Passion Struck with John R. Miles - Arthur Brooks on the 4 Ways to Build the Life You Want EP 344

Episode Date: September 12, 2023

In this riveting episode of the Passion Struck podcast, I engage in a profound conversation with Arthur Brooks, a celebrated authority in happiness research and co-author, alongside Oprah Winfrey, of the groundbreaking book, "Build the Life You Want." Within this captivating dialogue, Brooks not only unlocks the secrets of happiness but underscores that it is a destination accessible to all. Want to learn the 12 philosophies that the most successful people use to create a limitless life? Pre-order John R. Miles’s new book, Passion Struck, which will be released on February 6, 2024. Full show notes and resources can be found here:  https://passionstruck.com/arthur-brooks-4-ways-to-build-the-life-you-want/  Discovering True Fulfillment: How to Prioritize the Four Pillars of Happiness with Arthur Brooks In this episode, you will be able to: Embark on the adventure of happiness, understanding it as a continuous exploration, not a destination. Learn to interpret emotions as a universal language and to manage yourself effectively. Unearth the four cornerstones of a blissful life: connections with family, bonds of friendship, happiness at work, and faith in the divine. Dive into the realm of purposeful living and self-understanding as keys to personal growth. Understand the significance of kindness and happiness sharing in creating a positive global community. Brought to you by Netsuite by Oracle. Download NetSuite’s popular KPI Checklist, designed to give you consistently excellent performance at https://www.netsuite.com/passionstruck. Brought to you by Indeed: Claim your SEVENTY-FIVE DOLLAR CREDIT now at Indeed dot com slash PASSIONSTRUCK. Brought to you by Lifeforce: Join me and thousands of others who have transformed their lives through Lifeforce's proactive and personalized approach to healthcare. Visit MyLifeforce.com today to start your membership and receive an exclusive $200 off. Brought to you by Hello Fresh. Use code passion 50 to get 50% off plus free shipping!  --► For information about advertisers and promo codes, go to: https://passionstruck.com/deals/  Like this show? Please leave us a review here -- even one sentence helps! Consider including your Twitter or Instagram handle so we can thank you personally! --► Prefer to watch this interview: https://youtu.be/DsPvoScGNp4  --► Subscribe to Our YouTube Channel Here: https://youtu.be/QYehiUuX7zs  Want to find your purpose in life? I provide my six simple steps to achieving it - passionstruck.com/5-simple-steps-to-find-your-passion-in-life/ Catch my interview with Dr. Caroline Leaf on Parenting or a Healthy and Confident Mind. Watch the solo episode I did on the topic of Chronic Loneliness: https://youtu.be/aFDRk0kcM40  Want to hear my best interviews from 2023? Check out my interview with Seth Godin on the Song of Significance and my interview with Gretchen Rubin on Life in Five Senses. ===== FOLLOW ON THE SOCIALS ===== * Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/passion_struck_podcast * Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/johnrmiles.c0m  Learn more about John: https://johnrmiles.com/  Passion Struck is now on the Brushwood Media Network every Monday and Friday from 5–6 PM. Step 1: Go to TuneIn, Apple Music (or any other app, mobile or computer) Step 2: Search for "Brushwood Media” Network

Coming up next, on PassionStruck. What emotions are not nice to have or things we try to avoid. That's the wrong way of seeing it. Emotions are basically a machine language, where your brain is taking outside stimuli and then turning it into signals delivered to your conscious brain so you know how to react. Emotions are a universal language.

I don't care if you're born in Papua New Guinea or Canada. You speak the same emotions. The reason is because humans see the same things and they need to translate what's going on in their senses and turn that into a language so you know how to react. The problem is that not all those emotions are very pleasant. And so the result of it is that if you're reactive, you're just going to react on the basis of those emotions, your life is going to feel like it's out of control.

Welcome to PassionStruct. Hi, I'm your host, John Armiles. And on the show, we decipher the secrets, tips and guidance of the world's most inspiring people and turn their wisdom into practical advice for you and those around you. Our mission is to help you unlock the power of intentionality so that you can become the best version of yourself. If you're new to the show, I offer advice and answer listener questions on Fridays. We have long form interviews the rest of the week with guest-ranging from astronauts to authors, CEOs, creators, innovators, scientists, military leaders, visionaries, and athletes. Now, let's go out there and become PassionStruck.

Hello everyone, and welcome back to episode 344 PassionStruck. Consistently ranked by Apple is one of the top 10 most popular health podcasts. And thank you to all of you come back weekly to listen and learn, and had a live better, be better, and impact the world. PassionStruck is now in syndicated radio on the Brushwood Media Network. Catch us Monday and Friday from 5 to 6pm Eastern Time on your evening commute on Apple Music, tune in, or any of the terrestrial stations that we're on. Links to we in the show notes. If you're new to the show, thank you so much for being here, or you simply want to introduce

this, a friend, or a family member, we have episode sturder packs which are collections of our fans' favorite episodes, and we organize in a community topics that give any new listener a great way to get acclimated to everything we do here on the show, either go to Spotify or PassionStruct.com slash starder packs to get started. In case you missed it last week, I had three great interviews. The first was with Todd Rogers, a behavioral scientist and professor of public policy at Harvard University. Todd, along with Jessica Lasky Finck, has spent over three decades studying the science of writing, and together they have authored the groundbreaking book, Writing for Busy Readers,

to communicate more effectively in the role world. I also interviewed Eduardo Brasino, and we explored how to escape the performance paradox and embrace intentional living for higher level results. Eduardo has coined the term chronic performance trap to describe the counterintuitive phenomenon. That often occurs when we relentlessly work harder, only to find ourselves exhausted and unfulfilled. Lastly, I interviewed Amy Edminson, the Novartis professor of leadership and management at the Harvard Business School. We explore various facets of failure and learning. From the significance of teamwork and checklist and high-stress situations for the complexity of failure to the vital role of self-awareness. We leave no stone unturned.

Please check them all out and I also wanted to say thank you so much for your ratings and reviews. If you love today's episode, we would appreciate you giving it 5 star review and sharing it with your friends and family. I know we and our guests love to see comments from our listeners. Today, we're diving headfirst into a topic that resonates with all of us. Happiness. It's the elusive treasure we all seek, a pursuit that's as old as humanity itself, but

what if I told you that getting happier isn't just a lofty dream? What if it's an adventure, a journey that can transform your life in ways you've never imagined? I am beyond thrilled to be joined by a remarkable guest who is here to ignite your journey towards a happier and more fulfilling life. It's ready to be inspired because we have the privilege of welcoming back Arthur Brooks, a co-author with none other than Oprah Winfrey of the groundbreaking new book, Build the Life You Want, the art and science of getting happier. and turns can sometimes platter pursuit of happiness, leaving us searching for ways to create a brighter future. But fear not, because in build the life you want, Arthur and Oprah embark on a quest to show you that the power to become happier lies within your grasp, regardless of your current circumstances, growing on cutting edge science and their wealth of experience and

transforming ideas into action. They are here to guide you on a journey of self-discovery and empowerment. Imagine turning your emotions from masters to allies, facing life's challenges as opportunities for growth, and nurturing the pillars of happiness. Family, friendship, work, and faith. Arthur and Oprah unveiled the secrets of emotional self-management that can revolutionize your outlook and behaviors, offering you practical and research-backed strategies to enhance every aspect of your life.

Arthur Brooks, the William Henry Bloomberg professor of management practice at the Harvard Kennedy School, brings a unique blend of scholarship and practical wisdom to the table. He's not just a teacher, he's a torch bearer, illuminating the path, the greater happiness for countless individuals. As we unravel the essence of this remarkable book, Arthur will share the transformative practices that can help you. Strength and family bonds cultivate lasting friendships align your work with your passions and find inner serenity through spiritual practices. So if you're ready to seize control of your present and future and if you're eager to build a life filled with purpose, joy and contentment, then this episode is your compass to a brighter future. Thank you for choosing PassionStruck and choosing me to be your host and guide on your journey to creating an intentional life now. Let that journey begin. I am so excited and absolutely honored to have Arthur Brooks back on Passionstruck. Welcome Arthur. Thanks, John. It's great to be with you. I'd love the show and I've been so excited to get back with you and have another conversation.

First thing I wanted to tell you since our last interview about your books, Strength to Strength, which I'll hold up here, not only has it garnered more positive feedback than almost any other episode I've ever done, but since that episode aired, that book has gone on to become a number one New York Times bestseller. Congratulations. What do you attribute the success of that book on? Pure dumb luck, John. I've written a lot of books. You never know. The truth is you can hit the like guys in just the right way. I wrote a book about how to get happier in the second half of life for myself because as a social scientist, I couldn't find anything on that. All these self

help and, you know, happiness books are about how to start out in life, but none are how to finish up. And it not that I'm finishing up, but I am definitely in the second half. And so I wrote a book that I felt I needed. And that's actually a pretty good guide for what other people are probably going to need as well. And it hit that timing and just the right way. And I got a little bit lucky. And I'm just grateful. I have to say, when we last spoke, you told me that although you loved having me interview you for that book, what you were really excited about was having me interview you about your brand new book, which will release the day this podcast comes out, build the life you want, because you thought it would be a great topic for the listeners. And this book is co-authored by none other than

Oprah Winfrey. Could you share some insights about the journey of co-authoring this book with Oprah and how did your collaboration shape the content and the message that you both aim to deliver to the readers? Well, I didn't know Oprah Winfrey previous to this. I certainly know who she was. She's ever present in the American imagination. She's an iconic figure, trusted, beloved by so many. And I've been seeing her on television since I was a very young man. After from strength to strength came out, she contacted me

because she read the book. It turns out that she's a regular reader of my Atlantic column every Thursday morning as well. And she had been reading those columns through the coronavirus epidemic. She was holed up like everybody else. It's not like she was jetting around. She was living in her place in Montecito. And she was looking for interesting ways to learn new things. And my column was one of those inputs. And she liked it. I didn't know that. I have 500,000 readers a week.

And you don't know who's reading under those circumstances. Because you're broadcasting out into deep space. And not knowing who gets the signal. And then the book came out from strength of strength. And she read that and liked it and called up. She said, this is Oprah Winfrey and I said, yeah, and I'm Batman. It turns out that it was the real Oprah Winfrey

and she was interested in having me on her book club podcast, Super Soul, which is a phenomenal thing because she personally reads every book, reads every page of every book. She's so good. She was quoting from strength to me by memory when she was doing this podcast. It was amazing. And we hit it off like a house on fire, I have to say, we did a couple of other things together. And then we started seeing each other in person. After a while, she

came up with the idea of writing another book together on the basis of what I'm teaching to my Harvard students and writing in my Atlantic columns for an audience more along the lines of the people who follow her. And so I spent a few days out in her place in California and we cooked up the whole book in her tea house. She has this wonderful tea house in Garden and we sat out in the tea house and cooked up the book.

And then we went to other places where we liked to write and I would send chapters and she would send ideas and she would send her introductions and we wove it together over the next six months or so and the result is a book that I have to say we really like and it's coming out with Penguin Random House and we'll see if we can touch a lot of lives and help people be happier. One of the things that spoke to me is I was reading it and I always felt about Oprah as just how down to earth she is, and that she found her most happy moments sitting in front of a fire or reading a book or making a stew. And I think it shows you that regardless of what someone has, it comes

really down to the basics, which we're going to talk about a lot today of what brings happiness into our lives. Yeah, that's right. And it's funny because in my life over the past 15 years, I've been very blessed to meet iconic people, like Oprah, people were really well known. And it sometimes makes you a little nervous because they're not always the way that they seem. A lot of very famous people have highly curated images.

We'll put it that way. Oprah is exactly what people think she is. She's down to earth, she's authentic, she's honest, she's kind, she's funny. And the result of it is that she's super easy to work with. She does have the sources of happiness down. She is an incredibly equilibrated individual. And what really motivates her is actually

spreading the ideas of happiness to other people based in science. And she's looking to always work with people who've got what she considers to be good ideas that she can share because her mission in life is lifting people up. As is mine, we came together around mission. And then with our different audiences and different methods, we'll together this book on the science and art of getting happier. Let's start the book by going through your opening comments. And in them, you talk about how when you started studying

happiness, which is now over 25 years ago, you feared that happiness was something you couldn't change in a meaningful way. How did you learn that you could change your happiness by doing it through your own research? Yeah, me search is the right word. It started with research and then became research. A lot of what you do in academia,

when you're trained in any of the sciences, including the social sciences, is that you study things that are interesting to you, but it never occurs to you to apply the ideas to yourself. Everything is like astronomy. You study the stars, but you're not going to change them. And certainly you're not going to manage the stars. That's astrology. They're going to change your life. And I think I

started studying happiness because everybody wants it. And it's just so dang interesting. Happiness is endlessly fascinating to people. And that's why I was studying it. But along the way, I started to have a hunch that there was more actionable information out there. I didn't just have to observe the patterns of happiness. I could actually intervene in the process and adopt the lifestyles of the people who were happiest, avoid some of the mistakes of the unhappy as people made, and actually figure out new ways of living for myself and even passing on these ideas. And so over the past few years, I've really turned it into an applied

science experimenting on myself with real life explanations and interventions and how we live. And I'm telling you, John, it has completely changed my life. I became a social scientist because I'm so fascinated with human behavior. And I wound up becoming a self-help person to me. And along the way, I thought I have to share this. I have literally raised my own happiness level in the past five years by 60%. And I know this because I've access to the best measurement techniques that I'm regularly measuring my students.

I measure myself again and again with good, robust, honest, practical, quantitative measures. And the data don't lie. I've gotten much happier since I've been studying this. I'm bustin' John. I got to share it. Arthur, I thought it was really interesting how you at the age of 55 and me at the age of 50 both quit completely what we were doing before to both head out on a journey with a very similar mission to help people.

And we're doing it in our own unique ways, but it's interesting how the midway point in our lives, we are profoundly doing something different. And this is something that you talk about in your introduction with your mother-in-law, Albina, and how at the age of 45, something in her life shifted. She suddenly stopped waiting for the world to change and took control of her own life. I wanted to ask, what was her secret to turning the corner at 45, maybe how you and I turn the corner as well towards a better life and getting happier and staying that way for nearly five decades afterwards? Yeah, it's a story that I tell in the beginning of the book because when you're studying happiness, many of your most profound teachers are not the ones who are showing you the data and explaining the theories. They're the people who live in a

particular way. And then you look at their lives and see what they did differently. And in my life front and center was my mother-in-law, being my wife's mother in Barcelona. And she had an interesting life. And she grew up, she was a little child during the very brutal Spanish Civil War. Her father was a battlefield surgeon for the losing side and wound up in prison for a long time and so she would take meals to her father in prison, which sounds awful, but it turns out that the family was very close to it and had a lot of love.

Trouble in her life came later when she got married to the love of her life, the man that she was hopelessly in love with, who turned out not to be the world's greatest husband, and this is an old story. He had a little bit of trouble with loyalty and he wound up abandoning the family when my wife was six.

He took off with another woman, moved in with the other woman, and left my mother-in-law without child support. And they were poor and it was awful. My wife says that her mother would sit by the window and cry day after day. She would see her husband had not divorced coming to work and just the worst.

And finally, my mother-in-law along the way realized something when she was about 45 years old, something snapped inside her. She had always felt like she was a victim of circumstance and that she couldn't actually be happy until outside circumstances changed. And she realized that she had more power than she thought. And I'm not exactly sure how she figured this out on her own because this is a big insight that she couldn't change her outside circumstances,

but she could change her reaction to it. She says she felt like all along she had been working for a horrible company with a terrible CEO and she was miserable until one day she woke up and realized that she was the CEO of the company. And the company was her life. That didn't mean she was not going to suffer because when a company is really struggling, the CEO suffers a lot. But the CEO has a ton of power.

So she started to act like the CEO of the enterprise of her life, of Albena Inc. That's how she talked about it. She said, okay, what are we going to do this company? She went back to school. She got her college degree. She became a teacher. She got a job in the public schools. She made her own friends.

She made her own living. She became a completely different person. By the time I met her in her late 50s when I was newly married to my wife, she was completely independent. And by that time she had actually let the husband come home. He had finished the relationship and he begged to come home. She thought about it. She said, you sure, on my terms. And so it was a completely different relationship after that. She was not chasing after him. She brought him home because she wanted to not because she needed to. She was the primary breadwinner after that.

She had tons of friends coming and going. She had a new relationship with God. She had a better relationship with her kids. She had this career that she loved. And I'm telling you, John, it was all the tumblers turned in her once she took control of her reactions. In other words, not the stimuli, but the reaction to the stimuli in her life. And that was the life-changing moment for her. And she never went back. Oh, and she was

in her last days about a year ago. She was dying in Barcelona at age 93. She was bedridden and in pain. And she told me she's happier than she'd ever been. Crazy. Because she was in charge of her own happiness and her own decisions. She was building her life on the basis of her Catholic faith, of her relationship with her family, with her super close friends. Most of them had come through her work and the work that she had cherished. By the way, she had a pretty good relationship with her husband who had

died a year earlier as well. It was a pretty happy ending of the story. Thank you for sharing that. And I think something that I wanted to pick out of there is in the podcast is really about the power of intentionality in our lives and making those intentional choices to change our predicaments from where we're at to where we want to be, which is exactly what your mother-in-law did.

That's right. That's exactly right. And that's a lot of what Open I talk about in this book. I start with that story because what I needed to sort out when this was happening in real time as a social scientist, I was so fascinated by this particular case. And I realized that there's a whole body of literature on how each of us can do that. Now, I don't have the presence of mind that Albena did. John, I'm just not good enough. I need to actually know how to do it. I need to be taken by the hand. This book actually takes readers by the hand because they're all have problems. They all have things that are in their way. And reader after reader or person after person that both Oprah and I have met have said, I want to be happy, but, dot, and it's, I have to, my marriage

has to improve my, I have to get through school. I need a better job. My health needs to get better. And they're all like albina before, not albina after. So what actually took place for albina that the rest of us, I can actually learn from the science of emotion that can make and put us on that second path. And that's exactly what we talk about, the techniques based in research that can turn you from a victim into the CEO. You end that whole section by describing that she had a secret to turning this corner. Yeah. Can you share that secret?

The secret is exactly what we're talking about here. It is managing yourself, not managing the outside world. It's managing what you can manage. And that's to manage yourself is to manage your own emotions, which sounds so simple. But of course, it isn't. I talk to students all day long at the Harvard Business School where I teach and they say, I can manage money, I can manage a company, but I can't manage my own feelings. And so learning how to do that was the secret. And that turned her into somebody who was distracted by the world's troubles and wasting time into somebody who could really invest in the things that really

will bring enduring happiness, like faith and family and friends and work that serves other people. I'm so glad you start this book out like this because it's how I approach my book, which is coming out in months as well. So much of society today is focused on extrinsic motivation instead of the intrinsic drivers that are really bring us fulfillment. And I think it's something that some million people don't realize is that they're wearing this mask of pretence all the time, trying to go around being a person that they pretend to be, instead of being as you just brought up through your mother-in-law, the authentic person that they actually are.

I think it is one of the main things that's leading so many people into these lives of despair and apathy and loneliness, et cetera. Do you agree with that? I do. The way that a lot of people live, given that they feel victimized by their own emotions, they're managed by their own emotions, is they wind up distracting themselves from their own emotions. These things that are coming in all the time that are so intrusive, life for a lot of people is like waiting at the gate for a flight that is hopelessly late. And then you're just waiting for updates every 15 minutes

and frittering away your time on playing games on your phone. A lot of life is like that. I'm telling you, social media is frittering away your time. Shopping therapy. Most of the stuff just scroll on Netflix. You want to relax it in the evening. It's fun. But the point is a lot of people are trying to anesthetize

themselves from the feelings that are managing them. And in so doing, they're distracted from the things that are really arguing, are going to ring happiness, faith, family, friends, and work. And so the first order of business and getting happier, like Albina, or ultimately, when I studied this, how I managed to become a much happier person and the people that I work with and my students as well,

is emotional self-management and the tools to do so. It's interesting around the same time that I had you on. I also interviewed Robin Sharma and he brought up something that just coincided with what you said. He said, people don't understand they can either play on their phone and watch TV where they can change the world, but they can't do both. Both of your comments are extremely powerful. The time that you're playing on your phone, you could be praying. The time that you're change the world, but they can't do both. Both of your comments are extremely powerful. The time that you're playing on your phone, you could be praying. The time that you're shopping for needless nonsense on Amazon to anesthetize yourself, you could be talking to a friend. There's so many things that you could be doing, but we're so distracted

because we're so uncomfortable all the time. But you got to know how to know how to manage yourself is what it comes down to. And it turns out it's not just doable. It's doable for everybody. Well, in chapter one, you talk about beloved Carnegie Mellon professor Randy Pousch. Who ended up dying a pancreatic cancer? And unfortunately, it's a moving story for me because my own younger sister is battling stage 4 pancreatic cancer as we speak. But even in his sickness, Randy enjoyed his life to its fullest. And it's something that I'm also witnessing in my sister who has really shifted her focus to the things that bring her the most

joy in life. And she's a Buddhist. So she has really focused on these intrinsic things that really matter the most to her. And the premise of your book, Bill, the life you want, suggests that happiness is a journey rather than a destination. Could you elaborate using the story of Randy on how this perspective can reshape our approach to pursuing happiness and the tooness about happiness? Yeah, it's an interesting thing about people. We're very goal oriented and you need a goal to move toward, but the greatest happiness actually comes from making progress, not from hitting goals. And a perfect way to it to illustrate this is that diets usually fail. It's not that diets are impossible.

You can succeed. The problem is you can't maintain once you hit your goal. And the reason for that is that every day that the scale goes down, there's a reward for not eating these things that you crave. But then when you hit your goal, the reward is once you hit your goal, it is never eating what you like ever again for the rest of your life, which is not a very nice goal as it turns out. So what we need to do is to think about happiness in much the same way as something to make progress. Here's the truth. You can't be happy, perfectly happy. You're not supposed to be perfectly happy. That would mean eliminating your negative emotions.

And if you did that, you'd be dead a thousand times over. Your negative emotions are alarms, discussed that something's a pathogen, fear that something's a threat, anger that something is you need to fight, flight, or freeze, a sadness because you're not in the presence of somebody that you love, you're kin, the people you need to be around. These are deeply protective emotions. And so you're always going to have them in perfect happiness. And we're not going to find it at this side of heaven at least. What we can do is to get happier. This was a real opraism in this book. She said, so what's the goal? Is it happiness? I said, no, it's getting happier. So she said, okay,

so the goal is happiness. It's a made up word. It's an Oprah word. It's perfect, actually. And that's what we all can get. That's what Randy Pousch was a professor dying of pancreatic cancer and abulliant with joy about the fact that in his final six months, he's growing closer and closer to God and to his friends and to his family. And no matter how much time we all have left, and none of us has a thousand years left, we should all be moving toward these particular goals by using the time at our disposal to have good happiness hygiene to manage ourselves and then move

toward the pillars of really what a happy life is built on. Well, I'm going to stick with Oprah here for a second since she was just talking about her because she writes, happiness is not a state of being, but a state of doing. Not a thing you laid around and hope for, but an achievable change you can actively work towards, which echoes what you just said. What are the three macro nutrients you write about of happiness? So if we want to be happier, we need to know what happiness is.

And most people don't. Most people think it's a feeling, which is a huge problem. And if you're going to be searching for a feeling that's evanescent, that's impermanent, it's like a moving target, imagine you're an archer and you're trying to hit a target, that's impermanent. It's like a moving target. Imagine you're an archer and you're trying to hit a target.

The target is just moving all over the place all the time. Well, good luck with that. You need something that's actually static in that you can identify. Feelings of happiness are nothing more than evidence of happiness. Disregard the feelings of happiness and go for the three macro nutrients of happiness.

The three elements of happiness and go for the three macro nutrients of happiness, the three elements of happiness, which are enjoyment, satisfaction, and purpose. Those are the three things that we need in life. The happiest people have those three macro nutrients in abundance and balance. It's like the healthiest people have proper levels of protein carbohydrates and fat. And if you don't get those three things in your diet appropriately, you're going to get sick. The same thing is true with your happiness. You're going to be much less happy than you could be. Maybe even miserable. If you don't have enough enjoyment, satisfaction and purpose in your life.

And so this is where Oprah and I start the journey, defining it and talking about how to get each one of these three things. I listened to a podcast episode yesterday morning. It was at five o'clock in the morning, as I was on a walk. And one of the things I love that you talked about was the fallacy of the bucket list. Yeah. And another concept you talked about was the reverse bucket list. Can you talk about why creating this bucket list may be extremely detrimental to actually

creating happiness? That has to do with that second element of happiness, which is satisfaction. Satisfaction is funny. What it is, the joy you get after struggle. You worked hard, you got it, and it brought you joy. Now, maybe that's trudging across the savanna and finding something to eat on a bush. Maybe that's getting an A after studying hard for a test. Maybe that's getting to, as you are now over two million downloads a month on this podcast, you worked for it, you got it and it gives you joy. The problem is the joy doesn't persist. And there's a reason for that. This is a phenomenon called homeostasis. This book has a lot of neuroscience in it for neuroscience for non-neuroscientists. at homeostasis is the reason that you can get satisfaction, Mick Jagger was wrong.

You can't keep no satisfaction. That's the problem. You got it. It's great. Oops, it's gone. The reason is because your brain resets. And the reason it resets is so you're ready for the next set of challenges,

so that you'll stay in the hunt. You can't just sit there in front of the tree where you found a banana and say, that was a great banana for five days until you're starving. You need to go and you need to have that satisfaction. We're often going search for the next thing. But the problem with that is that it makes it very hard for us to be happy people because we get into this hedonic treadmill. This is what we social scientists call this treadmill of running and running for the feeling of satisfaction and then needing more and more. So the treadmill is speeding up and people like this all the time.

I get this great thing. Oh, that's great. Well, that's not good enough. I need more. I need more. I need another house. I need to raise from my boss. I need more so I can get that feeling. It's going after the feeling. The way to defeat that is to understand that real satisfaction that lasts is not a function of having more. It's a function of wanting less. See, your satisfaction is really your halves divided by your wants. Think about that. Everybody's listening to us. They got a piece of paper and write halves divided by wants.

Now, you know that you can make satisfaction rise by increasing the numerator, but it's not very efficient and it doesn't last because of the hedonic treadmill, homeostasis. What's much better to do is to decrease the denominator in that equation. And when that happens, you get lasting higher satisfaction. You need to manage your wants. You don't need to go live in a cave and have no possessions. The question is, how can you detach yourself?

But Oprah and I talk a lot in this book about how to manage your brain. This is about the science of emotional self-management. And the key is for all of us to think deeply about these things that we want, these attachments, these desires, these ambitions, and to say consciously, I might get it. Easy come, easy go, but I'm not gonna be unhappy if I don't. And that moves that want from the limbic system of your brain, which is an animal part of your brain to the prefrontal cortex of your brain you guide it's like the owner's manual of your happiness. And the way to do that is to stop doing a bucket list

which is just engorging your desires and your attachments. Make a reverse bucket list on your birthday where you take all of these worldly dumb things that you want. I want to be more famous, I want to have more followers, I want more money, whatever it happens to be. And then one by one consciously cross them out. That doesn't mean you're not going to get them. It means you're deciding you're going to be just fine if you don't. And I'm telling you, you'll be free. John, you know what I crossed off my reverse bucket list on my birthday? I turned 59 a couple of months ago.

You know what I crossed out? How was that? Half my political opinions. And I'm telling you, there were attachments to me. They were holding me down. I need more friends. I need fewer political opinions in this divided nation. I want to love more people. And I don't want to be held back by these crazy attachments that I have. It's been super good for me.

You can be as imaginative as you want in your reverse bucket list. But it's going to do a lot of good. I agree with you there. I have done my best on this podcast to keep it as a political as possible because everyone has an opinion. You can't impact people if you're going so far down one side because it doesn't allow you to hear the counter approach. That's right. And a counter intuitive approach to me is the concept of accepting unhappiness as part of our lives. Absolutely. Absolutely. Can you touch on that and share how acknowledging and working with unhappiness can actually contribute to our overall happiness? The one mistake that a lot of people make is thinking that unhappiness and happiness

are opposites. They aren't. As a matter of fact, they're largely processed in different hemispheres of the brain. You can be an unusually happy and an unusually unhappy person. In Bill the Life You Want, Oprah and I actually put in a psychometrically validated survey test that everybody can take to find out if they're above or below average happy and unhappy feelings. I personally am above average happiness and above average unhappiness. I'm what we call in the book, the mad scientist. I'm up and down the strong opinions, the strong views and strong feelings. Other people are unusually happy and unusually not unhappy. These are the cheerleaders. They have

strong positive and weak negative feelings. Some people are strong negative and not unhappy. These are the cheerleaders. They have strong positive and weak negative feelings. Some people are strong negative and weak positive. These are the poets. And then you have people who are low in the intensity of their happy feelings and low intensity of unhappy feelings. These are people called judges. But population goes in equal parts across these four profiles. And we need all of them, but you need to understand these things. You'll understand these things when you read the book and take the test, and then you'll learn how you can actually manage this particular emotional profile. Now, why is it that we don't want to have zero unhappiness? And the answer is because we get zero happiness as well. For example, we know that satisfaction has a whole lot of dissatisfaction associated with it. That is to say that the joy that comes from doing things has the frustration

from the satisfaction wearing off. Meaning or purpose has even more unhappiness associated with it because everybody listening to us and watching us, they know perfectly that they learn their purpose in life through pain. There's nobody who says, oh, I really learned who I was and what I'm capable of by going to Disneyland that week. Now, you learn that when you get sick and when you're sad, and this is what your sister is learning. And this is one of the reasons that you can get so much joy in the part of your life that people are saying, oh, it's

so terrible. Of course, it's terrible. And that's part of the point. And John, we're all going to be at that point in our lives. And we have to be ready to find the deep meaning to find out really who we are through that pain, pain, and suffering are incredibly sacred. And if we're in the business of just trying to avoid them, but the hippies used to say, if it feels good, do it. If you're the kind of the anti hippie saying, if it feels bad, stop, treat it, make it go away. You're going to miss your life. You got to get to the point where you have adequate self-management tools where you can say, bring it on. I want the whole thing, baby. I want the whole life. I want to take a big bite out of it. I'm not going to be held back by that. I'm not going to be held back by my fear of unhappiness. Thank you for sharing that. I think the tool that you're talking about is the panace,

am I pronouncing that correct? Yes. The positive affect, negative affect series, which is an incredibly powerful scientific tool for understanding affect. That is the same mood, both positive and negative. When the readers of this book, when they take that test, they're not going to be the same mood, both positive and negative. When the readers of this book, when they take that test, they're not going to be the same in the way they understand themselves ever again. Okay, so for the listener, the way that this book is set up is, it gives you 11 principles for building the life you want, and we've just covered a couple of them.

Happiness is a direction, not a destination, and unhappiness is not your enemy. Another one I wanted to explore was your principal. Choose your actions, not your emotions. Can you delve into metacognition, how it and emotional self-management play a role in making the choice of choosing your actions and not your emotions? For sure. And one of the biggest problems once again is that when my students or anybody that they recognize, I talk to people who Have successful parents of kids and they'll often say I'm not happy and I say why not? They say because I can manage my home. I can manage my kids, but I can't manage myself. I can't manage my own feelings

Same thing is my students is that I can manage money. I can manage a company, but I can't manage my emotions There's the whole idea emotional self-management comes down to a big tool called meta-cognition. Metacognition is basically the idea of moving the experience of your emotions from your limbic system to your prefrontal cortex. Now, a couple of definitions here. The limbic system is a bundle of tissue in the brain dedicated to creating emotions, positive emotions and negative emotions, and we need both to keep us alive.

What emotions are not nice to have or things we try to avoid, that's the wrong way of seeing it. Emotions are basically a machine language where your brain is taking outside stimuli and then turning it into signals delivered to your conscious brain so you know how to react. Emotions are a universal language. I don't care if you're born in Papua New Guinea or Canada, you speak the same emotions. The reason is because humans, they see the same things that they need to translate what's going on in their senses and turn that into a language so you know how to react. The problem is that not all those emotions are very pleasant.

And so the result of it is that if you're reactive, you're just gonna react on the basis of those emotions, your life is gonna feel like it's out of control. Metacognition is putting space between your emotions and your reaction, getting as much space as you can so you decide how to react, or you decide to take a better emotion or you decide to disregard those emotions, but you can't do that unless you're taking the time to make a decision and there's a whole lot of work in this book about the techniques for actually doing so from journaling is an incredibly powerful technique meditation on your emotions where you observe yourself at a certain remove. John is feeling sad right now. Prayer is incredibly powerful for me. It's just been so important for my life as a Christian man. I attend Mass every morning and I finish every evening

praying the rosary and ancient Catholic meditation with my wife. This is metacognition or walking in nature without your devices or learning to manage yourself and understand yourself through a various other techniques that we talk about in the book. The point is get space between stimulus and response so that you're actually consciously aware and managing your emotions and they're not managing you. I think that's a great one. Another principle that you bring up is to focus less on yourself. And I wanted to introduce this because earlier in the year, I had on Berkeley professor, Dacker Keltner.

I'm not sure if Dacker, I know Dacker is great. Yeah, he has a new book out called A. And one of the most profound findings from that book is when you think about experiencing, I'll usually think that it's looking at the Grand Canyon or some masterpiece for observing the birth of a child. And it is those things. But he said that the most common way that we can achieve awe in our daily lives is to watch someone else perform an act of gratitude or kindness towards someone else. Which to me, this moral beauty is exactly what you're talking about when you're saying

that we should be focusing on others to create happiness, which it's difficult to do in today's individualistic society. It is. And the way that we do that is by deciding to do that. This is why metacognition is so critically important. See, the key thing is that a lot of people say, I can't do that because I don't feel it. That's never an excuse. It's not to be able to do something because you don't feel it. On the contrary, feel it and act the way you want. That's what Albena did. And that's

what all of us can do if we're willing to put in the work. One way is to say, I feel this and it makes me want to react in a particular way. I'm going to choose a different reaction is more constructive or I have this feeling I'm going to substitute a different emotion that's also appropriate again. This is a conscious decision. And the last way that you're talking about is actually choosing not to look inward but rather to concentrate on looking outward such that your emotions are less relevant than they would have been otherwise. And one of the best ways to do that is to be amazed by the outside world. You know, the way is to simply judge less what's going on around you. This is one of the reasons that I recommend that people walk in nature without devices. One of the reasons

that I recommend that people get up at 530 and look at the sunrise. Do that. It's just that I just sit there and observe it, I've just observed to look outward. That's called in philosophy. That's called the eye self. The me self is looking in the mirror. The eye self is looking at it the grandeur of the world and disregarding your own emotions. And just by taking it all in, and this is one of the best ways to use medical ignition to emotionally self-managed and have a much better happier life. Yeah, Arthur, I have to tell you this morning, I saw the most amazing sunrise. I was out walking my dog. Sunrise is late here at this time of the year. I think it was at 704, but we just kept waiting

for it to start. And right when it was starting, there was a big ship that happened to be going by and it worked out perfectly that just as the sun peaked across the crust, it was adjacent to the boat and it was such just a transcendent moment. And I was deep in prayer and given gratitude right at that moment. So I couldn't have had a better start for this week. So I completely agree with what you're saying. That's wonderful. John, I love hearing that this very morning.

I woke up, I got up early to go to the gym. I had a lot of stuff going on because I'm teaching this week. And I met a beach house that my wife and I have rented so that our adult children and grandchildren can come and see us and grandchild only once so far. But they're coming fast and thick at this point. And I walked out of the porch over the Atlantic Ocean up here in near Cape Cod. And it's just this sky.

It was spectacular. Better than anything. I don't know any fourth of July I've ever seen before. And I just thank God for that moment. And I was not in the mirror. It wasn't about me. It was looking outward and it gave me this profound sense of deep satisfaction. And the reason is because

I had metacognitively put myself into the ice self state. And again, I can, that's clinical. I get it. The truth of the matter is that God gave me that gift. Well, Arthur, have you happened to have watched the series called The Bear? I have not. Tell me about it. The acting in this is incredible.

It's about a chef who has just been recognized as the number one chef in the world running a Michelin star restaurant. I think it was in Norway. And he ends up having to come home. I'm not sharing anything here that's going to ruin the show for anyone because this happens in the first five minutes of the first show. His brother ends up dying and he ends up coming back to run his brother's restaurant, which serves Chicago, Italian beef. Then the story goes from there, but one of the things that is amazing in the most current season is the family dynamics.

Because this is a family that you would think they just hate each other because there are so many problems that are going on amongst this family and it's got Jamie Lee Curtis and other people that acting is just incredible. Through this turbulence, the family problems end up start saving the family in this business. And I thought it was an interesting way

to talk about one of your principles. Your family problems can save your family. The first half of the book is about emotional self-management. You got to get the technique right and practice. And it's very clear how to do that in the book. The second half is once you've cleared the decks with emotional self-management of all the stupid nonsense that we do and distract ourselves with, then we can focus on the things that really matter the most. And there are four pillars on which you can build the life you want. Faith, family, friends, and work that serves. Those are the big four. Everything else is pretty incidental as it turns out. When I talk about family, it's very interesting because the research

on family life is quite fascinating. You find that the families that are least on family life is quite fascinating. You find that the families that are least nutritive, that build people up the least, are often the ones that have no conflict at all. Now, conflict is scary because conflict with your family can lead to schism. One in the six Americans is not talking to a family member today because of politics. It's just John is insane. So it's really bad out there. I get it. But no conflict means no intense love. Is the way that that comes down. So the key thing, the, what we need to talk about, is how conflict can actually be generative,

how conflict can be problem solving. And so in the book, I talk about how to fight with your spouse, how to fight with your parents, what not to do and what to do, what to be afraid of and what not to be afraid of what not to do and what to do, what to be afraid of and what not to be afraid of, what to avoid and what to embrace. But the bottom line is there's nothing wrong with conflict on the contrary, for the people who don't have any conflict at all, they don't really care about each other that much as

it turns out. I think that's funny. Another key thing that I thought was a profound statement in the book is happiness is love and action. Yeah. You and I both personally know Bob Waldinger, author of The Good Life and the current director of the Harvard Study of Adult Agent. How can we use happiness and love and that study to articulate the importance of relationships and the love that we show others in activating happiness in ourselves. The Harvard study that don't develop in that walldinger and company run, well, Braw walldinger is an incredible guy. He's a psychoanalyst and psychiatrist that

Massachusetts General Hospital in the Harvard Medical School. He's also the zen Buddhist priest of all things. He's a really interesting guy. And for 30 years, he's been running this enormous study. It's an 85 year longitudinal study that started when men were in their teens, all the way until death. There's a few of them are still alive, but men, they're really old. The study itself has only had three directors.

So the directors have as much longevity practically as the participants in the study. Bob has been doing it for 30 years, and he's very clear on what actually brings happiness. Now some people just get lucky. 50% of your happiness, your baseline mood is genetic, as it turns out. He had gloomy parents, it makes it a little bit harder. But if you have those gloomy genetics, which by the way, I have, you need to work that much

harder on your habits. The habits are basically sevenfold where the seventh is by far the most important. The first few are pretty easy. They're about diet and exercise and smoking and drinking. That's really what the first four are about. So diet and exercise means that you're not going to be healthy and happy if you're always struggling with your health and making sure you have a healthy body weight and you exercise moderately is really important.

None of this is new. Smoking is a really bad thing because lifelong smokers 7 and 10 die of a smoking related illness and they're really bad deaths. And drinking is a really interesting one because all of that about, you should have two drinks a day, it's not true. It turns out that most of that is largely from a vested interest that sponsored the research. And the newest research suggests that's too much. And then if you have any alcoholism in your family, you should stop drinking right now. And again, a lot of people don't wanna hear

that don't turn off the passion-struck podcast right now because they just said that. Okay, that's pretty obvious stuff, but then it gets more interesting. Because the last three, number one, is you need a coping mechanism for your stress and anxiety. You need to talk to somebody, you need to have a way to deal with your stress. If you don't, you're going to have too much cortisol and stress hormones in your system.

It's going to hurt your life, your happiness and your health. Second, if you need lifelong learning, you need to be interested. Interest is one of the basic positive emotions. Why are people listening to the passion struck podcast? Because it's interesting. And that gives people pleasure. There's a lot of neurophysiology that shows this. Be a lifelong learner podcast, books, all of it. And last but not least, number seven, this is the biggie. This is the one you can't miss. Happiness is love full stop. For most of us, that means a happy marriage. But if you don't have that, close friendships. You need a happy marriage or close friendships. That's what you need. And you got to do the work. You know, just fall off a log and have a happy marriage. And you certainly don't keep up to date with your childhood or college buddies,

you don't work with or halfway across the country. You got to do the work if you're going to have that source of happiness by far, the most important of the seven. And Arthur, I was hoping along the lines of love to me, love and gratitude go hand in hand. And I think gratitude is powerful emotion for enhancing happiness. Can you provide some practical techniques that a listener can use to cultivate a sense of gratitude? Yeah, so gratitude is really a substitute emotion for the more natural emotion, which is resentment. And there's a reason for that.

We're evolved to have a negativity bias. In other words, mother nature wants us to notice the bad and disregard the good all the time. The reason is because the nice things, they're nice to have. The bad things, if you miss them, you'll get eaten by a tiger. If you're looking around a room and somebody's smiling sweetly at you, okay, but if somebody's frowning at you, you better pay attention to get there might be violence coming in your favorite neighborhood bar, whatever it happens to be. And so we have evolved the tendency to feel resentment, to feel negativity, to feel on edge all the time, as opposed to feeling often the more realistic sentiments about what's going on, which are the nice things. So Mother Nature does not have to dictate this. However, if we decide met

a cognitively to choose the gratitude when we feel the resentment, that's called emotional substitution. When you feel resentment, when you feel bitterness, Venice time for you manually to turn on the gratitude. Here's how to do it. Make my students do this and it's incredibly effective. here's how to do it. Make my students do this and it's incredibly effective. On Sunday night, make a list of the five things you're most grateful for about your life. Five things. I don't care how dumb they are. Like, I finally got around to watching Breaking Bad and I'm really grateful for that. I don't care how dumb it is or that I'm a blessed child of God. That's really profound. Whatever your thing is on the five things. Okay. Every night, take five minutes and look at your list and contemplate that list. Sunday revise the list. Add another thing, take something off, but change it. Edit the list every Sunday. At the end of 10 weeks,

you're going to be about 20% happier than you were before because you will be practicing emotional substitution. In the end of the evening, yeah, look, the day has built up a little scar tissue on you. You're going to be a little resentful, you're going to be a little tired, you're going to be a little stressed out. And instead of wallowing in that, you got your gratitude list, which is an emotional and appropriate, realistic, emotional substitution mechanism, and it will change your happiness level. So Arthur, I've got two more questions for you and for this next one, I'm going to go all the way back to the beginning of the book. In the opening, you write that the 59-year-old you, if you went back in time and said to your younger self, you're going to learn to be happier and teach the secrets to others, that younger you would have told the older you that you've gone completely

insane. But if someone's been listening along this podcast and maybe they don't feel happy in their lives and are sitting here listening to you and I saying, no, I'm here in these two guys talk, but I don't see how this is possible. What do you think is the first step that person can take to get them on this path? Yeah. The first step is learning about happiness. Stop trying to feel happiness because it's not a feeling. Use knowledge. This is the same thing with anything else.

I wish I were a better golfer. Come on, man. Don't wish you were a better golfer. Take a golfing lesson, read a book on golfing and go to a golf pro and take a lesson. Then you'll get better. The same thing is true with happiness. Stop treating happiness like a nice to have and a hope to have. Start treating happiness like a skill because it is and because if you actually put forth just a little bit of effort, that's why Oprah and I wrote the book. It's because we want an owner's

manual for your happiness. If you actually just read the book, absorb the ideas, it doesn't take very much work. That knowledge per se is the first step in getting happier. It was for me, and it is for literally every single person I've met. Okay, and then my last question would be, we are living right now in a world that is just filled with nihilism, challenges, and uncertainties. What message of hope would you and Oprah like to leave with readers of the book or listeners of today's podcast, especially those who are seeking to build the life that they truly

want? Yeah. The answer is that you can be happier. Literally everybody on the planet can be happier and it's in your hands. And even better news You can make other people happier as well Every single person can see themselves as happiness teachers, which is extraordinary when you think about it How by sharing these ideas by learning these ideas, learning them,

practicing them and sharing them and every single person can do that. Look, it's a tough world out there, man. It's just rough and people are so bitter and having such a hard time and people are fighting and what we need is a revolution. And the revolution starts with each one of us and that starts with a commitment to happiness and love, bringing more happiness in love in our lives through knowledge, practice, and sharing. And if we do that, I'm telling you, if we commit ourselves to that, it's amazing to me. I was like a gloomy guy 20 years ago, 10 years ago. And now people are asking, my advice about happiness, if I can do it, everybody can do it. That's my promise. Well, great. Arthur, thank you again for being here. And if someone wants to learn more

about you, what is the best place for them to go for all things Arthur Brooks? Yeah, it's ArthurRuchs.com. It's all things Arthur Brooks. And that has my columns. You can learn how to subscribe to my newsletter. You can take a class online, a nice little class online that's I teach happiness for a living. And you can take a video-based class with a lot of activities. You can start a book group on the Opert book and all those resources and how to teach this stuff and how you can become a teacher as well as at authorbrook.com. Okay. Well, Arthur, thank you again for the honor of being here. It was such a pleasure

to have you. Thank you, John. Thank you for what you're doing. I can't wait to read your book. Well, I am going to send you a coffee when I get it. Can't wait. Thanks. I thoroughly enjoyed that interview with my friend Arthur Brooks, and I wanted to thank Arthur, Molly Glazer, Olivia Ladner, and Penguin Random House for the honor and privilege of having them appear here on today's show. Links to all things Arthur will be in the show notes at passionstruck.com. Please use our website links if you purchase any of the books from the guests that we feature here on the show.

All proceeds go to supporting the show. Advertiser deals on discount codes are in one convenient place at passionstruck.com slash deals. Please consider supporting those who support the show. Videos are on YouTube at both John Armyles and PassionStruck Clips. We are also, as I mentioned at the beginning, on syndicated radio on the Brushwood Media Network, where you can tune in every Monday and Friday

from 5 to 6 p.m. Eastern time on your evening commute. Links will also be in the show notes. My new book is also available now for pre-order. You can also find that in the show notes. I am on LinkedIn, where you can sign up for my LinkedIn newsletter, and you can find me at John Aramiles on all the other social platforms, or you can sign up for a newsletter at PassionStruct.com. And if you want to know how to book amazing guests like Arthur Brooks, it's because of

my network. Go all those relationships before you need them. Most of the guests that you hear on the show actually subscribe to the podcast and contribute ideas for topics and guests. Come join us and subscribe and you'll be in Smart Company. You're about to hear a preview of the PassionStrike podcast interview that I did with Robin Steinberg, an American lawyer and social justice advocate who is the chief executive officer of the bail project. We discuss her book, Courage of Compassion, a journey of judgment to connection. The criminal justice system is infected at every stage of its proceedings with systemic racism, from how we police to what we define as crime, to how we punish, to how we deal with probation and

parole, to how people are treated in jails, racism sort of pervades it. But there are also people from more marginalized, low-income communities who also have become victims of the criminal justice system. It disproportionately impacts women. It disproportionately impacts the LGBTQ AI community. It disproportionately impacts immigrants.

It sort of turns it's ferocious attention on the most vulnerable marginalized communities in America. And so that's certainly one of its flaws. At the core, the entire system is built on the idea that isolation and punishment is the answer. Once you create a system, it's really hard to change it. Remember that we rise by lifting others. So share the show with those that you love. And if you found today's episode with Arthur Brooks useful, then please share it with those that you love and care about. In the meantime, do your best to apply what you're on the show so that you can live what

you listen. Until next time, go out there and become Ashence Rock. you