Harvard Professor Reveals The Secret To Lasting Love & Happiness - Arthur Brooks - #931

**Chris Williamson** (0:00)
I think if I was to give myself the three traits that I've managed to hold on to, I pay a lot of attention to detail, I have an unusual capacity for suffering, or doing a delay in gratification might be an easy way to put it, and I'm just consistent. And those three things seem to be pretty potent fuel no matter what industry you try and get into.

**Arthur Brooks** (0:24)
Yeah, but then of course there's the natural level of curiosity, the high level of cognitive ability, right? I mean, those are table stakes though, that's your point, right?

**Chris Williamson** (0:33)
You've got to have that to play the game. Yeah.

**Arthur Brooks** (0:35)
Yeah. Because otherwise, you have that to play the game, but then when things are slow at the very beginning, that's when you stop your podcast and you didn't.

**Chris Williamson** (0:43)
A lot of questions come through from people who say stuff like, hey man, in the beginning when you didn't have any plays or anything, like what motivated you to keep going? To be honest man, my motivation waned way more inside of year three and four and five.

**Arthur Brooks** (0:57)
Because you're getting bored. Yeah.

**Chris Williamson** (0:58)
It's like, well, I've been there. You're trying to inject novelty into what you do and you're trying, even less than that, you're just trying to not let it get stale. How many books deep are you now?

**Arthur Brooks** (1:13)
Fifteen. Fourteen and fifteen are coming out in the next year.

**Chris Williamson** (1:19)
There's a new one about meaning.

**Arthur Brooks** (1:20)
The one that's coming out about meaning is coming out one year from the 14th.

**Chris Williamson** (1:24)
Unreal.

**Arthur Brooks** (1:24)
April 14th.

**Chris Williamson** (1:25)
I'm so fired up for that. I've been thinking about me. I remember I read this. Roy Baumeister. Yeah.

**Arthur Brooks** (1:30)
Buddy of mine.

**Chris Williamson** (1:31)
Essay article, a journal post from 2011

**Arthur Brooks** (1:35)
Contrasting meaning and happiness, that one.

**Chris Williamson** (1:37)
Fucking legendary, dude.

**Arthur Brooks** (1:39)
Yeah, totally. My whole concept of happiness rolls meaning into happiness, thus incorporating unhappiness into the process of getting happier, which of course is the standard experience of being fully alive. You want to be happy, you better be unhappy. Let's see how unhappy you can be before you can be happy. People who try to avoid their unhappiness, paradoxically avoid their happiness, which is the problem.

**Chris Williamson** (2:01)
Yeah. How do you square the circle of the fact that there seems to be some data that comes out around the more that people focus on trying to be happy, the less happy they become? Is that true?

**Arthur Brooks** (2:10)
That's what's going on. What they're really trying to do when they're focusing on being happy, they're focusing on eliminating the unhappiness from their life and paradoxically miss their happiness. That's the problem. That's what they're doing.

**Chris Williamson** (2:19)
So they're hiding from bad vibes, not just expediting good vibes.

**Arthur Brooks** (2:23)
Exactly right.
That's really the bad advice that they're getting from the therapy industrial complex in America today and around the world, is that if you're unhappy, if you're suffering, it's evidence that something's wrong and broken, you need to eliminate it. That's exactly wrong. That's exactly incorrect. If you had eliminated the sources of unhappiness from your life, the sources of suffering, and it's not a question of whether or not you delayed your gratification, it's a question of whether you embrace the suffering that comes along with doing a hard thing, you would have missed your success. That's what you would have missed. Therefore, the process of getting happier means accepting, embracing, being grateful for the unhappiness that comes along the way of being fully alive. That's what meaning is really all about. It's like the masters of meaning, they don't start each day going, I'm truly grateful for all the nice things that are going to happen to me today. They wake up and they say, I'm truly grateful for all the things I'm not going to like today. That's what the master says.

**Chris Williamson** (3:23)
Dude, you're so awesome. I hope you take a moment to reflect on just how great it is that we've got scientific insight, fantastic communication, illustrious career of teaching this to people, and then the ability to communicate it. You're so fucking great. I really appreciate your work.

**Arthur Brooks** (3:39)
I appreciate that a lot. It means a lot to me coming from you. You've talked to everybody in the world.

**Chris Williamson** (3:44)
We're getting, I'm slowly taking off the list.

**Arthur Brooks** (3:45)
You actually know what you're talking about.