Afford Anything - Two Types of Intelligence, with Harvard Professor Arthur Brooks

Episode Date: February 4, 2022

#363: In our 20’s and 30’s, we have high levels of fluid intelligence, or raw intellectual horsepower. We can ace tests, impress people with our memory and recall, and analyze facts, documents and data. But in our 40’s and 50’s, we have higher levels of crystallized intelligence, which allows us to draw together novel insights from across domains. Fluid intelligence allows us to analyze, or break apart. Crystallized intelligence allows us to synthesize, or put together. Each type of intelligence invites us to express different skills, to pivot our role at work – or perhaps even to change careers or industries altogether. In today’s episode, Harvard professor Arthur Brooks discusses these two types of intelligence, and outlines how we can gracefully move from one strength to the next. Subscribe to the show notes at https://affordanything.com/shownotes Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

You can afford anything but not everything. Every choice that you make is a trade-off against something else. And that doesn't just apply to your money. That applies to your time, your focus, your energy, your attention. Any limited resource that you need to manage. Saying yes to something implicitly means. Turning away all other opportunities. And that leads to two questions.

First, what matters most? Second, how do you make decisions around that which matters most? how do you bridge the behavior gap so that your actions and your choices reflect what you think you value? Now, answering those two questions is a lifetime practice. And that's what this podcast is here to explore. My name is Paula Pan. I am the host of the Afford Anything podcast. Normally, we're a weekly show.

We air once a week, but once a month on the first Friday of the month we air a first Friday bonus episode. So welcome to the February 2022 first Friday bonus episode. Today, Harvard professor Arthur Brooks joins us to talk about how to make a midlife career change, except it's not exactly about a midlife career change. It's more how to recognize when your skills, your talents, the types of intelligence that you have, how to recognize when those are shifting and to lean into that, how to move from the type of strength that you have early in your career to the different types of strength that you will have later in your career.

And so to anyone who's interested in financial independence, in an early retirement, in a second act, the following interview is particularly insightful. Now, Arthur Brooks is a senior fellow at Harvard Business School and a professor of the practice of public leadership at the Harvard Kennedy School. But being a professor wasn't his first career. Prior to that, he was a CEO. And before that, he was a musician who played at Carnegie Hall. And you're going to hear a funny story about that later in the episode. He's written 11 books. He writes a column for the Atlantic. And he hosts a podcast called The Art of Happiness.

Before we get into this conversation with Professor Arthur Brooks, I have a very exciting announcement. So Afford Anything is about to celebrate its 11-year birthday anniversary. What is it called when a company turns 11? Birthday or anniversary? Birth-aversary? Anyway, Afford-anything is turning 11. We'll call it a birthday. The podcast itself is 6 years old, but the website, the community, the idea of Afford Anything expressed out there in the world, we are turning 11 on 2222.

February 22, 2022. And to celebrate, we are throwing a party in New York City on 2222, which is a Tuesday, and you're invited. So if you want to come celebrate with us, go to afford anything.com slash birthday. That's afford anything.com slash birthday. And grab a ticket. Your ticket will include two hours of open bar. So that's Tuesday, 222, 22, 22, come celebrate with And by the way, if you are a student in our course, your first rental property, or if you have attended one of our live events in the past, pay attention to your email because we're going to email you a promo code for half-price tickets. It's one of the ways that we express our thanks and our loyalty to all of our students in our course, in your first rental property, as well as to everyone who has supported us throughout the years by coming to a live event, coming to a workshop. It's our way of saying thanks and celebrating. And if you haven't done anything with us in the past, we invite you to start.

So again, the party is 2222, and you can get tickets by going to afford anything.com slash birthday. That's afford anything.com slash birthday. With that said, here is Arthur Brooks discussing how to move between different types of strengths and between different types of talents and intelligences so that you can have a happier and more contributory life. Hi, Arthur. Hi, Paula.

How are you? I'm great. How are you doing? I'm doing fine. Arthur, you talk about moving from one strength to another, and the premise underlying this is the notion that a certain type of energy, idea, innovation exists early in our careers, then gets lost, often prompting a career crisis or a desire to make a midlife career change, but the good news is that new forms of talent, new strengths, emerge in its stead. Can you talk

about this? Yeah, I've been teaching and studying the human performance and human happiness for a really long time. And I started to see this really weird pattern. My data, which is the people between about the ages of 35 and 50 in knowledge industries. Most people listening to us, people who work in the realm of ideas, whether lawyers or doctors or data scientists or anything, really, where you're sitting at a desk and doing things, they kind of go into a crisis and their profession. It's like, I don't want to do this anymore. And a big part of it is because their jobs stop getting easier and start getting weirdly harder. You know, as I see this with lawyers, especially all the time, it's like, I used to be able to cruise through these cases. And now it's

kind of drudgery and the young people seem to be doing it a little bit faster than me. And so I started doing a little bit of research. And it turns out that this is really common. This is a very common phenomenon that the structure of the brain is such that that idea jobs, you know, the innovation and speed and the ability to solve problems, it tends to get a little bit worse and then get a lot worse. And what I was seeing was not aberrant. It was not unusual.

It was the norm. Is that age-related regardless of career inception? Well, there's a guy out at University California Davis named Dean Keith Simonton, who's a very famous psychologist, who's done a lot of work on the life cycle of careers, actually. And he's talking about creative careers and knowledge careers. So idea professions. And what he finds is that on average, you tend to peak in your career and start to decline 20 years after you start it. But it really depends. It depends on the kind of career that you're talking about.

So if you're doing something that requires pure innovation and processing speed, it peaks earlier. And if you're doing something that requires a ton of knowledge, just knowing a lot of stuff, but not speed or inventing new things, it peaks way, way, way later. So he's shown, for example, that if you're a poet, by about the age of 40, you will have done half of your life's work at age 40. On the other hand, if you're a historian, you'll have done half of your life's work at about age 65. So if you're a historian, you better take good care of your health because in your 80s you're going to write your best books. On the other hand, if you're somebody like any of, you know, Ezra Pound, for example, lived into his 80s, but did his best poetry in his 20s because his peak happened much, much earlier.

Is it purely the result of cognitive function or are there other social or environmental factors? And where I'm really going with this is, are there ways that we can head this off? So we're talking about this phenomenon that I saw. But really, I want to know what I can do in my 20s or 30s or 40s or even 60s so that I can be a lot happier when I'm in my 70s. And if I actually start seeing declines in this, that or the other thing, whether it's for structural reasons, psychological reasons, your brain, you know, physiology, whatever it happens to be. And I don't actually know what to do about it, either to head it off or to do something else, I'm going to be not as happy. Before I'm in my 60s and 70s, I want to know what I can do. So when I get there, I have a better shot at being happy.

And here's the weird thing, Paula. I noticed when I was doing my research that people have a tendency to get happier between about the ages of, you know, 55 and late 60s for all sorts of reasons, mostly because their kids are moving out. But then you find that half the population gets happier and happier and happier all the way to the end. And the other half of the population starts going back down again. And the ones who go back down again are the strivers or the hard workers or the most ambitious

people. It turns out that's because they're the ones who see the biggest decline because they had the highest highs. It's not because they had more decline. It's just because that they got higher, they worked harder, they achieved more. And so when they got their inevitable decline, it felt worse. And so that's what I'm trying to do, and to either figure out how to not have a decline or to have a new kind of success. What can you do? What are the investments that you can make in your 20s and 30s and 40s so that you will actually be able to age really, really well, no matter what happens. One distinction that you make is the distinction between fluid,

intelligence versus crystallized intelligence and how choosing activities that rely on crystallized intelligence can help you stay happier and more productive later in life. Can you elaborate on this concept? Yeah, for sure. And that is actually the answer to your earlier question. And the answer is that there are two basic kinds of intelligence. This comes from the work of Raymond Catell, a psychologist, a British psychologist who was doing his best work in the 60s and early 70s. He lived for a long time, actually, he lived into his 90s, but that was when he was doing his real work. And he showed that early on, early in your career, what makes you good is fluid intelligence. Fluid intelligence is the ability to solve problems, answer other people's questions,

get to the heart of the matter to innovate really, really fast. You can be a cowboy, a sole proprietor, you can do things better than anybody else. So hot shot, strivers, they have tons of fluid intelligence. But it declines. So what Ramigatel showed is that because of the structure of the brus, brain and the way it works, that between 35 and 50, just like I saw in my data, that your fluid intelligence is declining. It gets harder and harder and harder for you to do those things.

And it's normal and it's natural. But here's the good news. There's another intelligence curve lurking behind it that's even better called crystallized intelligence. Now, that's an intelligence that doesn't require or doesn't rely on speed of analytic capacity where you can solve problems quickly. It requires that you know a lot of stuff and know how to use it. So you go from being able to answer anybody's question to knowing what the right question is and who to ask.

Now, think about it. Now, which one do you want? You want the one where it's like, yeah, I can answer any stupid question, but I would prefer to come up with the right question and know where to get the answer. And that's what crystallized intelligence is all about. And that if you develop it, if you pay attention to it, you don't struggle to stay on your first curve, then happiness is in store for you. But you have to know how to develop it. you have to know how to cultivate it and you have to know how to use it. So would it be accurate to describe crystallized intelligence as the synthesis of many ideas

across multiple disciplines that emerges over time? Yeah, it's also known as wisdom. So one of the things that you notice when you talk to somebody who's wise, they tend to be older. I mean, there are some very young wise people, but you notice that the people who are the wisest people you've ever met, it's like your grandma, why? Because your grandma's been around the block a thousand times. She's seen everything. She's had every experience, and she can use all the information that she's got.

She can't come up with a recall of somebody's name in 74 milliseconds, but she knows a whole lot of people and knows a whole lot of things. And then she can put them together into a coherent storyline and give you unbelievably good advice. That's what it means to have crystallized intelligence. Now, you can synthesize knowledge across many fields. You can tell stories based on other people's work. Here's the weird thing, Paul. When I first got my PhD, I'm an economist. I was writing this mathematical theory that today I don't even understand.

It's like it was a different person writing these papers. But now I write for the Atlantic and I'm looking at everybody's research. I'm reading 15 academic journal articles in a week written by these hot shot brilliant young scholars. And they don't really know the significance of their work. They don't really know how you could apply it to your life. Now when my fluid intelligence was really high, I was writing papers like that. Now when my crystallized intelligence is a lot higher because I'm 57 years old, I can take other people's big ideas and put them together into a storyline.

tell you how to use it. And I'll take this eight days a week because I actually can give people ideas on how they can live happier, better lives based on the best science. And I couldn't do that when I was creating the best science. In order to pivot from a position in which a knowledge worker uses primarily fluid intelligence, that raw horsepower when they're young, to a position in which they're using crystallized intelligence as they age, is this something a person, the typical knowledge worker can do within the same role just by pivoting the way in which they interface with their existing role, or does it require a career change or an industry change? It really depends on the person, depends on the job.

It starts with your own orientation toward yourself. Most people are too attached to their own success. Most people who are really hard workers and have done well, they become success addicts. They get the dopamine hit from a job well done, from finishing the task, from getting a compliment, whatever it is, doing what they already do. well. You notice that when people are addicted to drugs or alcohol, they don't like to deviate from their drug of choice at all. You know, if you smoke cigarettes, have you ever been a smoker, Paula? No. Okay, so I was a smoker. I was an inveterate smoker. I loved smoking. And I'm telling

you, I had one brand that I was smoking. And I would go, I would go way out of my way if the place where I bought cigarettes didn't have the brand. And the reason is because I wanted the right kind of hit from the same experience over and over and over again. And success addicts are the same way. I get the hit from finishing my job, the same kind of job, the same way, and I love that hit, hit, hit, hit. You're like a dopamine monkey. And that's what success addicts all have in common. So to begin with, you have to kick that addiction of actually trying to goose your brain chemistry over and over again doing something that's getting harder and harder. Because it's going to get to get to become a source of it. It's already a tyranny if you're an addict, but it's going to get worse because it's going to be harder and harder to get your drug. So that's the first thing that you have to figure out is how to get over yourself. Then you have to figure out how you can start exploiting these new strengths that exist inside you. And you can do that in a lot of different ways. One of the things that I find, I'm an academic. And so the younger people, they do this really unbelievably scientific forward research.

But older people are much better teachers. And that's because research, cutting edge research, rewards fluid intelligence and teaching rewards crystallized intelligence. You know, the teaching evaluations at my university and every university show that, that the best teaching evaluations go to professors over 70, you know, so all the students who are listening to us, go take the oldest professors because they're the best teachers, not always. I mean, there's some really great young teachers and some really bad older teachers, but generally speaking, they're playing to their strengths. In every profession, you can become more of a teacher. You know, we also find that the kind of leader that you are, you could be a,

you know, you could be a Calaway CEO, you know, somebody who's, you know, a sole proprietor, I'm the star, all the ideas come from me. Or you can be an, you can be an, kind of an older type CEO who's using crystallized intelligence, building teams, training others, firing up other people, helping people see how the brilliance of their ideas fits with the brilliance of other people's ideas. No matter what you're doing, you can go from innovator to instructor. And in so doing, go from the first intelligence curve to the second intelligence curve and stay successful and get happier. And you describe in your book the distinction between Charles Darwin and Johann Bach. Can you tell us about that in terms of how they

managed their careers? Yeah. So, you know, this is a case study in not getting off the first intelligence curve because you're so stuck on it. Charles Darwin, and if you had a list of the three greatest scientists of all time, Charles Darwin would be on your list. You know, I don't know if it's Galileo or, you know, who else is on your list? But everybody's list contains Charles Darwin because he truly was one of the greatest

scientific minds, certainly over the past 500 years. Charles Darwin, he enjoyed early, unbelievable worldly success. He came back from his voyage on the beach. which is a five-year around the world track on a boat to pick up samples of, you know, botanical samples and zoological samples. And when he came back, he dropped this bomb, ideological bomb or intellectual bomb on science, which was the theory of evolution. 27 years old, 27, you know, it's like, oh, man, that is so far in the rearview mirror for me.

Then he spent the next 30 years elaborating this, getting more and more and more famous on this one big idea, making it better and better. And then he hit a wall where he couldn't go any further. because he couldn't understand the math that he would need to get to the next great big breakthrough. It actually came from a monk, a Czech monk by the name of Gregor Mendel. It's a pretty famous guy, but not as famous as Darwin, who invented genetics. But genetics required a lot of math that Darwin, Darwin had been a very lazy student, by the way. He actually didn't study his math or his stats.

And so when he hit the wall intellectually at 50-something, he was unable to break through. and his research stopped completely creativity. He wrote like 11 more books, but they're all kind of derivative. And he died a sad man feeling like a failure. He was buried in Westminster Abbey because he's such a hero, but it was for his past accomplishments. And he was just straw. Everything was just boring and he felt bad about himself because he wasn't, he was a complete success addict, hit after hit, after hit, after hit, and it stopped.

And the one thing you don't want to do is basically go to a cigarette smoker, you know, for that matter, an alcoholic and say, I'm just going to take away. the subject of your addiction. Just going to take it away. You'll be fine. No, no. You're not going to be fine. You're going to be really,

really unhappy. And if you don't actually come to terms of the fact that your life would be better without it, if you actually think that you're better off as a smoker than not, then you're going to spend a long time maybe years regretting that. Johann Sebastian Bach is another model. Bach, maybe the greatest composer of serious concert music who ever lived, he hit his wall at age 50 as well,

where he was the greatest innovator of the high Baroque, which is this, you know, everybody loves Baroque music practically, and everybody loves Johann Sebastian Bach for that matter. He's the maybe the most famous composer ever lived, lived from 16, 85, and 1750. And Bach hit the wall because he was unable to go with new trends in concert music. It was his son, Carl Philip Emanuel Bach, that invented a new style of music that completely overtook his father. So he was the most famous composer in Europe and suddenly became obscure because he couldn't stay.

He's like writing disco. effectively. And his son was all the rage. And his son, even, you know, for years and years later, was the most famous of the box. So Mozart said, you know, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart said, Bach is the father. We are the children. And he was talking about Carl Philip Emmanuel Bach, the son, not the one that we still remember today. Okay. So the father, what did he do at 50? He didn't, he could have turned into Darwin, really bummed out and bitter and feeling like a failure. Uh-uh. He said, I'm going to do what I'm really still good at. and he became the master teacher.

He took the job as the canter in the Tomas Kirchen, Leipzig, which is this big famous Lutheran church in Leipzig. And he would write these cantatas for every Sunday in the church liturgical calendar. These kind of fell off his pen. Now that the greatest music ever written, but it was written in the high baroque. So it was an ancient style. He taught the choir. He taught the organ.

And he became this beloved teacher to his kids. And he had 20 kids. He had tons of grandchildren. he had thousands of students. And when he died at age 65, he was surrounded by his children and grandchildren and his students. And he died a beloved happy man who was truly, truly successful, not famous anymore,

but successful in what really mattered, which was in building up other people using his crystallized intelligence. Now, later, 100 years after he died, another composer by the name of Felix Mendelsohn, it just found his stuff, the father's stuff, and said, yeah, you guys are all listening to this Bach, this C-P-E-Bock, but his dad's stuff is even better. And he made him into this rock star that he still is today.

But when he died, he died kind of obscure, but happy. Right. And that notion obscure but happy, that sort of it plays to a concept that you talk about later in your book, when you talk about how people deal with the fear of demise. And many people cope with the fear of demise by thinking about the legacy that they'll build. And the story that you just told highlights how oftentimes we have no way of knowing or predicting what legacy we may or may not build. Right. It's funny. I mean, we always, there's a very famous book called The Denial of Death by anthropologists that in written in the 1960s, it really captured everybody's imagination and it built this idea that everybody's afraid to die.

And the reason they're afraid to die because of this fundamental philosophical problem, which is that on the one hand, Paula, I know I'm going to die because I'm a sentient individual and I've seen people. die. So I must die. Everybody must die. But at the same time, my brain is incapable of capturing the notion that I don't exist. So on the one hand, I know I'm going to die. On the other hand, I don't understand my own non-existence. And that creates this terrifying conflict for people. That was the essence of the sort of the philosophical problem of death. But that's not the real scary thing for most strivers. For a lot of people listening to us, if you ever say, my work is my life, then professional decline is your death. And that's where you're, what you're afraid of. And as soon as, you know, this observation actually led me to do a lot of

a work as a social scientist into the fear of decline. And so people are just, just terrified of it. Terrified to people saying, you know, she used to be better than she is. It's so scary to people. If you define your identity on the basis of your professional excellence and achievements, then your fear of death is the fear of the loss of your own professional skills. And that's one of the things that I deal with. That's one of the big barriers. You know, when people see any sort of decline in their fluid intelligence and their skills that are tied to their fluid intelligence, they get so freaked out that they just basically do anything to stay alive, anything to stay alive. But what they should do is jump. You have to take the chance of trying to jump onto the next

curve to develop your crystallized intelligence and then the world's your oyster. But for those who are so afraid, they will hang on so hard. That's what actually makes it impossible for them to make the leap. What does hanging on look like to a person who, who's not willing to make that leap to crystallized intelligence? Yeah, these are people who are hiding any sort of diminution of their skills. And I see this all the time. You know, you see people who are, you know, a lot of people will be hiding their own aging. You know, people do all kinds of stuff to hide their aging. You know, men who get hair plugs or, you know, teeth caps or Botox or, you know, there's a lot of politicians to do this. And part of the reason is because there's a lot of data that

show that we want old politicians who look young. Because we want them to be very, you know, vital enough that we really trust that they're capable of doing the job, but we want them to be old enough to be wise. And so we want vitality and wisdom in the same person. That's the reason that a lot of politicians, you know, even presidents of the United States will color men will color the hair and get hair plugs and get teeth caps and Botox. That's terror at the natural process of aging. People may not be doing this, you know, in terms of cosmetic procedures, but they're doing the equivalent of cosmetic procedures by hiding things that they're doing that aren't going as well as they used to. They become sort of incapable of sharing credit. They tend to hog ideas. They tend to steal

ideas. If you find yourself acting in a way that you don't admire out of fear and it has to do with the fear of the performance of your job, that's a telltale sign. That's a dead giveaway that you're in a process of terror and you're fighting against the, you know, raging against the dying of the light, that famous poem by Dylan Thomas, you know, do not go to. gently into that good night, rage, rage against the dying of the light. That was actually written for his father when he was dying. But it could be written for any number of people that I know in media, in politics, in law, in medicine, who are starting to see a Wall Street, trying to see a little slip in their skills. And they fight like crazy to not let anybody else

see it. That's the telltale sign. We'll come back to the show in just a second. But first, Fifth Third Bank's commercial payments are fast and efficient, but they're not just. just fast and efficient, they're also powered by the latest in payments technology, built to evolve with your business. Fifth Third Bank has the big bank muscle to handle payments for businesses of any size. But they also have the fintech hustle that got them named one of America's most innovative companies by Fortune magazine. That's what being a fifth third better is all about. It's about not being just one thing, but many things for our customers. Big Bank Muscle, FinTech Hustle.

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Don't miss out on early Black Friday deals. Head to Wayfair.com now to shop Wayfair's Black Friday deals for up to 70% off. That's W-A-Y-F-A-I-R.com. Sale ends December 7th. You've talked about how in order to make that leap, that leap from fluid intelligence to crystallized intelligence, and in order to embrace the fact that skills do decline, at least certain types of skills decline. and so in order to continually play to our strengths, we must pivot with the growth of new strengths.

But you mentioned how one of the ways to do this is first by breaking your addiction to work and success. Specifically, tactically, how can a person break that addiction if they've been an overachiever their entire life? So when I talk to people, I've studied, as a social scientist, I've studied the phenomenon of addiction a lot. And there's actually some really good research about the physiology of addiction. It comes down to this, you know, to dopamine, which is a neurotransmitter. And there's a really good book out by Anna Lemke, who's a neuroscientist at Stanford University that talks about how dopamine works to get us addicted to absolutely everything, to behaviors, to drugs, to everything.

And we just increase the dopamine because it's so intensely pleasurable, but it never lasts. And so we go after it again and again and again. And one of the things she talks about is actually detoxing from dopamine. So she works with gamers, for example, who are deeply, deeply addicted to the dopamine hits that actually come from gaming, but they don't last. And it hurts them in their lives because it starts to crowd out what really matters. Now, what does all addiction crowd out? The answer is love. That's what it crowds out.

If you've ever had a relationship, a friendship, a romantic partnership with somebody who's addicted to alcohol, who has alcohol use disorder, you notice that they will, the most hurtful thing to the partner is that they will crowd out their relationship with you to actually have. the true relationship, which is with the booze. Now, the same thing is true. If you're addicted to gaming, you'll neglect your family for the gaming. Some addictions are a little bit more, I mean, they're dangerous, but they're not quite like that. Like, you know, cigarettes, you don't actually have to sneak around behind your partner so that you can get your cigarettes, because usually those two things are compatible. But if you have to choose between your beloved little dopamine stick and the real humans in your life, if you're really addicted, you're going to take the dopamine every time. So there's two things to keep in mind in there.

number one you need to detox and number two you need a better substitute you need the thing that you were crowding out if you're a success addict and the and you know the success addicts one of the things that they all have in common is they're workaholics but workaholism is a derivative addiction so workaholism is people who sneak around to do their work and you know the telltale sign for people listening to us is if when your partner leaves on a Sunday afternoon you sneak out your laptop and do a little bit of work and then put it away before the person comes back so they don't get mad at you you're workaholic you know that's a That's like sneak in a bottle. And lots of people do that. Or if you're staying late at the office and the 14th hour of work is crowding out your first hour at home, that's a problem too. Because even an unproductive hour is more satisfying to you than a productive hour of your particular relationships. So what do you need to do? You need to detox from the success addiction and workaholism, which is also kind of a self-objectification. You're reducing yourself.

It's kind of to homo-economics. You know, I'm just really, really good at my job because I just want the hits that I get for my job. you need to detox from that, which means you really need a bunch of, and kind of difficult, but time away, you need to go to detox. And, you know, I've done this before. When I stepped down as a CEO, I was a complete workaholic. And I ran this think tank in Washington, D.C. And I was working 80 hours a week for 10 years. And I went, I didn't just quit. I went away and I knew it was going to be hard. So I went to Spain and I walked the Camino de Santiago, which is, you know, that famous walking pilgrimage across Spain that's in that Martin Sheen movie

in the way. And I walked and I walked. And I walked. And I walked and I walked and I walked and I just walked day after day, blister after blister, because I had to detox. And I had to do something when I was detoxing that was meaningful and that was spiritual to me. The second thing is I did it with my wife because that's the relationship that's most important that I'm going to have. I mean, she's just the person I'm going to look at with my dying breath. I hope. The problem is I've been crowding out that relationship for too long with my success addiction and my workaholism. And I needed to reestablish that.

So I detoxed on my feet 25 kilometers a day for a long time with the person that I love the most. Those are the two things to do when you're addicted is go to detox and reestablish your human relationships. For the average person who's listening who's wondering right now, am I a workaholic or do I just have a heavy workload? How do you know? Yeah, how do you know? What's the inventory? What's the equivalent of hiding out? alcohol or once you start drinking, you can't stop drinking, or you always give yourself a goal of

not drinking tonight, but you always break it. Those are the kinds of questions that I was asked to see if you have alcohol use disorder. Work use disorder and success acquisition disorder kind of works the same way. Are you crowding out human relationships and sneaking around for your work? Do you actually know that you're doing something that is not normal and not healthy for you, but you're doing it anyway. That's that's actually the equivalent of risky behavior. And you can have people admire you for that, but you know perfectly that at the end of the day, you know, when you're taking your dying breast and your deathbed, you're not going to be saying, wow, I wish I'd gotten one more promotion. You're not going to say, you know, at your eulogy, they're not going to say he was a million

mile flyer on three airlines. That's not what people are going to be talking about. You know perfectly that this is empty, but you're going to take the short term hit instead of the long term investments in happiness and love. And so if you're starting to see those signals, that's that you got to take an inventory. You've got to be honest with yourself. And this book was a research project in me. I'm not going to kid you, Paul. It was me search.

It was not research. So I put together a 10-step plan from going from stuck on the fluid intelligence curve and desperate that something bad was going to happen and hopelessly addicted to work to I want to be free and I want to be happy. and I want to be successful in a way that favors the age that I am, well, at the same time, having more love in my life and more spiritual in the way that I'm living my life. And so I basically took a social scientist's 10-point plan on how to get there. And this is an owner's manual and how to get there.

And by the way, it doesn't matter. You don't have to be 57 like me. You can be 25 or 35, and these are the investments you need to make so that when you get to my age or older, that you're able to make the transition more seamlessly. and with less desperation and panic. With less desperation and panic. You mentioned people may admire you for the work that you do for the accomplishments that you have. I think that's one thing that makes workaholism different than, say, something like smoking cigarettes,

which typically nobody will ever admire you for. You mentioned it's pride, pleasure, money, and... Money, power, pleasure, and fame. Money, power, pleasure, and fame, the rewards. and that's because your brain and Madison Avenue and the entertainment industry and all of media, they tell you that that's the mark of a truly successful person, is money, power, pleasure, and fame. And there's a reason for that. The reason for that is that our brains have been evolved to want to accumulate those rewards.

And in so doing, we're more likely to pass on our genes. I mean, if you have more animal skins and arrowheads and buffalo jerky in your cave, than the caveman and the next cave over, you're more likely to get a mate and pass on your jeans. Well, that's completely anachronistic in modern society. You don't need five watches. You don't even need five shirts. The truth is that we accumulate lots and lots and lots of stuff because they're a marker of success. And our ancient, not evolved enough brain is telling us that we're going to be more effective in sexual selection.

And that's a big problem. And so that's the reason that you can't be satisfied. That's the reason that you run and you run and you run. and you can't keep any satisfaction because your brain is going more, more, more, more, more, more, more. You have to be in charge of that. See, Mother Nature does not select on happiness. Mother Nature selects on fitness for mating.

And if you're not happy, Mother Nature doesn't care. That's your problem. And so you need to fight against a lot of these conditions. You can't, you know, people who say, if it feels good, do it. That's useful idiocy. That's a big mistake. You've got to fight against that. So, you know, you don't need five watches.

You don't need more cars than you could possibly drive. You don't need these particular trophies. And not just not needing them, they're bad for you because you're crowding out the stuff that really matters. And so let's put it into just like a little easy way for people to remember it. If you're trying to accumulate money, power, pleasure, and prestige or fame or admiration or whatever, you're going to be unhappy. You need to accumulate faith, family, friendship, and work that serves. others. Those are the four habits of highly happy people, of the happiest people. And so you've got to go from the bad four to the good four. All right. Let's talk through. You mentioned the 10-step plan

about how to get there. Let's talk through that. Yeah. Basically, the first one is number one, recognizing that there are success curves. This is the first thing that people don't know. If you want to be happy as you get older, recognize that is normal to change. That change is normal. And you need to go from one set of skills to the next. That's step number one. And we've talked about that. And, you know, some depth already here in the last hour about, you know, how do you see that?

And what does it mean? The second step is really to start looking at what are the things that hold you back from trying to make the change from innovator to instructor? The main thing is it's sexier to be an innovator than it is to be an instructor. And what made you good is what you want to keep doing because you're a success addict and because you don't quite trust yourself. You don't quite believe there's another curve out there. And so you're not willing to try.

Or you don't trust yourself, right? Right. And to clarify, just for the sake of everyone listening, when you say instructor, you don't literally mean that everyone needs to go into a teaching profession or even become a mentor. Yeah. It's basically, you need to be doing something in which you take a lot of ideas from other people and you put them into practice in new and novel ways. You're a synthesizer. You're a manager that actually builds great teams of people that takes multiple different kinds of ideas. ideas that brings people together in new and interesting ways. You're not just relying on your

cognitive horsepower. You're really good at assembling beautiful things from the ideas of others. That's really what it means to be a teacher. That doesn't mean you have to be a professor like me. I don't recommend that a lot of people become professors. I mean, it's great for me, but not for everybody. But you can be a better manager and using the idea that you're actually the assembler of ideas. You can be somebody in almost any profession that focuses on that. How does this apply if you are currently in your 20s? And at this point in your life, your skill set is already what you've just described. Your skill set is already either literally being a great instructor or synthesizing ideas by virtue of writing books that synthesize ideas, writing articles, being a great journalist, etc. Well, to begin with, you're going to find that there's a, refer a journalist or a writer, for example. You're going to find that what you're really good at is finding stuff out before other people. And so you're going to be highly loaded on fluid intelligence, even though. you're kind of in a crystallized intelligence business, and you're going to find that that's harder to do.

So no matter what, you're going to see a rebalancing, no matter what kind of thing you're in. Now, on the other hand, I talked about historians a minute ago. And historians, basically, they're almost a pure crystallized intelligence business. And so you can be a young historian, but the truth is that you're just going to get better and better and better all throughout your career. And you're going to have to put up with less success early so you can get more success later. On the other hand, if you're a pure fluid intelligence person, you might in a career, like being a biotech inventor, you're probably going to have to change professions.

You're probably going to have to change professions to something that combines the two intelligences differently or really relies on it. So I can I tell you any number of people that were inventors and entrepreneurs? And they later in their careers is like, what I really want to do is, I want to teach, you know, high school history. Like, really? Why do you want to teach high school history? Why would you want such misery?

And they say, I don't know why. I feel like I just have a passion for it. it. And what's going on is in an inchoate way, their brains are telling them this would be intensely satisfying. Why? Because we want to be successful. Because we want to be good at what we're naturally good at. We're drawn to our charisms. We're drawn to our talents. So the bottom line is that some people get into professions that are a mix that require a mix and they rebalance the mix. Some people get into one or the other and either grow into what they're really good at or find that they're, they need to move on from what they are. And that requires just a top.

hunt of self-reflection and knowledge about the kind of business that you're in. Okay. So step two is reflecting on the fact that fluid intelligence is going to morph into crystallize intelligence over time and discerning how you cannot try to swim upstream, not fight the transition. Yeah, yeah, for sure. Not fight against it because you're not afraid of jumping under a second curve where you actually don't believe that there is one. So that's key, is that knowledge, that knowledge really is power on that. And then taking the requisite action, which is either rebalancing your career or planning for a second one. Now, that's, that sounds really scary to a lot of people. Well, let me tell you, I've literally changed career

radically four times. I'm on my fourth completely different career. And it's hard, but I got to tell you that going up the learning curve for your next 10,000 hours is intensely satisfying. It's an unbelievable adventure to leave your job and to start something new and to be bad at something and then becoming good at it. The hardest one of all was going from, I was a professional, French horn player. I was playing the orchestra in Barcelona. And I stopped that and I became a PhD economist. And that was really, really hard. Because I had literally not gone to college. And so I had to go to college by correspondence to start on that. And then go to graduate school. I never hadn't taken any math, but I was in a math heavy profession. It was a really, really, really hard thing to do. Usually they're

not that crazy. It's usually not that nuts. You can be a little bit softer and less hardcore than I was. Right. But didn't you fall off the stage at Carnegie Hall? Yeah, it's quite a distinction, isn't it? Yeah. So I say to say that that was God telling me that maybe it was time to move on. I was actually 22 at the time. And I'd been full-time professional as a French horn player for three years.

And this was the pinnacle of my career. It was my Carnegie Hall debut. And I lost my footing and fell into the audience with my French horn when I was 22 years old. And I was I was living in New York at the time. And I went home and I was like, God's telling me something. But of course, I didn't listen. I actually did it until I was 31, even though I was in decline as a musician for a lot of that. It was really, really, really frustrating.

Wow. Yeah. Yeah. It hurt, too. I broke my elbow and fell on my horn. Yeah, it wasn't great. I don't recommend it. Did you get up and walk out?

Did an ambulance have to come? Like, what happened? Oh, no, no, no. Oh, it was more ridiculous than that, Paula. So I'm 22, so I'm intensely interested in what people think of me. The whole audience is gasping. And so what do I do? I'm injured.

My instrument is damaged. I jump up and say, I'm okay, folks. Obviously not okay. Wow. Oh, I know. It was so stupid. It was so stupid. But, you know, hey, live and learn.

Now I can laugh about it. Yikes. Yeah, people often say, you know, I ask people, what's the most embarrassing thing that ever happened to you? And they tell me this story, you know, and I'm like, a little respect here, please. We'll come back to. this episode after this word from our sponsors. You did mention that many people may have to change careers, as you radically changed careers four times in your life. How do you square that

with the reality that success often is the result of compounding effort? So one of the great things about the modern economy is that most of our true skills are fungible, even between really, really different professions. So when I went from being a French horn, player to becoming an academic, I was a really, really good lecturer. And the reason is because I'd been thousands and thousands of hours on stage. And you see what my point, right? And then at the same time, I was becoming an academic. I was learning the research process. I was learning how to instantiate real creativity in the context of the frontiers of scientific knowledge. And that helped me a lot when I became a CEO, which was my next career, which I did when I was in my early 40s, I became a

CEO of a think tank in Washington, D.C., of, you know, an economic and policy analysis think tank where I had all these PhDs working for me. And so I knew the difference between the good research and the creative research and the not so good research. And that was a highly fungible skill. And on top of that, I was giving 175 speeches a year, you know, promoting policy and talking. And I was really, really super good at it. And so the things that I needed to learn new skills, but I was able to funge the old skills that really mattered into the new line of work that was getting progressively more. and more crystallized. See what I'm saying here, right?

So when I was a, you know, the French horn player, I don't know how much of that was crystallized versus fluid intelligence. But by the time I was an academic, it was using fluid intelligence, just like crazy and, you know, doing this research, et cetera. Then I became a CEO where I was using fluid and more and more crystallized intelligence. And now I'm back in academia and I'm teaching, I'm writing, but I don't write academic journal articles. I read a column for the Atlantic where I synthesize everybody else's cutting-edge knowledge.

And I talk about how people can use it in their lives. and I write books like the one that you read about how people can use science in their lives to actually go from where they were to where they want to be. And so now I'm like in crystallized bliss. I'm like I'm so happy now because, you know, I'm doing something that if I want to, I can literally do it for the next 25 years. I mean, the data say I could do this into my 80s as long as I got my marbles and energy. And in my family, we tend to, you know, die in, you know, early to mid-60s. So maybe I don't have that many years left. But that's not the point.

The point is because I did the research, I did the research over the past eight years, I figured out a roadmap on how my own life could play to my own strengths. And it works. It's amazing. It's not just theory. It's not just, you know, whizbang, self-development, improvement from somebody who's not taking their own advice. I eat my own cooking.

And when I saw that this piece of research that I did for my own life, step by step by step was really, really working. That's why I published it as a book. And for everybody else, because I think this is actually the way to do it. So we're on step three right now. Let's go to step four. Well, we're talking really about now about the, when you're getting off a success addiction, what do you need? What do you need to do?

And that's really about developing your relationships, developing the root system in your life. I talk an awful lot about, you know, why people are so afraid to do that. In my work, I teach you at the Harvard Business School and teach you classical leadership and happiness at HBS. And a lot of my students are really, really lonely. And it's interesting because they're surrounded by people and they're going to be CEOs. I mean, these people are going to be running the American economy and the economies of a lot of other countries and they're intensely lonely. And the reason is because successful people who work hard have a ton of deal friends and not very many real friends. And so I talk about how to establish real friendships.

For some people, they'll be in their 40s and 50s and they're intensely lonely and they don't know what to do. So I talk about actually, how do you do that? How do you establish relationships? How do you reestablish a relationship with a spouse for that that has gone cold? How do you apologize to people? Because how do you apologize to your kids for missing all their little league games and ballet recitals because you wanted that precious sweet 14th hour of work or, you know, a trip to Dayton or whatever it was over and over and over again?

And how do you do that? But the bottom line is the next step is you've got to reestablish relationships and learn how to make them satisfying. And, you know, there's a whole lot of literature that goes into it. But suffice it to say, you can do it and you'll never, never look back. You'll never be happier once you get more love in your life. Happiness is love, full stop. You gave the example of spouse and children, but how does this apply to people who are single or who are childless? It's intense and close friendships. So what we find is, you know, I have these data looking over 80 years. It was conducted at Harvard. It's called the Harvard Study of Adult Development,

It's a longitudinal study. I didn't run it. I just know the guy really well who does run it. A guy named Robert Waldinger who teaches at the Harvard Medical School and psychiatrist. And his data is really, really clear that the happiest people are the people who have the most relationships, the thickest relationships. And that means most people, that means a really good marriage, but not everybody. For a single people, you can be just as happy with really close platonic friendships. But you have to cultivate them and work on them in much the same way with the same purposiveness and the same.

and the same orientation that you would if you had a romantic partnership. You don't have to live with the person necessarily, but you have to think about it and you have to work on making the friendship a real thing. Friendship requires practice is the bottom line. But everybody can actually have this. It just takes the work. All right. What comes next?

What comes next is your spiritual journey. And this is a tough one because a lot of people listening to us are like, yeah, I'm not spiritual. So forget that one. But that's not the point. The point is not religion. The point is transcendence. And this is really critical. One of the things that actually makes people who are stuck on their first curve most brutal

is that life when you're only thinking about you, you, you, and your success and your success, it's so boring. It's so tedious. My job, my career, you know, my podcast, my apartment, my cat, my, I don't, it's just like, kill me. And it is killing you. And so the key thing is actually getting off that wheel. And the way that you get off that wheel is by zooming out. And the way to zoom out is by developing your religious, spiritual, or philosophical life. Now, even if you're an atheist, you know that their life has certain verities and secrets.

And they're really interesting. And starting the adventure of learning about these things, whether it's through stoic philosophy or reading the works of Jean-Paul Sartre, if you can handle it, or actually starting a meditation practice, or whatever works for you will zoom you out from that and start to give you peace and help you get off the hamps. wheel. Also, we call it in the book the hedonic treadmill of the success addiction. And that's really one of the great ways to break it. And everybody deserves to be able to do that. One thing that was an interesting detail in your book that I hadn't known, the man who coined the term hedonic treadmill committed suicide? Yeah. Yeah, that was Philip Brickman. He's a psychologist at the University of

Michigan. And Paula, this is the key thing to keep in mind. Anybody who studies happiness is looking for happiness. It's like, oh, it's like there's a reason I don't do research on oxygen. I got plenty of it. I got plenty of it. And there's a reason that my wife who on a one to seven scale of happiness is like a 6.8 doesn't actually think that this research is all that interesting. It's like, why are you studying obvious things? Why are you studying easy things?

Like I wake up in the morning. I'm alive. You know, I'm loved. It's sweet. it's because it's hard for some people. You know, 50% of your happiness is genetic, by the way. I mean, there's a lot of research that show this from identical twins that were separated of birth and raised in separate families.

I mean, it's straightforward to show that there's huge variance in happiness because of genetics and because of circumstances and because of habits. Those are the three things that actually make us so you can metabolize the macronutrients, you know, enjoyment and satisfaction and purpose that really go into a happy person. And that being the case, there's a lot of people who study habits. happiness, I dare say most people who study happiness are not that happy or that happiness is hard for them. Happiness is a struggle.

That's why I started on this thing. I was like, I wasn't happy. I wasn't happy. I was really, really successful, but I wasn't happy. And I'm like, what the heck? I don't want to, you know, get unhappier and unhappier. And then you go to my grave like Charles Darwin. I mean, I'm not, I'm not a shadow of the greatness of Charles Darwin, but I could, I'm very,

very capable of being just as unhappy as he was. That I can attain. So I said, I'm going to try to beat this. And so I do the research on this. And sure enough, a lot of other people who've been in this business just weren't able to get behind it. Now, Philip Brickman didn't have a happiness problem. Philip Brickman had an unhappiness problem. And that's what people who have, you know, untreated mood disorders is really what we're talking about.

People often ask me, what's the difference between therapy and studying happiness, which is, you know, that's my area. And the answer is studying happiness is like going to the gym when you're healthy and strong. Therapy is remediation of unhappiness problems. Unhappiness and happiness are processed very differently by the brain. So these are complementary ideas, is attenuating your unhappiness and bolstering your happiness. It's really good when you're in therapy to also study happiness, but they're not working on the same channels and they're not working on the same thing. So I dare say that the person who talked about the hedonic treadmill, which is you run and you run and you run. Or is Mick Jagger saying, I try and I try and I try and his famous song, the most famous song of Rolling Stil is I can't get no satisfaction is because the human condition is that you can't,

get that element of happiness. The guy who coined that term quite correctly pointed that out, but that wasn't his problem. He had an unhappiness problem. There's almost nobody who dies by suicide, who doesn't have a mood disorder and very often substance use disorders and then really major setbacks in life, circumstances that make it hard for them to attain to get past their unhappiness, to have a relatively normal life. I actually have low levels of unhappiness. I have relatively low levels of happiness, but I also have low levels of unhappiness too.

Right. You're very modulated then. Kind of, kind of, although I want more happiness. I want more. I really, really want more. And one of the things that I talked about that we've touched on before is you need to seriously contemplate your death. You need to seriously contemplate your death. And I learned this one largely in my studies in India and in the Tibetan communities, largely in northern India, Narm Salah, with the Tibetan Buddhists,

who are constantly contemplating their deaths, or also when I've been in, when I've studied with Buddhist masters in the southern tier called the Theravada Buddhist tradition, where they're always contemplating pictures of corpses in various stages of decay. You know, it's like so morbid and so weird. What they're doing is they're familiarizing the inevitable

so that it's no longer scary, thus setting them free to actually be alive. One of the reasons that a lot of people can't really be alive is because they're so afraid of not being alive. You know, so it's one of the things that you see all the time fear makes it impossible for you to love fully because fear and love are psychological opposites. Fear is the ultimate negative basic emotion and love is the ultimate positive basic emotion. And they're polarized counter to each other.

People think that fear that love and hate or opposites are not. Hate is downstream from fear. And so if you're afraid of something, you actually crowd out the love that makes the thing that you're afraid of that actually come to pass. So people who are morbidly afraid of disloyalty by their romantic partner crowd out the love for their romantic partner paradoxically. We've seen it again and again and again. So just crazy obsessive, paranoiac fear of disloyalty makes it impossible to love fully. And the same thing is true. It's impossible to be fully alive when you're afraid of dying.

If you want to be alive today, you need to stop being afraid of death. And if you want to be fully engaged in your life today, you have to stop being. afraid of decline. So I have a whole chapter on how to beat the fear of death, and they use that idea of beating the fear of death to beat the fear of decline. And in the end, I actually have this Marinasati Theravada Buddhist meditation on death, which is what the monks will do every day. They imagine themselves in various states of death and decay. Like, I'm a dead body. Now I'm a dead body that's bloated and blue and, you know, rotting. Now I'm just a bunch of bones, you know, and now I'm not even bones. I mean, it's like it's a nine-step meditation.

And I created a nine-step career decline meditation. Right. You know, and when I read through that, the career decline meditation was harder to read than the one about the physical rotting corpse. And specifically, there was one point that you made towards the end that one aspect of that career decline is that you reach the point where you're no longer able to communicate your thoughts and feelings to others. Yeah. That to me was the most terrifying. Oh, yeah, totally. And it's interesting.

It's again, I can tell a lot about a person about what scares them the most. You know, fear is really revealing. And this is the thing. I know tons of people who are like, I don't care if I die. I know a lot of people who actually literally don't care if they die. But if you talk to them about taking away their source of their greatness, the source of their prestige, wow. They'll fight tooth and nail. They'll kill or die to avoid that.

And so that's the key thing. And by the way, this works in anyway. I work with my students because they're horribly afraid of failing and not. living up to the expectations of the world. These are MBA students at the Harvard Business School, the best business school in the world. And so they have these unbelievably, almost unattainable expectations for themselves. So I make them do the Maran Sadi meditation for not living up to your parents' expectations. But it's like, every time I go home, I feel like my parents, they're kind of feeling sorry for me.

And it's true, all my friends from high school are doing better than me. I make them meditate on that. It's like, if you're afraid of snakes, expose yourself to snakes. If you're afraid of flying, little by little expose yourself to flying. If you're afraid of decline, look at it in the face because that is ultimately, you know, maybe the biggest lesson of all, which is that you got to embrace your weakness because life is all about strength and weakness, but it's more about weakness than anything else. And your humanity actually comes from your weakness.

Learn to love your weakness. And you'll be easily, happily jumping from one career into the great unknown. And you're going to land with both feet. on the crystallized intelligence curve where you're all about love and you're all about service and you're all about helping other people and you will be happier and you'll grow old happier. It's the bottom line. Well, thank you for spending this time with us. Where can people find you if they would like to know more about you, your ideas, your work?

Everything is kind of accumulating in a website called arthurbrooks.com. You know, hasn't that original? And there you can go and find out more about my column at the Atlantic, which is every Thursday morning. I write 1500 words on the science of... happiness, but for ordinary people, not for, you know, people who are suffering under PhDs. And that's a column called How to Build a Life. I have a podcast called How to Build a Happy Life. And you can actually get this new book, you know, from strength to strength, finding happiness, success and deep purpose in the second half of life, which is not just

for people in the second half of life. And that's, that's on sale right now. That's something that I wrote for myself, but it's my owner's manual for living my own life that I hope people find is a really good way for them to learn to live theirs as well. Thank you, Arthur. What are three key takeaways that we got from this conversation? Number one, early in your career, you will benefit from having what's known as fluid intelligence, meaning raw horsepower. But in the later stages of your career, you're more likely to develop what's known as crystallized intelligence,

which is another way of saying that you can synthesize ideas and by doing so develop wisdom. Think of it like this. Fluid intelligence can help you. analyze, which is to break apart. Crystallized intelligence can help you synthesize, which is to put back together. Early on, early in your career, what makes you good is fluid intelligence. Fluid intelligence is the ability to solve problems, answer other people's questions, get to the heart of the matter, to innovate really, really fast.

You can be a cowboy, a sole proprietor, you can do things better than anybody else. So hot shot, strivers, they have tons of fluid intelligence, but it declines. So what Raymond Gatel showed is that because of the structure of the brain and the way it works, that between 35 and 50, just like I saw in my data, that your fluid intelligence is declining. It gets harder and harder and harder for you to do those things. And it's normal and it's natural. But here's the good news. There's another intelligence curve lurking behind it that's even better called crystallized intelligence.

So as you progress in age and in career, you're more likely to have crystallized intelligence, wisdom, synthesis, that comes from age and experience. And so the distinction between these two types of intelligences, fluid intelligence and crystallized intelligence, that's the first key takeaway. Key takeaway number two, now that we've established the distinction between these two types of intelligences, the second key takeaway is what to do about it, which is to lean into that crystallized intelligence when it starts to form. and don't cling stubbornly to former skills, strengths, modes of intelligence that you used to have.

You know, when people see any sort of decline in their fluid intelligence and their skills that are tied to their fluid intelligence, they get so freaked out that they just basically do anything to stay alive, anything to stay alive. But what they should do is jump. You have to take the chance of trying to jump onto the next curve to develop your crystallized intelligence and then the world's your oyster. So you might get worse at some things, but you'll be better at other things. And by accepting that transition, by leaning into the things that you become better at, you become happier and more fulfilled in your work, in your life, and you're able to make bigger and better contributions because you're leaning into what works.

And so that is the second key takeaway. And finally, the third key takeaway was so powerful that we opened the show with it. So I'm just going to plant this right here. If you're trying to accumulate money, power, pleasure, and prestige, or fame, or admiration, or whatever, you're going to be unhappy. You need to accumulate faith, family, friendship, and work that serves others. And I think that says it all. So those are three key takeaways from this conversation with Harvard professor, Arthur Brooks. Thank you for joining us.

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