#62 Live A Better Post-Pandemic Life: The 3 Macronutrients of Happiness with Harvard's Arthur Brooks

What this episode is about

Arthur Brooks discusses his journey through three distinct careers and shares insights on how to cultivate happiness in a post-pandemic world. He emphasizes the importance of reevaluating life choices and offers guidance on making meaningful changes to enhance well-being and fulfillment.

Key takeaways

• Embrace failure: it's often the architect of your next career, not a tombstone for your ambitions.
• Switching careers isn’t a pivot; it’s a leap! Each jump can unlock skills you didn't know you had.
• Necessity breeds creativity: when your dreams falter, new pathways often emerge—just ask a former French horn player.
• Changing careers thrice? It’s not reckless; it’s resilient. Success often requires redefining comfort zones.
• Your degree doesn’t define you. Life’s unpredictability can turn failure into a roadmap for unforeseen successes.

Who speaks in this episode?

• Lynn Tomen (Host) · 10 min speaking
• Arthur Brooks (Guest) · 24 min speaking

What is discussed, and when

1. 0:00 – 5:00: Harvard, American Enterprise Institute, Lynn Tomen, The Art of Happiness
2. 5:00 – 10:00: Harvard
3. 10:00 – 15:00: Harvard

Notable quotes from "#62 Live A Better Post-Pandemic Life: The 3 Macronutrients of Happiness with Harvard's Arthur Brooks"

• Member of schools at Harvard Princeton and Columbia Lynn tomen hi everyone it's Lyn toen welcome to another episode today I'm excited to be with Arthur Brooks he's a professor…

  about Lynn Tomen · at 0:18

Who and what is mentioned in this episode?

People

• Lynn Tomen — Person · Host · 1 mention · first at 0:21
  Host of the Three Takeaways Podcast who interviews Arthur Brooks, guiding the conversation through his career changes and happiness framework.

Companies & orgs

• Harvard — Company · Affiliation · 6 mentions · first at 0:18
  Arthur Brooks is a professor at Harvard, where he teaches about happiness and building a good life.
  Tomen hi everyone it's Lyn toen welcome to another episode today I'm excited to be with Arthur Brooks he's a professor at Harvard who teaches about happiness and building a…
• American Enterprise Institute — Company · Former Affiliation · 2 mentions · first at 0:41
  Arthur Brooks was the president of the American Enterprise Institute before joining Harvard.
  That Arthur has had three completely different careers before joining Harvard he was the president of the American Enterprise Institute and before that he was a musician who…

Media & podcasts

• The Art of Happiness — Media · Hosted Podcast · 1 mention · first at 0:56
  Arthur Brooks hosts the podcast 'The Art of Happiness', which aligns with his teachings on happiness.
  Was a musician who played the French horn as a member of the City Orchestra of Barcelona he is the author so far of 11 books that I know of a columnist for the Atlantic and…

Full transcript with timestamps

0:00 welcome to the three takeaways podcast which features short memorable conversations with the world's best thinkers Business Leaders writers politicians scientists and other newsmakers each episode ends with the three key takeaways that person has learned over their lives and their careers and now your host and board member of schools at Harvard Princeton and Columbia Lynn tomen hi everyone it's Lyn toen welcome to another episode today I'm excited to be with Arthur Brooks he's a professor at Harvard who teaches about happiness and building a good life I am fascinated that Arthur has had three completely different careers before joining Harvard he was the president of the American Enterprise Institute and before that he was a musician who played the French horn as a member of the City Orchestra of Barcelona he is the author so far of 11 books that I know of a columnist for the Atlantic and host of the podcast the

0:58 art of happiness I'm excited to learn how he did three complete job changes not pivots but complete changes and how we can all live a happier post-pandemic life Arthur welcome and thanks so much for our conversation today thank you Lyn it's wonderful to see you again I'm watching you right now even though most people have listening to us and it's a delight to see you again and see that you're well and you've gotten through the Corona virus epidemic and prospered all the way through you're fine aren't you yes and it's a pleasure to see you too Arthur and I look forward to seeing you in person soon absolutely yeah in the whole world in person I hope soon enough exactly Arthur you've changed careers dramatically every 10 or so years people usually stress and consider themselves successful if they accomplish just one job pivot but you did three complete job changes how are you able to do that

1:56 successfully and for all the people re-evaluating their Liv lives and wanting their post-pandemic life to be different and better how can they accomplish that is there a process that you went through yeah it's called failure and necessity is the mother of invention you gave the sanitized version of my bio and I appreciate that a lot but the truth the matter is that there's been a lot of struggle in my career and it started with not succeeding in college so all the way through my childhood I was a classical musician and all I wanted was to be the world's greatest French horn player is that too much to ask that's ridiculous of course but that is truly that was truly my ambition and I didn't take studying seriously and sure enough I did really poorly in my first year of college and wound up on the outside of the institution at 19 having to make a living and I did so by necessity making my living as a professional French horn

2:45 player I did that playing chamber music barely making my rent for a long time and then wound up in the Barcelona Symphony which was a Better Living I actually went there and chasing a girl a hopeless dream of getting this girl who didn't speak a word of English to convince her to marry me the French horn crew didn't work out but this is my 30th wedding anniversary this year and we have three adult children and so the crew didn't work out but the marriage didn't which is really important things were going well in my music career but once again there was failure on the horizon sort of the fantasm of things not going the way that I wanted them to I found in my early 20s that instead of getting better and better as a classical musician I was doing well I mean my career was going well but I wasn't playing better on the contrary I was playing worse and I couldn't figure it out I could speculate on what was going

3:27 on at this point but I found that I wasn't going to get better jobs it was not going to progress in my career on the contrary I was probably going to be worse and the writing was on the wall by my mid to late 20s that I was going to need to do something else and just by sheer necessity I went back to college by correspondence I got my degree by correspondence which is not the typical profile of a professor at Harvard but it worked for me and then I jumped figuring that I had to do something else so I went and I got my PhD became an economist but once again it was not because I wanted to leave music it's because I didn't know any future in music and so I did something else that I thought I could probably do but in the process of that failure and by necessity re-engineering my own career I learned how to do it I learned the process of the fungible skills of understanding systems of understanding new kinds of

4:14 reward of reworking your brain of thinking in a different way and being forced into that was enormously beneficial because I spent 10 years as a professor after finishing my PhD most of it at Syracuse University at the Maxville school which is a very fine School very fine public policy school and during that time I thought to myself I wonder if I changed again if I could go run a company a nonprofit because i' had been teaching nonprofit management and when the chief executive job of the American Enterprise Institute I think tanken Washington came open and they offered me the job through a series of weird events I mean basically the first three people I offered the job to said no and they were desperate and they they offered me the job and I did that for a decade and when it was time to change again I was really confident that could actually it wasn't easy but I was confident that I could do it not back to

5:01 an academic like i' had been before but what I am here at Harvard which is a called a professor of practice where I work to create bigger audiences for my ideas being a columnist of the Atlantic where I have hundreds of thousands of readers every week I'm very blessed to do that but not doing regular research but rather doing research that harvests the incredible work of my colleagues around the country and bringing them to a mass audience and That Was Then sort of the fourth incarnation of what I can do so the bottom line for people are listening to us is that you got fail you're not going to learn and the way to be able to change is being changed usually by force and involuntarily and through pain and even some small amount of trauma and trying to avoid those things is a big mistake because you'll simply not be light on your feet you won't be able to have the repertoire and flexibility that you're going to need

5:45 later on you now study and teach on happiness what is happiness happiness is something that's misunderstood by most people when I ask people what's happiness they generally speaking talk to me about a Feeling they talk about feeling a particular way happiness is not a feeling the best way to think about happiness is like a meal and the way that you can describe a meal is to begin with through macronutrients so if we talk about your dinner tonight Lynn one of the ways that we could understand how it will nourish you is by breaking it up into its three macronutrients which would be carbohydrates protein and fat and you want them in the right form and you want them in the right balance so that you'll be healthy happiness is a blend of three basic macronutrients they are enjoyment satisfaction and meaning and so you need lots of enjoyment in your life but you also need lots of satisfaction which is

6:41 the reward for meeting your goals and a job well done and as important actually more important than anything else is having lots of meaning in your life but those are three different macronutrients you need all three of them you need them in balance and you need them in abundance and in so doing you will actually create the happiness phenomenon given fact that it's not a feeling although feelings come out of those things and feelings assist those things but given the fact that it's not a feeling the best news is that happiness is something we can get better at happiness is something that we can practice and happiness is something that we can share can you talk about each one of those pillars enjoyment satisfaction purpose what they are how people can achieve them enjoyment sounds like the most obvious but it actually isn't people have a tendency to mistake enjoyment with pleasure and pleasure is

7:28 a real thing but it's an animal phenomenon it's neurochemical in nature it's basically like some combination of dopamine serotonin and norepinephrine in concert with a sort of a stew and you do something and you feel good that's pleasure and pleasure is one of the ingredients of enjoyment but enjoyment also requires elevation it requires education it requires refinement and so real enjoyment which is one of the pillars of Happiness takes pleasure that you get but then you have to Lear a little bit about how to refine it appropriately for example real enjoyment comes from something that you understand like classical music for example or sports or reading these are things that take refinement they have pleasure attached to them but they also take some refinement you have to get better at them that's what enjoyment is all about and so people need a portfolio of things that give them enjoyment and that

8:22 requires that they get pleasure from those things and you need to discern does this give me pleasure or not but then you need to get better at making that pleasure into enjoyment by learning about those things by practicing those things by getting better at those things that's what enjoyment is all about so I actually have a whole set of lectures I do on how to enjoy life more it's a set of techniques it's a set of practices and you can get better at enjoyment weird as that sounds the second is satisfaction satisfaction is the most elusive of all the macronutrients like MC Jagger things I Can't Get No Satisfaction he actually can get satisfaction we all can the problem is that we can't keep No Satisfaction satisfaction is what you get when you meet your goals you do a good job when you want something and you finally get it if you see a two-year-old who's reaching for french fries and you give

9:11 her a french fry she gets intense satisfaction the problem is she doesn't keep the satisfaction she wants another french fry and that's one of the big paradoxes of life I write about the science of that that has a neurochemical basis on why you can't keep your satisfaction but satisfaction being rewarded for your goals is super important for your overall happiness if you have no goals and or you never meet any of your goals you're going to be an unhappy person is the bottom line so you got to have good expectations about this you can get satisfaction you just can't keep it and so the result of it is you have to manage your satisfaction differently than the world tells you to do it and once again this goes into the lectures that I give on the satisfaction pillar and then on meaning meaning is not as obvious as it sounds either what is meaning well it's life being coherent life having a direction life having

10:01 inherent value all of those are different meanings of meaning per se but when people have meaning those are the people at the end of their lives that say I had good days and I had bad days I had good years and I had bad years but overall my life was happy they judge that mostly on meaning meaning requires paradoxically Lynn that you have a lot of unhappiness because pain is one of the central ingredients of learning and learning is one of the central ingredients in meaning and so paradoxically to be a happy person you also have to have a lot of unhappiness in your life one of the biggest mistakes that we can make is trying to avoid unhappiness because in so doing we're also avoiding a big part of our happiness this is why I teach a class at Harvard on it because there's a lot that goes into it so Arthur in the last couple of days tell us about some moments when you were happiest what were

10:47 you doing happiness is well certainly there was enjoyment and the enjoyment came yesterday I was sitting around my kitchen table with a bunch of my friends my wife and I have a lot of friends from Spain my wife is Spanish we I was hanging out on Sundays and we were hanging around laughing and telling stories and there was a lot of enjoyment that went into that because I've learned how to cultivate those times that take them from the pleasure of eating and drinking and telling jokes to the more elevated enjoyment of talking about things that matter so those were periods of enjoyment satisfaction comes because these days I'm back in the classroom here at Harvard a real moment of satisfaction professionally for me was that in this last week I turned in a copy of my new book I turn in manuscript for my new book is coming out on February 15th and that was a major goal because a book is like it's like a baby

11:35 now an ugly baby to be sure but it's a baby and that's reward for a job well done I'm not going to count on it giving me satisfaction over and over again but that was intensely satisfying and meaning where does meaning come in meaning comes for me largely from the relationships in my life two weeks ago we left my youngest child at college and it was really really bitter I'm just absolutely bereft but I'm so happy at the same time and the reason is because it has a whole lot of meaning that we launched that ship into the world and so I have to say that those are three macronutrients that have met in three very different ways in my life just in the past couple weeks let's dig into each one of those three a bit enjoyment was your first one enjoyment doesn't come or I'm assuming that you don't believe enjoyment comes from watching Netflix let's say all day every day how can people increase their

12:27 enjoyment people need to increase their enjoyment first by Discerning what it is that gives them an unusual amount of pleasure and that's by the way something that's healthy enough that they can make it into something that they get better at if listening to music inherently gives you pleasure then learning a lot about music will turn it into a source of enjoyment if you find that sitting quietly and in the forest for example that nature gives you a lot of inherent pleasure then learning about nature and finding ways to get out in nature more creatively and more intensively will be a major source of your enjoyment in other words discern the source of your pleasure and invest in learning more about it so that your whole person not just the lyic system of your brain that's firing off these neurochemicals of pleasure but rather your whole prefrontal cortex your whole being can be present in the way that you use that

13:17 pleasure elevate it and turn it into something that makes you not less human as a pleasure machine but more human as an enjoyment machine so interesting so enjoyment is all about being active actively seeking building perceiving enjoyment and it's not passively watching TV or watching anything yeah the way to think about this is that Daniel conman the the Nobel Prize winner in economics he's actually a psychologist a professor emeritus of Princeton in Psychology he talks about thinking fast and slow which is process one process two neuroscientists talk about the limic system versus the prefrontal cortex the lyic system is your lizard brain this deep deep in it's evolved more than a million years ago it's the part of your brain that has Sensations feelings happen to you through your lyic system and pleasure happens to you through your lyic system your prefrontal cortex the big meaty loes behind the forehead those are your

14:15 conscious brain that's system to that's where you know what you're doing where you're fully Alive as a person where you're conscious the key thing from going from pleasure to enjoyment is taking the sensations of pleasure and moving them into your prefrontal cortex into your executive brain so you know what's going on and in so doing you enhance those Pleasures but more importantly where you're bringing your whole brain your whole self your whole being to the pleasures you Savor them in an entirely human and entirely conscious way so interesting Daniel Conan was a guest on three takeaways He is wonderful he's great satisfaction your second pillar of Happiness can you talk more about that what it involves and how people can get more satisfaction satisfaction we just touched on this a minute ago is this idea of a reward for something it's getting something that you want usually at the end of a process so you work for

15:14 something and you get it you work to be rewarded in your job you get a rais in a promotion you work hard on writing an essay it gets published in some national media the happiness the little burst of joy you get from that that would be satisfaction the good feelings that you get as a reward for your effort is basically what satisfaction is all about there are lots of neurochemical reasons that go into it but the brain signs to understand about why you can get it but you can't keep it is a process that neuroscientists call homeostasis now homeostasis is a concept that in all biological processes that we tend to go back to equilibrium that there's an equilibrium in your lymphatic system in your heart rate in your pulmonary system for example you go to the gym and you work out on the treadmill and your pulse is 160 you're getting good cardio exercise and you step off the treadmill and within 5 minutes your

16:06 pulse is back to 72 beats a minute or whatever it is in equilibrium if it stayed at 160 you'd be dead within two weeks you want homeostasis to return you back to a baseline so that you can survive you want to get out of your Baseline for particular reasons like running away from a tiger or getting exercise or whatever the same thing is true for your emotions you have basic emotions that happen to you in the lmic system system your fear your anger your disgust your sadness your joy your love your interest and they happen to you because you have an evolutionary reason to have them so that you can react to your circumstances appropriately but you don't want to stay in those grooves or you won't be ready for the next circumstances plus you'll be miserable you want homeostasis to take you back to a baseline now the problem is you want homeostasis to take your fear away and your sadness away you're glad of that

16:57 but you don't want homeostasis to take take away your joy and your love and your interest in things right and the joy is the satisfaction you get for a job well done it's a basic emotion you get in return for that and homeostasis said it's not gonna last it's gone man why because you got to be ready for the next set of circumstances now the bigger problem is that this implicates a system of the neurotransmitter dopamine which is a system in the brain of reward of desire and we all understand we all know enough about Neuroscience these days to know the dopamine lies behind all addiction so you supercharge the dopamine system you get much much better at producing it but homeostasis is going to take it away is going to take away the thrill you get from the shot of heroin or the alcohol or whatever happens to be or the joy you get from success the problem then is you become a success addict just like you can become

17:49 a cocaine addict so you want that return on your investment for your job well done and it you don't can't keep the satisfaction so you run to the next one and you can't keep us so you run to the next one that's called the honic treadmill run run run run run run run and there's an evil guy in the corner turning up the speed on the treadmill and then after a few years you're just afraid of stopping you stop on a treadmill you're going to face plant off that thing and you're not running for satisfaction and ambition anymore you're running out of fear that's the problem the satisfaction conundrum that we get in we want it we love it we can't keep it and it gets harder and harder to get under the circumstance ances so that's a lot of thought I write about that's a big part of what my new book coming out in February is about is the science of satisfaction how you can get off the honic treadmill how you can trade in the

18:39 ordinary Ambitions of life and do the things that actually give you more lasting satisfaction what is the highlight real what are two things people can do to have greater satisfaction in their lives let me give you two suggestions suggestion number one is never again do a bucket list a bucket list is a misery machine why because it takes all of your attachments and it'll make you more ambitious and successful by the way because you'll be chasing chasing chasing but it'll make you less satisfied and the reason is because your satisfaction is like all the things that you have divided by what you want and a bucket list all it does is it engorges all your wants turning them into these great big attachments and it lowers your satisfaction so number one is create a reverse bucket list on your birthday every year make a list of all these desires that are haunting you and take out five and say I detach myself from

19:30 these desires and watch your satisfaction rise that's number one number two actually is deflate the sources of your satisfaction one of the things that you find if you do this on purpose and you can own this is that instead of going from bigger better bigger better bigger better better car better house better vacation more success more money more sex partners all the stuff that people actually put the sign posts of success and whatever success is with respect to your dopamine go the other direction do the things that will actually bring you intense satisfaction specifically because they're small I was just recently for my summer vacation this year instead of going bunge jumping in the meong delta or some fancy thing that people would do I walked the commun of Santiago the second time I've done it which is the way it's a slow peaceful silent meditative prayerful walk across Spain and it's boring Lynn it's boring because

20:25 you're walking all day and it's painful and you're pray all day all day for day after day after day and I remember one day I was like an hour after starting in the morning my wife and I were walking silently walking and we saw this flower it's called the Blue passion flower I'd never seen it before and I couldn't believe my eyes it was like this thing from science fiction it turns it's a South American flower that's been transplanted to Galicia in Northern Spain and and it it's like the weirdest flower and I stared at it for 10 minutes and part of the reason that it was intensely satisfying for me and talking about it right now is intensely satisfying for me is because I slowed down the whole thing and I went from bigger bigger bigger bigger bigger to smaller smaller smaller smaller smaller so number one reverse bucket list number two stop trying to get bigger start getting smaller I have heard that that

21:16 walk across Spain is one of the highlights of many people's lives it sounds Wonder it's fantastic and it's exactly not an adventure Arthur I would love to take more time at explore that in more depth but we have so much more to cover your third pillar is purpose or meaning does that have to do with relationships or jobs or what does that have to do with and how do people increase it meaning is funny because it's a pillar of happiness but as we mentioned before it actually requires a lot of pain meaning is the most nuanced of all the concepts in the happiness macronutrient profile meaning is something that you don't get if you're not living fully and taking risks being really alive in your life being completely involved in your life and letting pain occur suffering is a very sacred thing it could be too much it can become medical problem actually but all lives have pain and being Fully Alive for that pain helps you understand

22:21 who you are if I asked you ly you're successful entrepreneur you've had a really good career and I say tell me the pivotal moment that give you the meaning in your career for sure you're not going to say that week I spent in EA on the beach it's going to be something difficult like we almost went bankrupt we got an unjust investigation by a government agency some that really helped you to understand who you were and tested your medal and made you appreciate the things that you had and so the key thing to keep in mind for meaning is being fully awake and accepting the things that come to you and always asking the following question not why is this happening to me but what can I learn from this and if that's always your question what can I learn from this then meaning will actually come to you then significance will actually come to you another way to enhance it of course is to not try to do

23:18 it alone it's very important that meaning be something that you co-experience and that means friendship and that means romantic relationships that are cultivated and taken very seriously and that means family making sure that you're as present as you could possibly be in family and that means dedicating your work to serving other people and for me a very important the most important meaning part of my life is my religious Faith that's really really critically important for me to find meaning because that's what part of the relationship that's part of being Fully Alive are there ways that people can increase their happiness with their lives by doing other specific things like trying to enjoy the moment ments or thinking about gratitude for things that they're grateful for Are there specific other things people can do yeah there's a lot of ways that we can actually take the three pillars of happiness and make

24:12 them all better and we've talked about some of the basics in here and a lot of it's pretty self-explanatory the mistakes that people make are only paying attention to pleasure or thinking that if they finally meet their goal they'll finally be satisfied once and for all or trying to get rid of their unhappiness as if that will somehow bring them happy those are the three big mistakes because you've ruled out enjoyment you've ruled out satisfaction in a meaningful way and you've ruled out meaning those are the things to not do but then there are accompanying things that you absolutely should do you really should be paying a lot of attention to how you can learn more about the things that give you pleasure practice the things that actually give you pleasure get good at the things that give you pleasure to simplify your life to do things like the reverse bucket list gratitude of course is something else

24:58 that will give you a lot more satisfaction because gratitude makes you a lot more aware of the things that are happening in your life that actually should be bringing you satisfaction as opposed to letting them pass by gratitude basically makes you more cognizant it makes you more conscious gratitude makes you more awake than it would be otherwise and related to that the first cousin of gratitude is mindfulness it's interesting that the mindfulness stuff I've studied a lot with and worked a lot with his Holiness to DAL Lama and I studied meditation with his monks his Tibetan Monks in daram Salah at his Monastery and they was talk about the unique psychological and philosophical and Theological properties of mindfulness but it's pretty simple just actually paying attention to the current moment is important because otherwise as tick notan the great Vietnamese Buddhist Master says you're just not alive right

25:44 now you're not alive you're alive sometime in the future kind of and you're alive in the past kind of but certainly not right now he thinks literally you miss your life under the circumstances so that's a first cousin of gratitude the best way to become more mindful is to pay attention to becoming grateful into the circumstances and then you can actually have more satisfaction you'll also find more meaning the last part about finding meaning is thinking what am I doing today that's trying to avoid a certain set of experiences certain things are happening all around me and I'm spending a lot of my energy trying to avoid things okay what am I doing and how can I stop doing those avoidance mechanisms how can I stop avoiding things so very much I'm avoiding having a difficult conversation I'm avoiding feeling hungry I'm avoiding avoiding avoiding stop avoiding things just you simplify your life by not

26:33 avoiding things so much we spent like three4 of Our Lives avoiding bad things and in so doing we're a missing our lives and B we're not going to get proper meaning from our lives under the circumstances just man just I mean I sound like a total hippie just let it happen Man Arthur what is research show about happiness over the Ark of one's life happiness over the Ark of one's life is very interesting question it's a very deep question almost all of my MBA students for example are in their late 20s and they think in their late 30s they're going to be happier because everybody's an optimist about their happiness most of them are like yeah when I'm in my late 30s I'm going to have my act together I'm going to be married if I want to be married my career is going to be together I'm going to have more money my student debts are going to be paid off life's going to be sweet and then when they get to their

27:18 late 30s they're not happier on the contrary their life has more meaning they understand themselves better but their daytoday happiness is lower what you find is that most people their day-to-day happiness Falls between their 20s and their early 50s not a lot it's not catastrophic some people it is and by the way your results May Vary some people are different on this too but most people see a slight degradation in happiness now David blanchflower at Dartmouth has done the best work on this he says this is robust to age group to generational cohort and across borders he's done this in developing countries industrialized countries the United States and the UK over many many just this is the way it is it's almost hardwired in a way but then in your early 50s you turn a corner and you start to increase in happiness and almost everybody gets happier from their early to mid-50s until their late 60s or

28:10 early 70s almost everybody has a sweet spot where they get happier not everybody because you can have bad luck or bad circumstances or mental illness or something but most people get happier and then it's all up in the air half the people get happier until death and the other half get unhappier until death and it all depends on the decisions that you made earlier in life interesting Americans seem to believe in happiness while many other societies especially Asian ones which are less individualistic than America believe more in family Duty and honor how does happiness differ between societies a lot is the answer and so when next time you read a newspaper article about the UN happiness index that ranks countries by happiness put it down it means nothing it's a waste of your time you can't compare societies and countries with respect to happiness because people in different places define happiness differently you're

29:03 quite correct that in the United States we Define it with respect to progress and achievement we also in the United States more than most other countries talk about our families when it comes to happiness and the love in our lives whereas in Asia people tend to Define their happiness with respect to a sense of peace and equinity so the extent to which there is very little personal struggle people tend to Define that as a happier State especially in East Asian societies you see different and you see even variation between countries you see differences between China and South Korea for example on this and certainly between the United States and Europe especially Northern Europe you find that in northern Europe people define happiness with respect to contentment there are very few Americans who Define their happiness with respect to contentment nobody's content in America are you kidding me it's like I don't

29:52 know what do you it's like I'm moving I'm going west everybody's a cowboy not everybody but you get my point that yeah this doesn't mean that the Danes are right and the Americans are wrong the Koreans are right and the Chinese are wrong no it just means that different groups of people Define their happiness in slightly different ways not hugely different there are certain constants enjoyment satisfaction and purpose but we Define how we get those things in slightly different ways Arthur you have said that idealistic but unrealistic beliefs can do a lot of damage but you are talking about romance and love not happiness is happy an unrealistic belief a mistaken goal and if so what should the goal be the goal should not be to be happy the goal should be to be happier that's a good goal to be happier and to be happier is not to be less unhappy necessarily unhappiness is our lot for a lot of people and and it's part of the

30:47 music behind our lives but all of us can get happier and the way that we can get happier is with basically simple process you got to learn about it you need to practice it and you need to share so we shouldn't say my goal is to be happy and to say I want my kids to be happy the key thing is for all of us given the fact that probably depending on the studies that you trust 50% of our happiness is genetic but we all can get happier and the process of getting happier in and of itself is a joy Arthur before I ask for the three takeaways you'd like to leave the audience with today is there anything else you'd like to talk about that you haven't already mentioned well there is everything when it comes to happiness I mean it's such an incredibly vast topic one of the things that we haven't talked about is the development of the Transcendent there's a tendency in our modern conversations about happiness as if it

31:39 were all a neurological phenomenon and that's a very very new way a kind of a materialistic way of talking about a vast topic and so the one thing that we haven't talked about that I'd like to ask people to think about is their own Transcendent path their philosophical path even their spiritual path this is a really important way that we can think about meaning in our life and we can actually get Beyond this notion that happiness is simply a neurological or a neurotransmitter process in our brains that in point of fact there is something probably bigger than ourselves and that's playing in on this as well especially those of us who are shall we say getting up there in years you know I'm 57 years old it's really really important in living a good life to be pursuing a path where we're trying to find the metaphysical realities that lie behind the physical realities that we see every day Arthur what are the three

32:27 takeaway you'd like to leave the audience with the key things that I think are most important for us to remember they come from the basic varities of life and the one is that what philosophers and psychologists keep coming back to again and again and again which is that happiness is love so if you want the one big secret to becoming happier you need to love more and so that's number one is Love More the second big takeaway is that we need to think an awful lot about about what the barriers are that we're putting up in our own lives to flourishing more to becoming happier people and the biggest one that I see over and over and over again is that a lot of people are living in ways that are not true and so the one big thing we haven't talked about it that each person can do to become happier and this is a takeaway and I can't get away from this is stop lying and what I recommend is that everybody

33:26 who's listening to us today go the entire day tomorrow without telling one single lie and they will find a new lease on life because truth is one of the great underlying Truths Behind happiness the third big takeaway is that you can't actually become happier unless you're giving this thing and that's not a very profound truth you should always give more of what you want give more of what you want if you want more compliments you should give more compliments if you want more success you should make people more successful around you that's a truth it's not a cosmic truth it's just a truth about how society's work if you want to be happier you need to understand it and practice it in your life but most importantly you need to teach this so I teach it formally and the reason I teach it is because I want to be happier this is my secret to becoming happier is teaching happiness at literally the greatest

34:19 University in the world and that is an incredible incredible privilege in my life Arthur thank you so much this has been wonderful thank you Lynn thank you for your important work and for sharing these ideas with people and for having a great show if you enjoyed today's episode and would like to receive the show notes or get new Fresh weekly episodes be sure to sign up for our newsletter at 3 takeaway.com or follow us on Instagram Twitter and Facebook note that three takeaways

Questions about this episode

Who speaks in "#62 Live A Better Post-Pandemic Life: The 3 Macronutrients of Happiness with Harvard's Arthur Brooks"?

Lynn Tomen (Host), Arthur Brooks (Guest).

What is "#62 Live A Better Post-Pandemic Life: The 3 Macronutrients of Happiness with Harvard's Arthur Brooks" about?

Arthur Brooks discusses his journey through three distinct careers and shares insights on how to cultivate happiness in a post-pandemic world. He emphasizes the importance of reevaluating life choices and offers guidance on making meaningful changes to enhance well-being and fulfillment.

What is mentioned in this 3 Takeaways episode?

4 people, works and ideas are mentioned, including Lynn Tomen, Harvard, American Enterprise Institute, The Art of Happiness. Each one on this page links to its own page with every episode that mentions it.

How long is "#62 Live A Better Post-Pandemic Life: The 3 Macronutrients of Happiness with Harvard's Arthur Brooks"?

The episode runs 35 min; the transcript is about 6,823 words in 41 timestamped sections.

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