The Science of Lasting Happiness with Arthur Brooks

All the Hacks: Money, Points & Life

Arthur Brooks explores the science of lasting happiness, challenging the notion that success alone leads to fulfillment in later life. Drawing from research and personal

Key takeaways

• Happiness is not just about feelings; it's a combination of enjoyment, satisfaction, and purpose—three 'macronutrients' that must be balanced.
• As we age, our cognitive strengths shift from innovation (fluid intelligence) to wisdom and synthesis (crystallized intelligence).

Main topics

• The science of lasting happiness
• Fluid vs. crystallized intelligence over time

Notable quotes

Happiness is not the feeling. Happy feelings are evidence of happiness.

You don't have to leave your happiness up to chance as you get older.

Conclusion

Arthur Brooks concludes that lasting happiness is achievable through intentional habits,

Transcript preview

Speaker 1 (0:00) One of the hardest things to recognize is when something that's served you really well starts to work against you. Ambition, speed, problem solving, the ability to push harder. Those traits can create a lot of success. But my guest, Arthur Brooks, argues that as we get older, the game changes. Our advantage shifts from innovation and raw processing power towards wisdom, synthesis, and teaching. And if we keep trying to win the old way, we can end up stuck. That is just one of the ideas in this conversation today. We also get into success addiction, why satisfaction depends as much on wanting less as having more, the reverse bucket list, and how money can actually buy happiness when it creates more time, connection, or generosity. This conversation actually originally aired as episode 47 on this show almost four years ago, but lately I've been thinking a lot about what I want more of. and less of in my life. And I went back and I re-listened to this episode, and I think I took away even more now than I did the first time. So I really wanted you guys to check it out. I'm Chris Hutchins, and whether this is new to you or you've already heard it before, I really think it's worth a listen. And if you do enjoy it and you want to keep upgrading your life, money, and travel, click follow or subscribe. Speaker 2 (1:17) Arthur, thank you so much for being here. Thanks for having me. I'm delighted. It's going to be great. When I first read the title of this book, I thought, maybe this book is for my parents and it's not for me. Now, I've since learned that that's maybe not the case, but could you talk about who the book's for and how that's different from maybe the time of your life that it's about? Speaker 3 (1:34) Yeah, this is a book that basically says you don't have to leave your happiness up to chance as you get older. And, you know, there are people who are old who Speaker 2 (1:41) are Speaker 3 (1:41) going to read it, and there are people who want to get old, and there are people who are getting older, and that is 100 % of the population. And a lot of people think, am I going to be happy when I'm old? I don't know. Hope so. Live right. Hope for the best. And this book is basically a claim. based on science and talking to the happiest people and the unhappiest people as they get older, that we don't have to leave our happiness up to chance. You can build a happiness 401k. Now we all know, and you know perfectly well, because you do a lot of stuff in finance, that the sooner you start your savings, the better it's going to look when you're older. So this is about happiness in the second half of life, but it's about starting to get happier in the first half of life. Speaker 2 (2:17) I love that. I think we all want to be happy, but one thing I think it's important is How are we defining happiness in these conversations here and in the book? That's Speaker 3 (2:26) the first thing I ask my students. I have this MBA class I teach at Harvard Business School. And the first day of class, I go around and say, what's happiness? And they start talking about their feelings. You feel the way you feel when dot, dot, dot, dot, dot. It's the feeling of whatever. That's not right. That's like saying that Thanksgiving dinner is the smell of the turkey. That's not the Thanksgiving dinner. That's evidence of the Thanksgiving dinner that you can perceive. Happy feelings are evidence of happiness. Happiness is something else. So when I look at the social scientists that people who are happy and unhappy, happiness is a combination of three. You might say they're macronutrients. Food can be defined in terms of three macronutrients, protein, carbohydrates, and fat. And you have to have them in balance and abundance if you're going to feel good, if you're going to have good health and feel good. Happiness has three macronutrients that you need in balance and abundance. You need enjoyment. You need satisfaction and you need purpose. When I meet somebody who's not happy, I start looking diagnostically at these three things. And so the first practical takeaway that comes from all this theory is that if somebody's like, ah, my life isn't complete, some things are good, some things aren't, but I'm not really happy. It means there's a lack of balance in one of these things. Either you don't have enough enjoyment in your life. or you're actually not hitting goals, which means you don't have satisfaction, or you don't have a sense of purpose and direction in your life. It's one of those three things. And so that's the first place to start looking if you feel like you're not where you want to be in terms of your happiness. Speaker 2 (3:50) And is there some kind of easy way someone listening could say, well, which one is it? Is there like a quiz or a question you can ask yourself for each one of those things to figure out how you are on each one, maybe rate them? Speaker 3 (4:01) Yeah, there actually are. And that's why I write my column in The Atlantic every Thursday morning, because I'm digging into different aspects of that. And so the column in The Atlantic has got a whole bunch of quizzes. People who are kind of into it, they want to read a little bit of the underlying research. You can read more articles about that. Sometimes I'll talk about it like the Greek philosophers did. So Epicurus said, happiness is all enjoyment. And the Stoics said, happiness is all virtue and meaning. And the truth is, we need to be both. And so I have a column about, are you more Epicurus or are you more Epictetus? And it actually has a quiz in there. on how to do that. So my column on that is actually a good way to start to test yourself. Speaker 2 (4:34) Okay, we'll link to the column and maybe some of those quizzes in the show notes. One of the things I saw in the book that I thought was interesting was the reason why this shift from the beginning of your life seemed to be somewhat linked to the type of intelligence we have and how that changes over time, fluid and crystallized intelligence. Can you walk through that for people who aren't familiar? Speaker 3 (4:53) Yeah. So this book basically has the seven habits of people who get happier as they age. And there's one thing to keep in mind that's really important that I found over the course of my research is that there's a lot of similarity in the patterns of happiness over the first part of their life. So generally speaking, adults, they kind of all pack together. And the older you get, the more that people diverge. And so you see that people after about 65 go into two groups. One gets happier and happier, and the other gets less and less and less happy. And the group that's getting less happy, paradoxically, they tend to be the strivers who work the hardest early in their lives. So you gotta look at that. That's a big mystery. That doesn't mean it has to be that way, but we need skills. That's why I have the seven skills that the happiest people later in life have, so that even if you are a striver, you're not doomed. You just have to adopt these skills and do the work is what it comes down to. Everybody who is getting the hacks needs the hacks. And these are the seven hacks for all intents and purposes. That's the book. In a nutshell, that's the book. Okay, now, what's the first skill? The first skill is making sure that you're on the right success curve. A little bit of background on this. For about 100 years, psychologists have noticed that there's two types of geniuses. There's early bloomers, people who have an early appearance in their genius, like... child geniuses and young entrepreneurs. And then you've got the late bloomers. And so you think of that as like the Elon Musk's and the Dalai Lama's. Those are the two types of geniuses out there. And one's really young and one's really old. For the longest time, they thought, well, two types of people. They got the people who do this kind of thing. People do this type of thing. Well, later we figured out everybody has both. So that doesn't mean that I'm going to be Elon Musk or the Dalai Lama, but I have a lot of power to actually use my potential to the max. Early on, it's going to be innovative capacity, processing speed, indefatigability, my ability to go, go, go, go. Later in life, it turns out that my abilities, they migrate toward my wisdom, not necessarily to work all night and solve problems that are brand new and innovative, but to take existing knowledge, understand what it means, combine ideas and teach them. That's what you're really good at later in life. Now, the first type of genius is called fluid intelligence. It increases naturally all the way through your 20s and through your early 30s, and it starts to decline in your late 30s and goes down really fast in your 40s. That's the reason that people are less likely to come up with some weird, big, eye-popping innovation when they're 50, much, much less so than when they're 30. When you're 30, you're at maximum innovative capacity. In your 40s, your crystallized intelligence, this is the second type, starts to increase, which means that you get more wisdom. You have more perspective. You know more. You have a good memory. Your memory actually improves in a lot of ways, believe it or not. You can't recall Joe Smith's name. You forget that, but you remember all the important things and you can combine them. It's like you have a vast library and you know how to use it, as a matter of fact. One of the reasons that you forget stuff when you're older is because your library is so big that it takes time to go get a piece of information. It's not degradation. It's just the size of the library, basically. The filing system is dense. And so later on in life, people use it. They become better Scrabble players. They can actually be better at foreign languages, even though their vocabulary is no good. Their historians do half of their work, on average, after age 65, because it's pure crystallized intelligence. It's this wisdom. They're teachers. At my university, the best teachers who get the best teaching evaluations are uniformly over 70 years old. That's crystallized intelligence. So the key thing is you got to be on the right curve. If you're 50 or 60 years old, you're like, ah, I'm struggling to keep up with the 30-year-olds. You're doomed, man. You're doomed. You're going to feel horrible about yourself. They're going to run circles around you. But here's what you need to do. You need to school them with your wisdom. This has so much potential for rocking our world. You're on the first curve. And here's the thing. If you want to be happy and successful, you got to jump to the second curve. You got to go from the Elon Musk to the Dalai Lama. You got to go from the innovator to the instructor. You might change jobs. You might not. But you got to retool your life and what you're paying attention to and what you're trying to do. That's the first big skill of people who get Speaker 2 (8:59) happier as they age. And so if you're someone listening to this and you're like, okay, I'm in that late 20s, early 30s part of my life, I know I need to jump the curve eventually. What does that jump look like? How do I prepare for it? What should I be doing with my time? Speaker 3 (9:14) So to begin with, the tell, the big tell, the hack is that when you're starting to see the decline, you're going to see it before anybody else does. You're going to notice that if you're starting to burn out a little bit, you're starting to be a little less interested. You're a little less inclined to stay up 16 hours to write all that code than you used to be. The reason you want to do it less is because you're not as naturally good at it as you were before. That's your tell. Ability is not the tell. Desire is always the tell. Your desire tells all. always. What you like always indicates what your capacities are. And so when you're first starting, it's like, I don't know, man, this guy came to me with this great new startup idea, but I like, ah, I don't have a fire in the belly anymore. That's good. That's a good sign. That means that you're actually in liminality. You're between the curves is actually what that means. Okay, so what do you need to do? You need to learn and you need to actually start combining knowledge. Instead of writing the book that has the big new mathematical treatise that nobody's ever come up with before, you write the book that combines everybody's best idea. Start learning about synthesis of things as opposed to the creation of brand new ideas. Synthesize things as opposed to inventing. things. And that means different things in different professions. If you're a lawyer, you should start running a team of young lawyers. You should go from a cowboy to a team leader. That's a really good way to do it. If you're going to be an entrepreneur, don't come up with a big innovation. Find people who can and make them successful. That's the reason that great athletes who are unbelievable early in their careers, they're really, really good as commentators on TV. It's not just because their knees have gone out. It's the same reason that entrepreneurs who are unbelievably successful can be great at VC later. Because what they are is actually teachers. They're cultivating the next big talent. And every profession Speaker 1 (10:57) has something like this. This episode is brought to you by Gelt. If you filed an extension this April or your CPA went radio silent after the deadline, summer is actually the easiest time to fix it. Real tax strategy takes months. The moves that matter like PTE elections, S-corp distributions, cleaning up K-1s, those happen in August, not January. If you wait until next March, you might be leaving real money on the table. Gelt is a modern CPA firm, actual tax professionals you work with, backed by a tech platform that keeps everything organized. I've been with them for a few years for both my personal and business taxes. And what I love most is that they are proactive. catching things in June, July, August, when there is still time to do something about it. 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I mean, he changed the way that we think with his theory of natural selection, the theory of evolution, unbelievable. Well, he came up with that at age 27 when he came back from his around the world voyage on the Beagle, collecting botanical and zoological samples. And from his late 20s, he was already the most celebrated scientist in Europe. He was rich. He was the king of the mambo, man. I mean, it was unbelievable. And he dined out on these theories for the next 30 years. He nurtured them and he used this big innovation. Now, the problem was, he got stuck when he was about 50 years old because he hadn't been a very motivated student. So he didn't learn very much math or statistics. He didn't learn German. And if you were going to be a serious scientist, you needed to know German in the late 19th century. So what happened was that his own field passed him by mathematically. There was a Czech priest and scientist named Gregor Mendel, who actually was more mathematically sophisticated. He invented the theory of genetics. And that's what Charles Darwin needed to progress in his own field. And he couldn't understand it. couldn't read it, and