Ten Percent Happier with Dan Harris - 419: The Good News About Your Inevitable Decline | Arthur Brooks

Episode Date: February 16, 2022

The unavoidable truth is that our skills change as we get older. We invest so much in our professional success, and then at some point, things change. But there’s good news. While certain abilities and mental capacities erode with age, others get stronger. With some foresight, planning, and good habits, you can make the second half of your life way better than the first.Arthur Brooks is the author of a new book called From Strength to Strength: Finding Success, Happiness, and Deep Purpose in the Second Half of Life. Arthur has seen the themes of this book play out in his own life. He started his career as a classical French horn player, then got his PhD in public policy analysis, and went on to run a think tank called the American Enterprise Institute. He then left that to be a professor at the Harvard Kennedy School and Harvard Business School. He also does work with The Atlantic , where he writes a column and hosts a podcast called How to Build a Happy Life.This episode explores: success addiction, and how to avoid it while still being successful; what it means to “live like Bach;” fluid intelligence vs. crystallized intelligence; what investments we can make now to increase the likelihood of more happiness later; the four most important habits of the happiest people; a workable definition of happiness; and how he feels about his own shifting capacities, having researched the subject for many years.Full Shownotes: https://www.tenpercent.com/podcast-episode/arthur-brooks-419See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

This is the 10% happier podcast. I'm Dan Harris. Hey gang, I'll be honest. When I first started to engage with the subject of today's episode, I found it horrifying. I did not want to look at this. But ultimately, I've come to see this topic as both fascinating and hopeful, largely thanks to the skill and wisdom of today's guest. Today we're talking about your inevitable professional decline, the unavoidable truth that our skills change as we get older. If you're young right now, you might be thinking, well, I don't need to worry about this. But the data show that your mental processing can start to shift way earlier than you might think, like way earlier. My guest today describes this as the strivers

curse. We invest, many of us do so much in our professional success and then poof at some point, things change. There is as I imagine good news here, however, while certain abilities and mental capacities change or erode with age, others get stronger. And with some foresight and planning and good habits, you can make the second half of your life way better than the first. These themes resonate quite strongly with me as somebody who recently bailed on a nearly three-decade career as a TV news reporter and is now whatever you call what it is that I do. They resonate quite deeply as well with my guest today who spent years wrestling with these issues. His name is Arthur Brooks. He's the author of the new book From Strength to Strength, Finding Success, Happiness, and Deep Purpose in the second half of life.

It's out this week. I blurbed it. It's really, really good. Arthur's had a fascinating career. He started as a classical French hornist. Then he got his PhD in public policy analysis and went on to run a think tank called the American Enterprise Institute. After a decade of doing that, he left to be a professor at the Harvard Kennedy School and Harvard Business School.

He also does work with the Atlantic, where he writes a column and hosts a podcast called How to Build a Happy Life. In this conversation, we talked about success addiction and how to avoid it while still being successful. What it means to live like Bach, fluid intelligence versus crystallized intelligence, what investments we can make now to increase the likelihood of happiness later, the four most important habits of the happiest people, a workable definition of happiness, and where Arthur is now vis-a-vis his own shifting capacities, having, as I said earlier, researched this subject

for so many years. We'll get started with Arthur Brooks right after this. Before we jump into today's show, many of us wanna live healthier lives, but keep bumping our heads up against the same obstacles over and over again. But what if there was a different way to relate to this gap between what you wanna do and what you actually do? What if you could find intrinsic motivation

for habit change that will make you happier instead of sending you into a shame spiral? Learn how to form healthy habits without kicking your own ass unnecessarily by taking our healthy habits course over on the 10% happier app. It's taught by the Stanford psychologist, Kelly McGonical, and the great meditation teacher Alexis Santos to access the course. Just download the 10% happier app wherever you get your apps or by visiting 10% calm. All one word spelled out. Okay. On with the show. Hey y'all, it's your girl, Kiki Palmer. I'm an actress, singer, and entrepreneur. I'm a new podcast. Baby, this is Kiki Palmer. I'm asking friends, family, and entrepreneur. On my new podcast, Baby This is Ski-E Palmer. I'm asking friends, family, and experts

the questions that are in my head. Like, it's only fans only bad. Where did memes come from? And where's Tom from MySpace? Listen to Baby This is Ski-E Palmer on Amazon Music or wherever you get your podcast. What's up? What's up?

Arthur Brooks, welcome back to the show. Thank you, Dan. What a delight to be with you now fully in 10% happier world. Are you happier now that you're 100% 10%? As the best math joke. I get a lot of math jokes and that's among, if not the very best. Yes, I am happier. I do really miss my colleagues and the rubbing elbows with said colleagues.

I had so many deep, deep relationships at ABC News for 21 years. So that is hard for me, but really focusing on what it is I want to do with my life or what remains of my life. It's a powerful happiness producer, which does that make sense? It sure does. As a matter of fact, that's exactly what I'm thinking and writing about these days is how people can do what you've done. And I think a wonderful case study and how to design your own life on purpose is to do it exactly as you've done it. It doesn't mean everybody needs to start a podcast and company and becoming happier exactly like you did in terms of a product, but the idea of designing your life such that the back half is dedicated

to our propagating ideas that lift other people up, oil boy, that couldn't be a better example of what I've been writing about these days. Well, I appreciate that. The only words I take objection to are on purpose because much of what I've done feels like just a glorious, messy mistake. Yeah, well, presumably leaving ABC News formally to focus entirely on 10% happier is an entirely

conscious decision in what we in my business call crystallized intelligence, which is to say, dedicating yourself to sharing ideas and instructing others on how they can live their own best lives. Well, let's explore that. And since you've made mention of your recent writings and you dropped one of your terms of art that show up in the book, let's talk about your new book, which I loved. And I found bracing and challenging and scary in all the right ways. I should also add inspiring.

So let's start there. And maybe if you're comfortable, perhaps a good way to begin would be to hear you talk about your personal story. Why did this subject become so urgent for you? Well, did bring the audience more or less up to speed. I'm a professor at Harvard, where I teach classes on happiness. But I haven't been doing that for the past several decades. This is only a few years old. I'm 57 years old. I retired from a CEO job when I was 55. It was a CEO of a big nonprofit, a think tank in Washington, DC. It's been around for many years

since 1938. So it's not on the month of founder or anything, but it's a big organization in the heart of DC. And I ran it for a decade. And in the middle of my time as a nonprofit executive, in the heart of DC in these battles, and it was a very public job, it was a very exciting job, I realized that what I was doing was kind of running on this treadmill, going from big accomplishment to big accomplishment. And I was starting to have this creeping feeling.

And again, I didn't feel unlucky. I was not resentful of anything. I felt super fortunate for having this privileged existence to be sure, but I started having this creeping fear that sooner or later this was gonna have to stop and then what? What does it gonna mean when I have to stop this or when it stops for me or whatever?

And I was always going through this to have this experience this. And I tell this story in the beginning of the book where I was on a plane from L.A. to Washington, which is, you know, my lifestyle. I was doing 100 trips a year, raising money, giving 175 speeches a year. It was a great life, but it was constantly on the road. And it was nighttime on this flight. And I couldn't see because it was dark.

People were watching the movies or sleeping or whatever. And there's a couple behind me on the plane. And I could tell by their voices that it was a man or a woman and that they were elderly. I could tell by the sound of their voices. I just assumed, you know, filling in their biography in my in my imagination that they were a married couple. And I couldn't quite make out the husbands words, but the wife's words were clear as a bell. He would kind of mumble and she would say, oh, don't say it would be better if you were dead. Like, whoa, they have my full attention, right? You know, I was, I didn't mean to even drop, but what are you going to do? And then he goes on, mumble, mumble, mumble,

and I hear her say, it's not true that nobody cares about you and that you're just a husband, you're washed up. And she was consoling him like this for 20 minutes. I'm thinking, who is this guy? He's a guy who's disappointed. You know, he's a guy who's never been ever looked accomplished very much. Because if you accomplish a lot, the world tells you you should be able to dine out on that even when it finishes. So just get the buried treasure, retire, and enjoy it for the rest of your life. But even I was worried about when the party stops. So something's not quite right about that. Anyway, we land in Washington.

The lights go on. I turn around, just to get a look. I'm kind of curious. And it turns out to be one of the most famous men in the world. This is somebody who's universally admired. He's not controversial because of politics or even in business. This is somebody who's done amazing things with his life

and is loved by millions and admired by millions and millions of people. And I thought to myself, if I had done what this man has done, which I won't, which I'm incapable of, I would be incredibly satisfied with my life. And yet I heard what he was confessing to his wife. And as we were leaving the plane, the pilot stops him and said, recognize him and said, sir, you've been my hero since I was a little boy. And he was beaming with pride.

And I thought, which is the real hero. This one or the one 20 minutes ago and I thought this is not right because increasingly I'm finding that people are afraid as their life changes, they're afraid as their skills and their abilities change that they're not in charge of what they're going to do with latter parts of their life and as a result the more that people tend to strive, the more they tend to achieve, it's too frequently the case that the more disappointed they are when the party stops. And I want to solve that for me, and I want to solve that for others, and I went on an eight-year, I mean, I'm a social scientist.

I'm a PhD social scientist, so I should be able to take on this task. But unfortunately, that's like taking out your own appendix if you're a surgeon. So it was a little tricky, but after eight years I think I've actually cracked the code why it is That it's so hard for people to change why they're so afraid why skills change and what exactly that we can do So the second half of our life is happier than the first half That was a brilliant setup and I have so many questions about what you learned. Let me just ask a foundational question. Are these lessons that you've learned for everyone?

What if you haven't achieved great things in the eyes of society? Nobody's stopping you on a plane to say they've admired you since you were four. What if you had an anonymous life but you still took pride in what you did? It turns out to be the same because what the evidence shows is that our skills change, we work very hard in our lives, whether we're working in relative anonymity or whether we have great unbelievable technical

or success like the guy in the plane. We're working hard to do something with our lives and the degree to which we can achieve those things for which we've worked changes. It looks like it's getting worse, but the truth of the matter is it's just changing from one set of skills and abilities to another set of skills and abilities. And if we don't recognize that, it doesn't matter if we're beavering away and there's only 10 people who recognize that we've been trying to do with a lot of our lives or if we're world famous.

We're going to be afraid and we're going to be bitter and we're going to be resentful unless we actually understand what's going on and know how to use it. What is the strivers curse? The strivers curse is the people who work really hard for their lives. They will achieve those things. I mean, there's a ton of research out there that shows that the old axiom, be careful what you wish for, is right because, you know, for example, there's a very interesting study on college graduates who was undertaken about a decade ago at the University of Rochester, where they were asked what their goals were and the researchers followed up some years later to see whether or not they had their goals and how happy they

were. And they found that about half of the students had what they call extrinsic goals, money, power, fame, and half of an intrinsic goals, which basically love relationships. And everybody hit their goals. The kids who wanted to go on and have more money and power and prestige in their careers, they got it, they were doing better than their colleagues in those worldly terms.

And those who wanted to have better relationships and deeper relationships, they had those two. So careful what you wish for because the truth of the matter is you're gonna hit something like your goals. The more that you strive, the more that you struggle, the more that you try to do amazing things. When it tends to turn around in midlife

and working harder is not working for you anymore, you're gonna notice it more of your striver. I mean, look, if you don't really try very hard to do very much, you're not going to notice when your skills wane, quite frankly, but if you do a lot, whether you're anonymous or your public, you're going to know that you've done a lot, that you've used your skills to the max, that you've driven to be kind of extraordinary. And when it gets harder to do those things things because not because you're going into decline, but because your skills are changing, you're going to see a big difference. The more you do, the more you strive, the bigger the contrast. And that contrast itself is kind of a curse.

So is it inevitable? I mean, I know the answer to this because I read the book, but this is a scary thing for a lot of people. Certainly scary for me. Is it inevitable that our skills are going to, I might say, decline, but I think you would say change? So the answer is yes. And there are very, very strong cognitive or neuroscientific reasons why certain things get harder and other things get easier as we go through life. Now, this goes entirely against all of the learning companies and executive coaches and self-development

experts who say 10,000 hours and you'll become a master and you'll master these things from life. The truth of the matter is that the structure of the brain and the functioning of the mind are such that we're really, really good at certain things early in life and we're good at different things later in life. And the result of that is that anybody who's, especially those who are working with their brains, which is almost everybody who's listening to us right now, has some basis for using knowledge and using cognitive horsepower in their work, using their mind of brains a lot in the course

of their work, they're going to see certain things decline. And if they're not paying attention, they're not going to see other things actually getting easier. So I've looked and I document this because I have to prove this point in the book. I go through a whole bunch of different professions. I go through medicine. I go through law. I go through data science. I go through teaching. I go through academia. I go through all of these different things. And I show that people have a tendency to be really, really good at solving problems and innovating, really sort of raw smarts, getting better at what they do, thinking through things really quickly, solving problems quickly when they're younger. And that just gets harder, generally speaking,

from mid-30s to about 50. And then after that point, they get much, much better at telling stories, at teaching, at putting ideas together. But if they want to just use what made them good early on for the rest of their lives, they're going to be really, really frustrated. And they're just going to feel like they've gone into the client. And that's a pity because it was what they have later on. But to answer your question, yeah, it's ubiquitous. This is just the structure of how things work. You're really, really good at innovation and Ross Martz and solving problems quickly when you're younger, and you're much,

much better at putting ideas together and explaining to the people as you age. And is this true across every profession? Like, for example, what's coming to my right now is rock music. Very few rock musicians stay good past. I mean, you could say early 30s, but, you know, maybe a few are doing good stuff at 40, 50, whatever, but maybe Paul McCartney's had a good song or two, in my opinion, in the last 20 years, and then he's arguably the greatest rock song writer of all time. Yeah. Sorry, Sir Paul, you may disagree with my math there. I mean, I listen to a lot of rock music, and I just see time. and again, they burn hot and quick. Yeah.

And that's has everything to do with the first, first is the second strength, the curve that we have. The first curve in your first strength is called fluid intelligence. And that's innovation, your ability to come up with brand new ideas quickly. That's the reason that it's easier to write songs when you're younger. That's the reason that Paul McCartney did more inventive work more quickly with greater volume when he was younger, when he was with the Beatles, and slightly thereafter. And that's why it's harder for people to come up with that later, because that curve goes cringing downward in the late 30s and through the 40s. And by the way, Dan, this is all of us. I mean, when I was in my early 30s,

I was writing these academic papers at a level of mathematical complexity that literally I have a hard time understanding my own math now. A couple of decades, I read my papers from my early 30s, I'm like, wow, that guy was really smart. Who is that guy? Oh, wait, that's my paper. And I could come up with this stuff

and I could crank through this research. Now, that's the bad news. The good news is there's an other curve that lies behind it which is not the ability for Paul McCartney to write brand new songs but would be his ability to understand how different kinds of music relate to one another to describe what the music is to be a David Attenborough type character to talk about how all things fit together. So David Attenborough is a kind of guy who was a much more adroit scientist with new ideas early on in his career.

And he's much better at actually talking about how all the ideas come together for a world that has greater harmony, a world that is more sustainable because he has a broader sweep of all these things. And he's a much better teacher later on. Those abilities are really low in your 20s and even 30s. They start growing in your 40s and even 30s. They started growing in your 40s to synthesize ideas, to talk about the broad sweep and to describe them as a

good teacher through your 50s. They're really strong and they stay strong through your 60s and 70s and even your 80s is the bottom line. So, be an innovator when you're young, be an instructor when you're old. So just to hang a lantern on this, the first curve is lightning in a bottle, innovation, ideation. Second curve is synthesizing, seeing the connection among ideas and explaining slash teaching. Yeah. So if you think about it, the people who are listening to us right now, and let's say some are in college, and you're going to come out of college, and you're going to go to interview for a job.

Let's say you go to interview for a consulting company. And the consulting company in the interview is going to give you a weird question. The weird question is going to be, why are manhole covers round? Or how many pennies would you have to stack on top of each other to reach to the top of the Empire State Building? What they want is your ability to solve a problem lightning quick. Now, and if you've got, you know, a good education and a lot of brain power, you'll be able to answer that. And if you answer it well enough, they're going to hire you. Why? Because of this thing called fluid intelligence, which they need to have an abundance. What they're not going to ask you is, what's a really, really interesting and novel question?

In other words, you're really good at finding answers when you're young. You're really good at figuring out the right questions when you're older. And then, by the way, go out and hire a young hot shot who's gonna answer those particular questions because it requires a different kind of credibility. The first is fluid intelligence,

the second is crystallized intelligence. The CEO is the one who's a good judge of the people with fluid intelligence and tasks them in the right way, puts them together in good teams and explains to them the importance of the tasks that they're trying to execute. That's somebody who's a really, really good leader

in life actually matures into that second position as opposed to trying to solve all those goofy problems. Are there fields where actually you tend to get better with age? Any fields where age is an asset? Absolutely. Those are the fields where crystallized intelligence is actually most prized. So for example, if I say, hey, Dan, tell me what pops into your head when I say poet, what do you think? T.S. Eliot. T.S. Eliot. Okay. Now T.S. Eliot lived to his Indus 80s. And T.S. Eliot actually wrote his most famous and arguably his best poetry when he was

in his 20s. And the truth of the matter is that poets use fluid intelligence by inventing stuff with language. And they do, on average, half of their work by about age 40 and the better half in the first half of their work. So when the age 40, half of your work is done in the better half of that. Now Dan, when I say, think of what who pops into your head when I say historian, think of somebody. McCullough? McCullough is in his 80s. He's doing his best work in his 80s.

How the heck is that possible? Is he some sort of freak? The answer is no. He's not trying to invent new concepts. He has to know everything in the world and figure out how everything relates to everything else to tell a story that makes sense. History is a perfect field of crystallized intelligence. It's like having a vast library and how to use it.

Now nobody's saying that David McCullough solved history problems fast. Now, who knows how long it takes him to write a book. He has to send his little librarian to the back of the stacks and his little librarian might stop and have a smoke or cup of coffee or something. But sooner or later he's going to come back from the vast stacks with this material and it's going to all relate to each other in a particular way. Lightning quickness is not a premium. And so something that requires that you know a lot

and know how to use the facts like history, you're gonna get better and better and better. And by the way, the data show that for historians, half of your life's work is done at age 67, and the better half is the second half. So if you're a historian, you better take care of your health and you're better not smoke because you have to be ready to write your best books when you're 85. So Amanda Gorman should enjoy her poetry prowess

now and perhaps switch over to history at age 40. That's exactly right, Dan. That's exactly right. Be a poet in the first half, be a historian in the second half, be a startup innovator in the first half, be a professor in the second half. Come up with the big ideas on how to break stories that ABC News in the first half and run 10% happier in the second half. Yeah. Well, I mean, I was reading the book

and I was thinking, I'm in the middle of writing my own book. And I don't know if it's any good, but I'd like to think it's maybe better than the first one I wrote, maybe, but then I was reading your book. And I was like, well, is that a mathematical impossibility since I just turned 50, et cetera, et cetera, but maybe since what I'm doing in the book

is hopefully not only storytelling, but also explanation of important ideas. Maybe I'm on the second curve with this project. Oh my goodness, I think you are. I really think you are. And part of the reason I know this is because I've been on your show before and you've been on mine and I'm a consumer of your work. And you're not inventing meditation.

Come on. The Buddha was talking about these ideas 2,500 years ago. What you're doing is you're bringing to audiences the varieties of ancient wisdom in a way that they can understand it. You are a professor. That's what you're trying to do. And this is something that favors crystallized intelligence. There's no reason you can't be doing this even better than now 20 years from now. You mentioned meditation. Do you think that the aging brain is gonna be better at meditation than a younger person?

So generally speaking, the answer is yes. And a lot of people find that they get much better at meditation as they age and they think it's because they have more practice. But the truth is that the aging brain favors that kind of thinking and that sort of concentration a little bit better than the young brain. So there's a lot of ways to think about it.

The Buddhist always talk about the monkey mind. Where your mind is like a monkey jumping from tree to tree and it wants to see lots of tasty fruit, it gives it potentiality, and I want to be able to get that fruit. And it can't stay constant. This is the reason that young people, for example, they tend to spend a big percentage of their time doing what neuroscientists call prospection. That's thinking about the future. Whereas older people are much better at mindfulness. They're just better at it because the monkey mind has

largely been tamed. Partly, if you're a practitioner of meditation, which I recommend that everybody consider at least, that they get better at it. But part of it is because the monkey has the tendency to be a little calmer as the mind as the brain goes from tendency to be a little bit calmer as the mind, as the brain, goes from fluid to crystallized intelligence. Coming up, Barthor is gonna talk about the dangers of success, addiction, and how to avoid it while still being successful.

He'll also explain what it means to live like Bach, that and more right after this. Hey, I'm Aresha, and I'm Brooke. And we're the hosts of Wundery's podcast, Even the Rich, where we bring you absolutely true and absolutely shocking stories about the most famous families and biggest celebrities the world has ever seen. Our newest series is all about drag icon RuPaul Charles. After a childhood of being ignored by his absentee father, Rue goes out searching for love and acceptance.

But the road to success is a rocky one. Substance abuse and mental health struggles threaten to veer Rue off course. In our series Rue Paul Bornnaked, we'll show you how Rue Paul overcame his demons and carved out a place for himself as one of the world's top entertainers, opening the doors for aspiring queens everywhere. Follow even the rich wherever you get your podcasts. You can listen ad-free on Amazon Music or the Wondery app. Oh, I want to go through a bunch of concepts from your book.

So I'll just throw these out and let you hold forth. Success, addiction. As a behavioral social scientist, I'm really interested in the phenomenon of addiction. And addiction comes in a lot of different forms, of course, and there's a lot of interesting books about this. Annel M. Key out of Stanford has a great new book about dopamine. And dopamine is the neurotransmitter that everybody's familiar with. It was a real novel concept 10 years ago, but everybody's familiar with dopamine, these days. It's the neurotransmitter of desire. It lays down tracks in your brain.

So you do something, gives you a reward. Dopamine actually gives you a little spritz of joy and anticipation when you think about doing that thing a second time and a third time and a millionth time in the case of smoking cigarettes or drinking if you have an alcohol use problem. So dopamine lies behind all these different addictions, but it's not just chemicals. It's also behaviors. One of the things that we find is that habit-forming behavior will implicate this problem. So dopamine lies behind all these different addictions, but it's not just chemicals. It's also behaviors. One of the things that we find is that habit-forming behavior will implicate the same neural pathways as the best of drugs and alcohol. And one of these

things that's going to be just going after all the time, a lot of people were listening to us right now, because these are people listening to us right now. You all know who you are. You want to make the most of your life. Congratulations. I think that's not just lot of well. I think it's admirable and it's really important. The trouble is if you gear your sense of personal success to worldly achievements one after the other, you're exposing yourself to a dopamine problem where you get a little hit of dopamine every time you make the goal every time that you're successful. And that gives you a success addiction where you see yourself as homo economicists where

you see yourself as somebody who just goes from worldly success to worldly success. And you're not happy unless you're hitting that success over and over. You're hitting the lever. I mean, there were these primate studies from the 50s where monkeys were allowed to self administer cocaine with a little lever and these are unethical experiments by today's standards. But they were just sitting there cage and hit the dopamine lever and not eat or drink or sleep and die. And I know success addicts that are kind of like the cocaine monkeys were giving the

next hit, giving the next hit, giving the next hit. And this is one of the big problems that I see with my students at Harvard. They're already success addicts. They're going to become workaholics, which is derivative to that. They're going to objectify themselves as less than fully human. They will starve themselves of meaningful relationships. And it's an addiction, a tyranny, every bit is bad as alcoholism. picking up what you just said, are there the podcast or jocelyn kay gly who has been

on the show poses a very interesting and challenging question, which is, who are you before the doing? And is there any worth to you, any value to you? That's the way I take her question without all of your activity. In other words, it is the you're looking for proof of your own existence and worth by the things that you're doing as opposed to the person you are being. And being and doing, that's a really interesting dichotomy. It's an interesting philosophical, theological, and psychological dichotomy, right? I mean, it's, can you be worth anything when you're not actually doing something? And that's sort of the nature of workaholism, by the way.

There's a huge literature on workaholism. It was coined by the psychologist and the 60s named Wayne Oats. He was a clinical psychologist, not a research guy, but he found that he was so obsessed with his work and so busy and his identity was so tied up with his work to get to the being doing the economy. Then his son, his eight year old son who desperately needed to talk to him about something, some crisis on the playground at school

or with bullies or something, had to make an appointment with his father's secretary to actually get into his office and talk to his father. And he felt so horrible about that that he coined the term for this melody that he saw among him and his colleagues and friends. And a lot of us today, who can't find ourselves apart from the evidence of doing something. So it's like look busy to yourself all the time and then you'll have some sense of your own self worth. I don't think it's wrong. Maybe I'm saying this a little defensively. I don't think it's wrong to want to be successful. How can you go about being

successful without getting addicted to this success. The big part is not focusing on the what, but rather on the why. This is a huge distinction that we have. It says important as being versus doing is the why versus the what. And our mutual friend Simon Sinek talks about this. The Simon Sinek has this really famous book called Start With Why. In which he observes that people with, you know, lead organizations, for example, but more importantly, people who are trying to be in charge of their own life, they really don't have an answer

to the why do you do what you do, but they have abundant evidence on the what part. So I've lived a lot in Washington, DC. I live in Boston now, but in Washington, DC, you go to a party and nobody asks you anything about the why of your life. It's all what do you do? And the reason is because there's a city run on power. In New York, it's a city run on money. And LA, it's a city run on fame.

And it's all what, what, what, what, what? Which is the self-objectification par excellence. But what would happen if somebody said, you know, they know what you do. You run this company. Number 7, happier. And you were a newsman for a really, really long time, your journalist. And they didn't say what, because that's self-evident. They said, why do you do that?

And if you had to answer that concisely and compellingly, and you were a true believer in the why per se, then being successful is all good if it's for the why, and this has been a huge impact on me in my life. And I write about this a lot in the book, is actually how to find your why personally. But had a huge impact on me because we talked about music a minute ago, I made my living as a musician for a long time for the first 12 years of my career. I mean, I didn't go to college until I was 30. My parents called my 20s my gap decade. So,

so any of our listeners were like, my parents aren't so sure. Well, my parents really weren't sure. Right. So and when I was making my living as a musician, I was a classical musician. I was in the Barcelona Symphony a lot of it. And my favorite composer was a guy named Johann Sebastian Bach, most of our listeners have heard of Bach. And he was asked near the end of his life, why do you write music?

Not what's your compositional process or some structural question like that. Why do you write music? And he said immediately, it was a biographer. The biographer's been lost to history, but the quote is famous. He said, the aim and final end of all music

is nothing less than the refreshment of the soul and the glorification of God. And I have to myself, man, I wish I could answer the why of my life like that. And I went in search of something that made it more possible. I literally left music and became a social scientist because I wanted to have a better why. Now, I worked really, really hard, you know, and it's like I suffered through a PhD and sort of climbing the ranks of this and that. And sometimes it was for bad reasons and I got myself into a fix that actually stimulated this book.

But I have a pretty good sense of my why and that makes me feel a little bit better about the fact that my success is for a why that's supposed to refresh other people and serve other people as opposed to simply being the scorecard. Does that make sense? Yeah, it does. How would you describe your why right now

out of curiosity? My why is to lift people up and bring them together. That's my why. To lift people up and there are a lot of people who are suffering my entire business these days. I teach happiness at the Harvard Business School. I mean, people say you teach at the Harvard Business School, but you teach marketing, finance, accounting,

and so you know I teach happiness. And the reason I do that is because this is one of the core skills that I find that our graduates really need the most to be competent in the business and understanding of their own happiness. And as part of that, I've looked forward in their careers. This book that we're talking about right now is supposed to be a crystal ball. What are the investments that you can make at 25 and 35, or by the way, even 65, to give

you not just a fighting chance, but an overwhelming likelihood of being happier when you're 75. This is all part of this endeavor to make people better in charge of their own happiness in the same way that you're doing it. I'm doing it a slightly more social sciencey and neuroscientific way because we need lots and lots of cooks in the kitchen here. And in so doing, I think I'm able to live more like Bach, quite frankly. I mean, I was a musician and I didn't feel like I was living like Bach. And now I'm lifting people up and bringing them together.

I feel like I'm refreshing people a little bit more. I feel like I'm glorifying the purpose of my life. So what can people do now at whatever age, they find themselves to make sure that the latter half of their life is more successful, again, not in the traditional meaning of success, but in the deeper meaning. So this is one of the, of course, the big topics of the current book. It's predicated on this idea that number one, you're going to change and giving yourself permission to change and

not freaking out about change and not regretting change is really critical. And then the book is really structured into the things that hold you back and the things that you need to do. So the things that you need to do department are number one, you need to be serious about getting on a metaphysical journey. Because the greatest adventure of life is that in which you're understanding the things that are bigger than you. This is something that they don't teach you in school. They actually discourage you actively from thinking about something that's bigger than yourself. But one of the biggest sources of frustration that people have, and they don't actually know why they're so frustrated, is that they're just bored. Even if they're busy, even if they're successful,

they're just so bored, and the reason is because only focusing on your own little narrow existence is like watching the same episode of the same show on Netflix every single day, obsessively. My job, my car, myively, my job, my car, my friends, my possessions, my relationships, my schedule, Dan, it's just so boring and getting a zoom out view of that,

which you can do with your meditation practice, which you can do with the study of stoic philosophy, which you can do with traditional religions is critically important, so that's one. Number two is getting your relationships on point. I can't tell you the number of people that I've met who are stuck in the what questions, who have neglected the fact that why is all about

love and relationships in our lives? The truth is that there are really, if you boil the ocean of all the studies on the habits of the happiest people, they boil down to four. Faith, family, friends, and work to serve others. Those are the big four. And if you don't put an investment in each one

of those portfolios, you're gonna be missing out on a good deal of the happiness that could come to you. Now, what do they all have in common? And when I say faith, I don't mean necessarily a traditional faith. I just mean an abiding interest in love in the transcendental, which I talked about a minute ago. But what all these things have in common is love.

There's a 80 year longitudinal study that we've run at a Harvard University called the Harvard Study of Adult Development. That's been following people that were graduating from Harvard College in the late 1930s and early 40s and matched up with people who didn't go to college. So it's demographically representative, more or less the population. And it looks at what's the biggest predictor of people being happy and well

when they're in their late 70s. And the answer is love, full stop. If you're neglecting your relationships, if you have deal friends, but no real friends, for example, if you're not serious about getting the partnership in your life that's at the center of your emotional life together and making the investments in that. If you're not dealing with your family in a way where these ties bind and they don't break, notwithstanding how terrible people are at Thanksgiving, you're just going to miss

out on the happiness. And so that it really comes down to these relationships that you need to build and foster and cultivate over the rest of your life. That's two. And there are others. There's a whole bunch in the book, but those are the biggies. I really, to use the load of term love, the way you're talking about love, as a skill, as something you can dedicate time and energy towards and cultivate in many areas of your life. Right. Oh, absolutely. I mean, this is the interesting thing that St. Thomas Aquinas, you know, the 13th century, the 13th, 14th centuries, Saint, he really brought Aristotle to the interest and attention of modern audiences. The reason that we all read Aristotle today, or at least no Aristotle today is because of St. Thomas Aquinas. And he wrote about love and he

called it to will the good of the other. He didn't talk about feelings at all. You know, we're very, very stuck in modern life about thinking about love as if it were a feeling. It's like, so why did you two break up? That we didn't feel it. Oh, that's the worst reason ever because the love is to will the good of another person. Martin Luther King, one time, he was giving a great sermon. November 17th, 1957 in Montgomery, Alabama's matter of fact. I've read it several times. And he said, love is not an act of feeling. He said, to like is a sentimental something.

He was a great orator. It's a sentimental something, but to love that requires strength, that requires commitment, that requires a decision. That's why Jesus said to love your enemies. Guess what? You don't feel love toward your enemies. Love them anyway. That's the bottom line. And when you're not having a good day with your spouse

or your partner, love her anyway. Hey, look, can you just said something to me one time down that really had a pretty interesting impact on me. You were on my show last summer. And we were recording this interview and you said that mindfulness as practice through meditation gave you the ability kind of to look into the future and say, is what I'm about to do impulsively

and reactively going to wreck the next 48 hours of my marriage? I thought that was a really interesting thing because in so doing it becoming mindful of your relationship, you're taking love and making it into an act of commitment and will. That was such a strong thing to say. By the way, I can't tell you how many fights you saved in my own marriage by that. I want to amplify something there that because the word love, which I think we should stick with, but we should do so with

full knowledge that it's a tricky word for people because we're in a culture where people use the same word to describe their feelings about their children, their spouse, and chocolate. So it's a tricky word, but I think actually we should take advantage of that and just start to think about love in a more capacious way as everything north of neutral. And so when you say love your enemy, that doesn't mean you need to hug some politician from the opposing party or invite that person over for dinner, et cetera, et cetera. Just means that you can have this mammalian capacity that we all have to give a crap. Yeah. Any of the foregoing makes sense. Remember to love us to give a crap. Yeah. Does any of the foregoing make sense?

Remember, to love is to will the good. Now, you don't have to kiss somebody on the lips to will the good. And I recommend in many cases that you stay within the bounds of appropriateness and not do that for people that you are actively choosing to love. And for the more, to will the good, once again, is the decision that we actually make. So lots and lots of ways to express that in a way that's productive, express that in a way that's helpful, and that's appropriate to the particular person at hand.

But also to remember that to love requires that you will the good of another being. And that's really, really critical. And that gets to the point that you made where we will use the term very loosely for our kids or our wife or spouse or partner or chocolate or our car. Here's the basic way to think about it. The world and the reason this is confusing is that the world sends us very confusing signals about how we're supposed to treat different entities in our lives. If you want the formula, the Madison Avenue, and the entertainment industry,

and a lot of our culture, especially, your social media culture sends us for a happy life. It says you gotta do three things. You have to love things like money, power, pleasure, fame, stuff, possessions, et cetera. You need to use people, because people are there for kind of your disposal, and you need to worship yourself. I mean that's sort of the Instagram

scene of quinon of excellence is use people love things worship yourself. The truth of the matter is according to every philosophical tradition, every religious tradition, and common sense, just ask your grandma, you don't need to actually change the nouns, you just need to switch up the verbs. The right formula is to use things. Nothing wrong with using things. Great, get a car, enjoy the car, use the car. Enjoyment is a form of use. It's a form of pleasure from use. But don't love your car. Love is relegated to people. So use things, love people, and only worship the divine. That's it. Now, I'm not going to tell you what that means in that last category because that's a personal

exploration that requires for many people a lifelong journey to be sure. But the first two categories couldn't be clearer. Only use things only love people and to love them means to will are good. And I would add, you should include in the category of people yourself. No, yeah. I don't mean worship yourself. I don't think loving yourself means posting 75 selfies a day. What I think is loving yourself just means including yourself in the give a crap category. And you love your child.

That doesn't mean, or if you have a child you probably love that child That doesn't mean endless indulgence It just means you want the best for them and sometimes that is a little tough love Yeah, for sure and again When there's any person whether it's yourself or somebody else if you're using them or worshipping them that's Disordered as a disordered relationship with yourself or anybody else that's disordered. It's a disordered relationship with yourself or anybody else. You're exactly right that the best evidence

that you're worshiping yourself is if you are constantly thinking about yourself and posting your pictures of yourself on social media. That's a disordered form, but using yourself only as a vehicle for immediate pleasure by misusing drugs and alcohol, that's not worship that's used, and once again, that's really disordered.

So to will your own good requires a certain kind of, and not self-care, it also requires that you care for others indeed, but it requires that you treat yourself in a particular way, a particularly sanctified way, because you are just, you are basically another person. And that requires a certain standard of care and treatment. I wanna go back to some of the specifics of the book in a second, but there are a few

things you said earlier that I want to loop back to. You talked about teaching happiness. And it's just the question came up in my mind, how do you define happiness? So, yeah, the problem with happiness is it's a highly diffuse term. It's kind of like food. What's food? Well, everything I eat, well, not necessarily. Some people will eat things that are non-food items, which is actually some categories of

mental illness for one of that symptoms is actually consuming non-food items. It sort of means something till you think about it, you don't quite know what it means. So how would you define food? One way is to look at this macronutrients. Food is something that's made up of one or more macronutrients, which are protein, carbohydrates, and fat. All of food can be categorized along those ways. You can categorize it other ways too, like dishes, and ingredients, etc. But that's the one way to start. Same thing is true for happiness. Happiness is a phenomenon that's made up of three core macronutrients that you need to have in balance and

abundance for you to actually have happiness. They are enjoyment, satisfaction, and purpose. Now, it obviously, there's a lot there. There's a lot to unpack in that. Enjoinment is not pleasure. It's different than pleasure. Satisfaction is a really hard thing to attain, and almost an impossible thing to actually maintain. And purpose is the most paradoxical of all because it actually requires pain and sacrifice and suffering. So in all of those things, I could teach an entire class in each one of those categories. But the point is when I meet somebody who is not happy, who has insufficient happiness, the first thing I do is I grill down to see where they are macronutrient poor.

And I always find the same thing. I mean, I'll find people who are really, really good at enjoyment, but their life is just directionless. Or they're good at actually getting momentary satisfaction, but they're sitting on this treadmill of just simply trying to, as success addicts, trying to hit the lever over and over and over again. And they don't enjoy it very much,

and they don't have very much meaning. Or they're super stoic. I have students like this who are unbelievably stoic, and they have a lot of purpose in their lives, but they don't enjoy themselves. And so this is what we need to remember. You need to be thinking about and becoming an expert in and practicing as well as sharing the ideas behind enjoyment, satisfaction, and purpose if you want to be a happy person. Love that. That's useful because this is such a, I wrote a book called 10% Appier and it's hard for me to define the word and that was better than I could do. It is tough. It is tough for sure. It's interesting because you know, as somebody who teaches

this at a nice university, I'm unhappy a lot of the time. I mean, I'm not above average in happiness. I mean, one of the reasons I study happiness is because it's, you know, it's me search, not research. Having these tools, however, is incredibly useful because when I'm having really a tough time of it, I gotta go through and say, I gotta rebalance my diet because I'm insufficient and one or more of these macronutrients,

and it always works. Speaking of you, one of the other things I'm my list to go back to from your earlier utterances was this notion of finding your why. How did you find your why and how do you recommend other people find their why? So yeah, this is a great question and a lot of young people ask me this because they think that their why is going to be presented to them. And you and I know the answer to this because we're both very interested in meditative practices

and the whole idea of discernment. But the world tells you that if you work really hard, go to a good school that you're going to figure out what you're interested in. So a lot of people will go through high school and they'll play their sports and they'll have their service project because they want to get into Princeton. And then they get into Princeton and they know that by the time they graduate from Princeton, that they'll know what they're interested in, which is what they think they're why is going to be. And then they get out of Princeton and they still don't know what they're interested in, which is what they think their why is going to be. And then they get out of Princeton,

and they still don't know what they want to do. So they take a job and it's kind of okay, but just kind of make it a living. And then they say, I guess I should go to graduate school because then I'll find out my why. I'll figure out what I want. And they don't, and it's still really frustrating. And I sometimes get them in the last semester

of the second year of their MBA program at Harvard, and it's like, I don't know what I want to do. I mean, I have a bunch of opportunities, but I don't really know what I want to do. That's a question of discernment and discernment only comes from doing the work by yourself. That's it. Now, there's a whole bunch of practices and that there's Buddhist practices of discernment. There's Catholic practices of discernment. But here's what it all boils down to.

It's annoyingly simple. You actually have to make it your purpose to listen to yourself and be thinking about that specific question every day. One of the reasons that I recommend that people have a practice of meditation or prayer is because they need time to actually be in a process of discernment. You know, it's a weirdest thing that young people know everything in the world except the nature of their own desire. The one thing that they don't know often is what they actually want and whether or not what they

want is what they should want as far as they're concerned. And that's a different issue in all of itself. So do the work. When I talk to people, I'm a Catholic and we have a traditions of prayer in the Catholic church. And when I talk to a young Catholic, I'll say, spend the time in your knees. You need 15 minutes a day for three months, where you're praying about asking for the nature of your own desire. If you're doing meditation, which I also have practiced for many years, you need to actually meditate on the nature of desire. So you can actually figure this out.

That's how you figure out your why by doing the work not by pretending that the why will be Presented to you on some sort of golden platter by the outside world which exists to serve you in some way which it of course does not Coming up Arthur presents an actionable equation for increasing one of the three key pillars of happiness Satisfaction also I'm gonna tell a story about my own mother, one of the most successful people I've ever met, and how she has adapted with astonishing success to use a loaded term to the stage of life in which she finds herself right now.

So that's coming up after this. A few other and actually quite a long list here of intriguing notions from your book. So in no particular order here, there is a phrase you use, satisfaction is what you have divided by what you want. And it raises the question that I've wrestled with a lot and continue to wrestle with, which is what is enough? Same or please? Yeah. And the world's formula for satisfaction. And satisfaction is the joy you get for attaining a reward. That's how satisfaction works. And I want to get that job. I get that job. I get joy. I want to make some more money. I make some more money. It gives me some joy. I want to get an A on the exam. I get an A on the exam. It gives me

joy. That's satisfaction. The problem is not as Mick Jagger articulated that I can't get no satisfaction. Yes, you can. The problem is you can't keep no satisfaction. And there's a biological basis for that. The biological basis for that is a complicated concept with a simple meaning. By the way, this is how we academics get ten years by taking a simple idea and putting a complicated word around it.

It's called homeostasis. Homeostasis is the biological inability to stay out of equilibrium. So your heart, you get off the treadmill in the morning, if you're doing your cardiovascular exercise, and within a few minutes, your heart goes back to its baseline. If it didn't, you'd be dead in a week. The same thing is true with your emotions. When you feel something, some elation, or for that matter, you're really bummed out. You don't maintain that because you need to go back to a baseline, so you're ready for the next set of circumstances. Your biology is wired for dissatisfaction, and life is kind of a,

if you let it, can be a process of dissatisfaction punctuated by this particular satisfaction. And if somebody's listening and saying, how is it possible that the state of nature is something that's dissatisfying or even unhappy? And the answer to that is that Mother Nature does not care if you're happy. Mother Nature wants you to propagate the species by being as successful as possible, by running, running, running from one thing to another, having more, you know, flint arrowheads and animal skins in your caves so you can have more kids. That's what Mother Nature wants. She doesn't care if you're happy. That's your business, basically. Your brain tells you, your mind tells you that you will be satisfied long term. You'll finally be happy and stay happy if you get what you want. So if you have more, this is the idea, this hair-brained idea called a bucket list,

where people on their birthday will write out their list of cravings and desires. Sticky cravings says the word dukkha in Sanskrit which is suffering which really means sticky cravings of dissatisfaction. That's what you're doing with your bucket list and the result is that your satisfaction is actually falling when you're looking at those cravings. So I had you defeat that and the answers by remembering the satisfaction is not a function of what you have. It's a function of what you have divided by what you want. The want is in the denominator of the satisfaction equation. And what that means is that having more will give you brief satisfaction is true.

But wanting less will also bring you more satisfaction and in a more enduring way at that. If you don't have a wants management strategy, your wants will sprawl like the suburbs of Atlanta. You know, I have this friend who, he's a private equity pioneer, he's super successful and he said when he was in his 20s that he was going to know he was successfully going to a Mercedes dealership and buy a car and cash.

And he was able to do that at 32. He goes in, he was super successful. He goes in, he planks down his cash. And he says, I want my Mercedes and they give it to him. And as he's driving it off a lot, he said, I should have waited a couple more months and gotten the Ferrari. Okay, so that's his wants are sprawling.

It's a disaster. He had a haves management strategy and not I want management strategy. So the way to deal with this for everybody listening to us is on your birthday, right out your bucket list, and then throw stuff out of your bucket. That's your reverse bucket list. Now, there's good stuff in there like your faith and family and friendship and work, make the bucket list of the fame

and the power and the pleasure and the money and that stuff the worldly Satisfactions and then just stick your hand in there and say I detach myself from this if I get it fine But I detach myself from Emotionally craving this particular thing and you will guarantee it you will see your satisfaction rise I'm just trying to figure out how to make To operationalize that advice in my life. I have seen in my own mind recently and it's very, I mean, better to see it than not to see it, but it's disturbing to see it that I am incredibly as the college kids would say privileged

just in every possible way, except for I'm not very tall, but everything else. I mean, look at you. If I had your hair, I could be present in the United States. Yeah, everything everything else. I mean, look at you. If I had your hair, I could be present in the United States. Yeah. Everything. Exactly. So that's a desire I don't have to be present in the United States. But I have watched, for example, we went through the process of buying our first house, and I aint that process, which was quite torturous.

I kept telling myself, if we could just get this done, I'm done. I'm good. That's all I want. Right. And now it's like, do it, maybe, maybe, nice to have a place in the city too. Or maybe we should get a second car because my life leaves. I've got astranded. And it just, that can metastasize indefinitely beyond the suburbs of Atlanta. Maybe I need to own the suburbs of Atlanta.

Yeah. If you had, then you'd be sprawling out into the three states around Georgia. It's a real rat race. Again, the reason is because human evolution has actually conspired to put you on that treadmill. We even have a word for it. It's called a hedonic treadmill. Hedonic means feeling.

To get the feeling, and this gets back to success addiction and dopamine, and you've got to run, run, run, run, you're never really moving forward. You're hitting the lever and you immediately go back and have to hit it again. Pretty soon you realize you're actually running out of fear too because if you stop on a treadmill, you become a hilarious Instagram meme and faceplant on the back of the treadmill, which is no good as well. So the key thing is not giving into your biology, is not giving

into the tyranny of evolution that wants you to be an excellent success machine. But to say, no, I am human, and as a human, I will not be subject to this evolutionary biology. And there are certain things that I can change. And being conscious is so incredibly important. I mean, this is one of the things that people who don't understand meditation, by the way. They think that meditation will lull you into this kind of a stupor as opposed to what it really does, which makes you fully alive. It makes you actually conscious for the very first time.

It gives you clarity, unusual clarity, that you would never see things. And this is one of the things that you can do is dedicating a reverse bucket list to your meditation practice. And you'll find that you can do is dedicating a reverse bucket list to your meditation practice. And you'll find that you can pretty successfully, especially when you expose one particular thing, and think, eh, I'd be good to have a place in the city. Let's expose this to the reverse bucket list and just see.

And you can do incredible things. Speaking of incredible things, I want to talk about my mom a little bit because she's an extraordinary human being. She was a full professor at your institution at Harvard over at the medical school, which was quite rare among women in her time. She was an editor at the New England Journal of Medicine, a truly brilliant human being. And she and my dad recently moved into my brother and I recently, within the last 18, 24 months, ushered them into an assisted living facility, which was DIC, and I was talking to them on FaceTime, on Sunday, and my mom was talking about how happy she is.

And I found myself moving this morning to send her a text, I want to read a little bit of it to you and then her response, because I think it plays into this. Right. I wrote, mom, I've just been reflecting a little bit on our conversation from the other day, which you talked about how much you're enjoying your current situation and how deeply engaged you are with the community at the place where you live.

I'm going to excise the name. I have some respect for how well you made this transition. It's genuinely a triumph. I believe it ranks right up there with your stellar career and A-plus parenting as a life achievement. To transition into a completely new context and do it with such a plum and enthusiasm is an inspiration for me as your son. And she wrote back, oh gosh, you definitely have too much time in your hands if you're wasting it admiring me. Just kidding, of course, showing my embarrassment at such high praise. I have to say that looking back on my life, I just can't believe how lucky I've been.

I keep thinking I've been everywhere I want it to go and done everything I wanted to do. So it's time to relax and be happy. Done with striving and achieving. And then she just adds that, although somebody just showed her a picture of going on a hot air balloon and now she wants to do that.

That's what I don't think. By the way, I think it's starting to talk about a bunch of lists according to surveys, that's number seven on average. Yeah, literally. Long way of saying, I think what you're describing is doable, I might not think it if I didn't know my mother. Yeah, I know that's true.

And this is one of the great constellations of age as well. It is that a lot of people, well, some people can't give up like the man behind me on the plane because he was such a success addict. The monkey was on his back. And for them, they need this particular knowledge. But other people figured out, other people like your mother figured out on their own. And one of the great constellations of age is also that you know yourself to the point

where it's funny, you know, people often ask, why is it that people, they tend to suffer less emotional upset when people do bad things to them. It's true. As you get older, you get less and less upset when somebody flips you off in traffic or offends you or when a family member neglects to do something, forget your birthday, whatever it is, you get less upset when you get older. Not everybody, it might not appear that way because some people are more upset than others at the same age.

But each of us, as we get older, we can look forward to that. The reason for that generally is that we know ourselves and we get a head start on the homeostasis. So, for example, if somebody does something nasty to you or that's sort of outrageous and it makes you really angry, well, it feels in the moment like you're going to be angry forever, but the truth is that next week you're not going to be. When you're 80, it like actually I'm going't get a head start on not feeling crummy about this. And so you do. And this is the kind of wisdom that actually comes to certain people,

but it's harder for others. The reason I wrote this book is I want people to get a head start on the piece that should come as a consolation of age by knowing what your strengths are, to avoiding the pitfalls and barriers and actually adopt some of the things that clearly your wonderful mother has figured out in her own. Just that for a lot of people, if you leave it up to chance, it's a lot harder. Yes. So speaking of not leaving it up to chance to go back to the practices you recommend, another is pondering death. Yeah, I mean most people I would guess who are listening to us would claim that they're not afraid of dying.

Only about 20% of people have a really big fear of death. And that's called thanatophobia, where they can't stop thinking about it. And most people can remember when they first remembered or first realized that they were going to die when they're 9 or 10 years old and they lay awake a couple of nights worrying about it. But most of us don't worry about it that much. And especially by the time you get into your middle age, I'm a little older than you are a few years older and you're 57.

And at this point, you're not that afraid of it. You don't necessarily know what to expect, but it's not keeping you up at night really at all. But for strivers, for people who are working hard to be excellent in their lives, claiming that you're not afraid of death is meaningless. Because if you're afraid of decline, if number one, you're disturbed or afraid of any sort of decline in your abilities. And if number two, you've ever said my work is my life, that's a death fear. You're just afraid of death is the bottom line. And so one of the things that I do in this book is for people who are afraid of a decline in any of their abilities and who gauge a lot of their self

worth on the basis of what they're doing and their hard work, to dominate the fear of death is to dominate the fear of decline. And it's unbelievably freeing. This is one of the things that's really helped me the most in my life. So in Theravada Buddhism, there's a thing called the Maranasati meditation, which you're really familiar with. Maybe some of your listeners are maybe they're not, but when you tour, if you go to a Buddhist monastery in Thailand, where I've been, or Myanmar, anywhere across Southeast Asia, where they practice Theravada Buddhism, often in these monasteries, you'll see photographs of corpses and various states of decay on the walls. And you think, this is super creepy. But then you find out what it's all about.

The monks will look at these photographs and ponder them and meditate on them, saying, that is me. And they have this thing called the Marnasati meditation, which is a nine-part meditation in which you actually will go through the various stages of death and decomposition and imagine yourself in each one of those states. Now that's all cold in Western psychology, exposure therapy, or something loses its sting and its creepiness because of its familiarity. And you must be free of the inevitable. Look, they're going to die.

Why would you spend a single second suffering in life about something that's inevitable is the whole idea? What I do in this book is I take that practice, which is a really healthy thing to do. I would recommend that everybody Google, Maran, Asatim meditation, or for that matter, just in the book, you'll find the Maran Asatim meditation. But to then take it and adapt it to your own life and your own decline. It's what I have is a version of that meditation in which you go through sort of the nine stages and

not being what you once were. And I have a version of what I do for my students at the Harvard Business School who are afraid of not living up to their own abilities either of it just visualizing what that actually means. You know, my parents are a little disappointed in how my career is turning out. Other people are getting the accolades that I thought I was gonna get. I find that I'm not really,

I'm not doing what I could have done. I didn't do as much as I thought I was gonna do with my life. At any point in life, if you're afraid of something, if you're afraid of being less than you should be, not living up to the identity that you wanted to be, whether it's life itself or whether it's your career, visualizing it in extreme detail and doing it in a structured way

will truly set you free. Exposure therapy. I've certainly heard of and maybe done a little bit of Moronisati meditation, but I hadn't thought about it as exposure therapy, which in my experience with anxiety has been quite helpful. So I really like your framing. One more phrase from your book to mention, and then a few other questions after that, cultivating your aspen

grove. Yeah, it's one of the biggest problems that worldly successful people, strivers, not just privileged people, allvers, not just privileged people. All people from all different walks of life who've worked hard to be good at something, who've striven for their what for a long, long time, is that there's a tendency to see ourselves as kind of a bone. And I don't mean this in a bad way.

I mean, this in kind of a good way. Look what I've achieved. Look what I have achieved. I, I, I, I, I. And I was thinking about that a couple of years ago, I usually speak of the Aspen Ideas Festival, which is fun and beautiful. And I was actually working on this book

and I was sitting under, I was having a laptop and it was breezy day in Colorado, beautiful. And I was looking up at this Aspen tree. And this, the Aspen is incredibly stately. And I thought, you know, this is a good metaphor for a person who is strong and independent, it doesn't need the strength of others necessarily. A tree. And, you know, in the first Psalm, King David sings about, you know, a tree planted by

streams of water. It's a metaphor for, you know, the solitary and righteous individual. And later that day, I was kind of striving this metaphor. A friend of mine, who knows a lot about botany, and he says, you got it all wrong. That's what he's talking about. He said, there's nothing solitary at all about that aspen tree. As a matter of fact, the Aspen Grove is one plant. The Aspen's and Aspen Colorado are one organism.

And it turns out that the largest living organism in the history of the world is an aspen grove in Utah called Pendo, which is it's millions of tons of wood. It's thousands of trees. And each tree is just a one manifestation of the same root system. In other words, it's one, and this of course is a highly Buddhist concept, the illusion of separability of individuals. And so there's all these Buddhist meditations on the puzzles of life. Like, what is the sound of one hand clapping? You know, you always hear about that. It's almost a joke and send Buddhism. What is the sound of one hand clapping? But there's an answer to that. And the answer, the sound of one hand clapping is in illusion. The same illusion is thinking that Dan and Arthur are just separate individuals. The truth is that Dan and Arthur and all the people listening to us are just

shoots off the same root system of life. And if you want to understand the nature of your life and you want to be happier, you need to cultivate that root system so that shoot that's coming out somewhat near you, maybe called your spouse or called your son or daughter or called your friend, maybe called your spouse or called your son or daughter or called your friend, is something that with your behavior, you're making healthier because that's making you healthier. That's what cultivating your husband grow means. And it's a core competency. It's a critical skill for people as they age. Reminds me of that quote from Richard Powers' author of the ineffably brilliant book, The Overstory, in that book, he writes, there are no individuals in a forest. It's absolutely true. And even trees that are belonging to species that don't have that

characteristic do that. I spend a lot of time in the Redwood forest in my life in the West Coast guy. And the Redwoods, they tend to grow in relatively small clumps. And they have incredibly shallow roots. A 200 foot Redwood can have six foot roots, which is physically impossible until you realize that their roots grow horizontally out from the base and intertwine with all the trees around them. It's the same idea. Look, you intertwine your roots or you're gonna fall down.

How are you doing? You, this conversation that you overheard on a plane with the unnamed famous guy you've had years and years of exploring this. Where did you land and how good are you at operationalizing your own advice? It's a work in progress, Dan. I wouldn't have done the research if it weren't a problem for me if I did not have trouble with success addiction. And again, somebody might be listening and say, you're gonna think they can DC big deal. Well, those are my dreams, you know? I found my bucket list, my stupid bucket list when I was 40 years old.

And I found out when I was 48 and I hit every single thing on it. And I was less happy at 48 than I was at 40. And it had everything to do with the fact that I was on the hedonic treadmill. I was running, running, running, running, running. And homeostasis was making dissatisfaction in the normal of my life. And everything held out more happiness than it actually delivered, because I had the wrong basic goals. And I was terrified of the natural state of decline, because I didn't understand the difference between fluid and crystallized intelligence. So suffice it to say that I'm the kind of person who needs this much much more so than my wife for example. The way that self-evaluations of

happiness work is that you usually are given something like a one to seven scale it's called a Leicard scale in which one is the most miserable person in the world and seven is unexplainable bliss. And my wife is like a 6.8. My wife from Barcelona, my wife is quite mindful of the present she has an intensely productive spiritual practice. She knows how to find good things in life. She's not happy all the time, especially with me. Oh man, but she's a happy person. And I'm usually, I think that probably when I started this project, I was a 3.5 and I think I'm about a 4.5 now and that's big progress.

That is substantial progress and that is all on the basis of understanding what's going on, practicing it in my life and sharing it with others. It was a three step algorithm and actually becoming happier because I needed to get happier. Am I practicing these things perfectly? No. Am I much better than I was? Yeah. Am I confident about the future? I really am. I really am. I think that I'm going to grow old, maybe you see even a 5.5.

But let me ask you this, Dan. What's your number? My number would be pretty high if I had to be honest. I certainly struggle with all sorts of issues. But you've been open about that. You've been open about the barriers to your own happiness that you've dealt with over the years and how that stimulated you to start a practice that ultimately is one that you've chosen to point toward blessing millions and millions of other people, including me, by the way.

Thank you. I have satisfaction, purpose, and enjoyment in abundance. It's really good. That's good. And I have plenty of bad days where I'm schmucki. So I'm a big believer in marginal improvement over time that can compound, hence 10%. So hopefully I practice what I preach. And there's one thing I want to point out that you do really well too. You don't call your company, your endeavor, your enterprise, your podcasts, the book 100% happy. Because happiness is in the progress.

You know, as mathematicians say, happiness is in the first derivative, which means you gotta have upward slope on your progress curve. And what you're offering, and what I'm offering here, and what I honestly believe in, is that 50% of our happiness, by the way, is genetic. I mean, your mother really is responsible for a lot of it physically, but all of us with

knowledge and with practice and with sharing, we can get happier. You have the most descriptively accurate formula for what we should all be endeavoring for, whether you're starting at 3.5 like me or you're starting at maybe a 5 or 6 like you, we can all actually get happier with knowledge, practice, and sharing. I appreciate that endorsement. We don't have much time, but there was a question I've been meaning to ask. We're having this conversation as too successful, wealthy men, white men at that. It's hard to know what you don't know, but do you think there are things that's possible

we would have missed in this conversation where we didn't speak enough to certain constituencies that might be listening. Everybody faces different circumstances that can either enhance or impede their happiness. One of the things that we haven't talked about, we just mentioned that 50% of your happiness is genetic. About 25% of your happiness is due to your circumstances. Now, those circumstances, unless they're chronic, are not gonna endure because the satisfaction, because of homeostasis, all the stuff that we've talked about in this conversation as well, but when a situation tends to be chronic,

those circumstances can actually endure in your happiness or your unhappiness. So if you are in a marriage where you have it, especially a lot of tension, a tense marriage turns out to be way, way, way worse than no marriage. And because a tense marriage is kind of like picking off a scab over and over and over again,

or one in which you have a spouse who understands you and makes you better than you were, well, it was tense to when you have a bad day, make you feel a little bit better, that's an ongoing circumstance that can enhance your happiness or great deal. There are things like poverty that are a negative, chronic, ongoing circumstance. And I think that we all have a responsibility to recognize that some people have circumstances

that are much, much harder than other people have. Among the biggest of these, by the way, is untreated mental illness. One of the greatest sources of unhappiness that we see in our society that I see in my day to day after day is an untreated mood disorder, by which I mean clinical depression, anxiety, bipolar disorder, these mood disorders are just absolutely misery-provoking. It can be a blockage to 10% happier, 1% happier, any percent happier. So these are the kind of conditions that we need to focus on on on proper mental health treatment so that we're not just talking about how to get happier.

We're talking about remediating the barriers to that happiness in the first case. Treat yourself. If and down, check it out. Treat other people, help other people. We need a better healthcare system. Does that? And then there are, of course, structural things in our society as well about poverty, about the way that we treat each other, about the way that we're bigoted toward each

other. That we're biased against other particular people. And boundless love should meditate against that. One of the greatest things is if you, as you search for your own bliss and you embrace the secret to that bliss above all others, which is love, boundlessness in your own love will start to mitigate the circumstances that hold other people back from their happiness as well. Right.

And one of the constituent parts of happiness in your definition is meaning and one way to get meaning is to help other people. And so there is within your system, I think, potentially the seeds of solutions to many of the big problems that we face as a world. Arthur, this has been fantastic. Before we go, just remind everybody the name of the book, the name of your podcast, the name of your newsletter, any other stuff we should know about

please. Yeah, so just for all things about the things that I'm talking about, people can get it by going to Arthurbrook.com, just like it sounds, because that'll have the newsletter, the podcast, and everything else. But the book that we're talking about, which, you know, eight years into making and has changed my life a lot, and I hope it helps other people as well, is called From Strength to Strength. And it comes out from Portfolio Penguin, and is finding happiness, success, and deep purpose in the second half of life.

Now it doesn't mean you need to read it in the second half of life. It's probably better if you read it in the first half of life so that you're making the investments to make the second half all that much better, but from strength to strength. I also write every Thursday morning in the Atlantic, which is sort of the it magazine of ideas in America that I'm very lucky to be there. On the science of happiness, every Thursday morning I have a column called How to Build a Life.

And then the podcast How to Build a Happy Life, which you have been on, which is a block by the way, I have a column called How to Build a Life. And then the podcast, How to Build a Happy Life, which you have been on, which is a block by the way, down as a blockbuster episode, people loved your interview because they just learned so much. And if you go to ArthurBrooks.com, it's all in kind of one place where you can find it. And I hope it's helpful. And the most important thing is if you learn anything

from this material, from the science of happiness, the way to lock it in in your own life is by becoming the happiness professor yourself and sharing it with other people. That's where the real progress comes. Aretha Brooks, thank you so much. Congratulations on an excellent book and a great job in this interview.

Thank you. Thank you, Dan. I appreciate it a lot. And happiest of days, 10% happier to the whole audience. Thanks again to Arthur. Thank you as well to the many people who work incredibly hard to make this show a reality. The whole audience. ultraviolet audio, they do our audio engineering. Thanks to those folks. We'll see you on Friday for a bonus. Hey, hey, prime members. You can listen to 10% happier early and add free

on Amazon Music. Download the Amazon Music app today. Or you can listen early and add free with 1-3-plus in Apple Podcasts. Before you go, do us a solid and tell us all about yourself by completing a short survey at 1dory.com slash survey.