15. ARTHUR BROOKS: The Science of Real Happiness

Episode Transcript

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Arthur Brooks: The biggest challenge that I see is that they’re lonely, high achievers. Uh, hard workers, strivers leaders. They’re the loneliest people I’ve ever met.

we’re excited today to bring to you our interview with Arthur Brooks.

Michael Hyatt: Now the truth is both of us have been. Super fans of his, 

Megan Hyatt Miller: we’ve been super fans and guys, I gotta tell you something of all the interviews I got COD when this interview was scheduled, and Arthur has a very full schedule, as you might imagine. I mean, he travels around and speaks all the time, so he couldn’t move it and you had to do it without me, and I was so sad.

I was like, this is the interview I’ve been waiting for. 

Michael Hyatt: I was a little bit nervous about it because I thought, you know, Megan asked such great questions. I don’t know if I can carry it for the whole hour, but man, it was so easy. Because he’s just, I dunno, he’s just easy to relate to. 

Megan Hyatt Miller: Well, I, I think that, um, his work has been so meaningful to us both, uh, you know, his book Build the Life You Want, that he wrote with Oprah and his book From Strength to to Strength.

Um, both of those have been very important books in our lives and we have so much. Respect for Arthur and the, um, the quality of his work and his research. It’s so applicable. 

Michael Hyatt: It is, and I first discovered him after I’d had my heart attack. I was on medical leave and somebody recommended from Strength to Strength, which is a book about kind of what you need to be focused on in the second half of life.

Yep. And there’s been a lot of books written on that, but his was so unique and so powerful. But then I started looking into his biography. This is amazing. He’s a Harvard professor teaching leadership and get this happiness at the Kennedy School and the Business School at Harvard. He’s the author of 13 books, including Build A Life You Want, as Megan mentioned, and from Strength to Strength.

He’s a former president of the American. Enterprise Institute. Mm-Hmm. Which is kind of interesting. He’s a columnist at The Atlantic, writes a great column called How to Build a Life. Yep. And he hosts a podcast called How to Build a Happy Life. Now, one of the things he told me. That his class at Harvard on happiness is like four times oversubscribed.

That 

Megan Hyatt Miller: makes like airline over booking seem like nothing. 

Michael Hyatt: There’s like too many people that wanna get into it. Yeah. And, and you’re gonna discover why as we go through this conversation. I had the privilege of speaking with him at an event in Phoenix, uh, earlier this year. And so we got to meet Face-to-face and he was as delightful in person as he is on stage or in his writing.

Megan Hyatt Miller: I think you guys are gonna really love this conversation because it’s gonna be so helpful as you’re pursuing the Double win, winning at Work and succeeding at life. So let’s get to the conversation with Arthur Brooks. 

Michael Hyatt: Arthur, welcome to the show.

Arthur Brooks: Hi, Michael. Nice to be with you.

Michael Hyatt: Great to have you on. I’ve been looking forward to this for many months now, Yeah, but I wanna start kind of at the top. And you know, one of the things that I didn’t mention in the introduction is that I got introduced to your work about two years ago when I had a mild heart attack and then bypass surgery.

So somebody recommended to me from strength to Strength and that book I, I took three months leave, uh, from work, which was great. Just medical recovery. And I read that book and it, it really reframed everything for my life. So thank you for that important work.

Arthur Brooks: Thanks for telling me that, Michael. I wrote it for you and for me.

Michael Hyatt: I, I did feel like you wrote it for me. what got you interested in happiness as a field of study?

Arthur Brooks: So my academic background is in behavioral science. I’ve done a lot of different things with my career. I was actually a classical musician to start off my life from when I was 19. I went professional as a French horn player, spent a lot of my twenties in the Barcelona Symphony, as a matter of fact, and then actually went to college in my late twenties by correspondence.

By that time, uh, I didn’t have a preconceived notion of. You know who I was, um, anymore academically, I mean it, most people go to college and they, they think they know what they wanna study and it turns out it was something else, et cetera. Well, I didn’t have that problem because I was 28 or 29. And so, uh, I just looked at a bunch of different things that might be interesting and I turned out that social science was behavioral science, was what I was really keen on.

So much so that when I finally finished my bachelor’s degree, I quit music and went to graduate school and got my PhD and then became an academic for 10 years, then ran a think tank, uh, for a behavioral science think tank for 10 years, and then, and then came back to academia. And during that time. I got really passionate, um, about the things that make people tick, that the things they want the most.

And I was most interested in why people don’t do what they need to do to get what they most want. These are the mysteries of life, and that really led me to this whole understanding of happiness. Everybody wants to be happier, but most people are not doing what they need to do to be happier. Why is that?

Why do we make these mistakes? Why are we. Sold all this snake oil, what can we do to actually be better? And so little by little by little over the past 30 years, I’ve refined my focus more and more to be about the science of happiness. And about three years ago, um, I started a company while teaching. I continued to be a professor at Harvard, um, dedicated entirely to lifting up as many millions of people as I can using science and ideas.

Michael Hyatt: I love that. How in the world did you talk Harvard into letting you teach a course on happiness?

Arthur Brooks: Harvard’s a wonderful place. It’s huge and it has everybody doing everything in the world, and their strategy is basically go find interesting people and let them do what they want. That’s the Harvard strategy, which is one of the reasons. I mean, it’s great to be hard. You have to have a lot of money to be able to do that, but it’s a great strategy for bringing out creativity and passion in the people who are doing what they do.

So when I came to the, at the Harvard Business School of all places, the Dean said so. you’re here. What do you want to do? And I said, I’ve been looking at the data on the graduates HBS graduates and they’re 15 years out and they got everything they thought they wanted and it turned out that they had the wrong dreams for their happiness and they’re not happy.

need a class in the MBA curriculum on how leaders can be happier. Let’s call it leadership and happiness. A science class. I mean, not a woo wooo class, not a self-empowerment class. Science class on neuroscience and social science and, and with really practical tools for business leaders and the dean’s like, yeah, dude, sounds awesome.

And it was born.

Michael Hyatt: When we were in Scottsdale together, you both, you both of us spoke out there at an event, and you mentioned in your keynote that that class, I think for this fall was like. I dunno. Several times. Oversubscribed.

Arthur Brooks: Yeah, yeah. I have 180 students enrolled. I usually have about 400 on the waiting list, there’s a, an illegal zoom link they think I’m not aware of.

Michael Hyatt: That’s amazing. Okay, another question about happiness. Is happiness a relatively new idea

or is this. it is an ancient idea. What, what’s happened is our understanding of it has changed over the centuries. So if you go back, you find that Aristotle talking at length about happiness by which he called, he called happiness Udai. Monia, which is a, an ancient Greek concept. It’s hard to translate. It kind of means a good life well lived. Um, and so it had very little to do with feelings. Uh, and then over the, over the centuries, it’s become more and more about actually how we feel about things. And, and its greatest expression of happiness as a feeling is what we see in America today, which is a big, wrong turn. the past 35 years, uh, scholars, neuroscientists, and social scientists like me have, have started looking at the science of happiness a lot more rigorously to define what it is.

Arthur Brooks: How you can get more of it, how you can teach it, and what the big mistakes are in pursuing it.

Michael Hyatt: So what did the ancients get right? And then based on the science, what did they get wrong? How was our understanding of it changed over

time? 

Arthur Brooks: I mean, the ancients got a lot right, that we forgot to begin with. Aristotle, he didn’t have any time for your feelings and, and part of the reason is because he understood that feelings are transient. And he had a, he had a concept that feelings, a k, a emotions. Are signals about the outside world and that turns out to be neuroscientifically.

Exactly correct. You know, when we talk about good and bad feelings, that’s a, that’s a mistake. There are no good feelings, there are no bad feelings. There’s positive and negative emotions because that’s information for you about whether or not something’s a threat or an opportunity around you. And that’s all it is, is what it comes down to.

you need to do to be a happier person is understand your emotions and learn how to manage them without trying to eradicate or medicalize, or pathologize your emotions. That’s necessarily, I mean, there’s some people for whom it is a medical problem, but way, way fewer than what we talked about today, and that’s exactly how Aristotle more or less talked about it in, in pre-scientific times.

You know, he, he said, you know, figure out the best life. Figure out the best habits. withstanding your feelings, follow the rules is kind of what he talked about, and that’s ultimately, that’s a lot of how I, I teach about happiness still today.

Michael Hyatt: You know, I, I know in the Bible, um, I don’t remember the word happiness being used, but the word joy, maybe a translation problem. But is there a difference between joy and happiness?

Arthur Brooks: Well, there is, and, and it is an important question that you’re raising because you and I as Christian people, we, we were raised in an environment where joy and had a particular theological significance, which is very different than the way that psychologists use happiness. Hmm. of the reasons I don’t talk about joy very much.

Is because as a scientist, it means something different to me than it does to me as a Christian. when scientists talk about joy, that’s a basic positive emotion. I. largely implicated in a whole bunch of biochemistry, including the anticipation of reward with dopamine and the, and the, and, and the stimulation of different parts of the limbic system of the brain, like the ventral tag mental area that give you a sense of a, uh, of a boole.

That said great thing. She says that she loves me or I just had a, you know, three lines of cocaine or something. It coming, it is the same thing. It gives you that, that particular transient feeling of good. Is the way that that works, right? And sometimes very destructive things like drugs and some things really wonderful things like, I love you that’s different than how Christians talk about joy.

As in, you know, the, the famous autobiography of CS Lewis is surprised by joy. And what he meant by joy is those moments when you get a glimpse of the beatific vision. Now I use that word on perfect, uh, on purpose. So I’m a Catholic. And the beatific vision for us, which is not as common for evangelicals and Protestant Christians, that’s the, the beatific vision is it is the face of God, and you’re not gonna get it till you’re in heaven, and you’re gonna lay your gaze on the face of God, and it’s all gonna make sense, and it’s gonna be unremitting joy now and forever.

That’s what CS Lewis meant. Now, why is it called beatific? Because the beatitudes. Are happiness. That’s another way to translate the beatitudes, that is to say, is to, you know, blessed. Are they who, you know, another way to say that is happy. Are they Mm-Hmm. the beatitudes are happiness lessons in the Bible.

That’s another way of actually translating what the beatitudes mean and what the words mean.

Michael Hyatt: You know, uh, I, I think I mentioned to you when we were together, I’m Eastern Orthodox and we have a little bit of a different view. Uh, it’s the vision of the un uncreated light, so it’s, it’s also related to joy and very few people ever experience it, 

Arthur Brooks: Yeah, 

Michael Hyatt: totally. 

Arthur Brooks: a different, so when you ask a psychologist what’s joy? They’ll say Joy is a basic positive emotion that you have because you have an approach motive that’s being ascertained by your limbic system, and that has to give you an incentive to go do that thing and eat that banana or get that mate like, okay.

And Christians say it is a glimpse of the face of God. And so you don’t wanna mix those two things up.

Michael Hyatt: Yeah, no, that’s a good point. There, it seems like there’s a lot of emphasis on unhappiness and you know, frankly you’ve popularized it a lot and there’s some other people writing about it, but why is it that people seem so profoundly unhappy, at least in the us? I went to Ethiopia about 15 years ago.

My wife and I were over there with World Vision for a couple weeks and I mean, these people had nothing 

Arthur Brooks: Yeah. 

Michael Hyatt: yet they seem to us to be profoundly happy

Arthur Brooks: Yeah. 

Michael Hyatt: and, and here we came back to the US and you know, it’s like we’ve never had more. In life, but everybody seems out of sorts and overmedicated and all the rest.

Arthur Brooks: Yeah. Yeah. So, so, yeah. So what gives, right, well, the truth is that there’s a, there’s a, a, a dislocation between what we think will bring us happiness and what actually brings us happy. What we think will bring us happiness because our animal nature tells us it is. So Mother nature lies. She lies all the time because Mother Nature just wants you to survive and pass on your genes.

She doesn’t care if you’re happy. she says, your goal in life is money, power, pleasure, and fame. Basically, there’s the things that make you more. Give you greater evolutionary fitness, right? You do that stuff, man. Life is gonna be so sweet. So if I have more cars than I need, it indicates to potential mates that I have excess resources, and so therefore, that fourth car is gonna bring me happiness.

That’s a complete cross circuit in your brain that’s doing all of these calculations, and they’re wrong. You know, when you’re in a very rich society, you can do all that stuff. You can pursue all that stuff very, very efficiently and then be. Weirded out by the fact that you’re not getting happier. Well, there’s a reason.

I mean, that’s, I just explained the basic evolutionary biology for why you’d think that and why it doesn’t work. What does bring happiness? Are not, you know, money, power, pleasure, and fame. It’s faith, family, friends, and work that serves. And, and there’s a ton of scientific literature behind this. This is not philosophy, this is, this is social science and neuroscience that shows that when you have a sense of the transcendent, when you have deep family relationships where you know your people and they know you, when you have real friendships and when you have work that serves others as opposed to serving yourself, that’s when you’re gonna be happier.

And it turns out that you don’t need to be in a rich society to do that. need to. And as a matter of fact, when you don’t have as many opportunities for those worldly idols, you might just be happier under certain circumstances. Now, that said, this is not an argument to turn the United States into a developing nation.

mean, we’re pretty good at doing that by screwing up our public policies and kind of going in reverse as far as I’m concerned. But that’s another podcast. What we need, a flourishing, entrepreneurial, upwardly, mobile progressive economy. Economically progressive economy, but we need not to be to, to, to be, um, um, idolized, um, you know, we, we to be idolatrous about the fruits of what that prosperity can bring.

And that’s one of the reasons that the happiest people you’re gonna find are not the American materialists, and they’re not necessarily the Ethiopians that you met. They’re the people in the United States listening to you that are your fans. Who have the opportunities to get ahead to create jobs and opportunity and growth and excitement, and to be able to feed their kids and to be able to educate other people and to be able to get a charity and they’re taking care of their families and they have close friendships and they’re living to serve and they’re on their knees Hmm, in, in, in, in, in communion with a divine, that’s, that’s the best life.

Michael Hyatt: can, can we unpack each of those four, because these are like the pillars. Of what you teach this faith, family, friends, and work. But I’d love to hear kind of the science that supports that because I, I think sometimes we think when it comes to faith, you know, it’s okay if you don’t. It’s okay if you do, doesn’t really matter, but what’s the science say?

Arthur Brooks: Yeah, the science is really clear on this, and, and so, you know, and the, the, the shorthand is faith, family, friends, and work, but the, obviously it’s, it’s a lot more complex than that. By faith, I don’t mean my faith, I’m a Catholic. You’re orthodox. A lot of our, a lot of your listeners are evangelicals. are a lot of people listening to you who are of no faith.

Now, as a Christian, I have my views as a scientist. What I will tell you is what brings the level of human flourishing that we’re talking about here is, is something that makes you small and makes the universe large. I love that. here’s basically what I mean. You will not be happy when you are the star of your own psychodrama.

And once again, mother Nature insists that this is, that Michael Hyatt’s life should focus on nothing more than Michael Hyatt starring Michael Hyatt, written by Michael Hyatt, right? Produced and directed by Michael Hyatt. That’s. The formula that Mother Nature is giving you. But that’s the, that’s the formula for misery.

That’s a good formula for you meeting your needs and passing on your genes. It’s a horrible formula for your happiness because it is boring. It’s terrifying. It’s tedious. What you need to do is to get small and make the universe large. So how are you gonna do that? And the answer is, your faith or your life philosophy.

You need a strategy that makes you little. Despite the fact that your tendency is to be the star, and, and that’s what faith does more efficiently than any other approach. But, but look, if studying this stoic philosophers and living according to their, dictates with, uh, the utmost seriousness, if that works for you, good.

Do that. If a, an eastern meditation practice works for you, that’s good too. I, I, I like to go to mass every day that, that works for me.

Michael Hyatt: Hmm. Hmm. So does, is there a science that says that, uh. People who are of some kind of faith self-report more happiness than people who don’t have a faith.

Arthur Brooks: Tons of experiments, tons of data, and there’s even neuroscience data that explains why that is the case, that the really, the greatest scholar in the world doing work on this right now is Lisa Miller, who teaches at Columbia University. She does the neuroscience and social science of, of religious experiences and what her work shows.

know, using cutting edge technology at this point is that religious experiences give you access to brain regions and, and knowledge that you can’t get any other way. And, and so this is one of the reasons that people who have I. Who are serious about their faith, they have a much greater sense of the meaning of their life because it’s hard to figure out the meaning of your life without access to these brain regions, quite frankly.

And, and, and actually we kind of know what this is, you know, the world, the technological world, is actually throwing you onto the left hemisphere of your brain, which is the, you know, the, the, the hemisphere of the brain most dedicated to technology and analysis and facts and distraction. The right side of your brain is all where all the meaning questions are and, and we’re distracted from that.

We’re having a hard time accessing that part of our brain, which is one of the reasons that people feel so that their lives are so meaningless in the current environment and so unhappy. have religious experiences, you’re on the right side of your brain. Yeah. put you in the place in your brain where you need to be to be able to consider questions of meaning.

Michael Hyatt: You know, I. I, I wanna save most of this for later. I wanna talk about practical strategies a little bit later, but it, it, it seems like what comes up for me when you say that is that there are those right side of the brain things that we can access, and we just turn off the technology long enough to do it, whether it’s painting or cooking or whatever.

Would you agree? I mean, are those things that are helpful?

Arthur Brooks: Yeah. They, they are, although it’s, you have to be serious about it is the way that this works. And so people will say, yeah, I’m gonna. Uh, you know, I’m gonna cook right now, and then they look at their phone every five minutes Hmm. cooking, right? Or that they’ll, they’ll fritter away their time.

I mean, is, is the structures of the brain called the default mode network? That’s where daydreaming and boredom comes in. You need meaning, you need to have the default mode network. And if, if every time you’re unoccupied, you’re actually looking at your device. You’re precluding your ability to actually be, to access the parts of the brain that you need to be able to find meaning for long enough periods of time that it makes sense.

Michael Hyatt: Man, that explains a lot. So here’s, here’s a question too. Why given where technology’s at, and with the rise of AI and the future of us all becoming cyborgs or something, I. What does that mean for happiness? I mean, are we gonna ever get into a balanced, balanced relationship with technology? Are you hopeful or discouraged?

Arthur Brooks: Yeah. Um, I, uh, I’m both actually, Michael, that’s a good question and part of the reason I’m discouraged is because the technologies that we’re rolling out are complicated technologies, which is to say that they are solving enormously difficult problems on static objects. What we have, the questions that we have are complex problems and complex questions, which is to say that they’re simple, but they’re impossible to solve.

You can only live them. So I’ll give you an example. A complex problem is a football game. solution is a computer simulation of a football game, which is always inaccurate, totally inadequate, and satisfying or fun. The point is the complexity. So love is complex, faith is complex.

Meaning is complex. That, that those are complex things, which means that you can’t find the solution. You have to live the solution in real time, is the way that that works. Technology is promising us solutions to our complex problems, and they never deliver. Social media was the comp, the complicated solution to the complex problem of loneliness, and it made loneliness worse.

Dating apps are the complicated solution to not being able to find adequate mates and it made the problem worse. People are less likely to find dates that they find satisfying, they’re less likely to find the, the permanent partnerships that they seek with dating apps. We know this is true, but it’s not because dating apps are evil.

It’s because they’re the wrong technology. Matched up with the wrong part of the brain, is what we’re talking about here, so I’m discouraged about that. What am I encouraged by that people are figuring it out. And then people are saying, enough, so my kids have left social media behind. My young adult children are like, this is boring.

I don’t like this. And, and instead they kind of, they did old fashioned stuff. I mean, my older sons got married at 22 and 23 and immediately starting having kids. 1940 around my house, man. Threshold. But the reason is not because I said, no, no, wag my finger. You know, dad, the professor said that I’m on the wrong hemisphere of my brain is because they figured it out on their own that it didn’t, it didn’t make ’em happy.

And so that’s what I’m, I’m really looking forward to the time where people use technology for what it’s supposed to be used for. And not for what it’s not supposed to be used for, which is the complex, beautiful, love filled parts of our lives that we have to live in real time.

Michael Hyatt: You know, the thing that dis discourages me from it, and I’m optimistic in many ways too, and I’m, you know, I love technology, but it seems like there’s been enormous amount of money and research developed in how to hijack. The dopamine parts producing parts of our brain and, and so that it’s really hard to break free from the gravitational pull of these devices today.

How do you do it? 

Arthur Brooks: well, you have to understand what the, what, what is actually going on because knowledge is power. Knowledge is power. A lot of people don’t know that there there literally, literally addicted. To their devices. They have no idea how many times a day that they look at their phones, for example, which is, you know, 250 times a day or something absurd like that.

They’re not aware that the first thing they do every single morning is actually look at these devices and when you have an awareness of this, then you can actually break free. You know, you should not, you know, and so you can set up a series of protocols. I don’t sleep in the same room as my phone. You know, because I don’t wanna look at it when I wake up in the middle of the night.

There’s nothing to look at. All it’s gonna do is wake me up, is the way that that works. And God knows I have tr trouble enough sleeping to begin with. You know, it’s, it’s, I don’t have to go into church with my phone. There’s all kinds of spaces in my life where my phone doesn’t actually have to play a role.

And the more that I realize that and start to practice. Purposively, uh, you know, an awake use of of technology in my life, the more that I realized I needed less than I thought I needed, it is the way that, the way that that works, it’s the same thing, by the way. It’s just paying attention to any of your activities that have become monotonic automatic.

Um, now sometimes you have such a full blown, um, you can have such a, a full blown addiction that you have to take special measures of, of going on a dopamine fast, you know, which is another word for Alcoholics Anonymous.

Michael Hyatt: Yeah, that’s good. let’s talk to about family and I’m, I’m thinking of the context today where it just seems like. Families are disintegrating, people are putting off, uh, parenting longer and longer. People are getting married later. A lot of people aren’t even getting married. A lot of people don’t wanna have kids.

You know, you’ve got a population or a depopulation problem in many countries. China’s probably the worst, but you know, it’s even happening here. We’re seeing dec declining birth rates. So let’s just talk about the importance of family. What do you see there and how’s it related to our happiness?

Arthur Brooks: The family relationships are, are directly neurophysiologically related to our happiness vis-a-vis neuropeptide in the brain called oxytocin. Most people know what oxytocin is. It’s also known as the love molecule. And what it it, it is a bonding agent between human, the human beings. are a kin based hierarchical tropical species.

We homo sapiens and you know, over the course of human life, we’ve evolved to have certain physiological properties that will help keep us alive, one of which is. The desire to be together with our people. Now, again, I want, you know, I’m, I’m a, I’m a follower of the gospel and cross of Jesus Christ. I believe that everybody’s my people.

I believe that we are all one human family. That we are all brothers and sisters made divinely with no exceptions. I believe that, but I also understand that I have a certain physiological union with people with whom I’m related. Either I’ve adopted, like the case of my adopted daughter and my wife that I married, or the people that were, are physiologically related to me, or genetically related to me.

And, and how, how actually do I experience that? I experience that through this neuropeptide that functions as a hormone of the brain called oxytocin. Meaning that when I have a con, when I have more contact with ’em, it’s like 4th of July. know when your babies are born and you’ve remember this, Michael, when your first child was born, you lay eyes on your first child.

You’re like, I would die for this baby. I don’t know why. It’s crazy. It’s like magic. There is a physiological explanation for this. Evolutionary biologists say that’s so you don’t leave the baby on the bus or something. But the truth is, you know, I believe it’s a gift from God that we actually have this, this unique and especially magical set of relationships with those particular people.

And if you don’t actually exploit that, if you don’t have that, it’s, you’re gonna not gonna be as happy as you could be, as you should be as you deserve to be. That’s one of the reasons that I’m I, it saddens me. It distresses me so much that one in six Americans is not talking to a family member today ’cause of politics.

nuts. That is completely crazy. You’re basically handing over your oxytocin and your happiness to some stupid political party or talking head on tv. Don’t be an idiot. Don’t fall for their snake oil man. They, they want you to not talk to Aunt Marge because she votes for Trump, or doesn’t vote for Trump or whatever, right?

Don’t be an idiot. You know, it’s a, your love should absolutely transcend ideological differences and, and the whole, uh, the whole line of argumentation that I hear today constantly, which is somebody who disagrees with me politically, is denying my right to exist. That is complete nonsense. That is idiotic nonsense, that somebody has tried to sell to you so that you will do their activist bidding.

They don’t care if you’re unhappy. They just want power, is the way that that works out. Don’t fall for it. We, we all need oxytocin because we all deserve more love, and that’s a unique bond of love that comes through the family.

Michael Hyatt: You know, it seems like in today’s modern world. There’s not the, I don’t know, the biological, uh, impetus or imperative to have large families, right? I mean, it’s not like we’re living back on the farm and we need the, the labor. right. like, I had five kids and I remember when we had five kids, people were like, what are you thinking?

Right. and it’s unusual, uh, today, but why? What, what can we do to fix that so that people get more enamored with family and we can kind of get back to more of these. Notions of family and connection.

Arthur Brooks: Yeah. So it, it’s absolutely true that the environmental incentives have changed, by which I mean that, you know, you’ll find huge families when there’s a lot of child mortality. When the, the, you know, the, the tendency is for some of your kids to die, you’re gonna have more kids. And, and when you actually use kids as labor because of a family operation, like a family farm, absolutely.

People are gonna have a lot more kids. And when those two things go away, um, oh, oh by the way, one more circumstance. When when kids grow up and take care of their aging parents. And so if you take in, you know, really good medicine, which I’m glad about, a social security system, which I’m glad about, and the fact that we don’t need our kids for child labor, which I’m kind of glad about, then you’re gonna have fewer kids than the people are gonna have lots of kids just because they belong to religious groups like the Church of Jesus Christ of Glad Day Saints, AKA, the Mormons.

Or to a certain extent, really traditional Catholics and, and, and Orthodox Christian communities are gonna see a lot more kids. But that’s because once again, they have a different set of incentives to do that. What do we need as a country? And this is a big question that a lot of people, politicians, including politicians are, are engaged in these days.

Um, some will say, well, we need a big child tax credit, right? So you need a big incentive to make that possible. Some countries where it’s absolutely disastrous, like Hungary. Has traditionally had the lowest birth rate way below replacement levels of all across Europe. And so the current leader of Hungary put in place a policy where if you have one kid, you get a permanent 25% exemption from taxation for the rest of your life.

If you have four kids, you have a hundred percent, you don’t pay any taxes again for the rest of your life. I mean, that’s a policy with teeth, but the truth is you need to change culture. And you need a culture that says the kids are awesome. what you need. And, and there are cultures that do that.

The reason that Catholics continue to have a lot of kids, and the reason that my kids, I have three, but my kids all say they want to have six and again, they were born around the year 2000. I was born in the mid 1960s. We’re going in reverse. In, in, my home. Why? Because they’re in a different culture than I was in, I was in a very modernist, kind of 1980s, 1990s culture that said, kids are a luxury item.

And my kids grew up and they’re, they’re more traditionally religious than the way I grew up. And they’re more traditionally, they’re, they’re morals or more traditionally than mine. I mean, kids these days, right? They gotta rebel in some way. And, and they’re like, all their friends are gonna have tons of kids and they want to have tons of kids.

And babies are, babies are a blessing is the way they talked about, and that’s what we need. That’s what we need to proliferate if we want to have more kids, because no joke, for the longest time we labored under a complete misapprehension, an utter lie that we have a population explosion that’s gonna deplete all the resources and ruin the earth.

That is wrong. That is straight up wrong. Paul Earli, the population bomb has been completely debunked again and again and again. And the biggest threat to the prosperity of your grandchildren and great-grandchildren is population decline. That’s That is the biggest threat that they face. We need more babies.

That doesn’t mean we need to, you know, misuse resources. We should be good in proper stewards of the resources, but we know how to do that too. And what we need is babies, babies, babies, babies. And the only way to do that is for us to start trying to change the culture in positive ways, not just in religious communities.

Well, I don’t wanna get into this too much, but this, all, this has an e, uh, economic impact, but I also think it has a role in foreign relations or international. Law, you know, if you have, for example, China with its population, I dunno what you call it, deflation, you know, they’re just losing people like their 

Michael Hyatt: crazy. 

Arthur Brooks: is imploding

And most people get desperate and you know that there’s a reason to become, all of a sudden if you don’t have enough population, you get very aggressive with other countries that are your neighbors because you gotta have some mechanism for, you know, satisfying the labor and the, and the needs of the people.

You do have.

For sure. I mean, just, there’s just nothing good that comes when a population is a decline. You have to be, you have to be so radical to be wanting to, to, to decrease the population. You gotta be Ebenezer, Scrooge Man or, or some weird activist version of that for the 21st century. I. To want to do this. It’s just, it’s just not a loving point of view, but it’s also an impractical point of view in so many ways.

Economic growth is the, the rate of productivity times the rate of population. That’s the economic growth rate in every country. So if you lower, if you lower productivity or you lower the population growth rate, you’re gonna get less, you’re gonna get less economic growth. And, and when you do that, you’re gonna have more competition for resources.

You’re gonna have more conflict, you’re gonna have more war, you’re gonna have more violence. That’s just the way it’s gonna be.

Michael Hyatt: Okay, well on that happy note, let’s move to friendships.

Arthur Brooks: friendship is something I do an awful lot with because I work, I, you know, you, you said that you read from strength to strength when, when you had a health challenge. Um, I wrote it for you, but I really mean that I was, I wrote that book for the highest achieving strivers that are seeing change in their lives.

So if I could have, you know, written the, the introduction about Michael Hyatt reading this book, I would’ve accepted the book hadn’t been written yet. So, and this, you’re exactly the demographic of somebody. I wanted to write that book for no joke. I talk to very successful people in the second half of life all the time, and there’s so much going right, but there’s also a lot of challenges.

The biggest challenge that I see is that they’re lonely, high achievers. Uh, hard workers, strivers leaders. They’re the loneliest people I’ve ever met. That makes it, it’s weird. It’s like, how’s that possible? I mean, Yeah. surrounded by people all day long, and the answer is, it’s simple. They have lots of deal friends and no real friends.

That’s what the people listening to, you know, the double win. It. That’s the reason a double win the single win is you’re successful in your job. Congratulations. Yeah. The, the double win is actually having love in your life and success in your, in your job and the love in your life is more important than success in your job.

And if you don’t have real friends, which is to say. Those that are not using you and you’re not using them. I don’t mean using in a, in I I’m not casting as versions. It’s just that you don’t need ’em to get ahead and they don’t need you for their own personal prosperity. You need people who are useless, frankly, be a happy person.

Those are, those are real friends the way, and that’s why I write a lot and coach a lot and talk an awful lot about how to have real friends for people who haven’t done it and maybe, maybe since college.

Michael Hyatt: I, I love the distinction between real friends and deal friends because I think it’s easy as a high achieving executive to get confused by this. Yeah. used to be the CEO of a public company and I had very long 17 years, had very close relationships with the people at work. You know, I saw him every day.

We went, often, went to lunch, you know, we did a lot of things together. But then when I stepped down from that, we sold our company to Harper Collins. But when we, when I stepped down from that, uh, those people didn’t call and I didn’t call them, and it was no malice on anybody’s part, but we just didn’t have the convenience of proximity.

Arthur Brooks: Yeah.

Michael Hyatt: So would you categorize those as deal friends or were they 

Arthur Brooks: yeah, yeah. And there’s nothing wrong with deal friends. We’re always gonna have deal friends. You just can’t have only deal friends 

Michael Hyatt: Yeah. 

Arthur Brooks: be a happy person. So Aristotle, back to the ancient Greeks, was great on this. He talked about friendship being in, in, in sort of, uh, there, there’s three levels.

the lowest levels, he called these friendships of, of transaction, that, or they were tele as in the head of telos in, in ancient Greek. That means, uh, that means 

Michael Hyatt: Cool. 

Arthur Brooks: of the friendship. And, and that’s fine. I mean, you know that your colleagues and your distributors and your subcontractors and they were your friends, they really were.

But you know, when you left the company or they, they left the company or something, there was nothing to talk about. You know, you didn’t know their kids’ names, you didn’t know their birthdays, except maybe transiently, I. And those are transactional friendships. So one level above that for Aristotle is friendships of beauty.

They’re based on admiration and those are good, right? But they tend to be one sided as well. And if the object of admiration goes away, so there’s a friendship, you know, the sense of humor, the success that you admire about somebody else, their beauty, whatever. At the highest level is what he called the perfect friendship, the friendship of virtue.

That’s the aic, that’s the useless friendship. They just love you. And what successful people all have a comment is they don’t have time for that. ’cause that takes time. You know, your useless friends, you gotta call ’em every week or they’re not friends, they’re not real friends, and, and there’s nothing to talk about that’s gonna be a good use of your time financially.

I mean, you can find something to do together in a deal. I mean, my, my best bud, he’s in Atlanta and, and you know, I sit on the board of his foundation and he was on the board of my company when I was a CEO. But those are just a pretext for us to talk on the phone about. So how’s your grandkids? Right. And, and, you know, how’s your, how’s your faith life and all the stuff that real friends talk about with each other.

Right? And, and by the way, how are the Red Sox doing useless stuff in that way? Not, not financially useful things. It takes time and you have to take the time. Make the time is the point.

Michael Hyatt: That’s so good. Well, and I think to just be aware of the distinction and not be confused, or to assume that the deal friends are real friends and like you said, nothing wrong with that, but. I need more real friends in my life if I’m gonna be happy. Yeah, That’s what I hear you say. 

Arthur Brooks: yeah, yeah, for sure. And again, you don’t need a hundred, you can’t do 102, just two time consuming. 

Michael Hyatt: Yeah. 

Arthur Brooks: You need somewhere between two and five real friends.

Michael Hyatt: That’s a good goal.

Okay. Let’s talk about the workplace, and I got some specific questions about this, but talk about the role of meaningful work and significance as it relates to our happiness.

Arthur Brooks: Yeah, so we have, you know, we set up our, our, our business school students to, with, goals that are the wrong goals for happiness. And, and our students, they’re, they meet their goals, their dreams come true, and then they find out that they had the wrong dream. I mean, what will be unto you if, if your dreams come true?

Because if you have the wrong dreams, it’s the big problem is the way that this turns out. We tell our students, because Mother Nature tells us that money, power, pleasure, and fame are going to make you happy. And so if you can get more of those things, then happiness will come on its own. And that’s completely wrong.

But you need to do is you need to aim for happiness and then you’ll be successful enough. 

Michael Hyatt: Hmm. 

Arthur Brooks: that, just the way I phrased that, every single striver listening to us right now, they have panic in their hearts. ’cause what do you mean successful enough? You mean I’m gonna settle? And, and everybody knows that settling is no good, no good because it doesn’t actually, it doesn’t scratch.

What the striver needs for the sense of satisfaction. I get it. I completely get it because I’m a striver too. I understand this. But the truth of the matter is that, that we have to understand that when it comes to work and real success, there’s really two goals that will authentically, reliably bring joy from work.

Those are the feeling that you’re earning your success. So no joke, you can’t feel. It’s the reason that merit based systems are so superior. To tenure and loyalty based systems.

Michael Hyatt: Mm-Hmm.

Arthur Brooks: And when I’m working with, when I’m working with CEOs, I’m like, how do you reward people? And, and I, I know, man, I know all the signals.

I, I wasn’t born yesterday. I can tell when it’s like you’re hanging around here long enough, you’re successful. That’s a tenure based system. That’s the post office. Or if you kiss up to me enough, you’ll be successful. Lots of companies work that way, but loyalty and tenure based systems have horrible morale.

Michael Hyatt: Hmm. best morale comes when it’s merit based and when it’s actually fairly administered. And the reason is because, if you’re a nice person about it, that then people can earn their success. They feel like they’re creating, they’re creating value with their lives and careers, and they’re creating value in the lives of their clients and colleagues, that they’re being rewarded and recognized for their personal merit, hard work, and responsibility.

Arthur Brooks: There’s nothing that. I mean, you and I are Christian guys. You know, we believe that earning your success is a, is a reflection of being made in God’s image. It really is. I mean, it’s like, you know, Adam and Eve, before the fall, they were working in the garden. I. Yep. it, it doesn’t say the book of Genesis that, you know, before the fall, Adam and E were like lounging around in the garden.

No, no. They were working the garden. That was paradise. They were earning their success. They were generative, they were creative, they were industrious, is the way that that works. But if you don’t know  whether you’re rewards are actually coming from that or something else, then it becomes a huge problem.

And so most CEOs that I talk to, they earn their success and they get tons of satisfaction from it. be a good CEO, you have to make sure that you set up systems so the people who work for you are also earning their success. That’s really, really critical. That turns out to be the magic ingredient for having a happier workplace.

And the second part of that brings joy to work is serving other people, believing that people need you. People need me. I am serving other people, I am focused on other people. That’s the basis of human dignity, and a lot of people get a lot of their dignity from what they actually do at work every day.

So great. CEOs need to be able to tell their clients. Somebody really, really needs you. I talked to a client yesterday and he was blown away by the quality of your work that goes so far or better yet, bring in the client to thank your employee. That that is just, it’s, it’s, uh, it’s, it’s, uh, it’s, it works like magic.

  

Michael Hyatt: So there’s one question I’ve gotta get to that, uh, before we get into our final round here. And that is the difference between fluid intelligence and crystallized intelligence.

Because I, it, it seems like, and correct me if I’m wrong, but if I understood from strength to strength correctly. Kind of your strategy has to change as you get older

or what you get 

satisfaction from.

Arthur Brooks: That’s right. So I write an awful lot about the, the neuroscience and social science of two kinds of intelligence. We think of intelligence as being just basically cognitive horsepower. iq. I. That’s not the most interesting aspect of it when it comes to the lives of everybody listening to us right now.

The, uh, Raymond Catel, the great British social psychologist in the sixties and seventies, uh, wrote about the difference between fluid and crystallized intelligence, which are the two different manifestations of your ability as you get older. fluid intelligence, which happens earlier is based on your, your working memory, your incredible energy and focus, and your innovative capacity.

your ability to solve problems faster than others. Pay attention, get stuff done. Crack the case. Usually it’s what? Every striver listening to us right now. That’s the reason you got ahead when you were young. That’s the reason that you got promoted before other people, that you got higher grades than other people.

That you got bigger raises than other people. It’s because you had higher fluid intelligence that you just then, then added that you supercharge with your hard work. And responsibility that with your, it’s just your horsepower, your, your, the sweat of your brow. That, that, that intelligence, that working memory and innovative capacity exists in every industry, particularly every industry where you use your brain.

Like I don’t care if you’re an air traffic controller or an opera composer, a financial advisor, or a surgeon, same. tends to peak when you’re in your late thirties. Which seems really early. It’s like, wait a second, my, my intelligence is peaking in my late thirties. Well, yeah, actually, and nobody notices but you, but that’s the reason that burnout tends to happen by people’s mid forties.

The reason is because the only thing that gives us real satisfaction is progress. That’s what we want. We’re made for progress. You can be really good at what you do, but if you’re not getting better, it’s no good. It’s no good. And if you’re really caring an awful lot about your excellence and you’re not making progress is very discouraging.

And a lot of people can’t quite put their finger on it, but they’re like, I don’t like my job as much as I did. A lot of dentists, a lot of doctors in their mid forties are like, man, I was passionate about this 10 years, and I’m just not, I guess I’m bored. No, no, no, no, no. You’re past your peak in fluid intelligence.

And so therefore, what you, you’re not learning things as fast as you used to. are not as easy as they used to be and, and that’s really discouraging. Nobody else notices if you’re a dentist. You’re not drilling the wrong tooth on somebody, you notice. So that’s the bad news. Now, the good news is there’s a second kind of intelligence that comes in behind it in your forties and fifties and sixties.

It gets higher and higher and higher. It stays high for the rest of your life in your seventies and eighties. That’s crystallized intelligence. And that’s very different. That’s not based on working memory, which is worse, and everybody knows that your working memory is not as good when you get older.

It’s not based on innovative capacity. It’s based on your ability to use everything that you see and hear and put it in toge together into a coherent story. So here’s really kind of how it works. You notice in your fifties that you have incredible pattern recognition. Everybody does. It’s like, I mean I, it’s like I’ve never seen this before, but I feel like I’ve seen it before.

That’s crystallized intelligence Hmm. where you can be like if you’re a mechanic, for example, I. You’ve never seen a particular machine, but you know how to fix it. That’s crystallized intelligence. When you’re 20, you can’t do it. When you’re 50, you can, because crystallized intelligence is high pattern recognition, the ability to take disparate things and put ’em into new ideas, the ability to explain things, the ability to use metaphor, the ability to teach, that’s crystallized intelligence.

So what everybody needs to do is to get from the fluid intelligence curve goes up and goes down. To the crystallized intelligence curve, which comes in behind, it goes up and stays high. You wanna walk from one to the other. You want to go from your innovator curve to your instructor curve, from your star litigator curve to your managing partner curve.

Mm-Hmm. that’s the goal. And everybody can do it in their own way, in their own life. And if they do that, they’ll get happier as they get older.

Michael Hyatt: Well, it seems like a lot of people that are in that transition phase when they’re going from the fluid intelligence to the crystallized intelligence, they desperately want to hang onto that fluid intelligence and their self-worth begins. I’ve seen this with my coaching clients. Their self-worth begins to decline, Yeah, and, and they just, they’re not giving the same output that they used to give, but they’re focused on the wrong thing.

If I hear you correctly. 

Arthur Brooks: yeah. Their ego, their ego driven, and, and what happens is that a lot of your, your. Sort of justification for living and sense of value creation comes from your, the fact that you’re the star, you’re the innovator, you’re the ninja, the cowboy, the sole warrior, right? That’s what people get really, really used to, and you need to turn into the coach.

You need to go from being the star quarterback to finding the next star quarterback. And if you don’t want to do that because you don’t care about other people, that you really only care about yourself and what you that, that your own greatness you’re gonna get, this is, you know, narcissism will get you stuck forever on your, on your first curve.

This is one of the reasons that people who are really self-absorbed, highly egotistical that they struggle so much is they get older.

Michael Hyatt: you may know him, Ian Kran, who does a lot of work with Enneagram. He wrote the road back to you, but he said to me at one point, he said, you’ve, you’ve living, you’ve lived a highly fruitful life, but now your mission is transitioning. Now your mission is to grow fruit on other people’s trees.

Arthur Brooks: Yeah. something I, I literally wake up with that sense every day that to measure my success by how successful I can make other people. And I think that’s why I like coaching as much as I do.

Yeah. That’s a, that you, you’re, you’re in the perfect crystallized. A of your life and you’re using it maximally, which is why you’re happy. This is why you’re really good at what you’re doing is because you’ve actually walked from, you know, in your earlier CEO incarnation into a coaching incarnation.

most CEOs are, I mean, you can be a coaching CEO, that’s great, but a lot who are just innovative CEOs are really fluid intelligence and then they, if you can go into something, I mean, I left my CEO job and became a professor. There you go. perfect. You know, I, I used to write academic journal articles that were so mathematically sophisticated.

I can’t read ’em today, Michael. I mean, they’re, they’re too technical. And I wrote them like, who wrote this? It was me when I was 35. Now I write about science, but I didn’t do the science. I’m reading the academic articles and I’m translating it into, into the story of how non-scientists can use it. And I have an average weekly readership of about 500,000 people.

way more, that’s way more impact than I could have had. But if I was continuing to try to do what I was 35, I wouldn’t be as good at it. I wouldn’t be as successful at it and I wouldn’t have an audience for it.

Michael Hyatt: You wouldn’t be as happy,

right? a total win-win. If you’re on the right curve. If you, you’re on the right curve, you’re gonna have a win-win.

Michael Hyatt: Well, we could talk for hours, but you don’t have time. And I don’t have time, but I wanna get to the lightning round. 

Arthur Brooks: Yeah. 

Michael Hyatt: this has been delightful. It’s everything I had hoped, and even more 

so. 

Arthur Brooks: you, Michael. Me too.

Michael Hyatt: Good. Thank you. Okay, so here’s some of the standard questions we always ask. What’s your biggest obstacle in getting the double win at this point in your life?

Arthur Brooks: Yeah. The biggest obstacle for me in getting the double win is pretty ironic, which is that the double win is, is is work and life and the truth is you shouldn’t have to worry about work-life balance because that suggests that work and life are different and your work should be part of your life.

But that means that your work is not your whole life. You know, you actually need a seamlessness between the different parts of your life, your relationships, and your work. And it should all weave together and do that really, really well. For me, my work is so consuming that without paying attention to it, I start doing it to, to the exclusion of other things.

’cause I only had 24 hours in a day. And so the, the main barrier to me is that I am. to people about strivers having a balanced life, and I’m doing it so much that I’m a striver without a balanced life.

Michael Hyatt: Yeah, I get it. I mean, I, I struggle with that same thing and it’s exacerbated by the fact that I can see that the runway is shorter now Yeah. and there’s so much stuff I wanna learn and so much, so many different ways I wanna contribute. But, okay. Another question. How do you personally know when you’re getting the double win?

What are some of the clues.

Arthur Brooks: Uh, I’m happier number one, right? I’m sleeping,

Michael Hyatt: Huh?

Arthur Brooks: and the big one is that the people that I love are happier because what’s the double win? What I’m doing and who I love. 

Michael Hyatt: Yep. 

Arthur Brooks: really what it comes down to. I mean, the, the, the big win of life is love for the people in your life. And if you’re crowding that out by, by, by working for things that are largely inanimate and and rewarding mostly to you, then the people around you who you love and they love you, they’re gonna be less happy and you’re gonna know it.

The best barometer for everybody listening to us and watching us. Who’s married? How happy is your spouse with your work life balance?

Michael Hyatt: Hmm. Great question. I don’t think we’ve ever had anybody ask that, but it’s a great, great one. Thank you. Yeah. Finally, what’s one ritual or routine that helps you do what you do?

Arthur Brooks: Yeah, so I’m super routinized and super disciplined, so I have a certain routine that I do every day. I wake up at four 30. I work out from 4 45 to 5 45. I go to mass from six 30 to seven. Then I have coffee and, and I work and I have a good, I’ve been able to max, I’ve been able to optimize the flow of dopamine into my prefrontal cortex to give me maximum and time for creative product.

But not just biochemistry that I’m talking about here. The main thing that I’ve been able to do to optimize the double win in my life is the way that I have put worship into my daily life.

Michael Hyatt: Hmm.

Arthur Brooks: It is the most important thing that I do is I start the day actually exercising. But the first thing that I do in, you know, outside of my house is I go to mass.

I go to mass every day, every day. and, Moving. I, I finish the evening praying my rosary. So I start and I end the day in worship, in communion with, with the Lord. And that has just been the, I mean, that it reminds me who I am. Yeah. I mean, ’cause otherwise I’m just like. A work machine, I’m just, or, or, or God forbid, I’m just another guy.

Michael Hyatt: Yeah. if I can remind if the first thing in the morning and the last thing before I go to bed at night and I go to, by the way, I go to mass with my wife and I pray the rosary with my wife.

Beautiful. And so because we’re jointly metacognitively linking with our, our master start the day and end the day.

Arthur Brooks: And in so doing it is just the biggest reminder of who I actually am.

Michael Hyatt: Mm-Hmm. Beautiful. Where can people connect with you? Of course, we’re recommending the books. All that’ll be on the show notes, and we talked about ’em in the introduction. We’ll talk about ’em at the end of this. When Megan and I reconvened to. Get our biggest insights out of this, but where can people best connect with you and what would you suggest their next step be 

in terms of. 

Arthur Brooks: appreciate that an awful lot. I have a website. That’s that, the eponymous website, arthur r.com. And there you can actually find links to a lot of the different places where I write, speak, and teach. I have a, I have a, you know, a science of happiness workshop and I have all kinds of free resources, et cetera, but also it’ll, it’ll tell people how they can actually start reading My column, my Atlanta column comes out every Thursday morning called, uh, how to Build a Life.

what new books are coming out, what new appearance, what new happiness, uh, uh, talks and keynotes and things that I’ve got coming up. And, and that’s, that’s the best way also to just to connect with me in case anybody wants to send me an email and tell me about, tell me how they, how they see life, which I love.

Michael Hyatt: We’ll have all that in the show notes. Yeah. Arthur, thank you so much. This has been a delightful conversation.

Arthur Brooks: Thank you, Michael. I appreciate the work that you’re doing, lifting people up and bringing ’em together. It’s, uh, it’s an inspiration to see, and I’m happy to be part of it today.

Michael Hyatt: Thank you so much. 

So I know Megan, you didn’t get to participate in the conversation, but you got to hear it afterward. Yeah. And you know, so we wanna talk about our takeaways. So lemme go ahead and start. You know, I think my biggest takeaway is him as a personality.

Yeah. And I love the way that he lives his faith. Yeah. Because I do too. You know, it’s not kind of this thing that makes you feel like there’s a barrier or that you’re excluded, but it’s very inclusive. But he’s also very committed. 

Megan Hyatt Miller: Yeah. You 

Michael Hyatt: know, he goes to mass every morning with his wife. You know, they say the rosary every night before they go to bed.

They’re really dedicated, but at the same time, he’s open to other ideas. Yeah. And I, I love that he brings his faith into his work, but not in a heavy handed way, but I think in a way that literally anybody can process. And that’s frankly what I aspire to do in all my work. 

Megan Hyatt Miller: Mm-Hmm. Oh, I love that too. And that’s one of the things that I first really appreciated about him when I began reading.

Some of his books. Um, and I, I think that besides coming, obviously from a place of personal conviction, which clearly it does, you know, when he was talking about the four pillars of happiness, uh, which are, um, family, faith, friends, and work, you know, when he is talking about that, there’s really good research around the faith piece and I think that.

It’s an interesting angle to get into that conversation because we know in at least America and uh, Western Europe, that attendance at church and things like that is dramatically down in the last several decades. Yeah. But I think in the last, in the last decade in particular, and I think it, it makes a good case for why we need to.

Be pursuing those things in some way because it’s actually really important to our flourishing, our human flourishing, our happiness. It’s not, it’s not just like a, a moral question. It’s so much more than that. You know, we, I think we all know like we have a spiritual component to who we are, and that needs to be expressed and um, and that’s really part of our happiness.

Michael Hyatt: Well, one of the things he said was that, and that resonated with me, is that this idea of transcendence Yeah. Is a key aspect of happiness. I like the way he said it. He said, making oneself small in relation to the universe. Mm. And he opposed that with kind of being the star of your own psychodrama. Yeah.

And that’s a little bit of the problem, not a little bit of the problem. A lot of the problem with social media is that you end up being the star of your own movie and you make yourself bigger Yes. Than you really are. Or a lot of people make themselves bigger than what they really are. And that kind of negates the whole idea of transcendence.

Megan Hyatt Miller: Well and interestingly, um. It also negates the idea or undermines the idea of happiness because that’s a pressure on a human being that was never intended to be there. You know, if, if, if narcissism could make you happy for one thing, you know, we, we would see a lot of happy people around ’cause we got a lot of narcissists I think these days.

But also the pressure of that, you know, I mean, I, I think when you look at those pillars of happiness, faith, family, friends, work. Uh, really none of those are singular endeavors. I mean, I think that’s one of the, one of my takeaways is that every single one of those is intended to be done with other people.

And, you know, I’m an introvert. I love time by myself. I don’t give very much time by myself, but I love it. Um, but we’re meant to live in a context, in a community and relationship with other people. And I thought it was so interesting how he contrasted those, uh, those pillars of happiness with sort of the things we think are gonna make us happy.

Like. Pursuing material? Well, yes, 

Michael Hyatt: I love that. 

Megan Hyatt Miller: Um, you know, kind of a, a celebrity or a, a public, um, recognition of, of who we are. And in fact, those things are just empty promises, and they don’t, they don’t deliver, not in, not in wealthy countries. I mean, certainly I think he talks about there are gains and happiness to be made when people are living in poverty primarily.

Um, you know, when your basic needs aren’t covered, it’s kinda hard to be. Too happy. But anyway, I thought that was fascinating. 

Michael Hyatt: Well, I did too. And you know, he contrasted that with sort of living in this consumeristic Yeah. Society where we’ve been indoctrinated into thinking that if we get more stuff.

Will be more happy. Yeah. You know, if I can just get that dream home or I can just get that dream car or some other gadget or whatever. And I mean, as we’re recording this, uh, I was watching the Apple event yesterday where they were introducing the new iPhone 16 and the whole way they, they introduced that, and I’m not blaming Apple, but it’s so attractive.

You know, it’s like if you have. The iPhone 16. It will solve all of your problems. Yeah. It will bring magic and wonder back into your world, 

Megan Hyatt Miller: and it’s like what’s actually gonna bring magic and wonder back into your world is sitting around a fire pit, talking to your friends or going on a walk or watching the sunrise or snuggling with your kids or serving someone in need.

I mean, it’s, it’s just so interesting because I, I’ve really been thinking a lot about the idea of contentment and just how. The stuff that we have is a burden, you know? And I, by the way, I’m not a minimalist. Like no one has ever one time in my life accused me of being a minimalist. My husband is a minimalist, but that’s not me.

But there is a wisdom to that because all that stuff has to be managed and it can be overwhelmed. Exactly. Overwhelming and, and happiness and freedom. I mean, they definitely go together, you know, if you feel encumbered by your stuff. You’re probably not gonna be very happy. It, 

Michael Hyatt: it’s almost like a bell curve.

Megan Hyatt Miller: Yeah. 

Michael Hyatt: Like on one side, you know you have poverty. Right. And you know, I’ve met happy poor people for sure, but it’s mostly misery. I. And then you start to get a little bit of material accumulation where you have the basics met and then you start to achieve happiness. Not a direct correlation between that and your material standing, but, but you gotta have some basic needs met in order to happy.

And security. And security. Yeah. Right. But then, then it’s like the other side of the bell curve is you start getting so much tough that you’re spending all your time managing your stuff and 

Megan Hyatt Miller: you need people to manage the stuff you 

Michael Hyatt: need PE and then, yeah. And so then you become less happy. Yeah. And I’ve definitely met a lot of unhappy.

Very wealthy people. Right. There’s not a correlation between wealth and happiness. Mm-hmm. Right. You know, so you, your happiness is gonna come as sort of a separate thing. I also like this idea, and this confirms something that I believed for a long time, and that is happiness is a journey.

It’s making meaningful progress. Mm-Hmm. Toward a significant goal. It’s not the attainment of the goal that brings happiness. Yeah. But it’s the pursuit of that thing. That brings a happiness. 

Megan Hyatt Miller: You know, it’s funny because one of my big goals from this year was the renovation of our home. You know, we discovered mold in our home in December of last year.

We had to remediate that as a whole process, but then we ended up doing a pretty significant renovation and I mean, it was. So much fun to do. It was stressful being out of our house, but it was so much fun ’cause I love design and all the aesthetics and everything like that and I was thinking last night I was getting ready for bed and my updated bathroom and you know, so much to be grateful for and, and I am extremely grateful for it.

But I don’t know that I’m measurably happier. Mm-Hmm. You know, and I was thinking about all the things in my life that I wanted at one point, and now that I have, like, am I measurably happier? And I’m thinking mostly of like material things, like a new car or moving into a better house. Like, I don’t think so.

Like the truth is, I mean, they, they make my life better. All kinds of ways, but I don’t know that I’m really happier. Like what I feel happier is when I am doing things. Like last night I was doing, um, kind of like a, an evening ritual that included a bunch of yoga and I was, had some great music on and I just felt, I felt happy after I did that well, that cost me zero money and I bought zero new things to make that possible.

And I just think it’s so counterintuitive. It’s just a, it was a, it’s a great reminder and I think Arthur has just done. Some powerful work in helping us remember what does it really take to be happy. 

Michael Hyatt: You know, he also mentioned, ’cause I asked him, uh, how in the world did Harvard let you teach a course on happiness?

Because that seems like the soft skill among soft skills. But he said he realized that most of these kids are getting no instruction in this. Yeah. They’re going out into the world. They think all the wrong things will bring them happiness. Well, especially 

Megan Hyatt Miller: at Harvard. I mean, if you think about what he says or the things that aren’t gonna contribute to your happiness status.

Yeah, exactly. You know, material, wealth, whatever. 

Michael Hyatt: And so he wouldn kind of set them up for success. Yeah. So they could actually, you know, achieve some level of happiness. Yeah. And, and not have to pursue this elusive thing that they never get by pursuing the normal things as society tells us. Will get us there.

Well guys, lemme encourage you to buy the book, build the Life you want. Also from strength to strength. If you’re a person of a certain age, like that’s a great book if you’re over 50 

Megan Hyatt Miller: or, or even really over 40. Yeah. Did 

Michael Hyatt: you read it? 

Megan Hyatt Miller: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. I’m 44 and I felt like it was absolutely relevant and changed my thinking a lot about getting older and what.

What the challenges are, but really what some of the opportunities are. Joel, my husband, also read it and loved it. 

Michael Hyatt: Yeah. That whole idea between, um, the contrast between fluid intelligence and crystallized intelligence. Yes. Really an important distinction. Yeah, 

Megan Hyatt Miller: it’s 

Michael Hyatt: okay. You guys can do us a big favor if you would, and would be so grateful if you would rate the podcast wherever you listen to podcasts and also write a brief review.

And if you could do that, that would help us rise in the rankings and help the Double Win show get discovered so that more people could get exposed to this idea of winning at work and succeeding at life. We’ll see you next week.