The Prof G Pod with Scott Galloway - Why Happiness Has Nothing to Do With Success — with Arthur Brooks

Episode Date: May 20, 2026

In the second of a two-part special Office Hours series, Scott Galloway is joined by Harvard professor, bestselling author, and Free Press columnist Arthur Brooks to answer listener questions on fulfillment, work-life balance, finding the right partner, and how to stop letting failure define you. Want to be featured in a future episode? Send a voice recording to [e-mail], or drop your question in the r/ScottGalloway subreddit. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Support for the show comes from Canva. What's your next big thing? Whatever it is, you can design it with Canva. From presentations powered by AI to social media posts, from logos all the way to websites. Whatever your idea is, you can make it a thing in Canva. Canva. Canva, the thing that makes anything a thing. Learn more at Canva.com. Welcome to Prop G on Getting Your Life Together, a special series where we're joined by Arthur Brooks,

Harvard professor, bestselling author, and columnist at the free press. we went to our listeners with one question. What's the biggest thing holding your life back right now? Today, we're going to try and help. We talk about burnout, distraction, purpose, and building a life that feels more intentional. Arthur, welcome. Hey, thank you. It's great to be with you. How are you today? Where are you today? I'm in London on what is an unusually beautiful sunny day. How about you? I'm in northern Virginia. I live outside Washington, D.C., actually. Oh, nice. My son is going to be a freshman at UVA. That's great. It's great here. We actually moved back here from Boston to get all the kids and grandkids in the same general area, including in the same house. So I was reading my own research that said you should have your family all in the same place. And it turns out to be great. We've got a compound. It's a cult, I think.

Nice. We'll have a longer conversation, but that's my plan. Anyways, let's bust right into it. Our first question is, I have a good job, a happy marriage, kids. and hobbies, but I still can't get real fulfillment out of any of it. I'm stretched so thin that everything feels like an obligation. Why is that? I built the life I was told I want to and still feel empty. Arthur. Yeah, I mean, I'm going to channel Scott Galloway here, because you're doing what you were told you're supposed to want, as opposed to doing what you want. You didn't do the hard work of actually figuring out what it is that you want. And what people told you that you wanted was a bunch of bro-shaped protocols, a bunch of lists of things, and you're trying to do all of it, and the result of it is that that's the definition of being stretched too thin.

What we need to do as, you know, people are good faith, and by the way, I use that expression on purpose. That's what Jean-Paul Sartre talked about is actually figuring out the essence of your life, as good faith, is to do the work, to figure out what actually it is that you want, which is probably a subset of the things that you're currently doing. You don't have to do a bunch, do a bunch of new things. You don't need to add more brushstrokes to your canvas. You just need to start chipping away the marble that is the statue so that you can find the real piece of artwork that's within. You need to start taking some things away, but you have to start with the work. The only thing I would try and discern between for this gentleman is if he's really unhappy

or if he's just putting in the work and the stress that's part of getting ahead. I think young kids are not, I think that's a lie, the young kids are amazing. I think there are a lot of work and a lot of stress. I think marriages, when you're trying to make your career, get some, get some trajectory in your career, it puts a lot of strain on the marriage. So in some ways, it's a distinction between are you unhappy and have fallen into the trap you're talking about of thinking that what's supposed to make me happy will and you made a mistake or two are quite frankly, you kind of where you should be, and that is putting in the work and making the investments in family, relationship, and work such that you can have a little bit more balance when you're a little bit older. Any closing thoughts, Arthur?

No, that's great. And actually, that's very astute because, you know, you've seen the data on how people get happier as they get older. And most people think they're going to get happier from their 20s to 30s and 40s and they actually get unhappier from the 20s to 30s and 40s. And then in their 50s, it turns around. And you and I can attest to this. Your 50s and 60s are freaking awesome. They're awesome. It's a renaissance.

If you're not addicted to drugs and alcohol or clinically depressed, there's going to be, it's like a bonanza. And then what really matters is the decisions that you make that will determine whether or not you're in the half of the population that gets happier all the way to the end or you start back down again, which about half the population does around age 70. And that's a different conversation, of course. But the big surprise for a lot of people is, you know, when my dreams start coming true, because I did all this work, I thought it was going to be a lot of.

happier, but I'm not. And the explanation for that is really in the corner pocket of what you just said, Scott. Happiness is a combination of enjoyment, satisfaction, and meaning. And in your 20s, 30s and 40s, your enjoyment is falling, but your meaning is rising. The enjoyment is how you measure how happy you are from moment to moment and from day to day. And when that's going down, you feel like you're getting less happy, whereas actually your life is getting more meaningful. And that's the big payoff in your 50s and 60s. And so that's very likely what's happening with our young friend. I like that. Let's move on to question number two. Our next question is, I'm in my late 20s and feel like I'm constantly having to choose between my career and my relationships. How do I know

when to prioritize love and how do I even find the right person when I'm this busy? Arthur. That's a work-life balance question. It's a classic work-life balance question. And that's generally a misapprehension of how your life is supposed to work. Work-life balance is a huge lie. And the reason is because it distinguishes between work and life. I mean, look, you and me, it's like some of the best, most fun times we've had in our lives, their work. You know, that's actually the work. But our work isn't our whole lives. You and I are family men. We're married. We love our wives. We love our kids. In my case, I'm crazy about my grandsons. I've got a ton of grandsons. It's the best. And the point is that my work makes my home life better and my home life

makes my work life better, which means you need work-life integration, not work-life balance. And so when you're going crazy, you're going, you're wrapped around the axle and all the decisions that you're trying to make, it's probably because you're actually trying to adjudicate between work and life, not saying, okay, is my work making my home life better or worse? Am I having a screaming argument with my wife all the time because I'm spending the 14th hour at the office instead of the first hour with my kids? Or is it that my home life is infringing on my ability to be successful in my career? And if either one of those is the case, it means you're not integrating the two appropriately. You're thinking about it wrong. What's your view,

Scott? I think it's situational. I think I'm more pragmatic, cynical, and that is I gave up most of my 20s when I should have been finding a mate for work. And I'm trying to be funny here. but there's some truth of this. I say that I had no balance. I agree with you. The work-life balance thing is a myth. I just worked all the time. But I got a lot of reward,

and unfortunately I got an unhealthy amount of my identity from work. And I would say it cost me my hair, and it cost me my first marriage, and it was worth it. And I'm being just somewhat tongue-in-cheek there because I now have a lot of balance now. And the cruel truth of the world is it's very sexist,

when it comes to this. And that is, if you're a dude working just your ass off such that you can get influence in economic security, the payoff, quite frankly, is that men with a certain amount of economic viability don't lose a lot of sexual currency as they get older. And I think the world is more unfair with women. Now, having said that,

I think this myth that women shouldn't work and focus on finding a maid, I also think that's bullshit. As a matter of fact, fertility goes up, as women make more money. So the notion you're not going to have a family, kind of the Charlie Kirk myth, that you're giving up kids

if you focus on your career, I think that's total BS too. But what, you know, I have found, I would question a little bit of it because I found as a guy, if I found someone I was interested in romantically, I found the time.

I just kind of figured it out. I was working at Morgan Stanley, where they, I was working 80 hours a week. And if I said I had a date, they were like, wow, that is literally like the solstice, give Scott the night off, let them leave a little bit early. So I don't, I think it's very situational based on who they are, the current situation. I think this is a tough one. And I also recognize, I don't know what I don't know, because I'm so out of the dating market.

Help save me for myself here, Arthur. Yeah, no, I completely get it. I'm out of the dating market, too. And my chronic workaholism, I've had four distinctly different careers, starting as a, I was a French horn player all the way through my 20s. playing in symphony orchestras. And then I was a, I got my PhD, I was a college professor, and then I was a think tank, chief executive.

I ran a big think tank in D.C., and now I, you know, have this happiness business and four distinctly different things and the way that I ran those things was by working 80 hours a week through my entire career. And it cost me my hair,

but not my marriage. You know, thank God, because I had this partner who was along with me and tried to moderate these ideas for me. And one of the things that's pretty interesting is the other side of the sexist coin is this,

that women who actually figure out the balance issue are much happier than men. So men, you know, in their 20s and 30s who, who tried to get enough balance because they know it's the right thing to do, they're not always very happy. But women who do are blissfully happy. And so women who have what Michael Driver, the great USC psychologists who died a couple of years ago, he talked about the spiral career, which is the happiest professionals, are not these linear guys like you and me, next thing, next thing, next thing, next thing. There are people who actually will dial down. dial up, you know, change industries.

Women are really good at spiraling their careers. They'll come out of college. They'll do something, you know, move to New York, do something professional, get married, dial back, go part-time while they raise their kids, come back into the workforce in a nonprofit role, perhaps, change industries. And those who do it well, they're happier than men. Do you, I've said that I think the most important decision you'll ever make is who you choose to partner with, specifically who you choose to have kids with, that you can be marginally

successfully professionally. And if you have a good partnership, you'll figure it out. You can be very successful. And if you have a bad partnership, it's just a life full of disappointment and anxiety. When I imagine you agree with that. But then how do, I'm trying to think how I reconcile with focusing on work versus the time invested to find the right partner. And do you have any thoughts on how you find the right partner with the right versus wrong criteria are? The right partner. I'll amend what you said, because I completely agree, obviously, but I'll amend that to say it's very important to allow yourself to be found by the right partner as well. And one of the biggest things, it's interesting because, you know,

people who are in the search mode for anything, for the perfect career, for the perfect partner, they're violating the first principle of what you do when you're lost. If you're lost in the woods, any Eagle Scout watching us right now knows, stay put. Don't start wandering around the woods. you're less likely to be found and you're more likely to starve to death or freeze to death or get eaten by a bear. Stay put and take care of yourself until they actually find you. And that's one of the most important things to do is to be open to what you want. The universe gears will turn and to allow yourself to be found, which is really, really critical important.

Most people who are real seekers and not finding what they want is because they actually are not allowing themselves to be found. They're not actually, they don't understand that they're sought in this particular. way. And so anyway, that's a slight amendment to what you're talking about here. But I think that under the circumstances that the right kind of partner is the one who wants to, I mean, every religious community in the world that believes in an afterlife, they all believe, and again, I realize that this doesn't include you or many of our listeners, but what they all have in common is that they believe that marriage, the permanent romantic partnership, is an antenna to God. The Hindus believe this, the Muslims believe this, the Christians and Jews believe this. They all believe that it's an

intended to God, which is why most people have a vocation to marriage is because they want God, and they're not going to understand God until they actually get married, and especially until they have children. It's a divine thing, is what it comes down to. So therefore, in these religions, you have to look for somebody or allow yourself to be found by somebody who's going to walk you into heaven. Okay, now the secular version of this, even if you're an atheist, find the person who wants to help you become a better version of yourself. I love that. So something you said there, there was someone illuminating for me or respond to thought was that you know, when you're out and you're serious about finding a mate, you know, I would say always default to yes. You can invite

to a dinner party or tired. Go to the dinner party. You meet someone, it's not sparks, but maybe they ask you for a second coffee. Say yes to the second coffee. You just don't know where it might go. Just have her propensity towards yes. No one's going to find you at home. But what I have found is that it was never that I found, it wasn't that I found the exact right person and she became my partner. It was that I was in a period of my life where I was ready to commit to somebody. And I don't buy this notion of soulmates.

You pass each other hopefully when you're both in a zone where you're ready to make the investment. in a relationship and you build something together. But I don't know, and my partner will kill me if she said this, I'm not sure she was the one. She was the one at the right moment, if you will. Any closing comments, Arthur? Yeah, no, for sure. And again, if you believe in the metaphysics of this, then the right moment is a divine thing as well as the person is a divine thing. And so it folds up into being effectively the same solution as the way that this works. But the whole point is that what you just said was you got to a particular point in your life and you allowed yourself to be found and you were. So when I'm talking to a lot of young men and women, which is, you know, my graduate students at

HBS, a lot of young people that I talk to. I mean, I'm sort of the 28-year-old striver whisperer at this point in my career that I can't find anybody. No, no, no, no. You're not allowing yourself to be found. Let's talk about that. You're wandering around the forest. It's time for you to allow yourself to be sought. Love that. All right. We'll be right back after a quick break. Support for the show comes from Canva.

An idea is just an idea, but actually transforming that idea into a thing, that's where the real work lives. It can be a journey full of pitfalls and banging your head against the wall. Or it could be a lot easier than that with Canva. Canva is packed with templates and design tools to turn your idea into something real, from presentations powered by AI to social media posts, logos, and websites, whatever for your ideas, you can make it a thing in Canva. Canva. The thing that makes anything a thing, learn more at Canva.com. Welcome back, onto our last question. I try not to spiral every time I make

a mistake at work, but it's hard. Why does failure hit so much harder than it logically should? And how do I stop tying my self-worth to my performance? Yeah, this is pretty classic, especially for people who have very, very high standards and who have a lot of fear. And that describes a lot of people who are going to, you know, Prof G followers and people who listen to my show as well. These are super strivers, people who are really, really hard workers, and they're deeply, deeply, deeply afraid of failure. And by the way, me too. I am terrified of failing. I am utterly propelled by a fear of failure, even though I do all kinds of stuff and I fail constantly, right? It's sort of the fear is a kind of fuel. And so these things are

tied up together with striving and fear. I get it. Here's a method for actually, getting out of that cycle of misery, but actually turning the inevitable failures into a source of learning and growth. And this is what we call in my class is the failure journal. So the way that this works is that whenever something happens that's inevitably disappointing, that feels like a failure that doesn't go the way that you want, you write it down. I mean, write it down. It's actually most cognitively impactful if you do with a paper and pencil, believe it or not. It's actually not as good on your phone. But anyway, whatever, however you do it, leave two lines blank below it in this failure journal. Now, obviously, don't let people find it. Come back to it after three weeks.

And then the first line below the entry, right, what did you learn in the meantime? And then the line below that, come back after two months and write down something good that happened. Now, it doesn't mean you're going to be happy that it happened, but something good has happened. I'll give you an example. You know, you get a bad performance review at work, even though you thought you were doing a really good job. This is classic for 22-year-olds. You know, they go into their first job, and they've been getting straight days in college,

and they've been told that they're very special, and they go into the workplace, and they're ordinary or maybe below average. They thought they were A-pluses and they're getting mean minuses. Okay, so that's a huge disappointment, really crushing loss, and their friends are like, just forget it. Your boss is a jerk, the whole thing. No, no, no, no, no, write it down.

I thought I was doing a superior performance, and my boss told me I wasn't. and it's really, really bumming me out. Okay, three weeks later, you're going to come back and you're going to say, I learned that I wasn't as good a fit as I thought I was. That's what I learned, and that is very valuable information. And two months later, you come back and you say, you know, I actually went on the job market and I found something that I think is going to be a better fit. Then what happens is that the next time you put in an entry, you're going to see all the ones above you and you're learning and growth, and you're going to start looking forward to writing down your failures and disappointments

because they become a source of generativity as opposed to a source of misery. I think about this a lot because so I don't have an answer. I can just have what I do to not solve this problem, but to diminish it because it's a big problem for me. I think everyone has a certain level of addiction in their life. I'm addicted to money. I don't need more, and I keep sacrificing relationships and time with family to try and make more money. But that's a scoreboard, right? Scott, that's scoreboard.

I think that's right. I also think it's because when I was young, I don't want to say I had trauma, but I grew up with no money, and so I always feel insecure about money no matter how much I have. I just can. I can't resist a speaking gig because I'm like, okay, this is five years of my mother's salary. I don't care what's going on with my kids. I'm going to take it. Anyways. I grew up the same way. I know it's a problem. It really is. And then the other addiction, and it's more pathetic, is I'm addicted to the affirmation of others. Yeah. And that is, I have a fairly healthy fear of failure. What I figured out as I've gotten older is I have a bigger fear of shame.

And when I screw up or I say something stupid or I say something that my audience doesn't align with their political views, I get dragged online and it bums me out. It bums me out less than it used to, but it still bums me out. Yeah. And my practice for trying to minimize that sense of failure or shame is the following. One, Arthur, I get a sense you're actually quite religious. I'm an atheist. And my atheism gives me a lot of power or comfort because I was 21 yesterday. I'm 61 now.

That was a blink. The next half a blink, I'll be dead. And so will they. And the notion, I find real comfort in knowing we're all going to be dead soon. and anybody you're worried about what they think about you is going to be dead soon, too. In addition, there's a lot of research. Adam Alter, my colleague at NYU, also at an appointment in the psychology department, did a lot of work on regrets.

And the three biggest regrets of people are they wish they'd stayed in touch with friends. They wish they'd led the life they wanted to lead, not the life society or their parents wanted them to lead. But their number one regret is they wish they'd been less hard on themselves. And you just need to know that when you look back on that failure or perceived, failure at work, one, people go, oh, they're not as good or they did something stupid, and then they go back to thinking about themselves. And two, at the end of your life, when you have real perspective, you're not going to regret the failure. You're going to regret how hard you were on yourself. So try to forgive yourself and recognize that when you do something bad or your performance isn't

great, all the people you're worried about, letting down or what have you, they're going to go back to thinking about themselves. And as you get older, the only, the only, the, The only upset you're going to have is that how upset you were. Forgive yourself. Yeah, that's very wise. That's very wise. Get a head, start on not caring for Pete's sake. This is, by the way, one of the reasons that 80-year-olds tend to be happier than 30-year-olds is because they're disappointed and offended just as easily, but they know themselves emotionally. They actually have an intuitive understanding of the functioning of their limbic system, and they know that what feels like it's going to be permanent misery is actually probably 24 hours of discomfort,

and so they get a head, start on not caring. That's literally what happens with that. 80-year-olds who have an emotional equilibrium. One side note about this, by the way, because I think that this is an area that you and I, you were born in 1964? Oh, God, yes. Me too. Me too, brother.

When? May 21st. All right, yeah. Thank God you're older than me. That makes me feel better. When was you born? What's your birthday? No, I'm almost technically Gen-X.

I call myself Gen-X. You're definitely a baby-over, Arthur. Oh, yeah, no, I'm such a boomer. Yeah, that's right. So apparently between May and when's your birthday, November? Yeah. Okay. Between May and November, that's when we went from Catholicism to atheism or something.

Maybe that's what happened. That's what happened. Yeah. But the key thing to keep in mind for a lot of people our age, people who are watching us, and we're the luckiest guys in the world. We really are. I mean, it's just, you know, we've got money, we've got the careers that we want. We have a marriage.

It's great. It's completely great. But there's one thing to keep in mind about almost all strivers is, that they tend to be quite workaholic, which is downstream as an addiction from an addiction to success. And success is all about the feeling of winning. And generally speaking, it ties to a particular pattern in childhood where you really only got attention and affection from adults when you did something, when you got a, you know, straight as in the report card or pitch, or you made pitcher on the team or something. And so your synaptically plastic brain concludes that love is earned. And, you know, newsflash,

Love is a free gift freely given. It's a grace. Anybody who makes you earn their love doesn't love you. That includes strangers. That includes sycophantic, take her friends, people who want your money. That's what they all have in common. If you're married to somebody who makes you earn their love, your spouse doesn't love you. Red flag, bigger than red flag. You know, there's a big problem in your life. But if you're going forth in the world, like so many of us do all the time, without thinking about it, trying to earn everybody's love, including the approbation of strangers, this torques your relationships and makes true love harder to keep and maintain. I mean, you'll trade away an hour with your wife in order to have the applause of strangers for peace sake if you have this particular pathology. And it's not, it's, it's, it's not healthy. And I think that you and I and a lot of people watching us suffer from this. 100%. We're going to end here, but there's, I always learn so much when I watch you. And the one thing you just said that really is going to stick with me. in terms of the confidence as you get older,

is you get a head start on not caring. I love that. I love, I'm going to put that. I need a head start on not caring. Arthur Brooks is a Harvard professor, best-selling author, and columnist at the Free Press. His latest book, The Meaning of Your Life, is available now. Arthur, that was great.

Thanks very much. Thank you, Scott. Great to see you, as always. Like, looking in the mirror, kind of. There you go. Likewise. This episode was produced by Jennifer Sanchez and Laura Gennar. Camryika is our social producer, Brad Williams is our editor.

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