hers. And then, you know, we would text and call sometimes. And finally, she said, you know, let's get this information that you're teaching for your students at the business school in front of millions of people. I said, what do you have in mind?

She said, let's write a book. I'm like, yeah, yeah. So that's how it actually came about. And so I went out to her place and I stayed at her place in California for a few days and we cooked up the structure of the book in her tea house, which was awesome. It was really nice. It was really incredibly pleasant and lovely. And then we went away to our respective homes and worked on it and past chapters back and forth and worked on it over the past nine months or so. And now it's showtime. So you put together the structure in the tea house, which was really fun.

It was super fun. It was lovely. As a matter of fact, it was the most fun I've ever had on a book project. You know how collaboration is. Collaboration can be painful or collaboration can be really lovely. It has everything to do with values congruence. This is the kind of thing that Simon Sinek would write. Find the person with whom you share values and you'll want to collaborate. That's true. So what I'm so curious is, A, are you living the life you want? Is Oprah living

the life she wants, which is what makes you qualified to help other people live the life they want? Or are you on a journey and it's the lessons you're learning on the journey that you're sharing with people to sort of join you on the journey? It's different in our two cases. Oprah has very largely cracked the code. I've rarely met somebody who's cracked the code as much as she has. I mean, you and I are in an enviable position of meeting a lot of people who are very much in the public eye. And they're often very different in public than they are in private. And the reason for the difference between public and private is because they have an image that they maintain, but they're human beings. And they're struggling and they're, you know, et cetera. The reason that Oprah is the

same in public as she is in private is because she's cracked the code of what to do when you get all of the worldly rewards, money, power, pleasure, fame, when you get those things. And the answer is you use them in the service of others. That's what you do. You dedicate them to the good of other people. That's when things really, really go right. And she's cracked the code in that way. It's a very unusual thing that I've seen. I've almost never seen it as somebody who studies happiness. I, on the other hand, my journey is kind of ongoing. I'm naturally an unhappier person than Oprah is. I'm naturally unhappier than a lot of my students are. But really what that has to do with is not that my happiness is too low,

it's that I have high level of negative affect. This is one of the things that we talk an awful lot about the book is separating your positive and negative affect levels and figuring out which is the lever that you need to pull. For me, I have very high positive affect, lots and lots of happy feelings, but I also have a lot of unhappiness naturally, and that's what I have to manage. And that's a journey that I'm on, learning about the science, learning about the habits, suggesting ideas to other people, seeing it work, and seeing progress in my own life, of which I've seen really a lot in the last five years. What is the correlation? What is the difference between living the life you want as it relates to happiness versus living the life

you want as it relates to lifestyle? When I talk to people about living the life they want, they talk about the job, they talk about the partner, they talk about the home, they talk about the lifestyle and the travel. And what is the correlation between a life that I want and happiness and where do the two diverge? They diverge a lot. And this, it comes from a misconception that people have. People don't understand happiness. And part of the reason is because it's not a complicated thing like, like how to fix your computer. It's a highly complex and adaptive thing. And a lot of people get this big thing wrong about happiness, which is they think if they, they get a particular lifestyle, then they'll automatically be happy. And the truth is, if you work on happiness first, then your lifestyle will be plenty good enough. I mean, this is one of the

things I have to convince my MBA students of. Look, they're going to be sort of the masters of the universe. They're coming out of this fancy business school and they're going to go run companies. And they're convinced going in that if I get the money and the power and the position and the admiration and all these things that the world has told me are wonderful, then the happiness will come for free. And what I tell them is that's exactly wrong. What will happen is, you know, woe be unto you if your worldly dreams come true, because you'll figure out that you had the wrong dreams. The whole point is living a life of love, of relationships, of faith, of family, of real friendships, of work that serves other people.

In other words, do the things that you need in your happiness hygiene, and then you'll succeed plenty. Happiness first, success second. Here's what I don't understand. We know this, right? It's a trope. It's a meme that if you pursue the stuff and when you get the stuff, that's not what brings happiness. Intuitively, instinctively, we all know this. Why is it then that we keep doing it? What is it about the human being or the culture that we are not doing the thing that we know produces happiness? There's an actual reason, which is that one of the things people don't quite understand is that they assume mother nature wants us to be happy. Mother nature does not care. Evolution

does not select on happiness. It selects on traits and emotions and experiences that will make you survive and pass on your genes. Mother nature has only two goals for Simon and Arthur and every single person listening and watching here, survival and passing on your genes. Now you want to be happy and you have an urge to do certain things. And so you make the miscalculation that since I want to be happy, and since mother nature is pushing me through these things like money and power and pleasure and honor, et cetera, that therefore, if I get those things, I will be happy. And we keep getting frustrated again and again and again. And we have a very hard time figuring that out. We don't quite

believe it because it doesn't quite make sense. Mother nature lies to us. And part of the reason that she lies to us is she wants us in the hunt. She wants us in the hunt to continue to learn and to grow and to progress and to survive and pass on our genes another day. And so if we keep getting fooled, we'll stay in the hunt again and again and again. That's one of the reasons that Mick Jagger saying, I can't get no satisfaction. The truth is you can't keep no satisfaction. That's the problem. You get a little bit of satisfaction that is fleeting. And so you try again and you try again. So this really gets back to this cruel reality of people who get all the things they thought they wanted. When they get there and they're still not happy, they tend to conclude that they just needed another billion.

They just needed another Academy Award. They just needed a slightly better fourth marriage than the third marriage, whatever it happens to be. And so they run and they run and they get back on the treadmill and run some more. I don't even remember if you and I've talked about this before, but I take exception with Maslow's hierarchy of needs. And I think Maslow made a mistake and you're touching upon it, which is there's an inherent paradox to being a human being, which is every moment of every day, I am both an individual and a member of a group. I am me, but I'm also a son, a brother, a teammate, a member of a church, you know, whatever it is, I am both me and a member of a group every moment of every day. And every day we're confronted with big or small choices. Do I put

myself first at the expense of the group? Or do I put the group first at the expense of me? And people debate this. There is the school of thought. You say you always protect yourself first. That way you're strong enough to be there for the team. And others who say, nope, you always put the team first so that you build relationships so the team will protect you in times of need. And the answer is you're both right and you're both wrong. It's a paradox. Yeah. Have you ever read this book? It's a really important book called Leaders Eat Last. Have you ever read that book? I read it when I recorded the audio book. It's a very good book. It makes a very persuasive case.

But the point is, I think when we think of the things of living the life you want, we oversimplify it. We make it binary. And to your point, too many of your students have the binary belief that if I put myself first, happiness will follow. And then there's another school of thought, I will call them the martyrs, who believe that if I always put others first, happiness will follow. And you're both wrong.

Because you and I both know there are times that we have to be selfish. There are times that I have to say to my team, I'm going to let you down. I will not be there for you. I need a break. But it goes beyond that. Real life is positive some. And to have positive some, you need people who are really achievement oriented, but also trying to do things for the good of society at the same time. That's the kind of balance that we're trying to do things for the good of society at the same time. That's the kind of balance that we're trying to get. High achievers, real strivers who also have relationships that they can serve and have a sense of service to others as well.

This is really what we're trying to get at. And that balance is just really hard to achieve, as it turns out. I think hierarchy plays into it as well, and not in the Maslow sense. But the fact that we're linear thinkers. And if you make a list, that list is going to be in some sort of hierarchy. As an example, I've never met a CEO who doesn't believe that their people are important. Never. But I always look where on the list. Number one, growth. Number two, shareholder value. Number three, our customer. And number four, our employees. There it is. Look, I believe employees are very important to us.

The problem is they're fourth on the list. Because you and I have both talked to many businesses and entrepreneurs where they talk about their desire to give back and their desire to serve society. But the problem is it comes second or it's some sort of lucky strike extra. When that hierarchy is flipped, do good and be successful rather than be successful and do good, that is more likely not only to drive innovation and do good, that is more likely not only to drive innovation and inspiration, but that is more likely to produce those feelings of fulfillment and joy and happiness that you and I are talking about. I'll give you an example of how I try to give people advice on how to do this that really gets to your point of hierarchy at this moment.

So we all have multiple objectives. We all have multiple objectives and we have the objectives that we naturally fall into in a particular hierarchy. And then we have a hierarchy that we want to follow, notwithstanding our inclinations. Every person should have a mission statement that's basically, let's say, four goals in order. And every big thing that you do with your life should actually hit all four goals, but in the order of importance. So I have an organization, it's a happiness organization. You know, I have my lab here at

the university and I've got, you know, a lot of people that work with me. And when we set the thing up, we said, okay, I have four goals and all of this happiness work and all of my public work, all my speaking and writing and teaching, et cetera, et cetera. We need to do all four of these things, but we need to do them in order. And if they're out of order, something's wrong. Okay. Number one, you know, I'm a traditionally religious person. So this is what number one is glorify God. Does it glorify God or does it not? If it doesn't, it doesn't matter what the other things on the list are. Number two, serve others, right? That's number two. That's not number one. It's number two. Number three,

Two, serve others, right? That's number two. That's not number one. It's number two. Number three, have an adventure. Number four, make a living. In that order. Now, I'm very privileged that I can have make a living at number four instead of number three, but I tell you, I don't care how little or how much money I'm making.

It'll never be number one or number two. It won't. It can't because that will be ultimately defeating the purpose of lifting people up and bringing them together with love and happiness based on science and ideas, which is kind of what we do. So we have a big project, me and my colleagues. I say, okay, does it glorify God? Pass the first test. Does it serve others?

Passes the second test. Is it fun and we want to do it and gives us energy? That's the third test. And is it helping us make a living? That's number four. And that's the order of. And is it helping us make a living? That's number four. And that's the order of operations that we need. Everybody needs a mission that's set up as an order of operations. Do you agree with that? I get asked the question a lot about God or spirituality,

and I believe in belief. I believe that it's essential to believe in whether it's a God or a higher power or a higher cause or something that is bigger than me that I choose to serve. So I believe in belief. And so I think I completely agree with that. Number one is you have to believe in something bigger, even if it's a cause. And number two, then are you serving others in pursuit of that cause? Number three, are you having fun? And number four, are you making a living?

I think that tracks where we've sort of gone sideways on our own pursuits, individual pursuits of happiness, or even the way we view capitalism today, not to go down that rabbit hole, is that we've made that hierarchy backwards. Am I making a living? Am I serving the shareholder? Am I demonstrating growth, whatever it is? Am I getting rich? Number two, am I having fun? We're still in selfish land. Then number three is, you know, am I serving others? And fourth, is it serving a higher cause? And sadly, that is how most organizations and individuals live their lives. But the fact of the matter is you sat in her tea house and you got to befriend Oprah Winfrey. And she's this larger than life human being who, as you put it,

more than most people you've ever met, seems to have cracked the code for living the life that she wants. I'm so curious about something you learned directly from her that you weren't doing or didn't do prior to meeting her, but now has become a practice in your life. She actually coined a term. You know, I study this stuff for a living, right? I mean, I'm sort of the scientist guy in the pair, and she's cracking a mass audience. And we had different goals and different roles in what we were trying to do in this project. But she actually refined something in my own knowledge of happiness. She put a point on something that I've been trying to get straight in my head, which was that the goal isn't happiness because it can't be happiness.

Happiness is not the goal because we need because it can't be happiness. You know, happiness is not the goal because we need negative experiences to become resilient and strong. I mean, you work with Navy SEALs, you know that better than anybody. And we need negative emotions because they keep us alive. Literally. I mean, people who are trying to eradicate negative emotions, it's foolish and dangerous and undesirable. And so we both know that, but talking about happiness is not the right way to talk about it because it's El Dorado. It's the golden city in South America that doesn't exist, but everybody's losing their lives looking for. It's an exercise in futility. What we want is to make progress. And so the goal, as she put it, is happierness. She coined this neologism of

happierness. And that was super important to me that helped me to understand not just how to live my life, but how to do my work in a better way. And this actually gets to a point that you've written about, and that we both really thought about this a lot. The secret to a better life is not attaining Shangri-La, getting to nirvana. The secret is progress. That's the secret. It's this interesting thing, you know, that the world of biology, something is quite remarkable is actually how easy it is to lose weight and how impossible it is to keep weight off. You know, why is that? That, you know, 95% of people when they're losing weight, they'll actually make progress. But once they hit their

goal within the end of the year, they've gained back all the weight that they lost. And usually then some, the reason is because it violates the progress principle. Every day when you don't eat those delicious things that you really like, the scale goes down and the benefits are higher than the cost mentally. But when you get to your target weight, the reward is never getting ever again to eat the things that you like for the rest of your life. And it's like, it's the worst. It's the worst. And so the result of that is that you no longer have progress to make, which is why 35% of people continue to diet to pathological ends and a quarter of them develop an eating disorder. Because they keep wanting progress and they don't know what to do. So they start to make progress in pathological ways as a result of that.

That's the happiness thing, the greatest news. Like, good news. You can't get happiness. Why? Because that means you can continue to make progress for the rest of your life. And I really think it's important to double click and highlight and spotlight the importance of negative emotions, the importance of negativity. Yeah, no, for sure. And one of the reasons that we have this misunderstanding of negative emotion is because our therapized culture has gotten it all wrong. If you go to counseling services at most college campuses and you say, I'm feeling depressed and anxious, they should say, well, of course, of course, you're 20 and you're in college and you're not getting enough sleep and it's midterms. Instead they say, those feelings are evidence of a problem. No, no, no, no. They're evidence of not a problem. Usually they're evidence that you're a normal human being and you're completely alive. And furthermore, you're not broken because you

have those feelings. You'd be broken if all kinds of crazy stuff was happening around you and you didn't feel those feelings. By the way, you'd also be dead. You'd also be eaten by a... Your ancestors wouldn't have made it off the place to scene without those emotions, without the stress that actually comes from ordinary life every single day. And so the key thing is that we have to understand that these emotions that we have are just signals. The world is going on around us. We see things, we smell things, we hear things, we experience life. It's coming in experience through the occipital lobe of the brain and through the brainstem and sending us all kinds of information.

It goes through the limbic system. In the limbic system of the brain, these signals are turned in using a machine language into emotions, negative and positive emotions. Negative doesn't mean bad. It just means we're aversive to them. That's anger. That's sadness. That's fear.

That's disgust. Positive emotions of affection and surprise and joy and interest, which is also an incredible positive emotion, so that we'll have approach motives towards something. All that is is a universal set of emotional language that sends signals then to the prefrontal cortex, to the executive parts of our brain, so that we can react in a way that makes the most sense. That's what emotions are. Emotions are information. If we have negative emotions, it means we're having aversive circumstances in our lives, and that's the most normal thing ever. I mean, the idea that we should somehow be deeply

trying to get rid of the bad and maximize the good, we're not actually alive in the world. We're going to be living suboptimally in all sorts of ways. The whole point is, yeah, I don't like aversive emotions. I got really high negative effects as a person. I don't love it. I have unusually high negative effect, but that's normal for about a quarter of the population, as it turns out. My job is to understand it, manage it, so I can learn and grow from it. But that doesn't mean suppressing it or thinking something's wrong because I have it. I've talked about this on the podcast before. I don't even like the term mental health because like happiness, I know it's well-intentioned.

We're normalizing the fact that we struggle in life and that's a good thing. But the fact that we've called it mental health, like happiness, we've made it a target to achieve. When somebody says, I'm struggling with my mental health, somehow they're falling short of the target. No one has, not a single person on the planet has perfect mental health. That person doesn't exist. And if they did, to your point, there's something wrong. And also the whole idea that mental health means I don't have negative emotions. No, no, no, no. That's unhealthy. So I like the term mental fitness, which speaks to that happierness. It speaks to that, you know, I'm constantly working on it. I'm never going to get there, but I always feel like I'm making progress. And I don't measure my progress on a daily basis because that's

ridiculous because it's always going to be a few steps back before a few steps forwards. But I measure my happiness a little more flowy, you know, sort of maybe in a weekly or monthly basis. You know, how am I doing? You know, I might've had bad days that week or that bad month, but overall I'm making progress towards my mental fitness, my happierness. Yes, that's exactly right. There's one other point that's really important about this that a lot of people don't quite get. We've had a tendency, there's a, from German philosophy in the 19th century. So you know, this is going nowhere good. We have something called nosology. Do you know what nosology is? Go on. Nosology is the science of diagnosis. In other words, it's you have this, you have that,

you have depression, you have anxiety, you have ADHD, you have obsessive compulsive disorder. Well, I got news. There's no switches. It's all dials. All dials, no switches. You know what Simon is? And Arthur? Depressed, anxious, tough with attention, a little autistic. But hold on, let's go down this path a little bit because there's a good and a bad to it, right? The idea of labeling something is in itself very therapeutic and very cathartic. And I know myself, I have been actually diagnosed with adult ADHD. It's not a self-diagnosis. And didn't see one specialist because when you're a hammer, every problem's a nail. Saw a couple. And that's what they concluded. And for so many years, I thought there was something wrong with me. Other people told me there was something wrong with me. As a kid, constantly getting yelled at for being distractible.

And when I got to read about the symptoms of ADHD, not that I had all of them, but I had some more than others, there was this catharsis that there's nothing wrong with me. It's that there's something that I carry, which is fine, and now I can manage it. I could stop beating myself up. Now, the problem is, and I think this goes to your point, which is our addiction to diagnoses, very often through WebMD or self-diagnoses, because we know a couple of attributes from a couple of different neurodivergence disorders, for example, and we claim them, is we're taking no accountability or by over-diagnosing, it's never me. by over-diagnosing, it's never me. It sort of becomes this strange, sort of like I'm disconnecting myself from myself. And I think that's where over-diagnosis not only devalues the real diagnoses, but the over-diagnosis allows us not to take responsibility for things that we are in control of or can do or can manage or can improve. Yeah. No, I mean, the truth is that everything exists on a spectrum. Yeah. And I love this idea of dials, not switches. I think that's 100% right.

Yeah. And so the ADHD, the adult ADHD thing, of course, it turns out that you're further along on the dial than you realized before. And it's getting in the way of certain things and understanding it can help you therapeutically turn the dial a little bit. You're not going to turn the switch off, Simon. You don't even want to turn the switch off. I don't want to turn it off. It's my superpower. I'm grateful for it. But I have learned to modulate the dial and I have learned techniques to mitigate some of the damages and amplify some of the strengths. Who really writes about this compellingly is Simon Baron Cohen. Do you know his work? No. You've heard of the actor, Simon Baron Cohen. Do you know his work? You've heard of the actor, Sasha Baron Cohen. It's actually his cousin, Simon Baron Cohen. He's the most distinguished

social psychologist in the world on the subject of autism. He teaches at Cambridge in the UK. And Simon Baron Cohen, he's actually constructed an autism spectrum scale that anybody can put themselves on and nobody's zero. That's the important thing. 50 is the highest and zero is the lowest. I'm 17, which is actually very, very low, but it's not zero. One of my kids took it, is 32, higher than me, not diagnosable with what we would call Asperger's syndrome or autism. But the whole point is, these are not maladies per se. These are sets of conditions that we have. They become maladies when they're above a threshold where they interfere with your life. We all exhibit characteristics of all kinds of things.

And what I love about what you're saying is what you're defining as human. And human is imperfect. Human is emotional. Human is irrational. Human is all of the things. And so when you say live the life you want, living the life you want seems to be getting to understand myself, getting to serve others, and embracing and accepting all of those things. And when you talk about progress, which is how to make all of my strengths glow brighter and how to manage all of my weaknesses, how to mitigate all of those things that may cause distress. That's the constant progress. That's happierness. Yeah. That's happierness. That's really, and the life you want is one in which you're achieving happierness. Not every day.

Not every day. You're making basic progress. This is so critically important. This is really what we talk about. The way that the whole thing is structured is it really has to start with an understanding of oneself. Self-knowledge is unbelievably critical. And most people don't, they don't even know what happiness is. I asked my students on the first day of class, you know, these are MBA students at this fancy business school. What's happiness?

I mean, look, I have 180 students and 400 on the waiting list. You'd think they know what it is before they take my happiness class. What's happiness? I mean, look, I have 180 students and 400 on the waiting list. You'd think they know what it is before they take my happiness class. What is it? They all start by saying, it's the feeling I get when I'm with the people that I love, or it's the feeling I get when I'm doing something that I enjoy. And I say, wrong. Feelings are evidence of happiness. Like the smell of your turkey is evidence of Thanksgiving dinner. If you think that Thanksgiving dinner is the smell of the turkey, you're going to be pretty disappointed when you don't get anything to eat. And that's what it's like to live for feelings. And so this is the first big misconception. I say, no, no, no, no, no. Good news. You do not have to be a

prisoner of your feelings. On the contrary, you can understand what it means to be a happier person on the basis of actual science. And then you can get a strategy in your life for getting the macronutrient parts. So your turkey dinner is actually protein, carbohydrates, and fat. Your happiness is enjoyment, satisfaction, and purpose. And those are the three things you need to understand. Those are the three things you need to make progress toward. And once you understand that, you can emotionally self-manage. You can start focusing on the parts of life, not money, power, pleasure, and fame that bring it, but the faith and the family and the friendship and the service to others that actually do bring those things. And then you're free to make the kind of progress that is building the life that you want.

Can you define those terms? So enjoyment, this is the first one. A lot of young people in particular, they think of pleasure and enjoyment as synonymous. They're not. Pleasure is a limbic phenomenon. It's produced in the limbic system of the brain. It implicates very old evolutionary brain structures and a neurotransmitter, a neuromodulator called dopamine. You hit the lever, you get anticipation of reward, you get an anatomical reward in the ventral striatum of your brain because of one thing you get really, really good at giving you pleasure. Maybe it's drinking alcohol or pulling the slot machine or looking at pornography. They all do the same thing to the human brain and you get better and better and better at getting that pleasure. The problem is the pursuit of pleasure never

brings happiness. There's not one person ever who said, my secret to happiness is methamphetamine. Those words have never been uttered. And the reason is because you'll compulsively hit the lever, hit the lever, hit the lever. And ordinarily, so that you can hit the lever sufficiently without criticism, you'll do it alone. That's ordinarily the case. So enjoyment is related to pleasure because it's the source of pleasure plus people plus memory. That equals enjoyment because you're moving the experience of the pleasure into the prefrontal cortex of your brain where you can remember it and you can actually experience it in love, in communion with other people. So here's the thing. People are always like, I got a problem with drinking. I got a problem with whatever it happens to be. Now, there's some conditions where you actually have cessation

is the only way you can deal with this. But for most behavioral addictions, you don't need to take anything away. You need to add two things to it, people and memory. Those are the two things you need to add. Here's the kind of the rule of thumb. If there's something that gives you a lot of pleasure, don't do it alone. If you're doing it alone, you're probably doing it wrong is what it comes down to. You're probably hitting the dopamine lever. There were these old studies in the fifties. You don't do them now because of animal rights, but they used to let monkeys self-administer cocaine. And after 24 hours, they would be sitting in front of the lever, hitting the lever over and over again until they died. That's like when you and I have a new book out and you're looking at the Amazon page, you're like cocaine monkey, right? Right, right. Yeah.

I know you don't do that because you're superior. That's the title of my new book, by the way, Cocaine Monkey. Cocaine Monkey. For some reason, it sold hugely. But that's basically when you pursue pleasure alone, you're cocaine monkey. So add people and add memories. By the way, this is the problem with social media. You're hitting the problem with social media and our cell phones, which is they produce huge amounts of pleasure, but alone. Yeah. Don't eat a half gallon of Haagen-Dazs by yourself. If you're with somebody and making memories, you won't eat half a gallon. You'll eat a bowl of ice cream. This is true for alcohol. This is true for gambling. This is true for gambling. This is true for sex,

people, and memory, not alone. Now, that's not a perfect rule of thumb, but it's a pretty good rule of thumb to distinguish pleasure from enjoyment. Okay, so that's enjoyment, love enjoyment. So the second thing is satisfaction. Satisfaction is the second one. Satisfaction is the joy you get from achieving something with struggle. It has to have struggle or you don't get any satisfaction. If you cheat on an exam and you get an A, no satisfaction. If you wanted a car and it was given to you and you didn't do anything for it, it's okay, but no satisfaction.

You need struggle. Humans need struggle, right? This is one of the reasons that the secret to happiness is unhappiness, is discomfort, et cetera. The Navy SEALs are given nothing for free, and that's why they have so much satisfaction about getting through hell week. My son is a scout sniper in the Marine Corps, and he's super proud of it because it was hell getting through the end dock. It was super hard. There was like 36 guys and two made it through in the end dock. And my son was one of them. And that was incredibly satisfying. Now, the problem with satisfaction, mother nature doesn't want you to stay in a state of bliss because you got to keep running,

running, running for the next thing. If you're just enjoying those berries on the bush forever, there's going to be a saber tooth tiger making you his lunch. You got to be ready for the next set of circumstances. So that's why when literally there's studies that show when people get a raise, the day they're happiest about is the day they find out about it, not the day it shows up in their check, which is because you can't keep no satisfaction is the bottom line. And so, and there's a solution to that, but it's a solution that means the divine path, not the animal path. You have to remember that mother nature says the solution to satisfaction

is have more, have more. How do you get more satisfaction? Have more, right? Two cars, three cars, 10 rings. No, no, no. Your satisfaction is all the things that you have divided by all the things that you want. It's halves divided by wants. You don't need to have more strategy. You need to want less strategy. That's the secret to enduring satisfaction. And that's super hard. But once you get the reverse bucket list going, then man, I mean, the reverse bucket list is the best bucket list. You and I both live reverse bucket list. It's been something I've been doing for many years. I never understood the idea of crossing things off a list to define my life, only to look at a list of things that I haven't done,

because that's what I focus on. I don't look at the stuff that I've crossed off. I look at the stuff that I haven't done. But rather, I have a reverse bucket list, which is I keep trying. I do. I actually keep a list of all the ridiculous things that I have done. And then I look at my life and say, God, I can't believe I've had the opportunity to do all these things rather than, God, I never got to do those things. Another way to look at the reverse bucket list is to not just list your cravings and desires and imagine yourself enjoying them, which is supposed to fire up your ambition. But just basically all it does is it engorges the denominator, the wants. It makes you feel like a loser.

It's to look at all those cravings and desires, most of which are money and power and admiration and strangers and all that dumb stuff and say, easy come, easy go. Maybe you get it, maybe you don't, but it's not going to be a limbic ghost in my head. It's going to be something that I actually, because you can, once you own it in the executive centers of your brain, you can achieve a high degree of detachment from it. And maybe it comes and maybe it doesn't, but you're like, huh, that thing came. It's okay. Why? Because you crossed it off your reverse bucket list. And then last of course is purpose and meaning in life. And that's the hard one, right? Because that's the one that requires the most pain. You know, there's a lot of work out there that asks the social scientists. They'll say that meaning is actually has three parts coherence, why things happen the way they do purpose, which is the direction and goals for

my life. And significance, which is, does it matter that I'm even around? Those are the questions you got to answer. And I have a kind of a two question exam that I give people to see if they have a meaning crisis, if this is something to work on. And if they do, good news, this is the objective is to find answers to two questions. There's no right answers, but you have to have questions. Do you want to take the test? I'm on the edge of my seat. Yes. Okay. So you don't want to pass. You want to play, right? Okay. Simon, why are you alive? To inspire people to do the things that inspire them.

I believe that because I've known you for a long time and anybody who's read your books knows that's true. There's two ways to answer that question. Something divine created you, or you have a divine path for something in your life. And you took door number two, which is great. Second question, for what would you be willing to die today? That's a harder question. It is harder, for sure. The only thing that comes to mind is my family, my niece and nephew, my, my sister. Yeah, that's all.

And that's a super hard one, right? And for a lot of people, they don't have answers. They don't know why they're alive and they have no idea for what they'd be willing to die. And that means there's a crisis in coherence, purpose, and significance. The goal for all of us, young people, old people, everybody in between, is to discern the answers to those questions. There's no right answers. And you see this a lot with young people today who really feel lost. You know, we've already talked about my

son Carlos, who's in the Marines, and he struggled, you know, in high school, like a lot of adolescents. I mean, just like meaning. And after high school, you know, with my kids, because I'm a weird dad, they're kind of the entrepreneurs of the business of their lives. And I'm VC. So I made them write a business plan when they were juniors in high school. And it was like, tell me about the next 10 years of your life if I'm going to invest. And by the way, it's not my life. It's your life. I used to send it back for revisions if it was insufficiently original. If I felt like they were telling me what I wanted to hear, I send it back. It's like revision. Carlos got six rounds of revisions in his business plan. And it was, at first it was like, I'm going to go to college. I'm like, no, you're not. No, you're not. I mean, like I was not ready for college. I made it

through nine months of college. And then I dropped out for what my parents called my gap decade. I didn't go back to college until I was 28. I graduated from college a month before my 30th birthday. This is not, you know, it's like, I know there's no fool in me when somebody is not ready for college. He wasn't ready for college. Like, okay.

All right. He said, I want to find the answers to the questions. They knew the questions. And I said, where are you going to find them? He said, alone outside. Okay. All right. He said, I want to find the answers to the questions. They knew the questions. I said, where are you going to find them? And he said, alone outside. Okay. So he took a job as a dry land wheat farmer in Idaho, digging rocks out of the soil and building fences and cutting down dead trees and driving a combine 16 hours a day. He made a bunch of money and he made a lot of progress. I got to tell you. And then after two years, then he joined the Marine Corps and he didn't just join the Marine Corps. He goes through bootcamp, goes through infantry training battalion, does mortars, and then does the in-doc for snipers,

which is a really, really, really hard path because he wanted to understand why he felt he was alive and for that for which he was willing to die. And today he has answers. And this is the essence. He's 23 now, he's married. He's like super focused. And if you ask him, he has answers. And this is the essence. He's 23 now. He's married. He's super focused. And if you ask him, you say, Carlos, why are you alive? He says, because God made me and I'm here to serve. And you say, Carlos, for what would you be willing to die? He says, for my family, for my faith, for my friends, and for the United States of America. Boom. And by the way, for those listening abroad, he'd die for our allies too. I think what's so interesting, and you know this with the son in the Marine Corps, which is it's rarely, if ever, God and country. It's person to the left and person to the right.

And you know well that what you and I have as colleagues and coworkers and what they have are brothers and sisters. They refer to each other as brother and sister. And they use familial terms because that's the quality of the relationships that they maintain. And this is a beautiful circle that takes us right back to the beginning of our conversation, which is that mother nature wants us to be happy when we include others and think of others and are willing to die for others.

Because at the end of the day, the species depends on each of us to look out for each of us. And that's not only the willingness to struggle together, which is it's always easier to struggle with someone than alone. Your point about true joy, enjoyment comes from sharing pleasure with others. And in all the things that we've been talking about, it seems there's this through line of other people involved, whether it's difficulty or pleasure. And going through difficulty together and going through pleasure together sounds like is what it takes to live

a life fulfilled, what it takes to live a life worth living. That's right. What you're getting at is the most metaphysically cosmic and great truth of the science of happiness. There's a study that you know really well, you've written about it, called the Harvard Study of Adult Development. That's an 85 year longitudinal study that followed people who were studying at Harvard in the late 1930s. But then it mixed in with a sample of people who didn't go to college from less privileged backgrounds. And then it followed their spouses and then it followed their kids over 85 years. And it asked, you know, what were they doing through the course of their lives

that predicted them being happy when they were in their 80s and even their 90s? Because that's what you want. You want the crystal ball. What were they doing? What were their investments? And the authors, there's only been three, in 85 years, there's only been three directors of this study. That's how much longevity this thing has had. It's incredible. And the guy who was running it for a long time was asked, how do you sum this up? And because there's lots of stuff. I mean, the ones who were happy and healthy near the end of their life, they either didn't smoke or quit smoking. They didn't abuse alcohol. They had a responsible relationship with their fitness and health. They coped with their anxieties and their problems. They had a way to do that, either through religion or therapy or whatever they did.

They were lifelong learners. But there was one big thing. And he said, this is the one thing you need to know. Happiness is love, full stop. That's what we need. I find in my own work that there's kind of four practices of the happiest people, faith, whatever that means. That means philosophy. It doesn't necessarily mean traditional religion at all. It means something transcendent to our experience, family, friendship. And that means real friends, not deal friends and work that serves other people. Those are the big four. And those are just different manifestations of love, love of the divine, love of your family, love of your friends and love expressed toward the whole world through the way that you earn your daily bread. Happiness is love. It's, it's, I sound like a John Lennon at this point,

but you know, it's true. You know, all the science comes down to that. Arthur, I can tell you in all these years that we've known each other, I would climb any mountain with you and I would share any pleasure with you. And I am a happier person. I know for a fact, I'm a happier person because you're in my life. Thank you, brother Simon. I feel exactly the same way.

And a great source of joy for me is that this is far from our last conversation. And every time we talk, I feel like we're just getting started, no matter how long we talk, which is, I guess, one of the reasons we keep coming back for more. Always a joy.

Check out Build a Life You Want, written by Arthur Brooks and Oprah Winfrey. There's some wonderful lessons in there. Arthur, always a joy. Thank you, Simon. I'll see you very soon. If you enjoyed this podcast and would like to hear more, please subscribe wherever you like to listen to podcasts. And if you'd like even more optimism, check out my website, simonsynic.com, for classes, videos, and more. Until then, take care of yourself, take care of each other.