Arthur Brooks and the Hunt for Happiness

Arthur Brooks

Harvard professor, Atlantic columnist, social scientist specialized in happiness, speaker, former classical French horn player

What is a book that changed your life?

One that changed my life recently was The Way of a Pilgrim, by an anonymous Russian Orthodox monk from the 19th century. And all it is, is a chronicle of a mendicant barefoot monk walking around Russia in about the year 1880 saying one prayer over and over and over again, and finding boundless joy in it.

What makes you feel like a grown up?

Using the unique gifts that you have to your full advantage, which comes with time and age. It is understanding how to synthesize the information around you to make sense in your life and also in the lives of other people. It's to be both properly expressive, and properly instructive. 

What is the weirdest thing in your tote bag?

Every place I go, I carry with me a handmade rosary created by my son, Carlos. He's a forward deployed combat marine and he's in Okinawa right now. He made it for me out of synthetic rope when he was 11 and I use it to pray my rosary very often for his safety. He’s never far from my heart, but really, really far from my home right now.

Make Way for Happiness.

From the time I was eight years old, I knew I was going to be a classical musician—the greatest French horn player in the world.  I went pro at 19 after getting tossed out of college; I had an unsuccessful first run there, followed by what my parents called my gap decade. I played chamber music for a bunch of seasons for the Barcelona Orchestra. At 22, I started stagnating as a player and then gradually got worse. I wanted to be number one and I wasn't number one. I went to college by correspondence starting when I was 28 and I got my bachelor's degree a month before my 30th birthday. Then I got my master's at night and at 31, I started my doctorate. I figured, I guess I'll go into the family business–academia.

My PhD is in public policy analysis and in particular, I did operations research. So, I'm a math modeler. I was first an assistant professor at Georgia State University and then at Syracuse, where I was writing very, very esoteric papers. I can't even read my old papers now because the math is too sophisticated. It was pure fluid intelligence. (In my Atlantic article I talk about fluid intelligence as the ability to reason, analyze and solve novel problems—or what I refer to as "raw intellectual horsepower." Crystallized intelligence, on the other hand, is the ability to use knowledge gained in the past. Think of people who solve problems by synthesizing their acquired experience and knowledge.)

I was doing pretty sophisticated statistical modeling on the predicates of charitable giving, which is fundamentally behavioral. I kept finding over and over again that I wasn't talking about charity, I was talking about happiness. When I did work in public policy, what motivated people was the quest for happiness. I've done a lot of work on the proper function of the free enterprise system, which is also about happiness. It is all about happiness. So, when I thought about what to do with the rest of my career and with the rest of my life, the answer was, I want to lift people up and bring them together around love and happiness. So I started doing work on it. Now, I got waylaid about a year into that corpus of work, when I took a CEO job. I ran a think tank in the center of Washington during a contentious political time—it was brutal. Meanwhile, I was writing books and giving speeches which were always about happiness.

When I retired as CEO in 2019, I once again said to myself, “What are you going to do?” And the answer turned out to be: I don't know how many years I'm going to have left, but I'm going to use all of my crystallized intelligence to the single-minded goal of lifting people up and bringing them together. And that's why I do what I do now. That's why I write for The Atlantic. That's why I teach at Harvard. That's why I do my podcast. I'm developing a television show. I'm doing a ton of public speaking. All of it is trying to lift people up and bring them together around their best lives.

Through all of my work on happiness, I’ve found the biggest barriers people face are themselves—they're stuck. The Hindu intellectuals have a theory, in the form of the Sanskrit word, Ashrama, meaning quarters. This theory of Ashramas is something I wrote about in my new book From Strength to Strength: Finding Success, Happiness and Deep Purpose in the Second Half of Life. Basically, there are two adolescences in a well-balanced life. The first is going from student life to what they call householder life—where you're having things like your career, family, etc. But the second adolescence is when you go from your worldly success into a  period of retiring into the forest to develop your spiritual life toward full enlightenment. What that means is stepping back from money, power, pleasure and fame.

For the strivers, like the ones that read The Verse, the main problem is that they're hopeless success addicts. People don't understand that the success addiction is actually holding them back from their strength, bliss, self-understanding, spiritual adeptness, relationships, and all the stuff they truly need. When I'm doing executive coaching, for example, one of the questions I'll ask people is, "Tell me, what do you prefer to be, special or happy? What do you choose?" And they say to me that they would prefer to be special rather than happy. And I say, "Wrong choice.” Because in the end, you will repudiate that choice. Everybody knows when they have a problem, yet they prefer to have the problem rather than solving the problem. The reason that drunks keep drinking, and I say this as someone who comes from a long line of drunks, is because it's fun in the moment and it's too hard to stop. After you’ve chosen to be special as opposed to being happy, eventually you're like, "No,  now I want to be happy, but that means I'm going to have to say goodbye to this weird little version of my special self." And it's hard as hell. 

The hard truth is you're going to decline in what once made you great. This is the striver’s lament. It's the winner's curse. It’s what got me to write From Strength to Strength. But it turns out that it is possible that you’ll be happier than you ever were in your most glory-filled days of supercharged, early-adult success. By refocusing on certain priorities and habits that anyone can learn, such as deep wisdom, detachment from empty rewards, connection and service to others, and spiritual progress, we can set ourselves up for increased happiness. This is your opportunity to have a second half of life that's blissful compared to the first half.