Revisited: Your Instincts Know What You Want with Happiness Expert Arthur Brooks

A Bit of Optimism

In this revisited conversation, Simon Sinek and Harvard happiness expert Arthur Brooks explore why chasing outcomes leads to burnout while embracin

Key takeaways

• Arthur Brooks transitioned from a professional classical French horn player to a Harvard Business School professor by treating his career as a spiral of reinventions rather than a straight line.
• Brooks teaches a neuroscience-backed decision framework: major life choices should evoke 80% excitement, 20% fear, and 0% deadness to ensure alignment with intuition.

Main topics

• Career reinvention and non-linear professional paths
• Process versus outcome orientation in life and work

Notable quotes

"Happiness is a combination of enjoyment, satisfaction, and meaning."

Conclusion

The episode empowers listeners to abandon the 'arrival fallacy' and instead find joy in daily

Transcript preview

Speaker 2 (0:00) I've been looking at the basic neuroscience of these why questions that you've been grappling with for decades now. And there's all this correlation between how much you use your devices. So you use your devices to make your life really efficient and you free up a whole lot of time, which you then waste by distracting yourself with devices on trivialities and nonsense. Right? And people are like, I don't know. I know. And it's like, it's Speaker 1 (0:24) a Speaker 2 (0:24) self-licking ice cream cone is kind of how the thing works. And not... very surprisingly, that, you know, happiness is a combination of enjoyment, satisfaction, and meaning. There's no evidence that people under 35 have lower levels of enjoyment and satisfaction, but meaning Speaker 1 (0:42) has cratered. Why? At some point in our lives, every single one of us has asked ourselves the question, can I be happier? There are competing theories. Some people think we have to learn to be grateful for what we have. That's the secret to happiness. Others think we have to learn to change our lifestyle, our habits, or our routines. That that's the secret to happiness. Enter Arthur Brooks. Arthur would challenge both those theories. He has lived many lives and made some remarkable career changes. From French horn player to CEO of a think tank with no think tank or fundraising experience to best-selling author. And through all the changes and challenges, he has learned exactly what it takes to be happy. In fact, his insights are so good, he actually teaches them in one of the most popular classes at Harvard Business School, an entire class on happiness. Arthur is one of my favorite people to talk to. He's fun, he's whip smart, he has a big heart, and whenever I'm done talking to him, I feel, well, happier. This is a bit of optimism. Speaker 1 (2:00) I'll be totally honest with you, which is I use this podcast simply as an excuse to hang out with you because you're so busy. You're so busy. The only way I can get you on the phone is to schedule you for a podcast and Speaker 2 (2:17) then we get Speaker 1 (2:17) to catch up. Speaker 2 (2:19) That's why I always thought I was doing the podcast is to get to you, to get into you, to worm my way into your Google calendar. You and I have known each other a very long time. Uh-huh. You were still at AEI back Speaker 1 (2:30) then. One of my favorite things about you. is you practice what you preach. And I know that should be standard fare for people who are out there teaching or who are out there writing philosophies and theories about, you know, how to live life, etc. But you and I both know a lot of people who give talks and write books on living lifestyles that they don't live. But you do the things you talk about and write about. You do the things that you teach in your happiness class. You do the things in how you've reinvented your own career that you wrote about in your book. How have you reinvented your career this time? Speaker 2 (3:12) You know, it's funny. And thank you, by the way. It's like you're doing the same thing, Simon. I've known you for years. And I mean, I read your books before I knew you. And I start with why had a huge impact on me. It had a huge impact on me when I was still at AEI. And it was operative and helping me understand the trajectory of my own life as well. I had a real early in life, major, major career change. And you know this, but not everybody listening to this is going to have any awareness of this. I was a classical French horn player from the time I was eight years old until I was 31. So for 23 years, that's all I did. And I went pro at 19 after a first run at college. I mean, I didn't want to go to college. I wanted to go pro. So I went pro at 19. And all the way through my 20s, I toured. playing chamber music. I played two years with Charlie Bird, the jazz guitar player. Then I played a bunch of seasons in the Morse Oral Orchestra in Spain. And then I tried to become a soloist unsuccessfully. And the whole point is that by the end of that, I had to do something else. And so I had to retool my own professional life. I had to reinvent myself, which I did in my 30s, my early 30s. And I kind of figured out how to do it. I figured out how to go from becoming a classical French horn player to getting a PhD and becoming a behavioral scientist. And it was hard. That was a hard one. All the changes after that have been easier because I figured out how to funge the best from my past life into my next life. And this is something I talk about an awful lot with my students, my MBA students at Harvard. They're going to have four distinctly different careers if they follow the norm. And that means that they're going to have to understand their career is not a straight line. I mean, you understand this. Careers are not a stair-step straight line for most people. They're more like a spiral where you have seven to 12-year mini careers of your own imagination. And if you're too paralyzed by fear and you don't know how to reinvent yourself and you're not willing to go backwards in terms of money and power and prestige, you're screwed. And you're screwed. You're not going to be able to do it. I just Speaker 1 (5:13) got Speaker 2 (5:13) lucky. I had to change. But this is Speaker 1 (5:17) really, really important because you're... Your case is more exaggerated than most, right? To go from a horn player to political scientist, pretty big difference. Pretty big difference. And most people's deltas won't be that big, which is why your case is really important. Because if you can do it, pretty much anybody else can do it. I think where people get stuck is they look at what their skill set is. So in your case, it'd be like, I know how to play a horn. So they look to reapply a skill set thinking that's reinvention. reapplying a skill set of instead of being a horn player in an orchestra or with a jazz guitarist, maybe I don't know, maybe I can do video game music. And Speaker 2 (5:57) it's the reapplication of skill, which they mistake for reinventing themselves. That's correct. The problem with that is, and there's a huge behavioral science literature on this that I didn't know until much later. Until I became a behavioral scientist and I started and I could look retrospectively and understand what had happened to me and then look prospectively at what the next set of changes were going to be. People have a tendency to say, OK, what what have I already, as you suggest, gained skill at? And I could be also good at so I can hit the ground running. Wrong question. The right question is what am I most interested in? What is my greatest area of interest? That almost never fails. But the most interesting thing to you is a blend. So here's the, we have intuition, which is also known as gut, aka data. We have a lot of data because we've all had a lot of experiences in our lives. When anybody's facing a new opportunity, a new threshold, whether it's a marriage proposal or moving to a new city or having a new career or whatever it happens to be. There's three sensations that you're going to feel based on the data inside the right hemisphere of your brain, sort of the episodic memory beyond words. That's your gut when you feel like you have a gut feeling. That's why your stomach feels that because your stomach is actually on the left, is weighted to the left side of your body, which is controlled by the right hemisphere. That's why we have that emotional feeling. Speaker 1 (7:22) Okay, so Speaker 2 (7:23) those three feelings when you're facing an opportunity are excitement, fear, and deadness. Which is that sense of emptiness where you're looking at an opportunity and it makes you feel dead inside. Like I really should get married to that woman, but it makes me feel dead inside to imagine myself 80 years old with her. Right? That kind of thing. The right mix that you should actually, when you know it's the right step to take, is 80 % excitement, 20 % fear, and 0 % deadness. That's the right combination. By the way. It's not 0 % fear because you might fail, but that's the point. And there is 0 % fear. Speaker 1 (8:02) Totally. And if there's no risk associated with it, it's going to be boring. You're going to be bored. And you're explaining almost everything worth doing. I mean, every entrepreneurial venture has to be more excitement than fear because the chances of you failing or things going badly are very, very high. And so you have to have the irrational excitement. to get over that fear to say, we're going to do this. It's not a rational Speaker 2 (8:26) thing to do. And sometimes, by the way, it's a little bit out of your control. When I left being an academic, I became a professor. And then in the second career, in the third career, I was the president of a think tank. And I had never had a single employee or raised a single dollar. And I had to go start raising $50 million a year. That's $250,000 every business day of the year. And I had raised $0 in my life. It was a completely... foolish decision on the point of on the party board of that organization to hire me into that role but they were out of time and out of options they're like ah what the hell i think which is not a great position to be in and so so when i took that job it was 20 excitement and 80 fear and that's because it was just too unknown it was it was foolish and retrospect i got lucky in retrospect is the way that worked out Generally speaking, if you're going to change jobs or go back to school or marry that girl or move to Topeka, it should be 80 % excitement, 20 % fear, and 0 % bitterness. Speaker 1 (9:27) The other thing that I think is very, very important, which is the willingness to go backwards, and you touched upon this, which is to lose money, lose what appears to be momentum, lose power. I think a lot of people think that if you only maintain forward... momentum. That's the only way to advance. But the reality is it's kind of more like a slingshot, which is at some point you have to go back and then it fires forward a lot faster than if you were just walking the stone Speaker 2 (9:52) forwards. Heck yeah, absolutely. And by the way, your case study is a perfect example of this. When you were starting out, I mean, you're a very well-known, very highly compensated public speaker. If you want to get Simon Sinek, you got to book him a year in advance and you got to have some money in the bank. because that's a big part of how you make your living, but also you just don't take anything. You got a lot of stuff going on. Okay. I know your humble origins on that because you told me when you were starting out, you said, I want to do a lot of public speaking because I have a lot of ideas and I want to share them with my fellow humans. You actually said that you took every opportunity you could possibly find to talk about ideas in front of people. And so six people would say, Simon, can you come to my apartment and talk to us about... whatever. And you'd be like, yes, I will do that. You took every single opportunity. And what that sounds an awful lot like as using your precious time with very little compensation. And you have to be willing to do that because you got to get in your reps. You actually have to train yourself. You have to go back to school. You got to have the confidence and actually the learning process. And lots of people do this, by the way, going backward. There's nothing going backwards in this. I talked to a lot of my students, for example, 65 % of my happiness students at Harvard are women. 42 % of the students, the MBA students at Harvard are women, but 65 % because they're more interested in happiness than the, I mean, the guys are across the hall at the supply chain management elective or some damn thing. They're Speaker 1 (11:18) in the Speaker 2 (11:18) success Speaker 1 (11:19) class. Something like that. And women are in the life Speaker 2 (11:22) success class. Speaker 1 (11:23) And Speaker 2 (11:23) one Speaker 1 (11:24) of the things that I'll talk about is if you're Speaker 2 (11:25) going to be a real spiral in your career, you might come out and go work for McKinsey and then you might work. part-time for eight years while you're raising your kids, if you decide to have kids. And then you might go and work for a nonprofit. And after that, you might go back to school and do something else. But the enterprise is not the company you're working for, not even the company you're starting. The enterprise is your life. It's you incorporated and you're the founder. You better treat it as a startup. Speaker 1 (11:52) I also, I think the concept of backwards is a misnomer, right? Right. Speaker 1 (11:58) Because what it is is education. It's re-education. Like when you go to school, you stop your life temporarily and you go to school. And I tell young people this who are – for example, one of the things I think is wonderful about the Europeans is they take a gap year between high school and if they go to college or if they start in the workforce. That's a great gap decade. Speaker 2 (12:22) And Speaker 1 (12:22) it's got nothing to do with financial resources. Well, I mean, it does have something to do with financial resources, which if you have to work, you go straight to work. But the point is they're not living the life of Riley in that year off. They might actually go volunteer or they might just travel a little bit or they might go do a job that just interests them, that pays them a living wage, but it's not the thing that they want to do for their career. It's just something to give them a little bit of space for a year. It's go do something for a year that's not your career. Right. And then I talk to young people in the States and I'm like, when they don't know what I don't know what to do. And I said, why don't you take a gap year? Why don't you just go get a job where you're you're you're teaching, you know, teach for America or something like that? Or if you have the means to travel a little bit, you know, and they all say the same thing