How to Redefine Success and Find True Happiness | Arthur Brooks

[00:00:07] I am so grateful I was finally able to get this guy on the podcast. I read a book by Arthur Brooks a year ago from Strength to Strength, and it was all about how the brain changes from when you're younger to when you're older

[00:00:23] and what changes and how you can still be successful and maybe even more successful when you're older, but you have to understand exactly how the brain changes and how you change during this period.

[00:00:40] This book was so valuable to me, and it's really changed my life in a lot of ways, just like this particular podcast episode that he did. Arthur Brooks is such an inspiration, and he also just wrote a book with Oprah called Build the Life You Want,

[00:00:54] The Art and Science of Getting Happier. It's a great book, again, really valuable discussion about it, valuable book, valuable discussion. I hope you enjoy this podcast as much as I've enjoyed it. So here is Arthur Brooks. This isn't your average business podcast, and he's not your average host.

[00:01:17] This is the James Altucher Show. And you'll have to forgive me. I have had a little bit of brain fog this week. So even though I've read these books, sometimes I might get titles wrong. So yeah, no, don't worry. Of course. I mean, it's that they're also...

[00:01:43] I mean, I wrote them, not you, so it's okay. And you do this all day long, so, you know? Almost. This week, again, this is the only podcast I'm doing is this podcast with you, Arthur Brooks. So Arthur, recently you wrote Build the Life You Want.

[00:02:02] You wrote that with Oprah. We'll talk about that. But about a year and a half ago, I read a book about you that really changed my perspective on a lot of things. And it was called From Strength to Strength, and it was about the fact that...

[00:02:17] Well, I think it was Chapter 2 that started, we decline as we age. I forgot the exact words. Yeah, yeah, your decline is coming much sooner than you think. It's interesting because, and my listeners know this, but trust me, listeners, this is the perspective I've been waiting to hear.

[00:02:34] So in my 20s, I was a competitive ranked tournament chess master in the U.S. Wow, I stopped for 25 years to blah, blah, blah. And now I've returned to it with the goal of getting to the same level as I was before,

[00:02:53] but better, and then writing about the journey, of course. And it is hard. And everything you discuss in your book is what happens to me. My fluid intelligence, my raw ability to calculate and be creative on the board,

[00:03:12] and be aggressive, and also memorize every variation, that's all gone. And I've actually had to learn how to play real chess, like with a real, strategical, old school chess. And it's a completely different game. And so I probably know more about chess than ever before,

[00:03:37] but I'm also more volatile because it's all over the board because I make old man mistakes at the age of 55. And so I've been going through this and your book really encouraged me that it's not just about decline and maybe you could explain from there.

[00:03:51] Yeah, for sure, absolutely. And 55, a kid to me, I'm 59 years old. And if I had that head of hair, you've got to be president of the United States. So count your blessings, man. Why do you think hair makes you president of the United States? Gerald Ford, Dwight Eisenhower.

[00:04:04] No, it's the old days. Those are the pre-modern media days. Now, I'm telling you, life is tougher and tougher, but that's just because I don't have any hair anymore. So I chalk all my problems up to baldness. What you're talking about here is absolutely classic

[00:04:19] and it has to do with the structure of intelligence that changes naturally over the course of your life. And what you perceive as a real decline is a decline in one kind of intelligence, but that's actually happening simultaneously with an increase

[00:04:33] in a better type of intelligence that I want to tell you about. Okay, now you've read the book so you know this, but not everybody who's listening to this podcast has read the book. It's astonishing to me, as that may seem.

[00:04:45] When you were a kid, when you were in your 20s, I bet you the two big strengths that you had were unbelievably fast, high-quality working memory and kind of an innovative style of play. Is that fair? Absolutely. That's what great chess players have in common.

[00:05:01] That's what great basketball players and computer scientists have in common. That's what everybody, including lawyers and surgeons and musicians and poets, have in common in their 20s and 30s. They're innovative. They can solve problems with lightning fast speed on their own. They can recall information better than anybody.

[00:05:22] This is what the great strivers have in their 20s and 30s and mixed with a little bit of information and knowledge, they just get better and better and better and better. They peak around age 39 in almost every profession that uses this so-called fluid intelligence.

[00:05:35] This was the term that was invented by a social psychologist in Britain named Raymond Cattel in the late 1960s. And what this is, is this, you're the kind of the ninja. You're able to crack the case. You're a star litigator or an incredibly creative surgeon

[00:05:50] or the kind of chess master that you were. The problem with it is that you can't keep that kind of intelligence going and going and going and nobody ever tells you that. So if you had continued to play into your 30s and 40s,

[00:06:01] you would have found that by about age 43, 44, you would have been experiencing a lot of frustration because your play would be in, it certainly would not have been making progress anymore. You'd probably be in a little bit of decline. Others might notice it, you'd start losing matches,

[00:06:16] you shouldn't have lost. Things would be getting harder that should have been easy and you'd start to burn out and feel really frustrated. That's because this is the decline in that working memory, innovative capacity, indefatigable focus that you had when you were 25 years old. That's the bad news.

[00:06:33] The good news is there's a second intelligence curve that's different coming in behind it that has other skills that are easy for you. That's crystallized intelligence. That's the professor brain. That's the pattern recognition brain. That's your ability to say this game that I'm looking at right now,

[00:06:50] it reminds me of another game that I didn't even play but I saw one time. That's what older chess players are good at. That's what good surgeons and stockbrokers and violinists are good at too. They're good at metaphor recognizing patterns, describing things with rich language. They're great teachers

[00:07:09] and that's crystallized intelligence that will increase all the way to the end of your life. So here's what you need to do with your chess game. Number one, you need to start thinking about every chess game you're playing being like some other chess game that you've seen

[00:07:23] and then copy that other game. That's something that you're uniquely capable of doing at 55. You couldn't have done it 25. You don't have to figure out a new way. You have to copy an old way. Second is to be a chess master means to be a chess master teacher.

[00:07:39] The great way for you to make a mark as a chess player is to become a better chess teacher and see your success through the eyes of the 25-year-olds that are coming along and that you're teaching the craft to

[00:07:50] in ways they never would have been able to learn and that you wouldn't, frankly, have been able to teach because you didn't know why you were able to do it at 25. Now you know why. That's crystallized intelligence and that's your future.

[00:08:01] So it's interesting because there are some professions like you say where this raw fluid intelligence is important like mathematicians, let's say computer scientists or computer programmers even more accurately, lawyers to some extent I think lawyers could benefit from both. And then there are other professions you talk about

[00:08:23] that really benefit from that second curve that crystallized intelligence. So I think you said the average age for the average peak age for a historian is like 69 years old as opposed to a mathematician might be 25 years old. Like what's, is it really true like a historian

[00:08:40] is better in their 60s than in their 40s? Yeah, for sure. Absolutely. So what really, what the interesting thing is if you're a theoretical mathematician you're going to be doing your best work in your 30s. If you're an applied mathematician it's going to come much later

[00:08:54] because you're not writing the theory. You're using a whole bunch of theories written by other people that you're piecing together with your pattern recognition and natural wisdom. So here's what you want to do. You want to be a theoretician in your 20s and 30s

[00:09:07] and then your 40s and 50s you want to become an applied mathematician. The same thing is true with scholarly work. So or words I should say if you're a poet that's a real fluid intelligence game where you're using words innovatively.

[00:09:21] You're going to do half of your body of work before the age of 40 and your, your better half is your first half. It's fresher. It's better. Same thing with songwriting. People always say how come the Rolling Stones don't have anything good in the last 40 years? Because Mick Jagger's 80

[00:09:35] and all his best work was before he was 40. That's why. Now, if you want to do something that uses crystallized intelligence that that's what takes a lot of stuff that's out there and you put it together in a mosaic. That's what requires this crystallized intelligence

[00:09:49] that's take everybody else's stuff and put it together in a puzzle that requires knowing a lot and knowing where to go get it. That's historians. It's not that historians do their best work at 69. No. They do half their work after age 65

[00:10:03] and the better half in the second half. So if you're a historian, you better take care of your health because your best books are coming literally in your 70s and 80s. That's a pure crystallized intelligence profession. Let me ask you about the music thing

[00:10:16] because I get it that playing an instrument might be better when you're younger. But let's say writing song lyrics. Wouldn't your experience and pattern recognition work better for writing lyrics and beautiful songs and your ability to sample other styles and stuff be better as you get older?

[00:10:38] Your craft gets better at doing things that are not original. That's the answer to that. Your inspiration at doing things that are truly original happens in the first half of your life. So there are very few poets and songwriters and lyricists who when they're 60 and 70,

[00:10:53] they're breaking new ground. They're not doing, they're doing derivative work. Now they're doing high quality derivative work. But what you'll find is that like movie composers, they're writing stuff, same techniques, same musical compositional techniques that people would have been using 30, 40, 50 years ago when they got their skills

[00:11:11] and they're doing them really, really well. But there's nothing new in there. Bach, the greatest composer who ever lived, he was the master innovator of the High Baroque until he was in his late 40s at which point he was left behind because musical styles changed

[00:11:25] to the so-called classical style and he couldn't keep up. He couldn't write in the new style. All he was stuck in was writing this old dusty, you know, what people thought was really boring Baroque style. Now today it's all the rage and he's the greatest composer ever lived

[00:11:39] but he was forgotten for a hundred years after his death because the second half of his career he was writing derivative unoriginal stuff. So it's sort of depressing that your most original and inspirational before you have the experience to even really know how original you are.

[00:11:57] Like now I want to be original and inspirational but it's not working in the same way. Yeah, you need to become a master teacher. This is really what it's about because you know what I'll find for example is that I'll have junior colleagues

[00:12:09] who were kind of like I was when I was fresh out of graduate school. I was doing academic articles that were so mathematically sophisticated that I can't read them today. I was writing mathematical theorems that I don't understand anymore when I was in my early 30s

[00:12:23] in my early to mid 30s. Amazing to me now, right? So what happens is I meet and I'm in my late 50s now and instead of writing that original groundbreaking theory I'm taking the work of scientists, neuroscientists and social scientists in the behavioral world.

[00:12:40] I'm piecing together their work and writing in a way that my readers in the Atlantic can read. So I have an Atlantic column for 500,000 readers a week none of whom or very few of whom are scientists but I'm talking about real academic science. I can read the literature

[00:12:55] but I can't really write the literature. I can just read it and talk about what it says and put it together into a composition that a medley that makes sense to answer actual questions. I'll talk to my junior colleagues who are coming right out of graduate school

[00:13:08] who have a ton of fluid intelligence and I'll say do you realize what your research is actually saying? And they'll say what? And I'll tell them the story behind their research. How do I know that? Because of pattern recognition because of what other people are doing

[00:13:21] and because now I'm a teacher is the bottom line. Can you give me an example? Like what's a specific example of that? Well, a specific example of that will be if I have a, you know and as has happened to me relatively recently a very junior colleague

[00:13:32] was doing a series of experiments on human behavior having to do with let's say honesty. And it was just, you know if you have the opportunity to cheat and nobody can watch you are you actually going to do it, etc., etc. It says, oh, that's an interesting finding

[00:13:45] interesting finding about human behavior. I say you could actually use that to talk about how we could redesign a tax system so that people cheat less. Do you realize that this has general applicability to the way that we do work in government

[00:14:01] that the way that companies actually could cut down on how much people steal in stores and it's like, no, I never thought of that before. The reason is because you're 30. That's why you haven't thought of that about that before you're focused on the innovation

[00:14:15] of winning this particular game as opposed to understanding all the games and how this fits into all of the games. You don't have the same kind of, you don't have the panorama in front of you in the same way and you don't have the experience

[00:14:29] to say how this actually fits into everything else you've learned. This is related to the topics that you talk about in both books including the book you wrote recently with Oprah which is success addiction. Right. So when you're young there's ways to judge success.

[00:14:59] Are you making more money each year? Are you, are you in the academic world? Are you publishing more papers in the writing world? Are you publishing more books? Are you getting more awards, a claim? What's success when you hit the second curve? How do you judge success?

[00:15:14] Well, the point is that we should all at any age be judging success on the basis of the things that actually bring greater happiness. What happens is that in the first half of your career you're much, much more willing to sacrifice your happiness for your success

[00:15:29] and your success is what you believe and if you have finally enough of it it's going to bring you to happiness. Now that's wrong. It's based on misconception. Young people will, will struggle for money and power and pleasure and fame

[00:15:42] and all the things that the world tells them is going to bring real enduring happiness but they only figure it out until it's a little too late that that's actually not the secret. I mean, I've known people who've earned a billion dollars by 30

[00:15:54] and the first thing that they conclude is that they'll only finally be happy when they have two billion dollars. The reason is because they have the wrong formula in their heads. Now, if you don't figure that out by the time that your capacity to earn those incredible rewards

[00:16:07] starts to decline for whatever reason then you're really stuck. You're really in the soup because you can't get more of those rewards which you thought were going to bring happiness when you finally had enough of them and you can't get as much of them anymore

[00:16:20] and that's really kind of a double or triple whammy on your happiness. What we need to be thinking about from a good young age is that the things that really bring happiness are faith and family and friendship and serving other people with our work

[00:16:35] and when we actually shoot for those goals then we will get happier and we'll also be plenty successful but that has to fight Mother Nature. Here's the deal. Mother Nature doesn't care if we're happy. Mother Nature just wants us to survive and pass on our genes by accumulating

[00:16:49] more and more and more of the success and if you don't actually figure that out you'll become an addict. You'll become a success addict. You'll become a workaholic. You'll become a self-objectifier and the result of that is that you'll sacrifice your relationships

[00:17:01] and your love and even your happiness. Well, and let me ask you then like you have this column in Atlantic you published these books do you look at the metrics of success in the type of activity you're doing? How many social media followers you have?

[00:17:18] How many people bought the book? Was it more than the last time? You mentioned 500,000 readers of your Atlantic column. Is that an important number for you? Like are these metrics that are really important in your 20s and 30s still important to you? They're important to everybody

[00:17:34] and we have to discipline our will, right? Because remember Mother Nature is cracking the whip on you. Mother Nature is urging you toward the animal path and we have a choice between the animal path and the divine path. I'll give you an example of this.

[00:17:48] Mother Nature says if you want to be satisfied there's one word you need to master more, more, have more, more of what? More of everything. But the truth is that real satisfaction comes when we understand that we should conceive of lasting satisfaction and fulfillment

[00:18:05] as being all the things that we have divided by the things that we want and we need to manage the wants every bit as much as we need to manage the haves and that's a very unnatural thing to do

[00:18:15] but to manage your worldly wants is the heavenly path. That's the reason in the Christian faith we talk about this extensively is subjugating the will to the will of me to the will of God which is to understand that these worldly wants are actually not in my interest.

[00:18:33] That's a really important thing to do. So am I subject to the metricification of success in life? Yeah, you know if somebody comes to me and says you know how many books we sold this week and it's a big number it's gonna, the locus ceruleus in my brain

[00:18:49] is gonna make little spritz of dopamine into my prefrontal cortex and I'm gonna say I want more. I want more why because I'm human and I've evolved to be this way but I'm also, I'm made in God's image. I'm a divine being too

[00:19:05] and I can make these kind of divine decisions about my life and so what do I do? I do the same thing that everybody should do which is to subject the will to the will of me to the will of God in the way that I do that

[00:19:20] is that I offer up the worldly urges. I offer them up in my prayers. I offer them up in my meditation. I offer them up as I go to Mass and say my rosary every day and I say Lord, thy will be done not mine

[00:19:34] because I want the better formula. And what do you think the result of that, of that those words in your prayers do for you? I get happier. Yeah, I get happier. Look, I've got the empirical verification that this actually works in people's lives from the peer reviewed research

[00:19:53] but I don't need that because I've seen it again and again and again when I've actually made the decision that this is the way I'm going to live. Now, I look, I'm not perfect and when I'm weak, you know, I'll look at a, you know,

[00:20:06] something doesn't go well with respect to the metrics and I'll interpret it as my own personal failure to excel but then I remember because I actually have this anchor in my life of greater things, of more heavenly things, of more divine things

[00:20:18] and it has made an incredible difference in my life. I mean, it's like, I just don't know how I would put one foot in front of the other, quite frankly. I would be a madman. Did I not have the key to the spiritual life?

[00:20:32] Yeah, because like imagine again, you're a musician and the first 10 to 20, let's say you're a great musician and the first 10 to 20 years of your career you were writing and putting out hit after hit and you really not only got off on it but you enjoyed it.

[00:20:48] You enjoyed writing new music that made people happy and suddenly you couldn't do it anymore. Like this is a loss. It's like losing a limb, like it's a loss in your life. Like, and yes, you can say I'm going to be a teacher and a performer now

[00:21:03] but I really enjoyed the creation of powerful new music is just faith and offering yourself in service of a higher power. Is that enough to overcome that loss? What's enough to overcome the loss is to learn the deeper satisfactions that actually come from the crystallized intelligence curve.

[00:21:25] It doesn't sound as good. Fluid intelligence sounds better. Why? Because you're the star. It's you, to me, as an individual and that's what Mother Nature wants me to pursue is a higher place in the hierarchy, a bigger cave with more animal skins

[00:21:39] and flints and buffalo jerky in it, more mates, 75 children if I can have them. But of course these aren't the things that I really want and when I focus on the things that I really want I want the deep faith in my relationship with God.

[00:21:51] I want the real friendships with people who actually love me as opposed to simply saying, you know, Arthur Brooks has, you know, a bunch of books. Who cares? I mean, I want, I want a relationship with my kids. You know, when I, before we started the podcast

[00:22:04] I had to run and get my headphones and I went upstairs and my little grandson was up there smiling at me and I stopped for a minute. It was just, you know, I mean, that's the life in life is really what it comes down to.

[00:22:15] And when we actually learn to understand that, when we actually learn that our work, the point of our work is to earn our success in the way that we're best able to do so and to serve others in the way that we most can,

[00:22:27] then true happiness actually comes. We have to subjugate ourselves in order to even be aware that this is the case. But when we do, when I talk to people who've really jumped onto that crystallized intelligence curve the me curve to the we curve, man,

[00:22:40] their life is never the same and they've never been happier. By the way, you can also be unbelievably worldly successful in that second curve if you're doing it right. Yeah. I mean, look at so look at many people yourself included who are, who are older

[00:22:52] and finding their place in this kind of influencer style world right now. You know, it's interesting you bring in faith like in both your books you weave in not only Christianity but there's a lot of discussion of Buddhism which focuses on eliminating cravings

[00:23:11] and cravings are the sources of suffering and even Hinduism you talk about this third stage of life that kings and philosophers will go on a Vanas Prastha. I don't know how to say it like a journey into the forest like how does one do that now?

[00:23:28] How have you done that? So I have, I go to India every year by the way the reason for my great interest in Eastern traditions is because they make me much, much better at my Western traditions quite frankly.

[00:23:41] You know, as a Catholic I pray my rosary every day which is an ancient thousand year old meditative prayer with repeated prayers using beads while contemplating mysteries that actually come from Holy Scripture and I never had good technique until I actually went to study with Adal-e-Lama

[00:23:57] and his monks in Dharamsala in the Himalayan foothills which I've been doing now for 11 years and I sat with his monks while they were praying the ancient Tibetan repeated prayers. I don't understand a word but as I sat in meditation with my brothers, the monks

[00:24:12] I was praying my holy rosary to my Lord and Savior and that's, you know, we have to understand that there's so many different ways that so many doors that can open to us. I know I've known the Adal-e-Lama well and worked with him for a long time

[00:24:24] and he always says I want you to be a better Catholic because he loves me, you know? And so there's lots and lots of ways that we can do that and many techniques that we can learn. A case in point is exactly what you just brought up.

[00:24:36] I was studying with a teacher in Southern India in a town called Palakad which is on the border between two Indian states of Kerala and Tamil Nadu and there's a pretty famous local teacher who believes he is the reincarnation of an ancient spiritual teacher named Ramana Maharshi

[00:24:55] not that ancient, he died in the 1950s before this teacher was... Ramana Maharshi is an incredible personage. He never wrote anything but his words are beautiful and they've been, I forgot the main book with a lot of his quotes and talks and so on.

[00:25:14] Yeah, the meditations of Ramana Maharshi. Yeah, it's incredible. I mean, it's like it's his short lessons, usually a paragraph or less. At an early age, it seems like he was very talented at being spiritual. Right. Like in an early age, he basically imagined himself as dead

[00:25:35] and that meditation kind of sent him on this multi-year period of silent meditation and basically an ashram was built around him while he was doing this. And that's right. And by the time he was 50 and older then he was surrounded by disciples

[00:25:51] to whom he taught these great innovations that had occurred to him during his period of fluid intelligence. These are actually a perfect example of the idea. Well, his avatar, this teacher believes, is this relatively famous teacher in Southern India today

[00:26:04] named Sri Nothuramankatiraman and who I have studied with who has talked about the work of Ramana Maharshi about the quarters of the ideal life. Now these are, it's called the ashramas and this is an ancient Vedic teaching, an ancient Hindu teaching from thousands of years ago.

[00:26:19] Probably, this is a probably 4,000 year old idea that the ideal life starts with a period called brahmacharya where you're the student taking in wisdom, taking in teaching, taking in learning. The second part is when you use that learning which is about age 26 to 50 which is called grihastha,

[00:26:35] build the business, build the family, pursue success, pursue adult life. Around age 50 is this new adolescence, this second adolescence called vanaprastha which coincides with the time between the fluid intelligence and crystallized intelligence curves according to modern social science and neuroscience. Vanaprastha comes from two Sanskrit words,

[00:26:56] van and prastha meaning to retire into the forest in which it doesn't mean literally to do that. I mean some people can and some people can't. I'm not, I don't really feel like retiring into a forest but the whole point is

[00:27:07] this is when you need to actually start getting more serious about the contemplative life and passing on wisdom within the context of the contemplative life. This is when you need to start seeing yourself as a spiritual teacher according to this idea

[00:27:21] such that you can get to the last quarter which is 75 and on and if you're lucky you get to 100 which is called sannyasa, the enlightenment period and the whole idea in Hinduism is if you're going to spend time in pure contemplation of the holy light of God

[00:27:37] when you're older, you better be trained. You better not show up for the spiritual Olympics having sat around on the couch eating haggendoss for the last couple of years. No, no, no, no. And the elite training is the contemplation that comes when you're my age and your age

[00:27:52] quite frankly, such that you have this incredible spiritual reward that lies ahead of you. But to get to that you need to jump between the curves. You need to jump between this householder phase of success addiction, workaholicism and you know, I am the success machine

[00:28:08] to the I am the teacher. I am the person dedicated to the depths of spirituality and transcendence while still, I mean, you're going to have to earn earn a living at the same time and reconceive of yourself in this new and much deeper way.

[00:28:25] And what if someone's listening to this and they're thinking, oh my gosh, I didn't do any training and now I'm 60 and whatever or I'm 30 and I didn't become a world famous musician so it's too late for me and like how does someone deal with falling in between

[00:28:46] the cracks in these theories of intelligence? Start now. I mean, the truth is none of us is on time. I didn't actually get onto my crystallized intelligence curve probably 10 years too late and I was experiencing a whole lot of frustration. I just didn't know why

[00:29:03] and the reason is because I was trying to do the old stuff and I wasn't trying to do the new stuff until I actually did the work and a lucky me, I'm a behavioral scientist. I can actually read the literature and

[00:29:15] I wouldn't say that's not so lucky but go ahead. Yeah, yeah, I know. But it was good for me because I'm actually able to use it to revolutionize my life and then create ideas that I can pass on and help other people with.

[00:29:25] But no matter how old you are, it's not too late to start. You know, for example, at age 30, you're not on your crystallized intelligence curve yet but you better have a plan. You know, what is my plan in 10 and 20 years? What is my career going to look like?

[00:29:39] How do I see my life as an arc of value creation and love? How do I see it? It's going to change. If you're going to do that successfully, it's going to change. If I'm 60 years old and I didn't ever have a religious bone in my body,

[00:29:54] well, what I'm talking about is not necessarily my faith, although I strongly recommend it. It's transcendence. It's transcendence to the individual psychodrama of my commute and my lunch and my money and my television shows and my boss and me, me, me. It's so boring.

[00:30:12] What you need is to transcend that. Now, the earlier you start, the better off you are such that in your period of Vana Prastha you can be enjoying that and developing that. But if you're 60 and you haven't started, start now. Start now, absolutely.

[00:30:25] I talk to people all the time and they ask me how to do it. I have a protocol of how to start, no matter how old you are in building your spiritual base around what you believe and what you want to experience

[00:30:40] and where you are in your personal evolution. So it seems like there's three strategies for as you're getting older. One is to move from performer, slash star, slash whatever to teacher, mentor, advisor. The other is to kind of pay much more attention

[00:31:15] to the spiritual aspects of your life. You could argue you should always do that but particularly as you're getting older. And the third as a practitioner is to not, figure out strategies to not rely on the raw intelligence but the more pattern recognition.

[00:31:34] So for instance, maybe a musician should be more of a producer where they're sampling from different songs and styles and so on. And a fiction writer could be more like, should be more like a historian where they're pulling from different strains of thinking

[00:31:51] and intelligence and putting together books that way. So what do you think of that? Those three approaches. That's right. That's right. Now there's no good reason not to develop a spiritual life or a philosophical life, even if it's not a religious life,

[00:32:08] something that is transcendent to everybody for sure. But the actual ways that you'll talk about the other business that you've just mentioned here, really coherently and really well about moving from one curve to the other really depends on what you're doing. If you're really love being a lawyer,

[00:32:23] you should be a star litigator at 30 but you should be the managing partner at 60. Why? Because there's two different sets of skills. If you're an entrepreneur, you should come up with a big new biotech or software idea at 30. Absolutely. There's a reason that the $1 billion

[00:32:38] and plus capitalizations of tech firms today are on average run by 31 year old founders because they're stewing in fluid intelligence. But what should you do at 60? You should be a venture capitalist. You should recognize the next generation of people that deserve and need support,

[00:32:56] who incidentally will also make you rich beyond your wildest dreams. And there's something like this for everybody. I should have been the mathematical theoretician at 30 and I should be the column writer and senior professor now that I'm 59 years old and I get so much more gratification

[00:33:15] from doing something I'm naturally good at and that actually shares with other people. That's the point to keep in mind. There is a path in everybody's life for exactly that kind of change. Now, in the book with Oprah, Build the Life You Want,

[00:33:30] you question about what the meaning of happiness is. Maybe you could just, what is the difference between happiness and well-being? Yeah. So well-being is really a, it's kind of an affect balance. It's a mood balance. Well-being is, you might think of it as happiness minus unhappiness.

[00:33:46] That's a good way of thinking about what well-being is. And if you want to maximize your well-being, you can actually get happier or get less unhappy. And those processes are largely produced in different hemispheres of the brain, believe it or not. Being unhappy is not being happy.

[00:34:01] It's not the absence of happiness. These are really different things based on different primary emotions that have evolved to give you information about different circumstances in your life. So, negative mood, negative emotions, sadness, fear, anger, disgust, which are the big four, they come because we're aversive

[00:34:19] to different threats and negative situations around us. We need that information. These are not bad feelings. These are negative feelings and they're very good unless they're maladapted. And this is a lot of what we talk about in the book. So when we say just well-being,

[00:34:31] it's kind of a blunt measure of all the good that I feel in my life. Mine is the bad that I feel in my life. Happiness itself on the good side of the ledger is really a combination of three things. It's a combination of enjoyment

[00:34:44] and satisfaction and meaning. These are the three things that we actually need. And interestingly, what a lot of people don't understand is that each one of those things requires sacrifice and pain. Now again, for me as a religious person, there's no mystery about this, man.

[00:35:01] I mean it's like, I'm a Christian, my Savior was nailed to a cross and that's what I pray in front of every day. And I'm like, yeah, but I don't want to feel any. I don't want to feel it. I don't like these bad feelings.

[00:35:14] I mean, who the heck am I to be saying such a thing? But what the bigger point that this brings is that to be fully alive, to be on the heavenly path, to actually find the happiness, the enjoyment, the satisfaction and purpose that should be my lot,

[00:35:29] I need to suffer too. And that's the great paradox of, you know, the happiness problem to begin with that Oprah and I talk about a lot in this book. Well, in terms of finding meaning in your life, why does that involve sacrifice? Meaning requires pain and suffering

[00:35:48] because we never learn the meaning of our life until we suffer. Nobody ever says, you know, I figured out the meaning of my life is that weak at the beach in Ibiza. That time I went to Disneyland and it was the most fun time

[00:36:00] I've ever had in my life. That's dessert, man. It's good for other things. But the whole point is when I ask anybody, anybody listening to us, lots and lots of people listening to us right now. Thank you by the way. When did you actually learn

[00:36:15] the most about what makes you who you are? How did you really learn about yourself, the why of you? You're going to tell me about something bad. You're going to tell me about something that somebody who loved you died or left or you were afraid

[00:36:30] or you got sick or you lost something very dear to you and you survived. That's what you're going to tell me about. You know, I was talking to Bernie Marcus, the guy who started Home Depot about starting the Home Depot and tell me really

[00:36:45] what made you who you are. And he talked about almost going bankrupt. Why? Because that was where he figured out his resiliency and that's what everybody actually figures out. Meaning requires suffering. Arthur, I can't even begin to tell you how happy I have been that you've been

[00:37:02] on this podcast. I'm a huge fan. And again, all your stuff's great and I recommend the book with Oprah really kind of boils down about not only happiness but well-being and a lot of things you discussed. But from strength to strength was really like a life changing book

[00:37:18] for me just a year ago. Thank you. And and it's really had a lot of effect on how I'm viewing this journey I'm currently in almost trying to relive my youth but in a in an odd way because I know I can't

[00:37:32] and it put a lot of things into perspective. I really appreciate you coming on the show. Thank you so much. Where do you like people to check you out? The most right now arthurbrooks.com That's where you find you know the books and the articles

[00:37:44] and all kinds of free stuff all kinds of quizzes and tests and you can learn about your personality and yeah, by the way, don't people lie on those tests like if you say oh, on a scale of 0 to 10 how generous are you? Doesn't everybody just put like a 10?

[00:38:00] Yeah, I usually don't ask about it. I usually don't quiz people on how virtuous they are. I usually ask relatively value neutral questions that will ascertain what's going on in your well-being and your personality. Those are the kinds of tests that I like. And so you know

[00:38:14] some of these tests are pretty good. You can still lie, you know, but but it doesn't do any good if you do. Well, arthurbrooks.com and I was going to suggest something else but now I'm getting brain fog again. Yeah, you got the COVID fog, man. Oh man,

[00:38:30] sorry you've got that. That's a crummy business. It really hit me harder this time than ever before. It's the third time I've had it. But anyway, arthur, thank you so much. I hope you can come on again at some point and it's so valuable to me

[00:38:45] as I process this one. Thank you. I appreciate it an awful lot. The next book that I've got coming out in 2025 will be about how to treat to start strong in your 20s, how to build your life as if it were a startup enterprise, but you're accumulating

[00:39:01] the fortune of love and happiness and bring it into other people and how to do that in a business like way. That's what the next book is going to be based on science and motivation and maybe a little bit of Tibetan Buddhism and Christianity to boot.

[00:39:14] Which by the way, you know, you talk a lot about Buddhism, Tibetan Buddhism, again, Hinduism, Christianity. I think they're all like 100% overlap. Like you look at the book of Job, for instance, which is this very mysterious book in the Old Testament, but there's one point where someone says

[00:39:34] to Job, you know, when he's at his worst, listen buddy, you need to take your thoughts into captivity. Which I thought was a beautiful way in the Bible to describe Eastern meditation. Yeah, it's also the best book in the Bible to understand that the nature of suffering,

[00:39:51] you know, people are always asking. And this is the main thing that trips young people up, people in their 20s. Like, why don't we believe in God when I see people suffering? And Job asked this, you know, in the 39th chapter of Job, he says,

[00:40:02] it puts God in the dock. You know, it's like, I did everything. I did everything right, man. And look, you cast, you, you, you, you ruin, you take away my fortune, you kill my family, you kill my livestock, you take everything from me. And God gets all,

[00:40:20] it's very funny. God gets very sarcastic and God says, well, if you know so much where you must know the answer of why I created the heavens and the earth, you might, where were you when I created the oceans? If you know so much, explain that.

[00:40:33] And if you can't explain that, don't explain, don't make me explain why you and your little way are suffering in this mortal coil. It's interesting because, you know, that's pretty much what the Dalai Lama says too. The Dalai Lama says, Yeah. Don't tell me to tell you

[00:40:50] why you're suffering. That's the wrong question. The question is not why are you suffering? The question is, what are you going to do now in the face of your suffering? Well, it's all beautiful stuff and once again, Arthur Brooks, thank you so much for coming on the show.

[00:41:07] Thanks a lot. I appreciate it a lot.