Passion Struck with John R. Miles - Arthur C. Brooks on Finding Success, Happiness, and Purpose EP 272

Episode Date: March 28, 2023

I am joined by Arthur C. Brooks, an American social scientist who holds the positions of the William Henry Bloomberg Professor of the Practice of Public Leadership at the Harvard Kennedy School and Professor of Management Practice at the Harvard Business School. We discuss his #1 NY Times bestselling book titled "From Strength to Strength: Finding Success, Happiness and Deep Purpose in the Second Half of Life." In This Episode, Arthur C. Brooks And I Discuss His Book "From Strength to Strength" Arthur C. Brooks, an esteemed authority on the economics of happiness, explained the central idea of his book: that contentment in the later stages of life is entirely attainable. The essential factor is to redirect our attention toward specific priorities and behaviors that are accessible to anyone. By cultivating qualities like profound wisdom, detachment from materialism, fostering connections and serving others, and making spiritual advancements, we can pave the way for greater happiness. Full show notes and resources can be found here: https://passionstruck.com/arthur-c-brooks-on-finding-success-happiness/  Brought to you by Green Chef. Use code passionstruck60 to get $60 off, plus free shipping!” Brought to you by Indeed. Head to https://www.indeed.com/passionstruck, where you can receive a $75 credit to attract, interview, and hire in one place. --► 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/dnuiun6e6lM  --► Subscribe to Our YouTube Channel Here: https://www.youtube.com/c/JohnRMiles 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/ Want to hear my best interviews from 2022? Check out episode 233 on intentional greatness and episode 234 on intentional behavior change. ===== 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/ 

Coming up next on the Passion Struck Podcast. Part of the problem is that mother nature lies. Mother nature tells you that if you get the world's idols of money, power, pleasure, and fame, that you're going to be happy. And part of the reason is mother nature wants to fool you into continuing to run on the treadmill. Why? Because mother nature all she cares about is you passing on your genes and surviving.

And when you chase those idols, you're more likely to pass on your genes and survive, but you're not going to get happier. Happiness actually predicts success. Success doesn't predict happiness. You got to get the causality right and take your happiness more seriously than anything else. Welcome to PassionStruck. 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 272 of PassionStruck and thank you to each and every one of you who comes

back weekly. But listen and learn how to live better, be better, and impact the world. And if you're new to the show, thank you so much for being here. Or you simply want to introduce this to a friend or family member, we now have episode starter packs, which are collections of our fans' favorite episodes, that we organize in the convenient topics to give any new listener a great way to get acclimated to everything we do here on the show. Either go to Spotify or PassionStruck.com slash starter packs to get started.

In case you missed it, last week I had three great interviews. The first was with Dr. Bereganese, who's a behavioral economist and author of the new book Mix Signals and Incentives work. I also had on Functional Medicine Expert Dr. Will Cole, and we discussed his new book, Gut Feelings. And lastly, I had on Lidia Fennett, who's the top charity auctioneer in the world, and we discuss her new book, Lame Your Components. Please check them all out, and if you love any of those episodes or today's, we would be so grateful if you could give us a five star rating interview which goes

such a long way and bringing more people into the passion-struct community where we can give weekly doses of hope, meaning, and connection. And I also know our guests love to hear your feedback as well. Now let's talk about today's episode. Would it be surprising to discover that most individuals will reach the pinnacle of their careers much earlier than anticipated, such as tech entrepreneurs who face a decrease in creativity in their early 30s. What occurs when you sense a twinge of disappointment while still being addicted to the pursuit of a smoothly ascending career path? In today's episode, our guest Arthur C. Brooks will go into how this period of decline can hurt one's pride and evoke fear.

He explores how it also can be difficult to understand and even harder to accept, as it goes against our natural instinct to continue creating successful endeavors. Using simple, approachable language that incorporates elements of spirituality, including teachings from the ancient Indian and Buddhist philosophers, works discusses the psychology and enticing nature of satisfaction. He highlights that one of the less attractive, but crucial keys to finding contentment lies in the art of downsizing, or a fulfilling and successful second half of life. It's essential to redirect your attention to practicality rather than invention. Instead of lamenting on your absence of novel accomplishments, utilize your prior successes more efficiently. Our

conversation will inspire those facing a mid-career dilemma to move forward and discover new abilities and strengths to concentrate on what brings long-lasting happiness instead of just adding more to an already full canvas. Arthur Brooks is the William Henry Bloomberg professor of public leadership at the Harvard Kennedy School and professor of public leadership at the Harvard Kennedy School and professor of management practice at the Harvard Business School. He teaches courses on leadership and happiness. He's also a columnist at the Atlantic, where he writes the popular weekly, How to Build a Life column.

Brooks is the author of 12 books, including the number one New York Times bestseller from strength to strength, finding success, happiness, and deep purpose in the second half of life which we will discuss today. Brooks speaks to audiences all over the world about human happiness and works to raise well-being within private companies, universities, public agencies, and community organizations. 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 humbled and honored today to welcome Dr. Arthur Brooks, a PassionStruck. Welcome, Arthur.

Thank you, John. And congratulations on the success of this podcast, serving people the Living the Best Lives. Thank you so much. And I just wanted to show the audience your book from strength to strength, which is a number one New York Times bestseller. And you are teaching people how to live a meaningful life throughout it.

So congratulations and congratulations on becoming a number one New York Times bestseller author. Thanks, I appreciate it. So congratulations and congratulations on becoming a number one New York Times bestselling author. Thanks I appreciate it. You never know how a book is going to do. You have to write the book that is in your heart, offer it up to serve other people and what do you know sometimes they buy it? While reading the book I discovered that our childhoods had a few things and common and one of those things was that when we were both younger, we both had paper routes. And I know the years that I had my route were very transformative. Can you tell me the influence that that route had on yours? I started in a paper open.

It was about fifth grade. And this is weird for kids. I have adult kids now. And they think it didn't want any child labor laws. And I guess the kind of work child labor laws in those days. But the truth is that kids would get up a 430 in the morning and deliver papers when they were 11, 12 years old. By the way, in a time of much higher street crime than what we typically have today. And I'm

a little bit dubious and my parents decision, let me do that. But it was huge for me to be earning my money and having a sense of early sense of earn success to I had to sell subscriptions, I had to deliver papers, I had to collect the money, I had to pay the bill. It was like, it was a small business is what it really was. Because each, you got a bill for the newspapers each month that you were delivering and then you got to keep the money that you, that you, I was delivering the Seattle paper, the Seattle Morning paper. And, and I think it imprinted on me this importance of do more yet more.

And it's what it comes down to as ridiculously simple as that seems, it's no small thing when you're 12 actually to see that. I remember I started mine about the same age and I was pretty scrawny back then. I probably had 200 houses on the route. And I remember I would strategically position the papers on the street corners because there was no way that I could carry that many. and you probably experienced a similar sort of dilemma. But it really does teach you time management, as well as how to deal with logistics, and then how to confront your customers, because there was always a slew who just never wanted to pay me. Yeah, no kidding. People never answer the door on the day you're going to be collecting. But the other thing is pretty interesting that I learned that I'm not a natural morning person, but I get up at the crack of dawn and I do what I've got to do. I mean, actually set routines into my schedule. I never really quit. I was

getting up at 4.30 in those days, I get up at 5 o'clock every morning and I exercise every morning and then I go to mass with my wife every morning and then I work. I tank up on caffeine and I get my three solid or four solid hours of creative work before lunch and then afterward it's just all the other stuff that you've got to do, the bureaucracy that attends modern life. And I'm just way more productive than I would have been otherwise. And I chalk a lot of that up to good parents and really solid values, but the fact that I've been basically working since I was a young kid and working early in the morning. And if I didn't get up, the papers didn't get delivered

and there was hell to pay. Yeah, absolutely. I'm also a member of the 5am club and it has brought a new level of productivity to my career that I don't think would have been there had it not been for that ritual and habit, which I think instills in you the ability to pick up other habits as well.

There's a lot of social science on that. I teach that stuff now about how you become path dependent in the methods of virtue, because they become habits. And Aristotle talked about that. About habits are virtues and these virtues lead to a happier life, a more productive life. But what you have to do is to get started and the earlier you get started, the better off you are. Another interesting intersection point is I read, you learned to play the French horn professionally. And as I was reading, it sounded like you were

in the Annapolis Orchestra, possibly during the time that I was at the Naval Academy. When were you at the Naval Academy? I was there 89 through 93. I was playing with a group called the Annapolis Brass Quintet, which was a chamber music ensemble based in Annapolis and was started from a bunch of guys that played in the Naval Academy band during Vietnam.

And then they started in the 70s, but way before me, I was way younger than those guys were. And I joined this group, and we didn't actually perform very much in Annapolis. We just traveled, we lived there, and we rehearsed there, and then we were on the road seven months a year playing concerts. Five guys in a van is what I turned,

and then I left after about six years and went to the Barcelona Orchestra. So when you were in the Naval Academy, I was actually living in Barcelona and playing the symphony. Well, after I graduated from the Naval Academy, I then moved to Spain. So I'm kidding me, man.

It's like, is what were we separated at birth? Yeah, I couldn't believe it either when I was looking at our two timelines. Your career has been so interesting because you were a professional French horn player for the first 10 to 12 years of your career. And then you discover that you peak at an abnormally young age. What happened and why at that point did you self describe yourself as a failure? If you know anything about musicians or athletes, classical musicians or athletes,

there's this monomaniac whole tendency to do nothing else. And part of the reason is because you just can't succeed if you do anything else. There are no hobbies, there are no outside interests, there is nothing else. If you want to be a pitcher, you want to be a gymnast, or if you want to be a professional violinist or French horn player. And that's what it was from when I was nine years old until I went pro at 19. And then from when I was all the way through my 20s, I didn't go to college. I went to college, I got tossed out after my first year just because all I wanted to do is to play the French horn.

And the result of that was that I had this dream to be the greatest French horn player in the world in no small part because there was nothing else. I mean, man, there was nothing else going on in the world as far as I was concerned. And what happened to a lot of athletes or a lot of other musicians is a peak. And you peak earlier than you think you're going to.

My best playing was when I was 22, 23 years old. And I was getting worse after that. So I went to Barcelona to play, and I was fine. It's not like you would listen to me and say, what's wrong with that guy? He's missing all his notes. Nobody else noticed but me. But I knew I wasn't making progress anymore. And I was actually what used to be easy was hard, what used to be hard as impossible. And I knew that the writing was a little wall, but I just didn't know what to do. It required marrying a normal woman who actually said, I think you're a real person, and not just a French horn playing robot,

to help me understand that I could get an education, I could do other things. But it took, it was a heck of a transition. I mean, it was super hard to see myself getting worse and figuring out I had to retool. But that experience was incredibly, was just fleeting for me, because it showed me when I went back

to correspondence school, to get my bachelor's degree, and then went to graduate school after that to do an entirely different thing in my early 30s that I could reinvent myself. And I wouldn't have known that was actually more important than having a paper out. It's something that I too have tried to instill in my kids because I think with this digital age,

we're gonna have to reinvent ourselves more than we ever have in the past. And I've had to reinvent myself three or four times during my own career, but things are changing so quickly. I think it's going to be one of those skill sets that people have to have is mastering reinvention. And I'm sure that is something that you have studied as a social scientist.

For sure, and one of the problems that a lot of people have is that they think that they have a different career trajectory than they really have. There's kind of four career types that people have based on the personality and the industry that they're in. And we think of being ambitious as being what they call the linear career. That's where everything builds on everything else. And you only make a change in your job or career when it's something better in line with what you're already really good at. And so that's like the corporate ladder. There's three others, however, that people fall into. That's only one type. Another type is what we'll call the steady state career where you do the

same thing your whole life and just get more expertise, but not that much more money. That was your granddad. My dad, for example, he was a college professor, same university, his whole career. Then there's this thing called the transitory career. People who are not very interested in their careers, not very ambitious, they make their job decisions in the basis of where they want to live or just learning a new thing or whatever. It's good enough. It's a good enough career. I mean, everybody's mom is worried about that. But the last one, this most interesting that a lot of people find out they are, everybody's mom is worried about that. But the last one, this most interesting, that a lot of people find out they are,

is called a spiral. A spiral career pattern is people who change careers every decade or so. And they have a series of many careers that build on each other. So you have a series of skills, you've got interests, and on the basis of those things, you move to a new things,

you can learn something big and new to challenge yourself, to serve other people. And a lot more people are spirals than they think. They get to the middle of their career and they're burned out. And they don't know why they're burned out. And the reason is because they think they're linear is they're actually spirals. And that's how I wind up counseling a lot of my students. I wonder which one I was. I always thought I was on a linear path when I was younger. I was definitely a success addict. I was on this maniacal path of just trying to climb what I thought was the ladder of success,

which is what I thought was the ultimate thing that we want to achieve in life. And I have to tell you, I started sacrificing so many things, especially relationships, time, and family. To achieve what I thought was the ultimate thing that would bring me happiness. And what I discovered is it actually brought me the opposite. Yeah, part of the problem is that mother nature lies. Mother nature tells you that if you get the world's idols of money, power, pleasure, and fame, that you're going to be happy. And part of the

reason is mother nature wants to fool you into continuing to run on the treadmill. Why? Because Mother Nature all she cares about is you passing on your genes and surviving. And when you chase those idols, you're more likely to pass on your genes and survive, but you're not going to get happier. Happiness actually predicts success. Success doesn't predict happiness. You got to get the causality right and take your happiness more seriously than anything else. And speaking of Spain, one of my best friends was in the Spanish military and looking back, I should have listened to him much more closely. He was a hair pilot and upon watching the Americans who were also stationed on the same base. He came to me one day and said, you Americans have it all wrong. You live to work while we spaniards work to live.

And I think looking back, that was such an important point because they don't seem to burn out nearly as much as other countries do, especially Americans. That's true. I mean, I still wouldn't take the European model by and large, and part of the reason is because the secret of being happy at work is earning your success and serving other people. And if you're passionate about what you do and your

skills, your meeting, your passions, and your highly trained, you deserve to excel on the basis of your hard work and merit and personal responsibility. And it's very hard to do in Europe. Having lived in Barcelona all those years, people, they're just stuck. They're simply stuck. I mean, there's in work regulations saying you can't work more than 35 hours a week. There's incredibly low mandated wages. It's almost impossible. If you're running a company to hire and fire people, it's just too hard to be entrepreneurial. So I agree that people are working themselves to death too often and have the wrong priorities in the United States, but I'll still take the freedom. I'll still actually take the freedom and do my best to make my own decisions. And I go back to Spain a lot of. I like Spain. I like living in Spain. My wife is Spanish. My whole

family is over there in their Spanish. But I'll still take the American Free Enterprise system eight days a week. Well, you're definitely right about that hiring and firing. Because what I found when I was leading organizations in Europe, it's just like what you're saying. Because if you bring a person in and they pass that probationary period, it's next to impossible to fire them regardless of poor performance. Yeah, imagine having a factory worker with tenure. That's basically the Spanish system. Absolutely. Well, I'm going to talk just a little bit more about your career background. And then go from there to an experience that led you to writing this book.

But you went from playing French horn to becoming a professor at Syracuse University's Maxwell School of Citizenship, where you got tenure. And then you took a step from that and became the CEO of the American Enterprise Institute. And I was hoping that you could touch on the American Enterprise Institute just for a second in case people are not familiar with it.

Yeah, so the American Enterprise Institute is a think tank, which basically a nonprofit research institution dedicated to better public policies. So it's in the middle of Washington, DC. It's one of the oldest think tanks in the world. By the time I left it had over 300 full time employees. So it's like a university without students dedicated to educating Congress and the media and academia about public policy analysis. And my PhD is in public policy analysis and that's what I had taught at Syracuse.

The American Enterprise Institute is the best place in the world so it seemed to me to apply that and actually make public policy help intervene in the process of laws and work its way into the lives of ordinary people. So I taught public policy economics and entrepreneurship at Syracuse for a long time. And I was also teaching nonprofit management during that period. I was sort of guilty because I was doing all these seminars for nonprofit managers and given them all this academic knowledge. I thought, I wonder if I could do what they do. I wonder if I could actually run a nonprofit organization, raise money, manage a big workforce. And so when the opportunity came along

to be a chief executive of a big nonprofit, which was a crazy confluence of events, it was just an incredible luck. I was at the 10 year itch point, by the way. And so I took it, which was insanity. I mean, I was completely unprepared and I had no qualifications to be the chief executive of a nonprofit, but the three guys they'd offered it to

before me had turned it down. Last words before hiring me were, ah, what the hell? There we were and I was having to raise $50 million a year and manage hundreds of people, et cetera. It was trial by fire and I learned a lot. I learned a lot about people, I learned a lot about organizations,

I learned a lot about fundraising, I learned a lot about what it means to be an executive, what it means to be a leader, what it means to lead with love. And I learned a lot about myself, I have to say, about what I was good at, what I liked doing. And so when I got the 10-year itch again, after 10 and a half years or 11 years as president, I decided to come back and dedicate myself

to creative work on the science of happiness for the rest of my life. Well, it's interesting, because you're being very humble in how you're talking about it, but you shifted the organization's focus to cover things such as poverty, happiness, and human potential. And at one point during your tenure, you're named by Fortune Magazine as one of the world's 50 greatest leaders. But if I have the timeline right during this period, you happen to get on a flight from LA to Washington, and while you're on it, you start overhearing a

conversation with a couple sitting around you that then caused you to look at your own life and ultimately write this book. What was that and why did it have such a profound impact on you? Well, about halfway through my tenure as CEO, it was a very high pressure job. It was right at the center of Washington, D.C. and everything is controversial in Washington. I mean, everything is political. I would come into my office, my assistant would say, the New York Times is on the phone. That's always bad news. It's just like 100% guarantee to be bad news. New York Times is not calling, you know, wish me a happy birthday.

There's something up, whatever happened to be, it was a lot of pressure, it was a lot of work. I worked 80 hours a week. I was taking that 14th hour over the first hour with my kids, my kids were little. And by the way, I'm not getting those years back. I'm an other to be a grandfather twice over this year. I better not screw that up because I missed a lot of that because of my ambition and because of the hard work

and I have some regrets. Not exactly. I just I was trying to put it in perspective and in this period of my life and I thought every year I raised the money, give the speeches, lead the organizations, grow, try to get better. But what is this leading to? I mean, what's is leading to in my life? And I didn't have an answer to that. And it was about the 60 or something out of 11 that I was thinking about this. And one night on this flight, it wasn't actually a red eye. I was just five five in the afternoon flight that leaves L.A. and then gets into Washington around one o'clock in the morning because you're losing hours. But it's nighttime. And I heard a couple right behind me on your plane talking. And I was in this kind of tender period of my own life and to figure out what I was trying

to do or where I wanted to go. And this guy was talking to his wife. And I could tell by their voices that they were elderly. He was a man and a woman. I assumed they were married couple. And he's mumbling and she's answering. And I can only really hear her answers. She has very piercing voices coming through the seats. And so he mumbles a little bit. And she says, Oh, don't say it would be better if you were dead. And men, now they've got my full attention. See, my laboratory is a, I'm a behavioral social scientist. That's why I got my PhD in. And so my laboratory is the over her conversation, basically. So, and then she, he mumbles a little bit more and she says, it's not true that nobody cares about you anymore. And this goes

on for 20 minutes. And she's obviously trying to console her husband. I'm thinking, what's going on with this guy? And I figure, well, he's somebody who is disappointed in his life, because he's never had the life that people listening to this podcast are striving to have. I mean, this is a success podcast. And everybody listening to us, they're basically, I mean, folks, your dreams are going to come true.

The problem is not that. The problem is having the wrong dreams quite frankly. And this guy on the other hand, didn't have this. He probably didn't get the education that he wanted. He didn't have the dreams. He didn't have the drive, whatever. And now he's like in his eight, eighties and it's almost over. Okay. So that we land in a Delacere Port in Washington and they turn on the lights.

We all stand up and I'm kind of curious. And so I turn around to get a look and it's one of the most famous men in the world. It's literally somebody every single person listening to his podcast knows. Now I'm not going to divulge his identity because that would be in the street. He would be improper. It could be a lot of different people. This guy's an op-ment to Kiro. He's not some politician or actor. No, no, this is a guy who changed the course of American life for the better a long time ago. And now he feels like

it was too far in the rearview mirror. And he feels washed up because it's gone. So here's the thing. We think that if we're successful, you work hard, you play by the rules, you bank it, and then you get to enjoy it for the rest of your life. And that's not true. That clearly told me that he was doing a bunch of things wrong in the way that he designed his life. One of the greatest, most interesting people in the world, rich, famous, the whole deal. He's doing 10 times what I'm gonna do, but I do not in 30 or 40 years wanna be on a flight,

telling my wife Esther that I might as well be dead. So, was he doing wrong? And how can I do it differently? And that's set me on a personal research project that truly changed my life. Well, it's an interesting story. At the beginning of the year, I happened to interview Frank Blake

who is the co-founder of the Home Depot and their CEO. And Frank is now in his mid-90s. He's probably as active as anyone I know. And after he finished his tenure with the Home Depot, he channeled his whole energy then into philanthropic endeavors because he felt like he still wanted to give back the humanity, in fact, in a bigger way.

And it was interesting to me how he didn't really look back in the rear of the mirror. He has this very forward-looking view and how enriched his life is even to today and how sharp he is. But your research has found that most people don't have what he has and similar to the person on the aircraft, decline is unavoidable

and begins much sooner than we think. Why is this a case and how does it impact the other elements of our lives? Well, Frank Blake actually might be doing exactly what we all should do for the following reason. We do tend to peak into decline early and we think, but not in every ability, just in the set of abilities that make us early on good at what we do. So for example, we find that early on people who are really ambitious and they're working where they have to use their noggin, which is to say everybody listening to this podcast, that you get better and better at what you do through

your 20s and 30s. That's called your fluid intelligence. Fluid intelligence is the ability to focus, it's working memory, it's innovative capacity, the more you study, the harder the work, the better you get, whether you're an electrician or an air traffic controller or a doctoral lawyer. The problem is you peak your crystal, your fluid intelligence peaks in your late 30s or early 40s. This is the reason that people tend to feel like they're burning out in their 40s and they're mid to late 40s typically. Not because anybody notices that they're off their game, but because they notice they're not making progress anymore and so it's not fun. That's the essence of burnout.

That's the bad news. The good news is there's another intelligence behind it that people most people don't know about, but obviously Frank Blake has found it. That's called crystallized intelligence through your 40s, 50s and 60s. And if you got your marbles, high through your 70s and 80s and 90s,

this is your wisdom. this is your pattern recognition, this is your teaching, this is your ability to coach people, to mentor people, to not to answer every question, but to figure out which questions need to be answered. You go from your brains curved to your wisdom curve, from your innovator curve to your instructor curve. You've seen it all and you know how to use it. You can't remember things as quickly,

you can't figure out stuff or come up with a brand new idea as well as you used to, but you figure out what actually matters. So if you're a lawyer, be a star litigator when you're 35, be the managing partner when you're 55. If you're an entrepreneur, the brand new shiny startup guy at 30, be the venture capitalist when you're 60, because you'll be able to say,

ah, this one yes, that one no. And you'll be able to coach people appropriately. And so that's what we all need to do is to get on that second intelligence curve, the one that goes up and stays high. Find your inner Dalai Lama, find your inner instructor, your inner professor, whatever that happens to be,

and you'll stay great and happy professionally for the rest of your life. Well, I know where you live is where one of my best friends lives in proximity. He lives in Gloucester, and he got his PhD from Harvard Business School as it turns out and used to teach there themselves. But one of the things that I see when I go visit him is

the fluctuation of the tides. And I'm going to go back to your paper out because in the book, you talk about that you use the paper out to help fund your love of fishing. And one time you were out fishing and you learned a vital lesson from a stranger who taught you something about falling tides. How does that relate to the two intelligences that you just brought up? It's an interesting thing that I see as I counsel a lot of executives and successful people and strivers. And that's that they're intensely uncomfortable about change in their lives.

Now, nobody likes change. Don't get me wrong. No, it was like, hey, good news. You got to stop doing what you were good at. You got to go do something new. Nobody likes that. But change is our state of nature. Every five years, the average person has a major kind of what Bruce Filer or the author calls a lifequake. He has a very famous book called Life is in the Transitions that only year and a half or so there's some transition, some significant transition every five years. It's huge. Most of the time it's unwelcome because you didn't invite it.

It happened to you. The key thing is that really successful people, they always look at those changes as an opportunity. See, it always looks like you're losing something because you are. And that gets us back to the whole concept that I got about this fishing metaphor. I grew up in the Pacific Northwest in Seattle, and I was down in Lincoln City, Oregon with my aunt. So she lived in a trailer. She was a receptionist at this hotel. It was a blast. And I would go down there and I would fish, you know, would hunt for Agots on the beach,

you know, goof around in the summertime. My very happiest memories are those times. And I was fishing off the rocks in Lincoln City. First time I'd ever trying to really fish in the ocean. And I was there for a couple of hours not getting any bites. Nothing. And this old guy from the town, he comes up and says, Hey, kid, I'm watching you. I like today, he'd probably be arrested, but he says, you're not getting any bites. Are you? And I'm like, no, he says, that's because you're doing it wrong. And I said, well, tell me, sir, how can I do it right? And he says, your baits fine, your lines fine, everything's's fine But you can't catch anything except during the falling tie now most of the people listening to us don't know what that is because you don't grow up on the ocean The falling tide is when the tide is going out fastest and it doesn't make sense because I said but the fish are all going out to see and he says wrong

He says what's being what's happening is as the tide is going out It stirs up the plankton and baitfish and the game fish go crazy and they'll bite anything He says wait 45 minutes. He had his pull too by the way So he's looking at his watch and he says now and he we throw our lines in and we're pulling fish out just like one after the other 20 fish It's unbelievable fun exhausting and after half an hour and we're sitting on the rocks It was fun, exhausting. And after half an hour, and we're sitting on the rocks, tons of fish, and done.

And he lights up a cigarette, he's getting all kind of philosophical. He says, kid, during a falling tide, you can only make one mistake. And I said, well, what? He says, not having your line in the water. And that's stuck with me because there's a lot of falling tides in life where it looks like we're losing everything.

But that's the time of transition when the circumstances are most fertile to catch the most fish. When you feel like you're losing everything, get your line in the water. That's the bottom line. Well, I'm glad that you brought up this whole concept of transition points because it's something that I often talk about as well, but we describe them slightly differently. When I have discussed transition points, I liken them to those moments in life where we find ourselves on autopilot, because maybe we've mastered the skill we're doing, or we've gotten to this repetitive motion of things we're doing, we're in this comfort zone, and we end up at that point, losing our intentionality about the direction we're trying to take. And so we start getting off course. And the trick is while you're in those periods, to be as mindful as you can about your behavior and your habits, so that you're intentional about

the direction you want to take your life. Yours is a little bit different than that. I was hoping you could take it one step further by discussing the concept of liminality. This is what we do in academia, by the way. You take a very simple concept and then you put a kind of a fancy sounding word on it and you get tenure. So liminality works this way. This is the time between the tides. It's the time of change where you're neither in nor out. There's really interesting studies that show that if you change jobs and cities and industries, all at the same time, it has the same disequalibrating impact as losing to death a member of your immediate family. The problem is that among other things, that you're in an intense period of

loss and grief, but everybody's congratulating you. So your brain is just exploding all over the place where you have no reason to feel bad. All these good things are happening and you feel like crying all the time. This happens to people constantly. That period is called liminality. When you're not with one thing, but you're not firmly on the other thing yet. And that liminality is a particular period of intense fertility in your creativity. You'll find, for example, I mean, some studies suggest that when you're in liminality, that your handwriting change, and so you can't sign checks convincingly, it's like a, it's like an imposter trying to sign checks and commit fraud or something. There's, you don't know you, and that's what's so profoundly disacolubrating, so disturbing about this.

And so what do you have to do? I mean, exactly what you say. You have to do what we call in my business. You have to be metacognitive. You have to be aware of this, such that the discomfort that you're feeling is not happening to you. What happens is that the discomfort that's coming to you is coming from a lot of processes, largely stemming

from the functioning of the limbic system of your brain. This is the part of your brain that exists, it's been evolving over a 40 million year period. It exists to take in signals from the brain stem and other parts of the brain and translate them using its unique machine language into feelings that happen to you. So when you have feelings happening to you, it's your limbic system delivering them to your prefrontal cortex. That shouldn't be the end of the story. If you're just like, oh, I feel sad today, I hope I don't feel sad tomorrow, you're being managed by your feelings.

To be metacognitive is to actually be conscious what's actually going on with you emotionally and figuring out how you want to react, to process, to experience your emotions in your prefrontal cortex, and to manage them as seriously as you would your business, as seriously as you would your checkbook. And we all can do, that's why we journal, that's why we have therapy, that's why we have meditation, that's why we have a best friend that we can talk to, so that we can become metacognitive about our feelings,

especially in these periods of luminality. For the listener, if you haven't listened to some of these other episodes, I've had some other behavioral scientists on the show, Katie Melkman, Ethan Cross, I let Fishback, who all talk about the importance of this metacognition and the microchoises that you make and why it's so important to do that

if you wanna take your life to where you ultimately want it to go. I have a whole new book coming out on this actually in September. It's actually co-author with Oprah Winfrey and it's called fully alive. The art and science of getting happier, that gives you the four basic rules for how to be a metacognitive person. And it's a very important set of steps that we take, but if you do the work, life will

never be the same. I mean, you will never forget a migdala hijack or any of these terrible emotional flooding sensations. It'll never be the same and you'll be more effective, you'll be happier and you'll make other people around you a lot after too. Well, I can ask you for a better person to bring up than Oprah at emphasized my next point because when people look at Oprah and they look at her life, they don't see the unbelievable pain and adversity that she faced when she was younger in life. And as we've been talking about these transition points,

I recently wrote an article and did a podcast on it that I believe pain is the pathway to our growth. And you write in the book that suffering during transitions can create the meaning in life that imposes a sense of stability over our subsequent transitions. Why is that the case? Happiness itself is actually a combination

of three phenomena. It's a combination of enjoyment, satisfaction, and purpose. And we don't find purpose when we're having fun. Purpose comes when we're challenged. Purpose comes from pain. Purpose comes from suffering and sacrifice. That's how we understand our resilience. That's how we get over challenges.

That's how we understand what we really care about. But one of the biggest mistakes that young people make today or anybody makes today is trying assiduously to avoid unhappiness because when you do that, you avoid meaning and you don't get happiness. The best way to not get happy is to fight against unhappiness all the time. That's the reason that every religious tradition from Buddhism to Christianity says that suffering

is sacred. Don't waste your suffering is what it comes down to. And Oprah completely understands this. She's truly one of the most amazing people I've ever met. Everybody thinks they know Oprah Winfrey because she's so famous because she's done so much good in the world. And all yeah, but that's her public persona. It's also her private persona. She's actually that person. She's equilibrated profoundly. She's learned from all these experiences that she has. And that's one of the reasons that she's so privately dedicated

to lifting people up from the margins of society. She has a school in Africa, for people, just under the worst of circumstances, to come to study, to come to the West, to make something of their lives, and to learn and build from the suffering that they've endured like she has, and that we can all do.

That's the book that we're writing together, is what are the steps? How do you do it? One, two, three, four, now apply it to your life. Man, that's amazing. Now, I'm gonna have to get you back on to discuss because that fits exactly what this show is all about. One of the things loved about this book then you also brought up a composer who you feel is one of the ones you love the most, which is Bach. What can we learn from his story? And why did you include him in the book?

So I have a lot of case studies of in the book of people who did it wrong, people who fought against the changes in their life, who wasted the falling tide, who tried to stay on their first curve, and just wound up more and more frustrated, and angry and bitter, and are shaking their fist at the heavens. But there are people who did it right, and it's important to give some best practices as well. And one of the best that I've ever for a met in my readings is my favorite composer, who's a classical musician for so long. Yohan Subashchenbach, who most of the people listening to us have at least heard of if you haven't listened to his music I mean goal is new folks when you finish the podcast goal listen to his B minor mass on Spotify It's gonna change the rest of your day and probably the rest of your life

I mean this was the greatest composer over lived he lived for 65 years 1685 was 1750 he He lived for 65 years, 1685 to 1750. He published more than 1,000 pieces of music and had 20 kids. So this guy was productive. And when Bach was in the middle of his career, he had his slump, just like everybody else. He was the most celebrated innovator of a kind of music called the Hyber Oak.

And it went out of style. It went out of style in no small part because one of his sons, as a composer, ushered in a new style of music called the classical style of music called the classical style of music. And what he did was he retooled his whole career from being a musical innovator into being the greatest teacher of his generation. He walked right from his fluid intelligence curve to his crystallized intelligence curve. And at the same time, he kicked away all the fame he used to

have. He built up the relationships of the people that were the loves in his life, he developed his Christian faith just to the maximum he possibly could. He finished every score with to the greater glory of God. He said at the end of his life, the aim and final end of all music is nothing less than the glorification of God and the refreshment of the soul. I mean, he was yet to go on, man. He was doing everything right. As he died, he was working on a textbook to teach future generations, which is the scenic one on of crystallized excellence. He was in the middle of a manuscript of a textbook.

He said, ah, nobody's ever gonna play this. But maybe somebody's gonna wanna know this. Maybe some student will benefit from this. Today, we play that in concerts. Imagine a textbook in accounting that's so beautiful that you read it as literature. That's what Box Art of Fugue was that he was working on at the end of his life.

He died mid-measure. And his son who had supplanted him, but they were, I mean, they loved each other. They had a perfect relationship, wrote in the margin, at this point, the composer put down his pencil and died. Strong finish. This is the excellence, man.

This is a life of excellence. I mean, absolutely climb that fluid intelligence curve with a white hot passion. And don't stay on it. Walk onto the crystallized intelligence curve in the way that you can share. Go from the me curve to the we curve, where you're actually going to share what you know, to pass on your knowledge, to make excellence around you, thus actually using your excellence in a way that is most productive, filled with love, surrounding yourself with people who appreciate what you can uniquely do, die happy, man. The guy

on the plane, he needed to be more Bach. Well, I'm going gonna bring up another illustration from the book of someone who was the opposite of Bach, and that is Malcolm Forbes. And it's interesting, because one of the first people I ever interviewed on this podcast was an Australian named Trav Bell, who actually has the domain name, the Bucket List guy.

And the Bucket List is something that he brings up as something that he believes people should do. But in chapter four, you use Malcolm Forbes who you illustrate had a saying that he who dies with the most toys win. Why do you disagree with that philosophy and in many ways that of living out the bucket list? So the truth is he who dies with the most toys dies.

And the question is not can you take it with you because you can't. The idea of the bucket list, particularly as you get into the second half of your life or he who dies with the most toys wins. That's something that we in my business called the hedonic treadmill or more. And I'm looking for the thrill of the more, and that can never be satisfied. Now, there's a huge neurophysiological basis for why people do that. Everybody knows these days about the neuro-modulator called dopamine.

Dopamine lies behind all addictive behaviors from alcoholism to gambling, to methamphetamine, to pornography, all the bad stuff that you can ruin your life with is dopamine related. And what happens is that dopamine pumps into your brain as you have the anticipation of reward, it gives you craving. It makes you do things that you really shouldn't do because you crave, you have this anticipation and craving of reward. Again and again, you build up these pathways for workaholics, for success addicts, for a lot of people in our society,

that's all about getting more toys, checking things off the bucket list, the next success, having more, doing more, seeing more prestige, more money, more power, more. And that is just the fast route to complete frustration. Satisfaction is hard, Mick Jagger is saying, I can't get no satisfaction. The truth is, you can't keep no satisfaction. Because of this tendency to reset constantly, that's what we call the hedonic treadmill. You want to make sure that is multiplied to the max and you're ultimately frustrated.

Make sure that you're always thinking about all the wonderful things that you'll have 10 years from now, but you don't have now. You'll never be satisfied. And you'll be less and less satisfied as the years go by. That's why I'm not a fan of that concept. Well, the other interesting thing that he brought up

when I talked to him is it was the first time I heard it, and that was the concept of the reverse bucket list, but he describes it completely differently than you do. The way he uses it is he tells people to go back and start examining their past self and to start jotting down all the accomplishments that they've done along the life that they've had that they thought would have been impossible at the time as a way to give themselves confidence so that they can pursue their bucket list in the future.

You tackle it a completely different way. I take it a different way because the truth is that your satisfaction is not a function of what you have. It's a function of what you have divided by what you want. Now, when we think about it, halves divided by wants means that your satisfaction can go up temporarily by having more, but it can go up much more efficiently

and much more permanently by wanting less. Now, I'm not telling anybody not to be ambitious. The truth is you gotta want the right things. Generally speaking, the things on your bucket list fall in four categories. They're money oriented, they're power oriented, they're pleasure oriented, or their prestige, or admiration oriented. That's the four categories of things that are in the bucket list. I did make that up. St. Thomas Aquinas made that up in the year 1265 and that comes from Aristotle. There's nothing new under the sun basically. The right loves, the right cravings are family, faith, friendship, and work that serves other people.

And only when you clear stuff out with your reverse bucket list, when you have fewer wants, can your satisfaction go up because you're going to be focusing on the not the vicious for but the virtuous for, is what it comes down to. So the reverse bucket list is not to be unambitious, quite the contrary. It's not even to say you're not going to get those nice, worldly things. It's to say that you're not attached to those worldly things. You don't have cravings for those worldly things. You're not going to have so much dopamine about those worldly things. So what I do on my birthday now, on 58, when I was 40,

I was still doing bucket list. I got everything on my bucket list. I was never happy. Now on my birthday, I make my reverse bucket list, which is all my cravings and desires, just like the old days. And I tell myself, I am not attached to this. I am not attached. I make get it. I might not easy come easy go, not attached, not attached. What I I've been when I think about is all the things I really care about the love in my life the faith in my life my Christian faith and literally the most important thing in my life my marriage my adult kids my grandkids they're coming this is the real source of enduring satisfaction and only when I cross the wrong things out do I have space for the right things you these attachments to be like a semi-trailer

in a little parking lot. You can't park any cars in there, you can't use the parking lot. You got to free up those spaces is what it comes down to. Yeah, and this is a great lead-in to where I wanted to go next. And that is I recently had a period years from Harvard, Robert Waldinger on the podcast to discuss his great new book, The Good Life, which is built upon the Harvard study of adult development, which for the audience, if you're not familiar with it, Harvard has been studying adults from a very prosperous population and the opposite for about 80 years now, and it's now extended to their families and their families families. But I wanted to bring this up in the terms of pondering our own death because it's something you bring up in this book, this whole concept of

the fear of decline. And what can we learn from Robert's book about how this fear of decline can be solved? So Bob Oldinger, he's a psychiatrist at Mass General and a professor at the Harvard Medical School. He's also a Zen Buddhist priest and a psychoanalyst. This guy's a total overachiever. And he writes this massive best seller when he's in his 70s. I mean, it's just unbelievable, but it's a teaching book.

So it is a crystallized intelligence book. So that's good. It's not a brand new idea. He's been running this study. He's the third director in 85 years of this study. So it's got incredible longevity, which as you suggest, it follows people starting in the late 1930s and then their spouses, and then their kids. So it's racially diverse, and it's many women, and it's all different ages of people. And it says, what are they doing early in life that predicts being happy late in life? In other words, this is information to put together your happiness 401k plan. That's what it comes down to. What are the investments you need to make to be happier later?

What do you need to do now? Now the good news is 401k plans, the reason people don't do them is they don't want to make a sacrifice when they're young. The happiness 401k plan, according to all the Bob Aldinger's research, is that you can be happier now and it'll make you happier later.

That's the good news. So some of it's pretty obvious. Don't smoke, drink moderately or not at all, exercise in a way that you keep your body moving and don't eat like a maniac. Okay, I mean, it's just basic stuff. No yo-yo diets and craziness. I mean, don't kill yourself nine hours a day in the gym,

walk an hour a day, whatever you want to do. But stay active, eat right. Pretty much stop drinking. It's what it says, The data are pretty clear. And I know a lot of people are like, ah, I hate that guy. Turn that guy off. But drink moderately or not at all. And if you have any alcoholism in your family

or you're worried at all about your drinking, stop now. Because this is the biggest predictor of divorce is drinking, for example, and divorce is a huge predictor of unhappiness. Okay, those are the big four. Then they're the other three. You need a coping style for life's inevitable problems. Don, those are the big four. Then they're the other three. You need a coping style for life's inevitable problems. Don't be a ruminator and don't be the kind of person who has

nobody to talk to. It's very important. Let me say talk to somebody. It sounds like I'm telling you everybody to go to therapy. No, you need to be able to to you need a strategy for dealing with worry. That's number one. And people do it in different ways. Some people meditate, some people pray, some people have a close friend, some people journal, some people go to therapy, some people, there's lots and lots of ways to skin that cat. But you've got to do something because worry will wipe you out. Number two, continuous learning. You should be reading, learning, learning, listening to the passion struck. It be a lifelong learner. And that's the kind of an easy one for everybody listening to us. They wouldn't be listening to this podcast. So they weren't lifelong

learners. And last but not least, here's the number, there's the most important one on a walk is number seven, which is the happiness is love work on your love relationships love of the divine. If you're religious love for your family, do not walk away from family relationships, people do this all the time. One in six Americans is not talking to a family member because of politics, which is idiotic, like times 10. The only reason you should have a schism in family is abuse.

And differences of political opinion don't qualify as abuse. So if you disagree with somebody having been talking because of politics, call today. The third is friendship, critically important friendship. The one that's most correlated with happiness, latent life is a successful marriage. Now, the basis of a successful marriage is not passion, it's not sex, it's friendship.

That's the basis of a really successful marriage. All this stuff comes together saying, take care of your love relationships. If they're broken down, repair them today. This is the most important investment that you can make to get older as you get happier and to die on your happiest day. I love that answer. So thank you for that. And the last question I want to ask you is in the conclusion of the book, you encapsulate all your lessons learned and now strive to live in the following seven words, use things, love people, worship the divine. What is their significance? words, use things, love people, worship the divine. What is their significance? So for a long time, you know, it's interesting because I teach you to business school.

And I noticed that my students, they don't learn as well from best practices as they learn from worst practices. So if you want to teach students something, tell them the story about something going horribly wrong and they will really pay attention. And there's a there's a neuroscience behind this. Actually have a bigger bias toward negative stories because they learn things faster. You learn things from negative impulses much more effectively than from positive because we're evolved to take in negative information to keep us alive. So talk about people making a mistake. Now I teach happiness at the Harvard Business School. So I talk about the perfect formula for being unhappy. Here's the perfect formula for being unhappy.

Love things, use people and worship yourself. That's the formula for unhappiness. It's every single thing that you're doing is wrong. Why? Don't love things because they won't love you back. You'll have an asymmetric relationship. Don't use people because then they won't love you back and they can, but they won't.

And don't worship yourself because it's the worst cult in the world. It's where you're the Messiah. Don't do it. I mean, it's like, I don't even have to explain to anybody that worshiping yourself is boring, it's misguided, it's a mistake. So that actually leads to the best practices, which is just to invert the verbs and nouns. Use things with joy, man. I mean, I'm a capitalist. Let's do it. Enjoy it. But don't love it because if you try to love it,

you'll get on the hedonic treadmill to be unbelievably unsatisfactory. Reserve all of your love for humans, for people, maybe for pets, okay. But basically, love what deserves to be love, which is flesh and blood and a beaten heart and then reserve all of your worship for the divine. Now, I know what it means for me.

I'm a Roman Catholic, like I said before, every day. For other people, it means other things, but you need a sense of the divine and all of your worship should be designed and engaged in and focused on that. This is it, man. Remember three things and three things only, and you'll never go wrong.

Use things, love people, worship the divine. Well, I love it Arthur. And last thing I wanted to ask you is if listener wanted to learn more about you, where's the best place they can go? Then go to my website where we sort of post everything. ArthurBrooks.com, real simple. And you can follow me on social media if you like.

If social media is your groove, it's at ArthurBrooks at Twitter and at ArthurCBrooks over on Instagram. Real simple and you can follow me on social media if you like if social media is your groove and so add our through rucksit twitter and our at our through sea Brooks Over on Instagram, but basically the website you'll find the podcasts and the books and the articles or Thursday morning every Thursday morning you can read column. I write on the science of happiness at the Atlantic calm So go subscribe the Atlantic and you can get a delivery to your inbox Fresh is a loaf of bread on Thursday mornings, and I'm hoping it'll be, it'll lift you up. Well Arthur, thanks so much for coming on the show today.

It was truly an honor to have you. Thank you, John. Thanks for what you're doing. You're doing good things for people. And I know that's a great source of satisfaction for you, but it's a real service to all of us. I thoroughly enjoyed that interview with Arthur Brooks. And I wanted to thank Arthur and Portfolio for giving me the opportunity and honor to have him here on the show today.

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. Videos are on YouTube at John Armiles and PassionStruck Clips. Avertiser deals and discount codes are in one convenient place, at passionstruck.com slash deals. I'm on LinkedIn and you can also find me on Twitter and Instagram

at John Armiles, where I provide daily doses of inspiration. You're about to hear a preview of the PassionStruck Podcast interview that I did with Susan Max Salmond, who is the founder and director of the International Art and Mind Lab Center for Applied Neurosthetics at the Peterson Brain Science Institute of the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine where she is a faculty member in the Department of Neurology.

She's also the co-director of the Neuro Arts Blueprint with Aspen Institute. She's the co-author with Ivy Ross of the new book, Your Brain on Art. Right now, I think the mental health issues that are happening all over the world, especially with young people. The arts offer an opportunity for rebuilding mental resiliency, but also for stronger social and emotional connections. And that's super importantly now. Remember, we rise by lifting others.

So share this show with those that you love. And if you found this episode useful, please share it with somebody else who can use today's advice. In the meantime, do your best to apply what you hear on the show so that you can live what you listen. And until next time, live life action struck. you