A Bit of Optimism - Your Instincts Know What You Want with Author Arthur Brooks

Episode Date: September 2, 2025

Your instincts aren’t just whispers. They’re a compass pointing you toward the life you’re meant to live. But in a world obsessed with speed, metrics, and outcomes, most of us forget how to listen.Arthur Brooks, bestselling author and Harvard Business School professor, teaches one of the most popular classes on happiness. But his insights come not just from research, but from a life of reinvention: from French horn player to scholar, from think-tank leader to teacher, and even pilgrim on the Camino de Santiago.In this conversation, we explore why so many of us feel unhappy today, the real equation for joy, and why following your gut is essential. Along the way, Arthur shares how to treat life like a pilgrimage, why AI may strip away the struggle that makes us wise, and why the process - not the outcome - is where happiness lives.If you’ve ever wondered whether you’re “falling behind,” or if you’re searching for the courage to trust your instincts, this episode will remind you that happiness isn’t something you chase - it’s something you practice, every step of the way.This is…A Bit of Optimism.Check out more of Arthur’s work here: https://www.arthurbrooks.com/

I've been looking at the basic neuroscience of these why questions that you've been grappling with for decades now. And there's all this correlation between how much you use your devices. So you use your devices to make your life really efficient and you free up a whole lot of time, which you then waste by distracting yourself with devices on trivialities and nonsense. Right? And it's like, and people are like, I don't know. I know.

And it's like, it's a self-licking ice cream cone is kind of how the thing works. And not very surprisingly that happiness is a combination of enjoyment, satisfaction, and meaning. There's no evidence that people under 35 have lower levels of enjoyment and satisfaction, but meaning has cratered. Why? At some point in our lives, every single one of us has asked ourselves the question, can I be happier? There are competing theories. Some people think we have to learn to be grateful for what we have.

That's the secret to happiness. Others think we have to learn to change, our lifestyle, our habits, or our routines, that that's the secret to happiness. Enter Arthur Brooks. Arthur would challenge both those theories. He has lived many lives and made some remarkable career changes, from French horn player to CEO of a think tank with no think tank or fundraising experience, to best-selling author.

And through all the changes and challenges, he has learned exactly what it takes to be. happy. In fact, his insights are so good, he actually teaches them in one of the most popular classes at Harvard Business School, an entire class on happiness. Arthur is one of my favorite people to talk to. He's fun, he's whipsmart, he has a big heart, and whenever I'm done talking to him, I feel, well, happier. This is a bit of optimism. I'll be, I'll be totally honest with you, which is I use this podcast simply as an excuse to hang out, hang out with you. Because you're so busy, you're so busy, the only way I can get you on the phone is to schedule you for a podcast and then we get to Jack and catch up.

That's why I always thought I was doing the podcast is to get to you, to get into it, to worm my way into your Google calendar. You and I have known each other a very long time. You're still in ADI back then. One of my favorite things about you is you practice what you preach. And I know that should be standard fair for people who are out there teaching or who are out there writing philosophies and theories about, you know, how to live life, et cetera. But you and I both know a lot of people who give talks and write books on living lifestyle that they don't live. But you do the things you talk about and write about. You do the things

that you teach in your happiness class. You do the things in how you've reinvented your own career that you wrote about in your book. How have you reinvented your career this time? You know, it's funny. And thank you, by the way. It's like you're doing the same thing, Simon. I've known you for years. And I mean, I read your books before I knew you. And I started with Y had a huge impact on me. It had a huge impact on me when I was. still at AEI. And it was operative in helping me understand the trajectory of my own life as well. I had a real early in life major, major career change. And you know this, but not everybody listening to this is going to have any aware of this. I was a classical French horn player from

the time I was eight years old until I was 31. So I for for 23 years, that's all I did. And I went pro at 19 after a first run at college. I didn't, I mean, I didn't want to go to college. I wanted to go pro. So I went pro at 19. And all the way through my 20s, I toured playing chamber music. I played two years with Charlie Bird, the jazz guitar player. Then I played a bunch of seasons in the martial orchestra in Spain. And then I tried to become a soloist unsuccessfully. And the whole point is that by the end of that, I had to do something else. And so I had to retool my own professional life. I had to reinvent myself, which I did in my 30s, my early 30s. And I kind of figured out how to do it. I figured out how to go from becoming a classical

French horn player to getting a PhD and becoming a behavioral scientist. And it was hard. That was a hard one. All the changes after that have been easier because I figured out how to funge the best from my past life and my next life. And this is something I talk about an awful lot with my students, my MBA students at Harvard. They're going to have four distinctly different careers if they follow the norm. And that means that they're going to have to understand their career is not a straight line. I mean, you understand this. Careers are not a stairstep straight line for most people. They're more like a spiral where you have seven to 12 year mini careers of your own imagination. And if you're too paralyzed by fear and you don't know how to reinvent yourself and you're not willing to go backwards in

terms of money and power and prestige, you're screwed. You're not going to be able to do it. I just got lucky. I had to change. But this is really, really important because Your case is more exaggerated than most, right? To go from a horn player to political scientist, pretty big difference. Pretty big difference. And most people's deltas won't be that big, which is why your case is really important, because if you can do it, pretty much anybody else can do it. I think where people get stuck is they look at what their skill set is.

So in your case, it would be like, I know how to play a horn. So they look to reapply a skill set, thinking that's reinvention. So re-applying a skill set of instead of being a horn player in an orchestra or, you know, with a jazz guitarist, maybe I don't know, maybe I can do video game music, you know? And it's the re-application of skill, which they mistake for reinventing themselves. That's correct. There's that the problem with that is, and there's a huge behavioral science literature on this that I didn't know until much later, until I became a behavioral scientist, and I started, and I could look retrospectively and understand what it happened to me, and then look prospectively of what the next set of change. are going to be. People have a tendency to say, okay, what what have I already, as you suggest, gain skill at? And I could be also good at so I can hit the ground running. Wrong question.

The right question is, what am I most interested in? What is my greatest area of interest? That almost never fails. But the most interesting thing to you is a blend. So here's the we have intuition, which is also known as gut, aka data. We have a lot of data because we've all had a lot of experiences in our lives. When anybody's facing a new opportunity, a new threshold, whether it's a marriage proposal or moving to a new city or having a new career or whatever it happens to be, there's three sensations that you're going to feel based on the data inside the right hemisphere of your brain, sort of the episodic memory beyond words.

That's your gut when you feel like you have a gut feeling. That's why your stomach feels that because your stomach is actually on the left is, is, is weighted to the left side of your body, which is controlled by the right hemisphere. That's why we have that emotional feeling. Okay, so those three feelings when you're facing an opportunity are excitement, fear, and deadness,

which is that sense of emptiness where you're looking at an opportunity and makes you feel dead inside. Like, I really should get married to that woman, but it makes me feel dead inside to imagine myself 80 years old with her, right? That kind of thing. The right mix that you should actually,

when you know it's the right step to take is 80% excitement, 20% fear, and zero percent debtness. That's the right combination where you're most, by the way, it's not zero percent fear because you might fail, but that's the point. If it's zero percent fear, totally. And if there's no risk associated with it, it's going to be boring. You're going to be boring. And you're explaining, well, you're explaining almost everything worth doing.

I mean, every entrepreneurial venture, you know, has to be more excitement than fear. because the chances of you failing or things going badly are very, very high. And so you have to have the irrational excitement to get over the fear to say, we're going to do this. It's not a rational thing to do these. And sometimes, by the way, it's a little bit out of your control. When I left being an academic, I became a professor. And in the second career, in the third career, I was the president of a think tank. And I had never had a single employee or raised a single dollar.

And I had to go start raising $50 million a year. That's $250,000 every business day of the year. And I had raised $0 in my life. It was a completely foolish decision on the point on the party board of that organization to hire me into that role. But they were out of time and out of options. They're like, ah, what the hell, I think, which is not a great position to be in. And so when I took that job, it was 20% excitement and 80% fear. And that's because it was just too unknown.

It was it was foolish and retrospect. I got lucky in retrospect is the way that worked out. Generally speaking, if you're going to change jobs or go back to school or marry that girl or move to Topeka, it should be 80% excitement, 20% fear and 0% of illness. The other thing that I think is very, very important, which is the willingness to go backwards, and you touched upon this, which is to lose money, lose what appears to be momentum, lose power. I think a lot of people think that if you only maintain forward momentum, that's the only way

to advance. But the reality is it's kind of more like a slingshot, which is at some point you have to go back and then it fires forward a lot faster than if you were just walking the stone forwards. Heck yeah, absolutely. And by the way, your case study is a perfect example of this. When you were starting out, I mean, you're very well-known, very highly compensated public speaker. If you want to get Simon Seneca, you've got to book them a year in advance and you got to have some money in the bank because that's a big part of how you make your living, but also you just don't take anything. You got a lot of stuff going on. Okay. I know your humble origins on that because you told me when you were starting at you said, I want to do a lot of public speaking because I have

a lot of ideas and I want to share them with my fellow humans. You actually said that you took every opportunity you could possibly find to talk about ideas in front of people. And so six people would say, Simon, can you come to my apartment and talk to us about whatever? And you'd say, yes, I will do that. You took every single opportunity. And what that sounds an awful lot like as using your precious time with very little compensation and you have to be willing to do that because you've got to get in your reps. You actually have to train yourself. You have to go back to school. You've got to have the confidence in actually the learning process. And lots of people do this, by the way, going backward, there's nothing going backwards in this. I talk to a lot of my students, for example, 65,

percent of my happiness students at Harvard are women, 42% of the students, the MBA students at Harvard are women, but 65% because they're more interested in happiness than the, I mean, the guys are across the hall at the supply chain management elective or some damn thing, I don't know. They're in a success class. Something like that. And women are in the life success class. And one of the things that I'll talk about is if you're going to be a real spiral in your career, you might come out and go work for McKinsey. And then you might work part time for eight years while you're raising your kids if you decide to have kids and then you might go and work for a nonprofit and after that

you might go and go back to school and do something else but the enterprise is not the company you're working for not even the company you're starting the enterprise is your life it's a you incorporated and you're the founder you better treat it as a startup i also i think the concept of backwards is a misnomer right right uh because what it is is education it's re-education like When you go to school, you stop your life temporarily, and you go to school, you know. And I always, and I tell young people this who are, you know, for example, one of the things I think is wonderful about the Europeans is they take a gap year between high school and if they go to college or if they start in the workforce. That's a good gap decade. Yeah.

And it's got nothing to do with financial resources. You know, well, I mean, it does have something to do with financial resources, which if you have to work, you go straight to work. But the point is they're not living the life of Riley in that year off. They might actually go volunteer or they might just travel a little bit or they might go do a job that just interests them that pays them a living wage, but it's not the thing that they want to do for their career. It's just something to give them a little bit of space for a year. It's go go do something for a year that's not your career, right? And then I talk to young people in the States and I'm like, when they don't know what, I don't know what to do. And I say, why don't you take a gap year?

just go get a job where you're teaching, you know, teach for America, something like that, or if you have the means to travel a little bit, you know? And they all say the same thing to me. I can't because I'll fall behind because I can't afford to take that year off because everyone will get ahead. I'm like, what race are you in versus everybody else that you're going to be, quote, unquote, behind? And the idea that anytime you do anything that's not in the plan is actually part of school. And like even people who like take their first job, their entry level job or their second job or the third job and like, ah, this job isn't perfect for me. My boss isn't great. It's not toxic, you know, but it's just like, it's not my saying. I think I'm going to quit. I'm like,

you've only been there two months. I know I think I'm going to quit. I'm like, stay longer. And instead of treating it like this is my career, treat it like school. Go learn how not to lead from your boss. You know, go to school every day. And your attitude is totally different when you're coming to school versus trying to make this a thing. Yeah, yeah. Every step aside for me, even in my own career, is going back to school. Yeah, for sure. I mean, your whole life is school is what it comes down to.

And especially if you love the process of learning. And if you love the process of the process, which, by the way, if you don't, the whole idea of I'm going to get behind suggests that you're in a race towards something, which means there's a finish line and that's what you're looking forward to the most. And that's the arrival fallacy, which I probably read about for the first. time in one of your books. The arrival fallacy is this, is this, is this, is this misapprehension that since progress is sweet, that getting to an ultimate gold is sweetest, and that is completely wrong.

That's the prescription for clinical depression is, I mean, literally, there's a, there's a big group of Olympic gold medalists that have suffered a clinical depression starting about a week after they won their gold medal, because they're, they don't understand how human emotion is designed, designed to give you a bullions and joy and then go back to the base. line. If you thought that winning the goal after all that suffering was going to keep you in a happy place for the rest of your life, you don't understand it. You don't understand how humans are what. Mother nature doesn't care if you're happy. She just wants you to win. And so the divine force within you is to live up to your own moral aspirations and build your life in such a way

that the progress that you make for being a better person, through creating better things to lifting other people up. That's what gives you the inherent satisfaction. So I tell my students this all time to get back to this point that you have about people coming out of school. A lot of young people listen to this podcast. And when they're coming out of school, then you're giving this advice for a gap year. That's great advice, by the way. It was a gift to me that I couldn't continue in college that I had done everything wrong because I was able to back up and assess what I was actually trying to do with my life. You know, I was the first person, you know, people that I'm like, ah, first person to go to college of my family. I was the first person not to get a PhD in my family.

You know, and so it was very controversial when I told my parents, yeah, I think I'm, I think I'm going to go on the road as a traveling French horn player. Like is that a thing? Is that even a thing? My dad was a college professor. His dad was a college professor. And it was great because I actually, by the time I was in my late 20s, I'd grown up. And that actually made me a better father, by the way. I've got three adult kids. My first kid comes out and go and went to Princeton at math and Econ, very bright valedictorian in his high school class. His brother wasn't up for that. His brother was a different person. And, you know, he's talking about going to some college someplace. I knew it was going to be nothing more than a waste of time and a bunch of partying, which is what people do. I mean, by the way, it's pretty stupid to send your kid thousands of miles away from home to be raised by other 18-year-olds. It's pretty stupid. It's a pretty foolish thing to do, right?

And so, and my son, Carlos, man, this is like stupid times 10. So I said, no, like, you don't want to go to college. He's like, no, I don't, dad, I don't want to. I said, then don't. Go get a job. And he found a job as a dry land wheat. farmer in Grangeville, Idaho, lived in the farmer's basement, made a bunch of money for 15 months, and then he joined the Marine Corps, became a special operator, became a scout sniper in the Marine

Corps. He did that for four years. By the time he got out at 23, he was married and his wife was pregnant. He's 25 now working for a construction company making bank. His second son will be born in a month. And he's going to, at some point, go back to college because he's going to be ready, is the whole point and I'll do something that he's actually interested in that he wouldn't have been interested in before your point is incredibly well taken

look if your life isn't being treated as an adventure as a pilgrimage and as a startup you're doing it wrong you know what about for adults what about for people who have you know they've got some tenure they've got some skill set they've got some experience they got 20 years 10 15 20 years

a career under their belt this is what I know how to do sometimes they they leave because they get bored. Sometimes they are asked to leave because the company doesn't exist anymore. They've been replaced by someone, something. The company misses its projections. They get laid off.

And now they're forced to figure it out. How do you apply this advice to somebody who thinks they have a pass? So I think they're on a pass. Yeah. And so there's a couple of different possibilities in this case. In the first case, there are some people who don't have any money. And that's just like getting laid off. and they're really hard up. And that's hard. I mean, that means like find a job, any job as fast as

you can. And I'm very, very sympathetic to the circumstances. There are a lot of people like that in the United States. And when we go into an economic dip, which inevitably we will, because we always have, that that's going to be the case for lots and lots of people. But you're talking about a different case where people have a little bit more good fortune in their lives and they have maybe a little bit more money. And they can sort of figure out how to reinvent themselves, even though they've never done it before. And that's a really exciting set of circumstances. The reason is basically this.

You know Bruce Filer, right? Do you know Bruce Filer? He's written a whole bunch of books, but one of his recent books was called Life is in the Transitions. And it's a very nice book where he talks about the facts, you know, based on pretty solid data that people have a pretty substantial life transition every 18 months. And they have what he calls a life quake every five years.

And a lifequake is a huge change. in your life usually uninvited and therefore unwelcome like you know you got sick somebody died you lost your job something like that like something really bad happened and not necessarily bad but something you didn't you didn't want the change because you didn't yeah you didn't expect it and he says and he finds and this is really the salient point of the book in the big majority of the cases like more than 90% of the cases people see those lifequakes in real time as unwelcome and later as beneficial. So this is super interesting

because what that is in my profession as behavioral scientist is called fading affect bias. So you have negativity bias in the status quo because change itself is really, really uncomfortable. And change feels like risk and risk feels like danger and that gets the limbic system all revved up right now. But in retrospect, change feels like learning

because that's what it's left with. You know, when most students, you know, I observed this, having, you know, been an academic now for a long time, they're super, super lonely and therefore unhappy because they feel isolated their first semester. But then they remember that first semester unbelievably fondly because of all the new experiences that they had and the new people that they met, which is a source of learning. So in real time, they're hating their lives. And when they come back for their reunions in five and ten and 20 and 30 years, they just

spend the whole time laughing about their first semester in college. And that's a really important case. And so the key thing to remember is when you are induced to make major life change as an adult, you're in what's called a liminal state, a phase of liminality, which is to be between states, that's the most fertile generative learning period. And you can remember that, notwithstanding your discomfort, you're going to do a lot better. That's how you reframe discomfort as excitement. Is reinvention only for those who can afford it? No. I mean, you said it.

You said like if somebody loses a job and they need to just get a job immediately, you know, but if you have some means, you have the opportunity to. So that seems unfair. Yeah, no, it's true. It's actually. And the reason I said that was to be sympathetic to the people who are involuntarily laid off and house a whole lot of needs that they have to meet and have fewer degrees of freedom in the reinvention process as regards to labor market.

but everybody should see it in this particular way. Look, a lot of people who don't have any money, they have a, you know, their marriage breaks up, right? You know, that kind of thing. That's a reinvention too. A lot of people, most people who get divorced against their own will, look back on it years later and say, that wasn't a bad thing for me.

I thought it was a bad thing at the time, but it wasn't a bad thing for me. So to the extent that you can see any changes in your life in your life as an opportunity for learning in growth, you're going to be a lot better. The other thing is this. You know, I talk to a lot of people who spend time between jobs and careers a lot and more time than they want sometimes. And that's an opportunity for edifying self-development that's not to be missed.

It's super important. So I recommend to people all the time that they walk a pilgrimage, which is what people have done for thousands of years in every major religious tradition. In the Hindu tradition, in the Christian tradition, for sure, the Muslims, they walk, you know, the Shinto, their Shinto pilgrimage. images and the whole point is when there is time between things and you're looking for what your next thing is make it into a physical metaphor and what will happen is you won't find it it will find you on the trail that's the ancient idea from that and i did that by the way when i you know left the presidency of this big think tank in washington dc and i didn't know what i was going to do next exactly i know i was going to go to university and do what i don't know and so i walked the community

Santiago across northern Spain and every day I prayed I said Lord guide my path guide my path just me and my wife worshiping and walking and praying and on the last day entering Santiago de Compostela in northern Spain I was granted the information just like the legend says it was to spend the rest of my life lifting people up and bringing them together in bonds of happiness and love using science and ideas and said all right All right, game on. Let's go back and talk about process. Yeah.

I think it is underappreciated. I think we're so results obsessed. We forget about the mechanisms and steps to getting to, hopefully, what somebody would define the success. And the education comes in the process, not in the outcome. The growth comes in the process, not on the outcome. the the wisdom comes in the process

that and the outcome and even if I talk to people and I say you know tell me about a time in your life that you loved

being a part of some project or some event or something like something that if all the things in your life are like this one thing

you'd be the happy person alive almost always they tell me about something that was not a commercial success

or didn't go well in the outcome, but it was the process of coming together with other people in common cause that leaves them feeling joy and fulfillment that they carry that feeling with them for the rest of their life. But we, for some reason, well, I know the reason, but we have seemingly abandoned or devalued the value of process. Yeah, no, that's right. And it's a very normal human thing. It's not, you know, the fault of capitalism. It's mother nature. I mean, Mother Nature says, since you enjoy progress, you're a progress-oriented species, we want today to be better than yesterday.

We want to get further down the trail today that we did yesterday and the day before. Therefore, the ergo when we arrive at the destination, that that's going to be bliss. Now, every major religion and philosophical tradition says that's wrong from the Stoics to the Tibetan Buddhists say that that's actually wrong. There is an end point in Tibetan Buddhism, which is to break out of the constant cycle of birth and rebirth and attain nirvana. But short of that, man,

it's not going to be that great when you actually achieve a particular thing. You're trying to actually make progress in your life and make progress in improving the world one step at a time. So the result of it is that all of these traditions, they come together around this concept of how to make process the point,

which is called intention without attachment. And the whole point is you have to have intention. And intention means you have to have a goal because you don't know which direction you're going. You'll wander in circles if you don't have a – and sailing, this is called the rum line. The rum line is a straight Euclidean line between where you're starting and where you want to end up. But you know when you're setting out on a sailboat that you're not going to be on that straight line. You're going to get blown off course. You might like Columbus wind up in the wrong continent.

You don't know. but you've got to have a rum line. The whole point is not being attached to the end of the rum line, but understanding that the end of the rum line gives you the rum line so that you can make progress and have a good process all along the way. That's the whole point of goals. I would push a little bit there. I agree with you that, you know, since the dawn of humanity,

you know, we're dopamine-driven, sort of results-driven animals. It's the thing that Mother Nature helps ensure our survival. I would argue, though, that because technology is so helpful that it shortens process to such a degree that that's where the devaluation happens. You know, it used to be if you wanted to do calculations, you had to do it out on paper because you didn't have a choice, you know, and the technology just makes it shorter and quicker. But there's a point where we are now where things are so quick and so short. and I would argue that AI is making things quicker and shorter as well so as to remove process. So as to remove, I'm going to write a blog, right? Now, I'm grateful for technology for fixing my spelling or fixing my grammar.

I love that, right? That condensing is very helpful. And I don't think, quote, unquote, does damage to process. But if the machine is going to do the work for me, I miss out on process in order to achieve result. and what I'm missing out is education, opportunity for wisdom, opportunity for learning, self-growth, for struggle, for difficulty, you know, for all of these things that are good for me, which I would call process. And because the internet allows us to measure everything immediately, we can measure every like, every view, how many minutes somebody is watching

our video, we can measure the efficacy of our advertising in real time. You know, it's not like old TV ads where you had to wait six months to find out if anything happened. And then we still weren't 100% sure it was the advertising that did it. You know, like we used to say 50% of advertising works. We just don't know which 50%. Now we can say we know exactly what's working. My point being is the metrics obsessed society that we've become, we've forgotten the value of the part that's not measured or easily measured, which is the value of process. Or at least the measurement is it isn't isn't a is not an affirming outcome yeah no i agree with that i mean it's uh we've lost the living part of life and i'll go a step further which is which is

a i may destroy wisdom that p we started talking about gut decisions that gut decisions are our guts are are educated they come from life experience they come from life experience they come from things going right, things going wrong. It's stored somewhere in the limbic brain, though we don't necessarily have a conscious access to all of those memories and experiences at all time, but our minds do. The limbic brain does have access to it, which is why you get that gut decision. But if we keep removing all the struggle, all the work, all the stuff that we have to do manually, arguably, you could live a life of 10 years and have a gut filled with cobwebs and flies.

That's right. No, you actually haven't put any volumes on the shelf of your episodic memory in the hippocampus. I mean, there's just like nothing on those shelves except nonsense. Process, process fills the gut. Yeah. Not the outcomes. No, for sure. I mean, it's like so in the whole discussion that you've been having for a long time and

me too about the whole why of life, the why of life, it winds up not being because I like the outcome. The why of life is because I've been fully alive during the process. And, you know, that is the whole, you know, the key to the treasure is the treasure. The journey is the destination, et cetera, et cetera. But there's one wrinkle on this that I've been thinking about a lot because I've been looking at the basic neuroscience of these why questions that you've been grappling with for decades now. And there's all this correlation between how much you use your devices. So you use your devices to make your life really efficient and you free up a whole lot of time, which you then waste by distracting yourself with devices on trivialities and

nonsense, right? It's like, and people are like, I don't know. I know. And it's like, it's a self-licking ice cream cone is kind of how the thing works. And not very surprisingly that, you know, happiness is a combination of enjoyment, satisfaction, and meaning. There's no evidence that people under 35 have lower levels of enjoyment and satisfaction, but meaning has cratered. Why? The why question has cratered for people under 35. So I'm like, okay, what is it about technology use and modern life that has made that happen? It's not good enough to say the machines. There's something about the brain that's being used differently. And the new research, this actually comes from this guy, Ian McGilchrist. He's a neuroscientist

at Oxford and a psychiatrist. He wrote the master in his emissary that talks about hemispheric lateralization where the right side of the brain asks the why questions and the left side of the brain asks and answers the how and what questions so the right side of the brain is like here's the meaning of life and the left side of the brain goes out and does stuff the problem is that in modern life that is not process oriented that is not learning oriented that is not mystery oriented everything's on the left hemisphere of the brain and we have we don't have access to the parts of our brain that will address questions of meaning. This is a huge crisis.

And so then the question becomes, what do you do? And so I'm thinking about, I mean, the first prescription, by the way, is to start with why. You know, your big why questions and all of your work, it's not like easy questions,

like, you know, why is my phone sitting on this desk? It's why questions like, why am I alive and why would I be willing to give my life? which are complex questions that are, you can understand, but never really answered. The way I would frame it when I was first started talking about the ideas, I said, why should I get out of bed this morning and why should anyone care?

Yes. Yeah, and that's what that is, is that's, so meaning or why has three parts to it philosophically. Coherence, purpose, and significance. Coherence is why things happen the way they do. Purpose is, what are my goals in direct? in life and significance is why does it matter and so you know why should I get out of bed and why should anybody care if that's purpose and significance those are the those are two of the three aspects of meaning yeah one of the as we're talking one of the things that

occurs to me as we're talking about process versus outcome and how it relates directly to our ability to thrive and find joy and happy and I would even add survives uh to that list and I think of prisoners of war and the prisoners of war war from Vietnam and take your pick you know the ones that their their mindset was outcome I hope I get out by Christmas right I I they said I'm going to get out by Christmas I'm going to count the days until I get out by Christmas okay I really hope I get out soon I hope I see my family this idea of a of a deadline of a finishing line where this suffering will end who's paradox is that again that's the that's the who's the paradox the naval admiral uh who was

imprisoned in the hanoy hilton what not stockdale is that stockdale is the stockdale paradox he was the vice presidential candidate with ross perro that's right so so so those guys often died actually they they they just couldn't hack it were the guys who uh let go of outcome and they just decided to embrace process. So I had Leopoldo Lopez on the podcast. He's part of the Venezuelan movement for democracy. He lives in exile right now. And he was put in, he was a political prisoner for seven years

and held in solitary confinement for, I think, four or five of them. And before he turned himself in, he knew this was a political thing. He knew that they were after him. And he was the mayor of Caracas at the time. And he prepared himself to go to jail, knowing that it was going to be awful. And also knowing that he didn't know when he was going to get out. And he said, I committed to three things. One, I was going to every single day do something to keep my body healthy.

Two, I was going to do something every day to keep myself mentally healthy. So I would write, I would draw, I would read. and the third thing I would do is to keep myself spiritually healthy and he went to he was a lapsed Catholic and he went to his priest to say, I haven't prayed in a long time, I'm going into jail

I need to know how to pray and his priest said most people pray incorrectly he says most people pray to get something or to have something end some sort of pain or suffering to end or to have some sort of bonus or bounty

right? He says that incorrect he says the correct way to pray is to be is to pray for with gratitude just to be grateful that's it and so every day leopoldo prayed with gratitude look how beautiful the sun the sky is today that i can see through the crack in my window look how i saw an eagle go past my window today how grateful am i i'm grateful that i have a family i don't know when i'm going to see them but how grateful that they are out there for me and that we never had a deadline on it and he made it through. He is one of the healthiest people you'll ever meet, mentally, physically, spiritually. He has no PTSD whatsoever. And he said he had other prisoners go through there. And the ones that

had deadlines, it broke them. It broke them. To this day, they are broken people. Yeah, yeah. But this, I've always wanted to ask you this, because about the Stockdale paradox, how does this, I know you've thought about this, how is this related to optimism? I mean, you're a professional optimist. And optimists, because this is the thing about the Stockdale paradox, when people talk about this, they say the optimists died. But that's not right, is it? That's not right. That's not right. I think the hopeful died. I hope that this will end soon. I hope to get out, whether they talked about it to end the suffering or to regain the freedom, doesn't matter. It's when they put artificial finish lines where you have no control over the finish lines.

and then you hope for this work of fiction to come true. And you're constantly disappointed. And you're constantly disappointed. And what you keep doing then, what you keep doing is moving the finish line. Okay, this Christmas I didn't get out. Next Christmas I'll get out. Right? And you just keep, and then you apply that to life.

I'll be happy when I make my first million. Okay, my second million. I'll be happy when I get the promotion. Okay, the second promotion. And it goes directly to your work, which is the finish lines come and go. You might have a thrill if something goes well. that elation goes away, you know, that high goes away pretty quickly. And then what we need to do is living a life, moving a finish line.

Whereas what Leopoldo did and Admiral Stockdale did was they embraced process. In other words, they found joy in the mundane. They found joy in the daily. They appreciated the struggle. They saw themselves to use what we were talking about before. They saw their struggle as education. My body is getting fitter from this exercise. My mind is getting keener.

What I'm writing, what I'm reading is interesting. And they could have very difficult days. They absolutely had days where they were depressed, but they embraced process over hope for outcome. My fear is that with technology and especially the rise of AI, we are not talking about our absolute complete abandonment of process. And it processes the thing that not only teaches us, fills us, fulfills us, and makes us happy, then what happens?

Yeah. What, yeah, then what happens is that we are learning disappears. We've outsourced our learning about what it means to be fully human and to live a good life. We've tried to outsource. And we wind up asking those particular questions about a good life to an AI. The idiocacy becomes real. The idiocacy becomes real. Yeah, yeah, I'm afraid that's the case.

I'm afraid that that's, and that is. increasingly the case. It's funny because one of the things that I see among my students is that use Chad GPT as a therapist. I mean, they're literally using chat GPT. And chat GPT, not just chat TPT, AI is a psychopath. AI is a dark triad. A dark triad is a person who is high in narcissism, machiavellianism, and traits of psychopathy. And that's AI. And so you're asking a true psychopaths, a dark triad to give you advice on how to live a happier life. That's insane. And it'll tell you everything you want to hear. It's an affirmation machine. For sure. That's a great question, Simon. That's a brilliant

questions. You know, you really, if, look, if she's toxic, it's her fault. It's not your fault. You know, you should break up. It's like, I don't know, man. I keep breaking up over and over and over again. And that's openly I just announced that they have programmed the machine not to advise anybody to break up with their partners. Like, yeah, I know. I mean, it's like they had to put restrictions on the psychopath. They try to, but the whole point is interesting because the guys that Anthropic are trying to understand the misalignment between what we really want and what we inadvertently have asked the machine.

And so these really interesting new experiments have shown that when you set it up to optimize an email program, and then in the email, you send emails to each other saying we should disengage the AI, the AI will start playing dirty tricks. There's one simulation in which it started blackmailing. people in the email chain about an extramarital affair saying yeah you can turn me off if you want but this is going out to the whole company and uh in other words and that's what happens when the that's what that's what dark triads do it's my way and only my way i'm willing to hurt you and i feel no remorse that's what it means to be a dark triad that that explains a i to a t and you want

that for advice in your life about how to get happier maybe many therapists might be dark triads too but that's not my point. If you can compress your entire happiness class into a couple of bullets, here's the idea. Happiness is a big problem in life because people don't know what it is. People think it's a feeling and it's not. Feelings are evidence of happiness. Happiness is a combination of three things you can measure and study and get better at. Those things are enjoyment, satisfaction, and meaning. And then, only then can you actually come to terms with the fact that unhappiness isn't your enemy. Because that's the process, that's part of the process of enjoying your life and getting real satisfaction after struggle and finding meaning

after the discomfort that comes from everyday experiences. And only then can you be fully watched. This is so important for people to remember. Right? We never learn anything when things go well. We only learn things when things go badly. Correct. We can have fun, which I think is different from enjoyment or satisfaction. Right.

Well, it's part of enjoyment. It's part of enjoyment. It's actually one of the component parts of enjoyment. Fun is part of enjoyment, but definitely not satisfaction. No, correct. Satisfaction is actually more has struggle. is what leaves the satisfaction. And this goes back to everything we're saying,

which is process, struggle, you know, all of these things are actually a thing that produce what we would describe as the feeling of happiness. Yeah, yeah. It's interesting because... The evidence of the happiness. You know, for Jung talked about

the fact that unhappiness is so critically important for well-being. And this is one of the things that my students most often get wrong. To begin with, they don't understand emotions. Emotions are the universal language to tell you what's actually going on below your level of awareness. Negative emotions, aka bad feelings, tell you that you perceived a threat and you should avoid it. And we have different kinds of threats.

Some about losing people and things that you love. That's sadness. Some about you might be poisoned. That's disgust. Some about things that might attack and hurt you. That's fear and anger. And then there's emotions that you want more of like joy and interest and surprise. And all those are a perception that something is a, is an opportunity and that you should approach it.

That's all it is. That's what emotions are. And, you know, and have good, I always want to have good feelings. I don't have bad feelings. You'd be dead at a week without your so-called bad feelings. And that means that you need to be very appreciative and it gets back to the sense of gratitude, that you should be grateful for all of your emotions. And so what I want to do with my students in this full understanding of the happiness is being fully alive.

great Saint Irenaeus in the 4th century. So the glory of God is a person fully alive, which is this Aristotelian notion of eudaimonia, right? A full light, that you should be able to get up in the morning and say, and I urge all of your fans watching this now to do this, to get up tomorrow morning and the first thing, get on your knees and say, I'm really grateful for all the fun, happy things that are happened today.

And I'm also really grateful for the stuff I don't like that's going to happen today. because that's what's going to make me a more serious, better, more educated, more complete person. So when it comes to the suffering, man, bring it on. I've also found one's attitude towards the unexpected play significance into optimism and the ability to sort of appreciate and enjoy and learn the lessons. When something unexpected happens, well, I'm talking like simple stuff. It doesn't have to be like major life things like, like, you know, something happens at work

or, you know, that people go, oh, no, you know, this is not going according to plan. Yeah, I know. You know, no, right? Versus, ooh, okay, what's the opportunity we can find in this? This is weird. What's going on? I know, yeah, yeah. What's going on here?

Like, oh, I didn't expect that. What can we make something good out of that, you know? And the seeing, and I think that, the quality that underlies that reaction is curiosity. that I think when you have curiosity, when things don't go according to plan, you're curious about what happened. When I think when you lack curiosity and things don't go according to plan, you know, the plan is the thing. And I think, so the question is, is can one cultivate curiosity

or is it something you're born with or either have it or you don't? There's literature on this. And most facets of our positive and negative emotionality are between 40 and 80% genetic. But that means they're between 20 and 60% environmental. And environmental means if we create the right environment, we get more or less of these things. Okay, so that's really important.

I mean, your personality and your affect profile is mostly genetic, but it's also hugely environmental, and you can do a lot to change it. Okay, so that answers the question that we can learn curiosity. So then it begs the question, how does one learn curiosity? Well, curiosity is a positive, It's related to positive emotion through the channel of interest. Interest is for sure a positive emotion. Humans love to learn.

Humans really love to learn. And the only reason we don't think we love to learn is because our education system is so screwed up. I mean, it's like we have this Bismarck German education system where you take kids at age five and you sit them down in groups of 30 and they go one year after another, all learning the same thing at the same pace with the same people of the same age. It's just so boring. It's just I hate it every day of school from kindergarten through my Ph.D. I did not enjoy school. And I didn't know for years what it was.

It was because it was extinguishing interest. Yeah. I love learning and I hate school. I'm the same. Yeah. I mean, it's like, and learning is the best because learning is we're evolved to learn more. Of course you're going to get positive emotionality from learning because your ancestors, the ancient cynics on the African society.

Savannah, they were, it's like, one of them found berries on a bush and gazelles around a watering call and said, this is awesome. And that's why they passed on their genes. And so they got positive reinforcement and dopamine, et cetera, from, from the learning process. And so we still love to. How do we teach curiosity? How do we teach it? We teach it by actually figuring out how people learn best and then help them in that lane to learn the things that they're really interested in. So there's a lot of deep, there's a lot of research now about neurodivergent people who have dyslexia. AC, AC, ACBC, no, ADHD, right? You know, and one of my kids, you know, one of my kids was diagnosed with ADHD.

And what you learn when one of your kids is diagnosed with ADHD is that it's mostly nonsense what they're telling them. What they're, what they're, have a hard time doing is sitting still and suffering through the stuff that they think is boring. They have a super strength. ADHD kids have a super strength and focusing on the things that they think are interesting, super strength. So when my son, yeah, and when my son Carlos, he became a sniper, you know, he'd be like, yeah, dad, I spent six hours in a bush in 110 degree heat and in a forward operating base of the United Arab Emirates.

And there was a tarantula on my arm. And I'm like, oh, it sounds awfully. He says, it was awesome. And it's like, this is the kid who can't concentrate in school. And so you got to look for the super, the super strength, the super skill of these kids. that's why the stakes are so much higher with people with ADHD to find that number one what is the thing that fascinates them and number two how do they like to learn and there's lots of ways to do that that's where technology is a blessing and that occurs because the technology

that we have today is not that it gives you the right answer it provides you with the means to investigate what the answers might be in your own learning style better in my case that's where teamwork mattered or it still matters like I have to be on a functional team and like making a being part like being whether formally or informally I have to contribute to the the leading of that team to help keep it functional because of the team is not functional I'm screwed because if I'm not interested in something I just don't do it it's terrible I'm not proud of it my whole life it's been you know I've been accused of all kinds of things like you're unreliable why don't you get that done it's because it's not interesting

but if I'm on a team with other people who find that stuff interesting we're off to the races I just want people to recognize that the way that everybody tells us we have to succeed both on purpose and by accident done the opposite and it's worked out okay

I'm living proof that having a plan I don't have one I'd never had one people like what are you going to do in five years I'm like I don't know how the hell should I know what's going to happen in five years and I've got no plan I've never had a plan, right? I'm living proof that you don't need great grades in college, right?

My GPA was fine, right? I'm living proof that you don't have to be a voracious reader. You know, my ADHD, I really struggle to read, and, you know, I carried a lot of shame about this for many years, but the fact that matters is I've written more books than I've read. That is a true statement. And I've started a lot of books. I like the idea of books. I wish I could read more.

because I'm so curious, I want to read the books, but I struggle. And saying, look, oh, what about audiobooks? Nope, I'll have to listen to it six times because I get so distracted. So, and so what I've done is let go of how other people tell me I have to learn, and thank goodness, figure out how I learned how I learned. And so I hope that my entire sort of career is a sigh of release for people who are struggling the way they've been told they have to do things. Yeah, no, that's right.

And the basic rules of how things are supposed to be done is for the average person, and there isn't an average person. There's no average person. There actually isn't an average person. And I mean, there's one person right in the center of the standard normal curve. But we're all some weird thing. And the whole point is that learning how you learn, learning what's interesting to you, building your own life, treating your life as an enterprise in this particular way is the way that we all should be living, is the bottom line. And that's very process-oriented approach to life. And that's where I get to the, that's where I think we are, which is, I think the conclusion

I have from this conversation, which is success, happiness, wisdom, gut, all of that is learning to find joy in process. Learning to find joy in the doing, I mean, it's so, it sounds so hackneyed, it sounds so like, again, like how many freaking different ways it's, You said it before. It's not the destination at the journey, like learning to let go of outcome. It's so Buddhist.

And like how many philosophies for millennia has to reinforce the same damn message over and over again? And our job, your and my job as sort of social commentators, is not to remind people of what people have been saying for millennia. Our job is to translate it into words that resonate today. And that's one of the reasons why start with, why was a coup. It's not that I was the first person to start talking about, you know,

mean or even meaning at work. It's that I found a language that was right for the times. I abandoned the old language, you know? And that's, I think, why it allowed people who needed to listen to listen. It was no longer preaching to the converted. And so this idea of process as opposed to the journey, which sounds a little hippie-dippy, you know, love the journey. It's like, I want to punch somebody in the face the next time somebody's told me that, you know? But to appreciate the process, which means learn to write your own blog.

You know, learn, learn, learn to have a difficult conversation with somebody on your team or with a loved one without memorizing a script from chat, GPT. Learn to sit in discomfort. All of these things are, it's just, it's called, it's process. process of work, it's process of life, it's process of learning. Process is messy, ugly, and very imperfect.

Yeah, that's for sure, because it's actually in real time. It's actually in real time. It's happening right now. And I guess, I guess, I guess this is the point. Be alive now. Be alive now. They'll be alive later. Crazy.

We've all, this is a great place to, this is a great place to end. We've all been alive before. Uh-huh. We can't plan to be alive later. Your mind or might not be. The only thing we can do is be alive now, and how would you like to do that right now? That's right. Well, I'm glad I'm alive right now with you.

I'm glad I'm alive with you right now, too. I love you, you, I've always ended any conversation with you smarter than I began. I love you, and I can't wait to see you in the same city one day soon. I love you, too. A bit of optimism is brought to you by the Optimism Company and is lovingly produced by our team Lindsay Garbenius and Devin Johnson. If I was able to give you any kind of insight or some inspiration or made you smile, please subscribe wherever you enjoy listening to podcasts for more.

And if you're trying to get answers to a problem at work or want to advance a dream, maybe I can help. Simply go to simic.com. Until then, take care of yourself. Take care of each other.