Arthur Brooks | What's The Best Path To A Good Life?

Speak­er 1:

We believe and have always believed in this coun­try that man was cre­at­ed in the image of God, that he was giv­en tal­ents and respon­si­bil­i­ty and was instruct­ed to use them to make this world a bet­ter place in which to live. And you see, this is the real­ly great thing of America.

Doug DeVos:

It’s time to dis­cov­er what binds us togeth­er and find­ing it has the pow­er to trans­form our world. That’s what I believe. How about you?

Well, hel­lo every­one and wel­come to Believe. I’m Doug DeVos and I’m thrilled to have the oppor­tu­ni­ty to talk with a good friend of mine, Arthur Brooks. And Arthur is just a won­der­ful friend, but a very insight­ful per­son when we think about this idea of the path to a good life. How do we live a good life? How do we find our way there? And that’s the top­ic we want to explore today with Arthur. Because we all want to find our way to a bet­ter place. We all want to find a way to a place of pur­pose and a place of mean­ing. And Arthur has just a spec­tac­u­lar per­spec­tive on this, knowl­edge on this, and real­ly look­ing for­ward to shar­ing it. Arthur’s done so many things. We’ll talk about that a lit­tle bit. The title I like is the chief hap­pi­ness cor­re­spon­dent. The role he plays with The Atlantic. So Arthur Brooks, wel­come. So good to see you my friend.

Arthur Brooks:

Nice to see you too. I haven’t seen you in per­son in a lit­tle while, but now I’m see­ing you on the vir­tu­al screen. I hope you’ve been hap­py and healthy.

Doug DeVos:

I’ve been hap­py and healthy. Doing the best I can and trust you’re doing the same.

Arthur Brooks:

Oh yeah. No. Life is good. I got one of my kids is get­ting mar­ried this sum­mer. I got one who’s a scout sniper in the Marine Corps, and one is get­ting A’s in col­lege so for once, nobody’s in crisis.

Doug DeVos:

Wow. Wow. That’s good. How’s the wed­ding plan­ning going?

Arthur Brooks:

It’s going just fine. I think that their engage­ment is going to sur­vive the wed­ding plan­ning, which is a very good sign for a suc­cess­ful marriage.

Doug DeVos:

If you can make it through that, you can make it through any­thing can’t you?

Arthur Brooks:

Exact­ly right. And the deal is that I must be a grand­fa­ther with­in the next two years. That’s the deal. Of course, they might not live up to their end of the bar­gain, but we’ll see.

Doug DeVos:

Yeah right. Well, there’s just so much you can do to be help­ful in that regard.

Arthur Brooks:

I know. I know. Exact­ly right. They said, ​“Fine. If you want to live with us and take care of the children.”

Doug DeVos:

Exact­ly. Exact­ly. Arthur, let’s dive in here a lit­tle bit. It’s an inter­est­ing world right now. There’s a lot of tough things going on and this idea of hap­pi­ness is some­thing that seems to be at an all time low. And it seems to be more than just the pan­dem­ic expe­ri­ence. It seems to be a few oth­er things pil­ing on. And the recent sur­veys would say that cer­tain­ly from an Amer­i­can per­spec­tive only 14% would say that they’re very hap­py. That’s a low num­ber. The low­est I think they mea­sured in five decades. So help us under­stand this issue of hap­pi­ness and the depth of it a lit­tle bit. Just frame that out, then we’ll dive into a lit­tle bit more of your story.

Arthur Brooks:

Yeah. So you’re refer­ring to the gen­er­al social sur­vey data from the Uni­ver­si­ty of Chica­go, I think. And that’s a sur­vey that going back to 1972 has been ask­ing peo­ple to self rate their hap­pi­ness. How hap­py would you say all things con­sid­ered in your life? And there’s three cat­e­gories. Very hap­py, some­what hap­py and not too hap­py. And gen­er­al­ly speak­ing, most peo­ple, about 33% of the pop­u­la­tion tra­di­tion­al­ly, would say they’re very hap­py about their lives and now it’s down below 20% for the very first time. Now, some of that is COVID, but a lot of that is a sec­u­lar down­ward trend. And we’ve been see­ing the down­ward trend lit­tle by lit­tle by lit­tle, all the way back to the late 1980s. This is a problem.

Now, the first thing that your lis­ten­ers are going to be ask­ing is, ​“Can we real­ly rely on that? Does that real­ly tell us how hap­py peo­ple are or do they lie?” And the truth is that when you ask peo­ple in big sur­veys anony­mous­ly how hap­py would you say you are, they don’t lie. I mean, you can’t ask that in front of some­body’s spouse, because then they will lie. But if you ask peo­ple that anony­mous­ly and in big sam­ples, you’re going to get a pret­ty accu­rate rep­re­sen­ta­tion. Peo­ple do know how hap­py they are. So this is the big ques­tion. Why would this be hap­pen­ing? Some of it, as I men­tioned before, as we talked about is because of COVID. But most of it is actu­al­ly this down­ward trend in Amer­i­can hap­pi­ness, in peo­ple who say they’re hap­py about their lives. That’s what I study. Now, peo­ple look all the time at the wrong things with hap­pi­ness. They’ll look at the inter­na­tion­al sur­veys, which is the hap­pi­est coun­try? And they always find, for exam­ple, when you com­pare peo­ple with respect to their hap­pi­ness on aver­ages across coun­tries that Den­mark and Swe­den and Nor­way and Ice­land and Fin­land, that these are the hap­pi­est coun­tries. You can’t trust those things at all because inter­na­tion­al com­par­isons are com­par­ing peo­ple who answer the ques­tion in dif­fer­ent ways.

And so, your grand­par­ents who came from Hol­land and my grand­par­ents who came from Den­mark, they’re always say­ing that they’re hap­py because peo­ple who stay in coun­tries … Although your grand­par­ents, I know were actu­al­ly immi­grants as were mine. But the peo­ple who do stay in those coun­tries, they tend to answer it in terms of con­tent­ment. We in Amer­i­ca answer that in terms of adven­ture and oppor­tu­ni­ty because we’re very immi­grant focused, very entre­pre­neur­ial based soci­ety. When peo­ple answer it in east Asia, they’re large­ly talk­ing about peace in their fam­i­lies, which is sort of the high­est val­ue. You can’t com­pare Danes and Amer­i­cans and Japan­ese and Indi­ans and south Amer­i­cans. In Rus­sia, it’s bad luck to say that you’re not hap­py. Or that you are hap­py, I should say. And so every­body says that they’re not, and it looks like every­body’s mor­bid­ly depressed. So for­get all of those com­par­isons. But we can com­pare our­selves against our­selves over time. And that’s the real­ly, real­ly wor­ry­ing thing. So that’s what I study. And why do peo­ple answer the way that they do? Why are peo­ple answer­ing it in a dif­fer­ent way? What are the big soci­etal trends that are dri­ving it? And most impor­tant­ly, I think I know the answer, what can we actu­al­ly do to turn it around?

Doug DeVos:

Well, let’s spend a lit­tle time with that, but first let’s back up and talk a lit­tle bit of your jour­ney so our lis­ten­ers will all under­stand a bit of who Arthur Brooks is. And so we go back a long way to Grand Rapids Chris­t­ian High School when you were here and then your adven­tures as a pro­fes­sion­al musi­cian and then to a think tank and now into a new adven­ture. Talk a lit­tle bit about that pro­gres­sion, because that’s an inter­est­ing back­ground and you must have learned a lot about being hap­py or not being hap­py. And so why don’t you start as a pro­fes­sion­al musician.

Arthur Brooks:

Yeah, no. That’s right. And so the lis­ten­ers under­stand what we’re talk­ing about, you and I coin­cid­ed for one year in high school. You and I are almost exact­ly the same age, but I spent my sopho­more year at the high school that you went to, which is Grand Rapids Chris­t­ian, because my father was teach­ing at Calvin college.

Doug DeVos:

Calvin Col­lege. Sure.

Arthur Brooks:

For just one year on a trade. Then I went back to where I grew up in Seat­tle. Well, I grad­u­at­ed from high school and went to col­lege for a year, which did­n’t work out and I became a pro­fes­sion­al musi­cian, which was my dream. A clas­si­cal musi­cian. I don’t want peo­ple to think that I was run­ning around like some crazy gui­tar play­er or a drum­mer or some­thing. Not that there’s any­thing wrong with that. I played with sym­pho­ny orches­tras and then cham­ber music. And I wound up in the Barcelona Sym­pho­ny, which is actu­al­ly where I got mar­ried. I mar­ried my wife, who’s Span­ish, in Barcelona.

At the same time, I start­ed real­iz­ing in my late 20s that I need­ed to do some study­ing. I thought that might be a good thing to do. So I went back to col­lege actu­al­ly by cor­re­spon­dence and got my cor­re­spon­dence school degree when I was 30 years old and then went to grad­u­ate school because I was so inter­est­ed in what I had been learn­ing and I became a social sci­en­tist. I spe­cial­ized in behav­ior. I looked at why peo­ple give mon­ey to char­i­ty, why peo­ple think things are beau­ti­ful. And ulti­mate­ly I wound up look­ing at human hap­pi­ness. I taught at Syra­cuse for about 10 years. Syra­cuse Uni­ver­si­ty. And then I left to run a think tank. A free enter­prise ori­ent­ed think tank. And that’s when you and I con­nect­ed. Reconnected.

Doug DeVos:

Absolute­ly.

Arthur Brooks:

Where you and I recon­nect­ed because you were run­ning Amway at the time and I was run­ning the Amer­i­can Enter­prise Insti­tute and what syn­chronic­i­ty could this have … It could­n’t have been bet­ter. And I was run­ning a think tank of pro­mot­ing the val­ues of Amway, which Amway was doing every day in the mar­kets and lift­ing peo­ple up and-

Doug DeVos:

Which we appre­ci­at­ed by the way.

Arthur Brooks:

Yeah, no, no. It was fan­tas­tic. It’s one thing to study it, but you also have to do it. So we were sort of ver­ti­cal­ly inte­grat­ed from ideas to action, to pros­per­i­ty for fam­i­lies. And then I left after the think tank expe­ri­ence for about 11 years and for the last three years, I’ve been a pro­fes­sor at Har­vard Uni­ver­si­ty at the Har­vard Kennedy School and The Har­vard Busi­ness School. And I teach class­es in hap­pi­ness. I write about hap­pi­ness as a social sci­en­tist. It’s not self-improve­ment, it’s real­ly the sci­ence and how you can use it. And so I write every week in The Atlantic. I write books about the sub­ject. I have a pod­cast. I’m work­ing on a tele­vi­sion show. All kinds of fun stuff. And as impor­tant­ly as any­thing else, I’m actu­al­ly doing hap­pi­ness class­es inside com­pa­nies so that cor­po­rate lead­ers can be hap­pi­er peo­ple and their man­agers can actu­al­ly be teach­ing hap­pi­ness to their work­forces so they’ll be more pro­duc­tive and lift­ing each oth­er up. So that’s a big part of what I’m doing these days.

Doug DeVos:

Well, that’s spec­tac­u­lar. I’d love and I’m sure our lis­ten­ers would love that his­to­ry because this is not some­thing you’ve just stum­bled on. This is some­thing you’ve lived and you’ve stud­ied and you’ve devel­oped and you’ve par­tic­i­pat­ed. And one thing maybe to dive deep­er in, your tran­si­tion. You’ve just found a … You were incred­i­bly suc­cess­ful at the Amer­i­can Enter­prise Insti­tute. A lot of great things going on. And you just said time for change. Been here long enough, time for a change. Talk about that a lit­tle bit. Help our lis­ten­ers under­stand. Because so many of us when we’ve been doing some­thing, espe­cial­ly when we’re suc­cess­ful, the last thing we want to do is make a change.

Arthur Brooks:

Yeah. I know.

Doug DeVos:

How did you approach that, deal with that? And help us under­stand how we can appre­ci­ate that there’s more to life.

Arthur Brooks:

Yeah, no. And by the way, you could answer the same ques­tion because you did the same thing on near­ly the same time­frame. I mean, you and I have sort of a par­al­lelism to it. I mean, you ran the com­pa­ny … Only one of the most suc­cess­ful com­pa­nies in the world that got more suc­cess­ful when you were run­ning it, and you stepped down on pur­pose to leave suc­cess to the next per­son. To have the next gen­er­a­tion of lead­er­ship in the com­pa­ny take over and to go from strength to strength as Psalm 84 likes to remind us should be our goal. One of the things that you learn when you study lead­er­ship, when you actu­al­ly look at lead­er­ship, which is tech­ni­cal­ly what I’m a pro­fes­sor of at Har­vard. I’m a pro­fes­sor of pub­lic lead­er­ship. Is that the cadence of chief exec­u­tive jobs tends to be most suc­cess­ful at about 10 years. 10 years is a real­ly good mark.

Now it should be more than five because you can’t get a vision going in less than five years, most of the time. But more than 10, you don’t usu­al­ly get more than one vision. And so 10 years, nine years, 13 years, what­ev­er it hap­pens to be, but around there tends to be the sweet spot for a lot of CEOs. And I saw it in myself. After 10 years, I was hit­ting the zone and as I was get­ting close to 10, I noticed what I had been see­ing in my stud­ies as an aca­d­e­m­ic in the years gone by. That it was going to be bet­ter for the orga­ni­za­tion if I hand­ed it over to some­body else who had dif­fer­ent strengths than me. And so I worked with a board and I did that. It’s hard to step away. I’m not going to lie, Doug. I’m sure it was for you too. I mean, you were hav­ing a good old time. It was a par­ty at Amway and it was a par­ty at the Amer­i­can Enter­prise Institute.

But the key thing is you have to have the humil­i­ty to do so. Now it’s very help­ful … I’m a Chris­t­ian. And this is the most impor­tant sin­gle part about my life for every­body to know that my life is based on my Chris­t­ian faith and my Chris­t­ian faith has to be based on my humil­i­ty and an under­stand­ing that I’m not the sav­ior of any­thing. I might be a good CEO. I might bring some cer­tain gifts, but the truth of the mat­ter is I need to bring every­thing to God and bring it and lift it up in prayer. And I ask about this. And this is what I rec­om­mend that every­body do with their job, with their life, not just prob­lems, but chal­lenges and oppor­tu­ni­ties and excit­ing adven­tures, bring it. If you have reli­gion, if you’re a reli­gious per­son, bring it to your reli­gious life and ask for guid­ance. And that’s what I did. And that was ulti­mate­ly the best part about my per­son­al tran­si­tion was how it lived up to my research, but more impor­tant­ly, it improved my faith.

Doug DeVos:

Yeah. Wow. That’s a great sto­ry. And again, you draw on the foun­da­tion­al aspects of your life that you go to and you real­ly think about what you’re expe­ri­enc­ing. So how have you now applied that? Talk a lit­tle bit about how you’re apply­ing that now at Har­vard and the things you’re doing now. So pre­sum­ably you’re cre­at­ing that. You’re going from strength to strength as your book says, and you’re get­ting to that next vision or sweet spot.

Arthur Brooks:

Yeah. So that’s what actu­al­ly I want­ed to do next was to cre­ate more val­ue, lift peo­ple up and bring them togeth­er. What I fig­ured out was when I stepped down as a CEO, the ques­tion was okay, what am I sup­posed to do next? And I real­ly felt very strong­ly if the answer to that ques­tion was to lift peo­ple up and bring them togeth­er in bonds of love and hap­pi­ness using my ideas, that’s what I have a whole lot of. I mean, I’m in pret­ty good shape, but I’m not going to dig ditch­es faster than some­body else. And I’m cer­tain­ly not going to shoot jump shots. And there’s a whole lot of things I’m not going to be able to do very well. What I’m real­ly good at is com­ing up with ideas and explain­ing them to oth­er peo­ple. I mean, I know it sounds ridicu­lous, but it turns out that’s a real job out there, espe­cial­ly in a world that’s pro­pelled by ideas. It’s pro­pelled by good and bad ideas, by the way.

So when I went to Har­vard and I start­ed at a busi­ness school, they asked me, ​“So what do you want to teach?” Which is the first ques­tion they always ask a brand new pro­fes­sor. And I said, ​“I think you need a class on human hap­pi­ness. I think you need a class on the sci­ence of hap­pi­ness. That’s 25% neu­ro­science. That’s 50% social sci­ence. Most­ly social psy­chol­o­gy and behav­ior eco­nom­ics. And 25% phi­los­o­phy and the­ol­o­gy. That’s what I think you need.” And I said, ​“The rea­son is that I’ve been look­ing at data on busi­ness school grad­u­ates. And one of the things that I notice is that 10 or 15 years after these very elite MBA stu­dents fin­ish their degrees they all have their dreams come true. The prob­lem is they have the wrong dreams.”

And by the way, there’s noth­ing weird about this. There’s noth­ing wrong with Har­vard Busi­ness School stu­dents. I mean, every­body wants to make mon­ey, to be pros­per­ous, to be admired. Every­body wants to have some influ­ence over oth­er peo­ple. To have an impact. And this is how human beings are wired and it’s a good and beau­ti­ful thing. The prob­lem is that it’s not as sat­is­fy­ing as peo­ple are going to think. And so what they wind up doing on a lot … Not every­body. But what a lot of them wind up doing is think­ing they’re going to be sat­is­fied when cir­cum­stances smile on them. And what they don’t under­stand is that you don’t need cir­cum­stances, you need habits. You don’t need hacks, you need habits in your life that make good hap­pi­ness hygiene.

Basi­cal­ly what it amounts to is this Doug. If I meet some­body who’s real­ly strug­gling when they get old­er with their mon­ey, I’ll say, ​“Well, you should have had a 401k plan.” Some­body who made a lot of mon­ey and then winds up broke … I mean, you need a 401k plan. Every­body knows this, right? So what peo­ple need is also a hap­pi­ness 401k plan. And every­body, whether they’re rich or they’re poor, they need the same hap­pi­ness 401k plan. Look, the invest­ment strat­e­gy is very dif­fer­ent in mon­ey between peo­ple who are very lucky and the peo­ple who aren’t. But the strat­e­gy is the same for all human beings when it comes to our hearts.

And so what I work on right now is the hap­pi­ness 401k plan that my stu­dents and every­body else, and the com­pa­nies that I go teach to. I say, ​“Look, they’re telling you to put mon­ey in your 401k plan. I’m going to tell you where to put your heart so that you can actu­al­ly get hap­pi­er as the decades go by. You can be ready for the change that inevitably will be com­ing your way. And you can be hap­pi­er at 75 than you were at 25.” So that’s basi­cal­ly the guar­an­tee and what I teach and what I write about and what I talk about.

Doug DeVos:

Fas­ci­nat­ing. This idea that there’s sci­ence behind things, because some­times we tend to just think that, I just want to be hap­py and I’m going to see some­one, I’m going to fall in love. And I’m going to do this thing and it’s just going to be great for me because I have this image of it or this thought about it or this dream. And then once you get there, you real­ize it trans­lates back to some prin­ci­ples and work and the sci­ence behind it that you talk about. So help us under­stand. Give us a cou­ple exam­ples. Give us some of these prac­ti­cal steps that you can turn the sci­ence that you study when you teach these class­es, when you talk about these things at uni­ver­si­ties, at cor­po­ra­tions that peo­ple can take and apply. So for our audi­ence, what are some of the things that they say, ​“Okay, I’m get­ting my mind around what Arthur’s talk­ing about here, but how do I now start to take it and maybe do a few things with it?”

Arthur Brooks:

Yeah, sure. So to begin with, it’s impor­tant that peo­ple under­stand what hap­pi­ness is. Now every­body thinks they know what hap­pi­ness is, but then they think clear­ly about it. They’re like, ​“Actu­al­ly I don’t. It’s a feel­ing and I know when I have it and I know, and I don’t.” But that’s real­ly not true. Hap­pi­ness is not a feel­ing any­more than your Thanks­giv­ing din­ner is the smell of the turkey. That’s evi­dence of the Thanks­giv­ing din­ner and your hap­py feel­ings are evi­dence of your hap­pi­ness. Hap­pi­ness is basi­cal­ly … Stay­ing on the metaphor of food. All of food has what we call macronu­tri­ents. So all of food is made up of pro­tein, car­bo­hy­drates, and fat. All food. So your whole diet. And if you want to get health­i­er, you’ve got to make sure that you have all three macronu­tri­ents in bal­ance and abun­dance and not too much of one and not too lit­tle of anoth­er. The big prob­lem that we have in the Amer­i­can diet is too much car­bo­hy­drate and not enough pro­tein for exam­ple. And so I’m rebal­anc­ing peo­ple’s diets all the time, because they ask me for … Because I’m like you. I’m con­scious of what I put in my body because I want to stay around for a lit­tle while, for example.

Doug DeVos:

That’s right.

Arthur Brooks:

Well, hap­pi­ness is like food. It has three macronu­tri­ents that you need in both bal­ance and abun­dance. You need three things. They are enjoy­ment, sat­is­fac­tion and pur­pose. Those are the three macronu­tri­ents of hap­pi­ness. Now how do I know this? Because when I look at hap­py and unhap­py peo­ple, these things are out of bal­ance or they’re miss­ing. Now, enjoy­ment is not the same thing as plea­sure. If only it were as easy as plea­sure, you could get it from a gin bot­tle. You could get it from all kinds of sources, but that’s not true. Enjoy­ment is plea­sure plus ele­va­tion. So your Thanks­giv­ing din­ner gives you plea­sure because it fills you up and it tastes good. But the enjoy­ment actu­al­ly comes from your Thanks­giv­ing din­ner when you’re eat­ing it with the peo­ple that you love and you’re think­ing about it and you can make a mem­o­ry. That’s when it actu­al­ly becomes part of happiness.

Now we’re always telling our kids, ​“It’s a beau­ti­ful day. Don’t sit in front of the com­put­er. Go out­side.” What we’re telling them is don’t be sat­is­fied with plea­sure, get enjoy­ment by get­ting more ele­va­tion. Actu­al­ly using your brain. Don’t look at TV, mind­less­ly. Read a book. Why? Because a lit­tle bit of easy TV gives you plea­sure. A real­ly good book gives you enjoy­ment. That’s the idea. The sec­ond is sat­is­fac­tion. Now sat­is­fac­tion is a joy that you get from a job well done. The joy, the hap­pi­ness that you actu­al­ly get is a reward for an accom­plish­ment that you real­ly earned. So that A you get in school or the pro­mo­tion you get at work or the raise or some­body says thank you and admires you or I love you. I mean, these things actu­al­ly are a form of satisfaction.

The prob­lem with sat­is­fac­tion is that you can’t keep it. It tends to be very tem­po­rary. And the fact that we don’t ever real­ize that is why we run and run and run and run. That’s called the hedo­nic tread­mill. Where you want the reward and you think you’re going to keep it, but you don’t so you keep run­ning and run­ning and run­ning. And that’s how peo­ple get into cycles of addic­tion. They want to be sat­is­fied final­ly, by how much they drink, by how much they eat, by how much they gam­ble, by how much they work. Worka­holism is all about this tread­mill. Final­ly, I’ll be sat­is­fied with my per­for­mance. Final­ly, I’ll have worked enough. No you won’t. You’re addict­ed. That’s the sat­is­fac­tion prob­lem. And there are ways to solve it.

Then final­ly, there’s the mean­ing. Mean­ing and pur­pose in life. And this is the hard­est one because mean­ing and pur­pose actu­al­ly requires suf­fer­ing and sad­ness. My stu­dents don’t want to hear this some­times, but I have to help them under­stand that you should nev­er, nev­er be try­ing to avoid suf­fer­ing. Now too much is too much and peo­ple can suf­fer from depres­sion and anx­i­ety and those are med­ical con­di­tions to be sure. But ordi­nary suf­fer­ing is some­thing that you need to find mean­ing and pur­pose in your life. The loss, the fear that actu­al­ly comes from ordi­nary life can be the source of your strength because you see it as an oppor­tu­ni­ty. So these are the three things that we talk about. When I meet some­body who’s real­ly unhap­py I’m look­ing for an insuf­fi­cien­cy in enjoy­ment or sat­is­fac­tion or pur­pose. And once I see that, then I can actu­al­ly get into more of the science.

Now, the prac­ti­cal ques­tion that you’re ask­ing is, so how do you do it? What are the actu­al invest­ments in the hap­pi­ness 401k plan? And again, every­body’s a lit­tle bit dif­fer­ent. And part of the rea­son that we’re dif­fer­ent is because 50% of our base­line hap­pi­ness is genet­ic. And some peo­ple are nat­u­ral­ly hap­py, some peo­ple are nat­u­ral­ly gloomy, as it turns out. Just as some peo­ple eat the same food and some peo­ple get fat and some peo­ple don’t. That’s because we have dif­fer­ent metab­o­lisms. And then 50% is genet­ic 25% is from cir­cum­stances, which every­body has dif­fer­ent cir­cum­stances. But 25% of your hap­pi­ness is pure habits. Now, we don’t have to leave those habits up to chance. And good news, those habits con­trol 25% of your hap­pi­ness direct­ly. They can change your cir­cum­stances for the bet­ter and they can make you con­trol your genet­ics. So you real­ly got to get these habits right.

This is the hap­pi­ness 401k plan. Now, I can look in the aca­d­e­m­ic sci­en­tif­ic lit­er­a­ture, which is the stuff I read all day and there’s a thou­sand dif­fer­ent habits. Should you do weight train­ing or car­dio? That kind of thing. But that stuff is bor­ing. That stuff is triv­ial. There’s four habits. The big four. These are the invest­ments you need to put your time and ener­gy into every sin­gle day. Every sin­gle day with­out laps­ing. The four are your faith, your fam­i­ly, your friend­ships and your work. Now that sounds an awful lot like the pil­lars of Amway I real­ize that are in the world­wide head­quar­ters. And this is all based on the sci­en­tif­ic lit­er­a­ture. This is not wish­ful think­ing. This is not self-improve­ment. This is based on the fact.

And by the way, when I say faith, I don’t nec­es­sar­i­ly mean my faith and my Chris­t­ian faith. That’s not nec­es­sar­i­ly the way. What I’m say­ing is you need a big­ger per­spec­tive on life than just me, me, me, me, me. Because life is so triv­ial and bor­ing when it’s my car, my job, my com­mute, my friends, my kids. I mean, we’re com­pul­sive­ly think­ing about this, but we need peace and per­spec­tive and you need to zoom out. Now, maybe you’re walk­ing in nature. Maybe you’re read­ing the sto­ics. Maybe you’re going to church. Maybe you have a med­i­ta­tion prac­tice. You need some­thing that’s tran­scen­den­tal and that’s habit one.

Habit two is your fam­i­ly life. Now, a lot of peo­ple are neglect­ing this and it’s hap­pen­ing more and more. The fam­i­ly ties are the ties that bind and don’t break and you did­n’t choose. And God knows in many cas­es, we would­n’t choose them. You choose your friends, not your fam­i­ly. A lot of peo­ple lis­ten­ing to us had a tough Thanks­giv­ing because aunt Marge would­n’t stop talk­ing about pol­i­tics. I get it. But aunt Marge will take your 2:00 AM phone call when you’re in cri­sis. And most of your friends are like, ​“Who is this?” This is real­ly impor­tant. These ties, these fam­i­ly ties. If you can avoid a rup­ture, espe­cial­ly because of some­thing stu­pid like pol­i­tics, you must do that work. To stop talk­ing to a fam­i­ly mem­ber because a pol­i­tics is step­ping over a hun­dred dol­lar bills to get to nick­els. It’s bad, bad, bad strat­e­gy. The third thing is friend­ships. Now, when I’m talk­ing about friend­ships, I mean, real friends, not deal friends. And every­body lis­ten­ing to us knows the dif­fer­ence. Real beats deal all day long. Real friend­ships are based on the use­less things that we both love. This is a real­ly impor­tant thing that we talk about as opposed to I help you, you help me.

Deal friend­ships are fine. There’s noth­ing wrong with deal friend­ships, but we need real friend­ships. By the way, for every­body’s lis­ten­ing to us who’s mar­ried, your spouse must be a real friend. That’s the basis of a life­long mar­riage. That’s the basis of hap­pi­ness in mar­riage is real friend­ships. Of course not deal friend­ships, but a lot of spous­es aren’t even any kind of friends, quite frankly. They don’t even think of them­selves as such. You got to fix that.

And final­ly work. And work has to have only two char­ac­ter­is­tics. I don’t care if you’re the pres­i­dent of Amway, the pro­fes­sor at Har­vard, the politi­cian, the brick lay­er, the elec­tri­cian or the plumber. I don’t care. You have to have two char­ac­ter­is­tics. One is that you have to earn your suc­cess. That comes from accom­plish­ment and hard work and mer­it and it has to be rec­og­nized and reward­ed. You will love your job if you earn your success.

The sec­ond is you need to serve oth­er peo­ple. You need to feel like you’re serv­ing oth­ers, that some­body needs you with your work. If you don’t feel those things, you’re going to hate your job. If you’re a boss and your employ­ees don’t feel those things, your employ­ees are going to quit because they’re going to hate their jobs as well. So that’s it. I mean, Doug, it’s not that hard to remem­ber. Faith, fam­i­ly, friends, and work that serves. And if we do that and we got to put a deposit in each one of those accounts every sin­gle day, and if we do, boom. That thing is going to grow and our hap­pi­ness is going to thrive.

Doug DeVos:

Bril­liant. Bril­liant. So well devel­oped, so well artic­u­lat­ed. But isn’t it some­times coun­ter­in­tu­itive? Some­times if you’re look­ing at these things for faith, some of the most dam­ag­ing things that have hap­pened to peo­ple, an expe­ri­ence they had in the faith com­mu­ni­ty or the rejec­tion they felt, or that bad dis­cus­sion at a time in fam­i­ly. Does­n’t it feel coun­ter­in­tu­itive to some peo­ple and what’s the step they have to take up? What should they believe about this pos­si­bil­i­ty of hap­pi­ness, of ful­fill­ment, get­ting enjoy­ment, sat­is­fac­tion, and pur­pose, and tak­ing the risk with those areas in their life. How to take those steps.

Arthur Brooks:

Yeah, it’s real­ly hard. There are peo­ple lis­ten­ing to us who’ve had very bad expe­ri­ences in their faith com­mu­ni­ty. Real­ly bad expe­ri­ences in their fam­i­lies. And the rea­son that those things are so trau­mat­ic is because you care about them so much. If you’re brought up in the church and you care about it and some­body vio­lates, your trust, which has hap­pened … Look, I’m a Catholic and I don’t have to tell you all the bad things that have hap­pened in the Catholic church. Now, we’re read­ing all these expos­es about the South­ern Bap­tists and well, why? Because peo­ple are real­ly, real­ly imper­fect. Lots of lead­ers are imper­fect and they vio­late trust and hurt peo­ple. Nobody would care if they did­n’t care about reli­gion. It’s like, ​“Yeah. I went to a church. I did­n’t care. And the guy was a jerk and I still don’t care.”

But the truth is these are real­ly impor­tant things. And when a par­ent betrays trust or what­ev­er it hap­pens to be, that’s real­ly, real­ly dam­ag­ing. The things that can raise your hap­pi­ness the most, they can also raise your unhap­pi­ness the most. Key thing to remem­ber is that hap­pi­ness and unhap­pi­ness actu­al­ly work in dif­fer­ent parts of the brain. They’re not oppo­sites from each oth­er. Unhap­pi­ness is not the absence of hap­pi­ness at all, but the things that are your most emo­tion­al­ly invest­ed in, because these are your hap­pi­ness sources, they can be your great unhap­pi­ness sources as well. So when peo­ple have had a ter­ri­ble dam­ag­ing expe­ri­ence with faith or with fam­i­ly, the key thing is not to write that off. The key thing is to find … If you can heal it, heal it, or to find some oth­er avenue to get that. You don’t have to go to the same church, for example.

You can actu­al­ly find peo­ple who are more vir­tu­ous, for exam­ple. If you had a roman­tic rela­tion­ship with some­body that was real­ly dam­ag­ing, it was real­ly tox­ic, and it real­ly hurt you a lot, don’t write off romance. Romance is one of the great hap­pi­ness sources in life. You need to be an entre­pre­neur with your life and one of the things that entre­pre­neurs all know is that you got to take risks. You got to fail. You got to try again, is what it comes to. But at the end of the day, these still are your hap­pi­ness sources. They just might not be the orig­i­nal ones.

Doug DeVos:

Right. Right. The idea of tak­ing risks, of accept­ing fail­ure. In the Amway busi­ness, the most pow­er­ful sto­ries are when peo­ple failed. My dad and Jay Van Andel, prob­a­bly the most pow­er­ful sto­ry they talk about is their idea of sail­ing to South Amer­i­ca when they did­n’t know how to sail and how they got lost going down the east coast of the Unit­ed States and final­ly the boat sank. So the whole idea of their sto­ry was it was a fail­ure, the boat sank, but they did­n’t let the boat sink­ing stop them from their trip. They turned the sto­ry around. And so many peo­ple in life, some of the most pow­er­ful sto­ries that they have are when they failed. They tried some­thing and failed. So how does risk … Talk a lit­tle bit more about how risk tak­ing and the free­dom to fail at some­thing maybe should­n’t stop us from tak­ing the next risk.

Arthur Brooks:

Peo­ple are deeply afraid, not just of fail­ure, but a lot of peo­ple are moti­vat­ed by a lot of their fears. Some peo­ple are afraid of death. Some peo­ple are afraid of being for­got­ten. Some peo­ple are afraid of rejec­tion. A lot of my stu­dents who are some of the most high achiev­ing intel­li­gent peo­ple ever met, real­ly are afraid of aca­d­e­m­ic and pro­fes­sion­al fail­ure. Fear is part of life. But the key thing to keep in mind is that fear is the oppo­site of love. Peo­ple often think that love and hatred are oppo­sites, but they aren’t. In the Bible, St. John, the apos­tle, says that per­fect love dri­ves out fear, but it’s the same thing that Lao Tzu, who wrote the Tao Te Ching, an ancient Con­fu­cian wis­dom in Chi­na said this exact­ly the same thing.

And we know from mod­ern neu­ro­science that the mas­ter emo­tion is fear on the neg­a­tive side and the mas­ter pos­i­tive emo­tion is love. They real­ly are oppo­sites, neu­ro­log­i­cal oppo­sites from each oth­er. And the impor­tant thing to keep in mind about that is that you can’t be held back by fear, but it’s not enough to say that. You’ve got to put good news around it too. There’s a way to con­quer your fear and it’s more love. When my stu­dents come to me and they ask for my advice and they say, ​“I’m real­ly, real­ly afraid of fail­ure,” I say, ​“You need more love in your life.” When they come to me and they say, ​“I don’t have enough love in my life,” I say, ​“Let’s exam­ine your fear.” Because you always go to the oppo­site and you don’t treat the prob­lem at hand, you go to the oppo­site prob­lem and treat that in the oppo­site way.

This is one of the best tech­niques for solv­ing prob­lems in our lives. And so this is the key thing for us to keep in mind. You need more love. Love actu­al­ly brings you con­fi­dence, love neu­tral­izes fear in your life. And one oth­er thing to keep in mind. A lot of peo­ple that lis­ten to us real­ly admire entre­pre­neurs. Entre­pre­neur­ial fam­i­lies like the DeVos fam­i­ly. The sto­ry of Amer­i­can entre­pre­neur­ial suc­cess. Very inspi­ra­tional, what it was. But all of us are entre­pre­neurs because it turns out that busi­ness is not even the most inter­est­ing kind of entre­pre­neur­ship. The most inter­est­ing kind of entre­pre­neur­ship is the start­up of your life. Every­body who’s lis­ten­ing to us is the CEO of a start­up endeav­or called the enter­prise of you inc. Now, you got to remem­ber what all entre­pre­neurs have in com­mon. What they’re try­ing to do is to cre­ate explo­sive rewards.

They’re try­ing to use a kind of explo­sive amount of cap­i­tal that does­n’t exist. They have dreams of things that did­n’t exist in the past and they have faith in resources they don’t cur­rent­ly have in hand. I did­n’t say any­thing about mon­ey. That does­n’t have any­thing to do with mon­ey. The most impor­tant cur­ren­cy for us as start­up entre­pre­neurs of our lives is love. And the way that you could do this is by giv­ing your heart away and tak­ing a big risk. That is your entre­pre­neur­ship. I talk to young peo­ple today and I say, ​“You want to be an entre­pre­neur? Get mar­ried.” That’s an incred­i­bly entre­pre­neur­ial thing to do. You might start a busi­ness too, but get­ting mar­ried is a much big­ger deal for hap­pi­ness and life suc­cess than start­ing a busi­ness. Any busi­ness, even if it’s a bazil­lion dol­lar busi­ness, get­ting mar­ried is a much big­ger deal than that. But to do it, you got to give your heart away and you might get hurt.

Now, one thing to keep in mind, Doug, the research shows that the aver­age start­up busi­ness entre­pre­neur has 3.8 fail­ures before their first suc­cess on aver­age. I mean, nobody has 0.8 fail­ures, but you get my point. About four fail­ures before suc­cess. Think about that in terms of your love life. It’s pret­ty nor­mal to have your heart bro­ken a bunch of times. And from that you learn, from that you become resilience. That’s called stress inoc­u­la­tion. It’s an expo­sure ther­a­py to some­thing that’s real­ly, real­ly hard. You got to try again. You have to learn from it. You actu­al­ly have to be strong as a result of it. And we as par­ents need to help our kids be strong when their hearts are bro­ken as well and to say, ​“That’s the way it works some­times.” And there will be some­body who will love you for who you are as a per­son. And I know it feels like you’re going to be hurt­ing for­ev­er, but you’re not. In the same way that if your busi­ness failed or your boat sank, there’s some­thing else that you can actu­al­ly do.

Doug DeVos:

Spec­tac­u­lar. This idea of resilience. We talk about grit. We were with anoth­er friend who was say­ing … We were dis­cussing the top­ic of anx­i­ety in the US and young peo­ple. And he was rais­ing the pos­si­bil­i­ty it’s because peo­ple have had it too good. They’ve had great par­ents that’ve looked after them, they’ve tak­en care of them. They’ve had lots of oppor­tu­ni­ty. So they almost have to cre­ate some­thing to give them anx­i­ety in their life. I don’t know if that’s accu­rate or not, but this idea of being strong enough to over­come some­thing seems to be very powerful.

Arthur Brooks:

For sure. We are built as human beings to over­come adver­si­ty. This is how we’re wired. And if our par­ents take away all the adver­si­ty, it can be real­ly, real­ly prob­lem­at­ic. Now, some peo­ple who are lis­ten­ing to us, they grew up poor and some peo­ple who are lis­ten­ing to us grew up rich, but we all need chal­lenges in our lives. And if we are ful­ly alive, we will have those chal­lenges. The key thing is for us not to shy away from them. The big prob­lem is when we’re pro­tect­ed from chal­lenges and then we pro­tect our­selves from those chal­lenges, from those sac­ri­fices, even from that suf­fer­ing. The ques­tion is not, how can I make the suf­fer­ing go away? The ques­tion should be, what am I learn­ing from it? The inter­est­ing exer­cise that I give my stu­dents is I have them have a fail­ure and suf­fer­ing jour­nal. And I know it sounds real­ly ter­ri­ble and mor­bid, but here’s how it works, Doug.

Doug DeVos:

I love it. I love it.

Arthur Brooks:

Because inevitably bad things hap­pen to us. Some­body’s mean to us or we get a rejec­tion or we don’t get the job that we apply for or some­thing bad hap­pens. Every time some­thing bad hap­pens that real­ly both­ers you, take out your jour­nal and write it down and leave two spaces below it. Okay. Now, one month from now, set a timer on your phone that gives you an alarm, go back and under that you need to write what did I learn from that thing that hap­pened a month ago? And then six months after the prob­lem you go back and you say what oppor­tu­ni­ty came as a result of this chal­lenge? What oppor­tu­ni­ty came that I did­n’t see at the time? Now, when you do this, you get incred­i­ble per­spec­tive and you wire in your own resilien­cy by not just hop­ing and leav­ing it up to chance.

You’re actu­al­ly going to install it in the pre­frontal cor­tex of your brain. Actu­al­ly this is called metacog­ni­tion. If you write things down, if you jour­nal things, you take them to prayer, what you’ll be doing is you’ll be mak­ing the metacog­ni­tive in the big meaty human parts of the brain. Also, next time you write some­thing down, you’re going to inevitably see the last thing and say, ​“Yep, bad thing just hap­pened to me. And every time it hap­pens, I learn some­thing and it’s an oppor­tu­ni­ty. I don’t want the bad thing to hap­pen, but there’s some good that comes from it every sin­gle time.” And that makes you strong.

Doug DeVos:

Yeah. Yeah. Fas­ci­nat­ing to be able to take that and to turn it around in the right ways. Arthur, talk a lit­tle bit … I know we’ve had some fun dis­cus­sions in the past. You have a very, very strong faith. Your Chris­t­ian faith is very strong and per­son­al for you and you’ve talked about that. You’ve also engaged with a lot of peo­ple from dif­fer­ent faiths who have shared wis­dom with you. Talk about that a lit­tle bit. In par­tic­u­lar, you’ve spent time in the East­ern reli­gions and with the Dalai Lama. Can you fill us in or share some of the things that you’ve learned from some of the peo­ple that you’ve met and the work that you’ve done there?

Arthur Brooks:

Yeah. I mean, some of the most impor­tant lessons that I’ve learned about my own Chris­t­ian faith has been from non-Chris­tians. From sec­u­lar human­ists, from athe­ists, from Bud­dhists, from Hin­dus, from our Mus­lim broth­ers. I mean, it’s incred­i­ble how much I’ve learned because they give per­spec­tives that I don’t have. And they have teach­ings and scrip­tures that are not avail­able to us, but that hold incred­i­ble truths. Now, some Chris­tians who are very, very seri­ous about their faith, they might be pound­ing the desk right now say­ing, ​“No. Why is he say­ing some­thing like this?” But I want us to remem­ber a cou­ple of things. There’s no Chris­t­ian out there who does­n’t love the words of St. Augus­tine from his famous con­fes­sions, ​“You made us for your­self, oh Lord. And our hearts are rest­less until they rest in you.” Those are the words of the great St. Augus­tine. For both Protes­tants and Catholics is very, very impor­tant writing.

Well, St. Augus­tine actu­al­ly was a Pla­ton­ist. His main source of ideas came from scrip­ture and Pla­to. Pla­to was a pagan by Chris­t­ian stan­dards. He was pre-Chris­t­ian. He was some­body who did­n’t even know that there was a Chris­t­ian faith. Now, this is impor­tant to under­stand, there­fore, that one of the great saints, one of the great sages, one of the great teach­ers of the Chris­t­ian reli­gion that made it pos­si­ble for future gen­er­a­tions to share the faith and to love God more, he was being heav­i­ly influ­enced by some­body that was­n’t a Chris­t­ian at all. And we can do the same. We can learn from the Dalai Lama. And I’ve been work­ing close­ly with this holi­ness, the Dalai Lama for the past 10 years. We’ve writ­ten togeth­er. I’ve inter­viewed him in pub­lic many times. He’s a beloved teacher and a beloved friend.

And he’s often said to me that what he wants for me is to be a bet­ter Chris­t­ian. It’s a won­der­ful thing, because he wants me to be on my own par­tic­u­lar path. I also have stud­ied with teach­ers in South­ern India who’ve taught me a great deal. Or Mus­lim imams that I’ve seen. And I’ve had so many Jew­ish rab­bis that have helped me along my way. And of course, peo­ple with­out faith. Real athe­ists who have helped me under­stand what my neu­ro­science beliefs can and should be and helped me along my path of hap­pi­ness and how I can be a bet­ter, more eth­i­cal per­son. Basi­cal­ly it comes down to this. Moth­er Tere­sa, the great Catholic nun who helped the poor in Cal­cut­ta for so many years, was asked, ​“Why are you hang­ing out with all these Hin­du gurus?” And she said, ​“You don’t under­stand. I love all faiths, but I’m in love with the Chris­t­ian faith.” And that’s how I feel too.

Doug DeVos:

Wow. That is a great per­spec­tive of how we want to expand our think­ing and expand the inputs that we get in life. And that’s what we’re try­ing to do with this pod­cast, is to have oppor­tu­ni­ties for peo­ple to explore their own beliefs and to receive some infor­ma­tion and to receive a per­spec­tive that may exact­ly align, may be a lit­tle aligned, or maybe even from a dif­fer­ent per­spec­tive. But it will chal­lenge all of us to be a lit­tle bet­ter and find our own path for­ward. Arthur, let me go back a lit­tle more prac­ti­cal­ly again, and I’m going to go back to the habits that you talked about. And you’ve ref­er­enced this a lit­tle bit, but ask you to go back into the dig­ni­ty asso­ci­at­ed with work, because you talk about it as one of the four, right? Faith, fam­i­ly, friend­ships, and then work. And there’s a lot of activ­i­ty in the world today where peo­ple are hav­ing a hard time, work­force par­tic­i­pa­tion is low. But beyond just work get­ting a job, this idea of devel­op­ing these habits, that’s work too. Help us under­stand how you look at what we get up every day to do. Maybe we don’t go to a job, but we’ve got to get up every day to do some­thing. Help us under­stand how we should think about things when we get up every day.

Arthur Brooks:

Yeah. What we’re wired to do as peo­ple is very clear in almost all of the evo­lu­tion­ary biol­o­gy lit­er­a­ture. Peo­ple are cre­at­ed … I believe they’re cre­at­ed, but peo­ple are born cer­tain­ly to cre­ate val­ue. We’re made to cre­ate val­ue. Now, as Chris­t­ian peo­ple, we believe that we’re made in the image of God and God is cre­ative and God cre­ates. And since we’re made like God, we’re made to be cre­ative and to cre­ate things too. It’s not like cre­at­ing the oceans and the earth. I mean, I’m not going to flat­ter myself. I’m not doing any­thing along those lines. But I’ve got my own lit­tle ver­sion of that. But even if you don’t believe those things, even if you’re not a reli­gious per­son, it’s very clear that peo­ple are hap­pi­er when they are creative.

And every­body is cre­ative in their own way. They’re cre­at­ing val­ue with their lives and in the lives of oth­er peo­ple. Peo­ple just love this. It’s a true source of bliss and endur­ing sat­is­fac­tion. You don’t get your sat­is­fac­tion from meet­ing your wants. You get endur­ing sat­is­fac­tion by meet­ing the wants of oth­ers, because that means you’re doing some­thing valu­able, which is such a beau­ti­ful thing. Now, some­times it’s paid and some­times it’s not. Maybe it’s going out to the mar­ket. Maybe it’s being a CEO. Maybe it’s stay­ing home and tak­ing care of your chil­dren. Maybe it’s doing vol­un­teer work. Maybe it’s doing work that peo­ple actu­al­ly nev­er see. All of these things are gen­er­a­tive, but that’s what we have to be think­ing about. What can I do to con­tribute that will cre­ate val­ue in this world and make this world bet­ter in some way? And in doing it, you might not enjoy it every sin­gle day, but the sat­is­fac­tion that you’ll get from actu­al­ly doing that will be an endur­ing source of hap­pi­ness for you.

Doug DeVos:

This idea of set­ting about to cre­ate val­ue and to cre­ate val­ue for oth­ers. We’re talk­ing about hap­pi­ness in our­selves. We’re talk­ing about this con­cept of the habits we can devel­op, the things we can do to get bet­ter as we talk about the best path to a good life that we’re try­ing to live. But you’re talk­ing about the fact that you do these things so you can serve oth­ers. Talk about that a lit­tle more.

Arthur Brooks:

I know. It’s so para­dox­i­cal. Peo­ple often think, ​“Why do I do my work? So I have mon­ey. Why do I have mon­ey? So I can buy stuff. Why do I buy stuff? Because I want stuff.” Here’s the key way to think about it. It’s fun­ny that as you go through life, you start to real­ize that get­ting what you want is a ter­ri­ble strat­e­gy to sat­is­fy your­self. And so if I get that car, then I’ll be sat­is­fied. You’ll like it for a cou­ple of weeks, but the new car smell, uh-uh. It’s not going to last. It’s just not going to stick around. Get­ting the things that you want, hav­ing the things that you want is actu­al­ly not the right strat­e­gy. For a greater sense of con­tent­ment, you need not to have what you want, you need to want what you have.

And the way to think about that as a prac­ti­cal mat­ter is to think about your sat­is­fac­tion is not a func­tion of all of your haves. Your sat­is­fac­tion is a func­tion of what you have divid­ed by what you want. Haves divid­ed by wants. Now, why? Because you can get a lit­tle more sat­is­fac­tion by increas­ing the numer­a­tor of that frac­tion, or by decreas­ing the denom­i­na­tor, by want­i­ng less stuff, by want­i­ng few­er world­ly things. In so doing, you can free your­self up to enjoy the things that you actu­al­ly do have, to enjoy your life and to serve oth­er peo­ple in a real­ly mean­ing­ful way. But what I’ve tak­en to doing is I’ve put togeth­er now a reverse buck­et list, as opposed to a buck­et list.

The buck­et list is all of your attach­ments and you look at it on your birth­day and your crav­ings. And I know I’m going to be suc­cess­ful if I get that Mer­cedes or what­ev­er it hap­pens to be. And no, you won’t. You’re just going to want the Fer­rari after that. And it’s kind of cool and it’s sort of okay, but that’s not going to bring you sat­is­fac­tion. I make a reverse buck­et list. And it took me a while to do that. I used to have a buck­et list when I was 40, but now I’m 58. We’re 58. And I have a reverse buck­et list at this point where I go and I list all of my crav­ings and all those things that I always thought I always want­ed. And I make a strat­e­gy for detach­ing myself from those things.

It’s okay if I get it. I detach myself from lov­ing the mon­ey. St. Paul said to his dis­ci­ple, Tim­o­thy, ​“For the love of mon­ey is the root of all evil.” He did­n’t say mon­ey is the root of all evil. He said the love of mon­ey is the root of all evil. And so I detach myself from lov­ing these par­tic­u­lar things. And I’m telling you, I’m free. At one point I gave away half my clothes. But that was kind of easy, because I don’t have that many clothes. But you know what I did last year on my reverse buck­et list? I gave away half of my polit­i­cal opin­ions. And I’m telling you I’m free. It’s crazy. It does­n’t mean I don’t have polit­i­cal opin­ions. I have polit­i­cal opin­ions. I hap­pen to know per­son­al­ly that you and I have the same polit­i­cal opin­ions, as a mat­ter of fact. I’m just less attached to them and I’m less con­vinced I’m right than I was before. And that reverse buck­et list non-attach­ment thing has made it pos­si­ble for me to love more peo­ple and to be free and to be hap­pi­er. And I rec­om­mend it to every­body. Not specif­i­cal­ly that, but to just be less attached and to enjoy your life more,

Doug DeVos:

I think it was a come­di­an who made this long list of things he believed and he was right about this and that. And at the end of the whole thing, he went, ​“But I could be wrong.” And I think when we leave our­selves open, I think it’s pow­er­ful to detach our­selves from mate­r­i­al things, but from things where we can be absolute­ly con­vinced that we’re right. And one of the things that I’ve so enjoyed about our rela­tion­ship and talk­ing to you is that you bring new per­spec­tives that make me chal­lenge things that I thought for sure were right. But now there’s a new source of infor­ma­tion. There’s a new fact on the table. And it does­n’t maybe change what I believe inside, but it may change the way I think about that. And what it real­ly changes is maybe the way I think about oth­er peo­ple who may have that thought. And you open your­self up to a deep­er rela­tion­ship, which goes back to the four things that you talked about that are … Faith, fam­i­ly, friend­ship, and then doing the work nec­es­sary maybe to devel­op those rela­tion­ships with your faith, with your fam­i­ly and with friends old and new friends that may have a dif­fer­ent per­spec­tive and have a new view.

Arthur Brooks:

Yep. I com­plete­ly agree. And this is real­ly what I believe our coun­try needs to become tru­ly great. To reverse many of the prob­lems that we have. The thing that real­ly makes me sad is that we’re so con­vinced that the ene­my is with­in and peo­ple who dis­agree with us. And the truth of the mat­ter is that the source of strength of the Amer­i­can exper­i­ment is peo­ple who dis­agree with us. The com­pe­ti­tion is so great. Com­pe­ti­tion in mar­kets is called cap­i­tal­ism, com­pe­ti­tion in pol­i­tics is called democ­ra­cy. And the com­pe­ti­tion of ideas is fun­da­men­tal to a free soci­ety and to excel­lence in our ideas. And I was talk­ing to a large group of Repub­li­can con­gress­men a cou­ple of years ago. I was doing a keynote pre­sen­ta­tion for all the con­gress­men, for all the mem­bers on the Hill and their staff and the sen­a­tors as well.

And I said, ​“How many of you wish we lived in a one par­ty state?” No hands. And by the way, no hearts either. Nobody wants that. And I said, ​“How many of you are grate­ful that we have a mul­ti-par­ty or at least a two par­ty democ­ra­cy?” All the hands went up. And I said, ​“You just told me that you’re grate­ful for the Democ­rats.” Why? Because if you’re grate­ful to live in a coun­try that has more than one par­ty, you’re grate­ful for the oth­er par­ty. It just works that way. It does­n’t mean you agree. You should­n’t agree. I mean, you and your wife and I, and my wife, we’re going to go to our graves dis­agree­ing on cer­tain things, but we’re going to go to our graves in love with our wives. And there’s no incom­pat­i­bil­i­ty between dis­agree­ment and love because we actu­al­ly need dis­agree­ment. This is the Amer­i­can exper­i­ment. These are enlight­en­ment val­ues. This is the Amer­i­can way.

Doug DeVos:

Yeah. Well, Arthur, we’ve had a great con­ver­sa­tion here and you have walked us through the sci­ence, but not just the sci­ence, but the heart of what it takes to get on the path to a good life. And you’ve opened up ways of think­ing. I trust all of our lis­ten­ers are just grate­ful to you for your life’s work and for how you’ve lived these things out, how you’ve learned about them, but how you shared them through the books that you’ve writ­ten, through the speech­es that you’ve giv­en, and through the time that you’ve tak­en here with all of us today. We’re just grate­ful for how you can help us all learn how to get on that path.

Arthur Brooks:

Thanks, Doug. Thank you for the show. Thanks for what you’re doing to bring these ideas to peo­ple, to lift peo­ple up and bring them togeth­er, which you’re doing with your work as well and I’m real­ly impressed. And I can’t wait to see you in person.

Doug DeVos:

All right, my friend. Well, I’m just so thank­ful for the time that we’ve had again to chat. Look for­ward to con­nect­ing again soon and just enjoy the things that you’re doing. I just love to see that tran­si­tion we talked about when you said I’m going to go the sec­ond half of my life and go from strength to strength. And so I’m try­ing to fol­low in your foot­steps, my friend.

Arthur Brooks:

Thanks. I think you have, and I think you are. So God bless you, Doug. And God bless all of our lis­ten­ers and thanks so much.

Doug DeVos:

Great, great. Take care of your­self, my friend. And for all of you who’ve been enjoy­ing this, thanks for join­ing us on this episode of Believe and we look for­ward to con­nect­ing with you very soon. Thanks everyone.