When Arthur Brooks was interviewing for his job, longtime Harvard Business School professor Len Schlesinger asked him, “What can you teach that really only you can teach—and that we need and don’t have?” Brooks responded that he’d been hearing about data on HBS graduates decades after they’d graduated.
“Here’s the good news: They got everything they wanted,” Brooks said. “Here’s the bad news: They wanted the wrong thing. The result is that they’re not as happy as they could be. We need to teach a class on happiness,” Brooks concluded.
A social scientist with a PhD in public policy analysis and a former professional French-horn player, Brooks came to the subject of happiness by way of art. His early research focused on why people produce and consume art and beauty as well as the motives behind human generosity. He discovered that happiness was the common reward for both, which led to his 2008 book, Gross National Happiness: Why Happiness Matters for America—and How We Can Get More of It. And while his next move was to run the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) think tank, he couldn’t shake the topic. It wasn’t just a professional interest; Brooks himself wanted to find out how to be happier, personally, too. As he began to dig into the research, the conclusions were unambiguous: “I needed to retire and dedicate myself to sharing knowledge,” recalls Brooks, who left AEI in 2019.
At HBS, he teaches the Leadership and Happiness course, has delivered hugely popular alumni webinars and virtual reunion sessions on the topic, and recently released From Strength to Strength: Finding Success, Happiness, and Deep Purpose in the Second Half of Life.
“I’m simply eating my own cooking,” says Brooks, who also teaches at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. “I’m on both sides of the research problem, at this point. I’m the subject and I’m the researcher. I’m like a perpetual-motion machine of happiness research.”
In this conversation with the HBS Alumni Bulletin, Brooks talks about why happiness has become such a hot topic in academia, how understanding its drivers can make better leaders, and the practical steps to kicking an addiction to success.
Dan Morrell: There’s been increasing academic interest in the topic of happiness in recent years. We’ve seen it at HBS with the work of Ashley Whillans, Leslie Perlow, Mike Norton, and Francesca Gino, among others. We’ve seen it with the inception of the Center for Health and Happiness at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. And, really, the interest is global. What do you think is behind this rise in scholarly attention?
Arthur Brooks: Two things. The first is that people have actually figured out that happiness is more than a feeling, so therefore it’s worthy of study. The second thing is figuring out that, when you study it, you get better at it. This is not of theoretical interest; the more you know, the happier you can get.
When it turns out there is knowledge that can be acquired and that knowledge is directly applicable to your life, this combination becomes highly combustible. So, for instance, we can learn about the spike proteins on viruses, and then we can use that knowledge to create a vaccine to counter these viruses. One, two, bang. That’s how it works in the intellectual traditions, and that’s what happened—catalytically—in the science of happiness.
Morrell: You’ve been deep in this topic for almost two decades. How have you seen the field evolve and change?
Brooks: It’s become a lot more cognitive and brain-scientific. Neuroscience is a relatively new field, but if you’re going to be a good social scientist today, you have to know a fair amount of neuroscience. And if you’re a good neuroscientist today, you have to know a fair amount of social psychology and basic social science. These are crosshatched fields.
About a quarter of my course at HBS is neuroscience. I’m not a neuroscientist, but I can read the science. It’s the same tools as social science—the experiment, treatment, control, human subjects, statistical inference, using the scientific method.
Outside of academia, the happiness field has become fairly polarized. You have the scholars who do the science, where the work can be quite technical. Then you have the self-improvement people who can’t read and interpret the science, and some of it’s wrong. Where it is really exciting now is the seam between science and self-improvement, and that’s what I’m working on.
Morrell: In the course description for Leadership and Happiness, you note that the course “aims to give students a competitive advantage.” How can understanding happiness, both that of our colleagues and our own, make one a more effective leader?
Brooks: One of the big problems that we have is that when people don’t understand happiness at all, they make a lot of mistakes. The biggest mistake that they make, for example, is believing that they’ll actually find satisfaction through money, power, and fame. Sooner or later, they become a success addict. If you’re an alcoholic, you can’t actually drink so much alcohol that you’re ever finally satiated. You have enough until you pass out, and the next day you want it again. That’s the nature of all addiction, and success addiction is no different. People get on what we call the “hedonic treadmill,” where you’re running and running and running, and you become deeply addicted to success, which leads you to burnout. And it’s based on the mistaken idea that you can actually find ultimate satisfaction through success.
Happiness science helps people break that cycle because it helps them to understand the nature of true satisfaction—how to get it and what true rewards should look like. So you’ll be more effective, more joyful. You’ll bring along more successful people, and you’ll have more career endurance.
Morrell: Thirty-three million Americans have quit their jobs since the spring of 2021. What can good leaders do to make sure that workers are engaged and happy?
Brooks: The Great Resignation is no joke: Twenty-five percent of Americans changed jobs in 2021, and 53 percent say they’re going to change jobs. We’ve never seen numbers like this: historically low workforce-participation rates and historically tight labor markets. In other words, you can’t find workers, but many people aren’t working. And that’s because we have unbelievably high frictional unemployment, because people are changing jobs and they’re being really, really choosy.
Now, the key thing you’d want to know, if you were running a company, is why you have such unbelievably high churn. I would say, “Okay, let’s look at comp.” And you’d say, “Oh, I pay really competitive salaries and benefits.” Then I’d say, “No, let’s look at the real comp.” Real comp is the tangibles plus the intangibles in a job, and the number-one intangible in a job is social capital—your relationship with your boss and your relationship with your coworkers.
The big problem that we’re having culturally, and the reason for the Great Resignation, is people like their jobs less, and people like their jobs less because their compensation is lower. And their compensation is lower because they’ve been separated from human involvement and human contact. People are saying, “It’s just a job.” So if it’s just a job, I might as well go get another job. But when it’s your friends who are working there, it’s not just a job. When you’re rewarded by somebody who knows you as a person and builds you up, it’s not just a job anymore; it’s a bunch of relationships. If we don’t understand that, then all we’re doing is just running nameless, faceless factories.
Morrell: Your new book focuses on how people can reorient the second half of their lives for optimal happiness. Does this idea play less with students because they first have to chase that success to understand its limits? Or are they ready at an earlier age to define their lives in real and fulfilling ways?
Brooks: Different people have different orientations and different timelines. HBS students tend to have a very long time horizon, because they’ve deferred a lot of gratification. The students in my Leadership and Happiness class are very interested in the following questions: What should I do at 25 to increase my chances of happiness at 75? What are the investments I need to make so that I can be happier right now, and so I have a better shot at being happier later? So the book that I wrote, sure enough, is for career changers and mid-lifers and people who are frustrated and burned out and don’t know why—people who find that they’re in decline and they’re panicking. But for 25- and 35-year-olds, it’s about knowing you’re going to change. Owning that and being ready is something they’re really interested in.
Morrell: Some of these lessons seem so obvious. This idea that the hedonic treadmill will never lead to happiness—this is the theme of every Disney movie I watched as a kid. Why is it so hard for us to forgo that chase?
Brooks: Your dreams are liars. Here’s the problem: Your genetic proclivities are not biasing you toward happiness. They’ve biased you toward sexual selection, toward impressing potential mates. The ancient brain says strive, strive, strive, and finally you’ll get satisfaction.
It’s a lie, but not because you’re an idiot. It’s a lie because your brain is structured to lie to you. There is a process called homeostasis, or the tendency toward equilibrium. You can’t stay out of equilibrium for long, but you’re going to try to get back out of it again by chasing success [which creates dopamine], which promises enduring satisfaction. That’s why you run on the hedonic treadmill, and that’s why your brain lies to you and says, “Do it again. Do it again. Do it again.” It’s interesting that a cocaine addict’s brain is lying to him and a success addict’s brain is lying to him using the same pathways.
You basically have three kinds of people: The first is people who run on the hedonic treadmill and never quite realize why they don’t feel satisfaction. Second is people who run on the hedonic treadmill and know why they don’t feel satisfaction but are afraid to stop because they’re going to face-plant off the back of the treadmill. Third is the people who are able to get off that treadmill. My book is for people who are in groups one and two, trying to get them into group three.
Morrell: Okay, help us get off the treadmill. What are the strategies and tactics?
Brooks: Number one, when it comes to happiness: Knowledge is power. Again, this was the big breakthrough of happiness science—that we could know something about it, and when we knew something about it, we got happier. When you understand the nature of your own change—the structure of your own brain and the exercise in futility that is actually attaining these worldly rewards—that power is tremendous. Then the second thing is, now that you’ve got the truth, what’s holding you back? The first key thing is that people are just afraid of making change. When you’re good at something, you keep doing it. When you’re an addict, you want the same kind of hit again and again and again.
I tell the story about a woman who told me how miserable she was in her life. I said, “Why don’t you change?” And she said, “Because I would rather be successful than happy.” I know people suffering from alcohol-use disorder who would say, “I would prefer to be high than happy.” The truth is that people are afraid to stop; they’re afraid to break away. So you have to break the fear—the fear of jumping, the fear of change. This is the first chain link that you need to break to be free.
Morrell: How has writing and researching this book changed your life?
Brooks: This truly is me-search. I started this intending for it to be a private matter, because I was a CEO and I was not happy. I recognized that what had made me really good at what I was doing was not something I was going to have forever. And it didn’t even make me happy—I was lonely, I wasn’t satisfied, I was working 80 hours a week, my relationships weren’t what I wished they were, and I was marginalizing things that should probably be more important to me. And I said, “What the hell, man?”
On a plane one day, I overheard one of the most famous men in the world confessing to his wife that he wished he were dead. He was 30 years, maybe 40 years ahead of me in age, he was way more famous, way more successful, richer than I’d ever be, and he was miserable. I thought, “Dude, that’s future-me. That’s where I’m going.” So I said, “Look, what am I trained to do? I’m a ‘happiness’ guy. I’m trained in social science. Why am I not using this to solve my problem?” So I started an owner’s manual for myself as I got older—a 401(k) for my happiness. I diagnosed a problem, and I put together 10 ways that I could solve it. As I started talking about it with people, they said it was maybe a game changer. So I wrote it up.
It did change my life. I quit my job because of the findings in this book. Why? Because I came to the American Enterprise Institute with a lot of fluid intelligence to solve a lot of problems, to be on top of the world. I came to Harvard because I wanted to work on my crystallized intelligence. And I wanted to have space to build my love relationships. I wanted to share the knowledge that I had. I wanted to have more time to walk my spiritual journey. I wanted to show myself that I could quit. I wanted to show myself that I could jump—that I could walk away, that I could face my decline, that I could face the end with confidence. I passed the test, and I’m telling you, I’m happier than I’ve ever been.
This article originally appeared in the HBS Alumni Bulletin.
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