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Coming up next on Passion Struck.
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What emotions are not nice to haves or things we try to avoid.
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That s the wrong way of seeing it.
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Emotions are basically a machine language where your brain is taking outside stimuli and then turning it into signals delivered to your conscious brain so you know how to react.
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Emotions are a universal language.
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I don t care if you re born in Papua New Guinea or Canada, you speak the same emotions.
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The reason is because humans see the same things and they need to translate what s going on in their senses and turn that into a language so you know how to react.
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The problem is that not all those emotions are very pleasant.
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And so the result of it is that if you re reactive, you re just going to react on the basis of those emotions, your life is going to feel like it s out of control.
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Welcome to Passion Struck.
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Hi, I m your host, Jon R. Miles.
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And on the show, we decipher the secrets, tips, and guidance of the world s most inspiring people and turn their wisdom into practical advice for you and those around you.
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Our mission is to help you unlock the power of intentionality so that you can become the best version of yourself.
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If you re new to the show, I offer advice and answer listener questions on Fridays.
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We have long form interviews the rest of the week with guests ranging from astronauts to authors, CEOs, creators, innovators, scientists, military leaders, visionaries, and athletes.
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Now, let s go out there and become passion struck.
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Hello everyone and welcome back to episode 344 of Passion Struck.
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Consistently ranked by Apple, it s one of the top 10 most popular health podcasts.
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And thank you to all of you who come back weekly to listen and learn how to live better, be better, and impact the world.
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Passion Struck is now on syndicated radio on the Brushwood Media Network.
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Catch us Monday and Friday from 5 to 6 p.m.
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Eastern Time on your evening commute on Apple Music, TuneIn, or any of the terrestrial stations that we re on.
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Links will be in the show notes.
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If you re new to the show, thank you so much for being here.
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Or you simply want to introduce this to a friend or a family member, we have episode starter packs, which are collections of our fans favorite episodes that we organize into convenient topics that give any new listener a great way to get acclimated to everything we do here on the show.
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Either go to Spotify or passionstruck.com slash
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starter packs to get started.
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In case you missed it, last week I had three great interviews.
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The first was with Todd Rogers, a behavioral scientist and professor of public policy at Harvard University.
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Todd, along with Jessica Lasky-Fink, has spent over three decades studying the science of writing,
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and together they have authored the groundbreaking book, Writing for Busy Readers, Communicate More Effectively in the Real World.
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I also interviewed Eduardo Brasino, and we explored how to escape the performance paradox and embrace intentional living for higher-level results.
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Eduardo has coined the term chronic performance trap to describe the counterintuitive phenomenon that often occurs when we relentlessly work harder
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only to find ourselves exhausted and unfulfilled.
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Lastly, I interviewed Amy Edmondson, the Novartis Professor of Leadership and Management at the Harvard Business School.
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We explore various facets of failure and learning, from the significance of teamwork and checklist in high-stress situations, to the complexity of failure, to the vital role of self-awareness.
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We leave no stone unturned.
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Please check them all out, and I also wanted to say thank you so much for your ratings and reviews.
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If you loved today s episode, we would appreciate you giving it a five-star review and sharing it with your friends and families.
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I know we and our guests love to see comments from our listeners.
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Today, we re diving headfirst into a topic that resonates with all of us.
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Happiness.
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It s the elusive treasure we all seek, a pursuit that s as old as humanity itself.
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But what if I told you that getting happier isn t just a lofty dream?
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What if it s an adventure, a journey that can transform your life in ways you ve never imagined?
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I am beyond thrilled to be joined by a remarkable guest who is here to ignite your journey towards a happier and more fulfilling life.
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Get ready to be inspired because we have the privilege of welcoming back Arthur Brooks,
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a co-author with none other than Oprah Winfrey of the groundbreaking new book, Build the Life You Want, The Art and Science of Getting Happier.
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Life s twists and turns can sometimes cloud our pursuit of happiness, leaving us searching for ways to create a brighter future.
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But fear not, because in Build the Life You Want, Arthur and Oprah embark on a quest to show you that the power to become happier lies within your grasp, regardless of your current circumstances.
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Drawing on cutting-edge science and their wealth of experience in transforming ideas into action,
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They are here to guide you on a journey of self-discovery and empowerment.
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Imagine turning your emotions from masters to allies, facing life s challenges as opportunities for growth, and nurturing the pillars of happiness, family, friendship, work, and faith.
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Arthur and Oprah unveil the secrets of emotional self-management that can revolutionize your outlook and behaviors, offering you practical and research-backed strategies to enhance every aspect of your life.
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Arthur Brooks, the William Henry Bloomberg Professor of Management Practice at the Harvard Kennedy School, brings a unique blend of scholarship and practical wisdom to the table.
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He s not just a teacher, he s a torchbearer, illuminating the path to greater happiness for countless individuals.
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As we unravel the essence of this remarkable book, Arthur will share the transformative practices that can help you strengthen family bonds, cultivate lasting friendships, align your work with your passions, and find inner serenity through spiritual practices.
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So if you re ready to seize control of your present and future, and if you re eager to build a life filled with purpose, joy, and contentment, then this episode is your compass to a brighter future.
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Thank you for choosing Passion Struck and choosing me to be your host and guide on your journey to creating an intentional life.
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Now, let that journey begin.
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I am so excited and absolutely honored to have Arthur Brooks back on Passion Struck.
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Welcome, Arthur.
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Thanks, John.
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It s great to be with you.
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I love the show and I ve been so excited to get back with you and have another conversation.
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First thing I wanted to tell you is since our last interview about your book, Strength to Strength, which I ll hold up here, not only has it garnered more positive feedback than almost any other episode I ve ever done, but since that episode aired, that book has gone on to become a number one New York Times bestseller.
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Congratulations.
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What do you attribute the success of that book on?
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Pure dumb luck, John.
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I ve written a lot of books.
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You never know.
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The truth is you can hit the zeitgeist in just the right way.
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I wrote a book about how to get happier in the second half of life for myself, because as a social scientist, I couldn t find anything on that.
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All these self-help and happiness books are about how to start out in life, but none are how to finish up.
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And not that I m finishing up, but I am definitely in the second half.
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I wrote a book that I felt I needed, and that s actually a pretty good guide for what other people are probably going to need as well.
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And it hit that timing in just the right way.
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And I got a little bit lucky and I m just grateful, I have to say.
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When we last spoke, you told me that although you loved having me interview you for that book, what you were really excited about was having me interview you about your brand new book, which will release the day this podcast comes out, Build the Life You Want, because you thought it would be a great topic for the listeners.
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And this book is co-authored by none other than Oprah Winfrey.
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Could you share some insights about the journey of co-authoring this book with Oprah, and how did your collaboration shape the content and the message that you both aim to deliver to the readers?
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Well, I didn t know Oprah Winfrey previous to this.
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I certainly know who she was.
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She s ever present in the American imagination.
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She s an iconic figure, trusted, beloved by so many.
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And I ve been seeing her on television since I was a very young man.
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After From Strength to Strength came out, she contacted me because she read the book.
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It turns out that she s a regular reader of my
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Atlantic column every Thursday morning as well.
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And she had been reading those columns through the coronavirus epidemic.
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She was holed up like everybody else.
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It s not like she was jetting around.
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She was living in her place in Montecito and she was looking for interesting ways to learn new things.
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And my column was one of those inputs and she liked it.
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I didn t know that.
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I have 500,000 readers a week and
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you don t know who s reading under those circumstances because you re broadcasting out into deep space and not knowing who gets the signal.
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And then the book came out from Strength to Strength.
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And she read that and liked it and called up.
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She said, this is Oprah Winfrey.
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And I said, yeah, and I m Batman.
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It turns out that it was the real Oprah Winfrey.
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And she was interested in having me on her book club podcast, Super Soul, which is a phenomenal thing because she personally
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reads every book, reads every page of every book.
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She s so good.
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She was quoting from Strength to Me by memory when she was doing this podcast.
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It was amazing.
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And we hit it off like a house on fire, I have to say.
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We did a couple of other things together and then we started seeing each other in person.
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After a while, she came up with the idea of writing another book together on the basis of what I m teaching my Harvard students and writing in my Atlantic columns for an audience more along the lines of the people who follow her.
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And so I spent a few days out in her place in California and we cooked up the whole book in her tea house.
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She has this wonderful tea house and garden.
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And we sat out in the tea house and cooked up the book.
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And then we went to our other places where we like to write and I would send chapters and she would send ideas and she would send her introductions and we wove it together over the next six months or so.
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And the result is a book that I have to say we really like, and it s coming out with Penguin Random House.
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And we ll see if we can touch a lot of lives and help people be happier.
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One of the things that spoke to me as I was reading it and I always felt about Oprah is just how down to earth she is and that she found her most happy
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moments sitting in front of a fire or reading a book or making a stew.
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And I think it shows you that regardless of what someone has, it comes really down to the basics, which we re going to talk about a lot today of what brings happiness into our lives.
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Yeah, that s right.
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And it s funny because in my life over the past 15 years, I ve been very blessed to meet iconic people like Oprah, people who are really well-known.
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And it sometimes makes you a little nervous because they re not always the way that they seem.
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A lot of very famous people have highly curated images.
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We ll put it that way.
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Oprah is exactly what people think she is.
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She s down to earth.
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She s authentic.
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She s honest.
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She s kind.
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She s funny.
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And the result of it is that she s super easy to work with.
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She does have
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the sources of happiness down.
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She is an incredibly equilibrated individual.
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What really motivates her is actually spreading the ideas of happiness to other people based in science.
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And she s looking to always work with people who ve got what she considers to be good ideas that she can share because her mission in life is lifting people up as is mine.
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We came together around mission and then with our different audiences and different methods, wove together this book on the science and art of getting happier.
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Let s start the book by going through your opening comments, and in them you talk about how when you started studying happiness, which is now over 25 years ago, you feared that happiness was something you couldn t change in a meaningful way.
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How did you learn that you could change your happiness by doing it through your own me-search?
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Yeah, me-search is the right word.
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It started with research and then became me-search.
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A lot of what you do in academia when you re trained in any of the sciences, including the social sciences, is that you study things that are interesting to you, but it never occurs to you to apply the ideas to yourself.
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everything is like astronomy.
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You study the stars, but you re not going to change them.
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And certainly you re not going to manage the stars.
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That s astrology, or they re going to change your life.
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And I think I started studying happiness because everybody wants it.
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And it s just so dang interesting.
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Happiness is endlessly fascinating to people.
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And that s why I was studying it.
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But along the way, I started to have a hunch
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that there was more actionable information out there.
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I didn t just have to observe the patterns of happiness.
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I could actually intervene in the process and adopt the lifestyles of the people who were happiest, avoid some of the mistakes that the unhappiest people made, and actually figure out new ways of living for myself and even passing on these ideas.
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And so over the past few years,
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I really turned it into an applied science experimenting on myself with real life explanations and interventions and how we live.
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And I m telling you, John, it has completely changed my life.
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I became a social scientist because I m so fascinated with human behavior and I ve wound up becoming a self help person to me.
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And along the way, I thought, I have to share this.
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I have literally raised my own happiness level in the past five years by 60%.
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And I know this because I have access to the best measurement techniques and I m regularly measuring my students.
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I measure myself again and again with good, robust, honest, practical, quantitative measures.
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And the data don t lie.
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I ve gotten much happier since I ve been studying this and I m busting, John, I got to share it.
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Well, Arthur, I thought it was really interesting how you at the age of 55 and me at the age of 50 both quit completely what we were doing before to both head out on a journey with a very similar mission to help people.
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And we re doing it in our own unique ways.
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But it s interesting how the midway point in our lives, we are profoundly doing something different.
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And this is something that you talk about in your introduction with your mother-in-law, Albina, and how at the age of 45, something in her life shifted.
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She suddenly stopped waiting for the world to change and took control of her own life.
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I wanted to ask, what was her secret to turning the corner at 45?
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Maybe how you and I turned the corner as well.
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towards a better life and getting happier and staying that way for nearly five decades afterwards.
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Yeah.
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It s a story that I tell in the beginning of the book, because when you re studying happiness, many of your most profound teachers are not the ones who are showing you the data and explaining the theories.
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They re the people who live in a particular way.
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And then you look at their lives and see what they did differently.
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And in my life, front and center was my mother-in-law, being my wife s mother in Barcelona.
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And she had an interesting life and she grew up, she was a little child during the very brutal Spanish civil war.
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Her father was a battlefield surgeon for the losing side and wound up in prison for a long time.
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And so she would take meals to her father in prison, which sounds awful, but it turns out that the family was very close knit and had a lot of love.
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Trouble in her life came later when she got married to the love of her life, the man that she was hopelessly in love with, who turned out not to be the world s greatest husband.
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And this is an old story.
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He had a little bit of trouble with loyalty and he wound up abandoning the family when my wife was six.
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He took off with another woman, moved in with the other woman, and left my mother-in-law without child support.
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And they were poor.
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And it was awful.
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My wife says that her mother would sit by the window and cry day after day.
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She would see her husband, who had not divorced, coming to work.
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And it s just the worst.
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And finally, my mother-in-law, along the way, realized something.
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When she was about 45 years old, something snapped inside her.
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She had always felt like she was a victim of circumstance, and that she couldn t actually be happy until outside circumstances changed.
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And she realized that she had more power than she thought.
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And I m not exactly sure how she figured this out on her own, because this is a big insight.
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that she couldn t change her outside circumstances, but she could change her reaction to it.
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She says she felt like all along she had been working for a horrible company with a terrible CEO and she was miserable until one day she woke up and realized that she was the CEO of the company.
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and the company was her life.
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That didn t mean she was not going to suffer because when a company is really struggling, the CEO suffers a lot, but the CEO has a ton of power.
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And so she started to act like the CEO of the enterprise of her life, of Albina Inc.
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That s how she talked about it.
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She said, okay, what are we going to do with this company?
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She went back to school.
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She got her college degree.
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She became a teacher.
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She got a job in the public schools.
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She made her own friends.
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She made her own living.
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She became a completely different person.
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By the time I met her in her late 50s, when I was newly married to my wife, she was completely independent.
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And by that time, she had actually let the husband come home.
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He had finished the relationship and he begged to come home.
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She thought about it.
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She said, sure, on my terms.
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And so it was a completely different relationship after that.
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She was not chasing after him.
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She brought him home because she wanted to, not because she needed to.
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She was the primary breadwinner after that.
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She had tons of friends coming and going.
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She had a new relationship with God.
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She had a better relationship with her kids.
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She had this career that she loved.
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And I m telling you, John, it was all the tumblers turned in her once she took control of her reactions.
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In other words, not the stimuli, but the reaction to the stimuli in her life.
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And that was the life-changing moment for her.
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And she never went back.
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When she was in her last days, about a year ago, she was dying in Barcelona at age 93.
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She was bedridden and in pain.
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And she told me she s happier than she d ever been.
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crazy because she was in charge of her own happiness and her own decisions.
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She was building her life on the basis of her Catholic faith, of her relationship with her family, with her super close friends.
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Most of them had come through her work and the work that she had cherished.
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And by the way, she had a pretty good relationship with her husband who had died a year earlier as well.
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And it was a pretty happy ending of the story.
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Thank you for sharing that.
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And I think something that I wanted to pick out of there is this podcast is really about the power of intentionality in our lives and making those intentional choices to change our predicaments from where we re at to where we want to be, which is exactly what your mother-in-law did.
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That s right.
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That s exactly right.
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And that s a lot of what Oprah and I talk about in this book.
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I start with that story because what I needed to sort out when this was happening in real time, as a social scientist, I was so fascinated by this particular case.
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And I realized that there s a whole body of literature on how each of us can do that.
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Now, I don t have the presence of mind that Albina did.
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John, I m just not good enough.
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I need to actually know how to do it.
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I need to be taken by the hand.
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This book actually takes readers by the hand because they re all have problems.
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They all have things that are in their way and reader after reader or person after person that both Oprah and I have met have said, I want to be happy, but
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And it s, I have to, my marriage has to improve.
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My, I have to get through school.
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I need a better job.
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My health needs to get better.
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And they re all like Albina before, not Albina after.
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So what actually took place for Albina that the rest of us that can actually learn from the science of emotion that can make and put us on that second path.
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And that s exactly what we talk about.
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The techniques based in research that can turn you from a victim into the CEO.
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You end that conversation.
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whole section by describing that she had a secret to turning this corner.
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Yeah.
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Can you share that secret?
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The secret is exactly what we re talking about here.
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It is managing your self, not managing the outside world.
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It s managing what you can manage and that s to manage yourself.
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It s to manage your own emotions, which sounds so simple, but of course it isn t.
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I talk to students all day long at the Harvard Business School where I teach and they say, I can manage money.
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I can manage a company, but I can t manage my own feelings.
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And so learning how to do that was the secret.
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And that turned her into somebody who was distracted by the world s troubles and wasting time into somebody who could really invest in the things that really will bring enduring happiness like faith and family and friends and work that serves other people.
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I m so glad you start this book out like this because it s how I approach my book, which is coming out in months as well.
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So much of society today is focused on extrinsic motivation instead of the intrinsic drivers that are what really bring us fulfillment.
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And I think it s something that so many people don t realize is that they re wearing this mask
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of pretense all the time, trying to go around being a person that they pretend to be instead of being, as you just brought up through your mother-in-law, the authentic person that they actually are.
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I think it is one of the main things that s leading so many people into these lives of despair and apathy and loneliness, etc.
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Do you agree with that?
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I do.
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The way that a lot of people live, given that they feel victimized by their own emotions, they re managed by their own emotions, is they wind up distracting themselves from their own emotions.
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These things that are coming in all the time that are so intrusive, life for a lot of people is like
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waiting at the gate for a flight that is hopelessly late.
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And then you re just waiting for updates every 15 minutes and frittering away your time on playing games on your phone.
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A lot of life is like that.
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I m telling you, social media is frittering away your time.
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Shopping therapy,
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most of the stuff just scroll on Netflix, you want to relax it in the evening, it s fine.
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But the point is, a lot of people are trying to anesthetize themselves from the feelings that are managing them.
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And in so doing, they re distracted from the things that are really are going to bring happiness, faith, family, friends and work.
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And so the first order of business and getting happier, like Albina, or ultimately, when I studied this, how I managed to become a much happier person, and the people that I work with, and my students as well, is emotional self management and the tools to do so.
2
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Well, it s interesting around the same time that I had you on, I also interviewed Robin Sharma and he brought up something that just coincided with what you said.
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He said, people don t understand they can either play on their phone and watch TV or they can change the world, but they can t do both.
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Both of your comments are extremely powerful.
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The time that you re playing on your phone, you could be praying.
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The time that you re shopping for needless nonsense on Amazon to anesthetize yourself, you could be talking to a friend.
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There s so many things that you could be doing, but we re so distracted because we re so uncomfortable all the time.
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But you got to know how to, you have to know how to manage yourself is what it comes down to.
2
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And it turns out it s not just doable.
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It s doable for everybody.
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Well, in chapter one, you talk about beloved Carnegie Mellon professor Randy Pausch, who ended up dying of pancreatic cancer.
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And unfortunately, it s a moving story for me because my own younger sister is battling stage four pancreatic cancer as we speak.
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But even in his sickness,
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Randy enjoyed his life to its fullest.
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And it s something that I m also witnessing in my sister, who has really shifted her focus to the things that bring her the most joy in life.
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And she s a Buddhist, so she has really focused on these intrinsic things that really matter the most to her.
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SPEAKER_00
And the premise of your book, Build the Life You Want, suggests that happiness is a journey rather than a destination.
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Could you elaborate using the story of Randy on how this perspective can reshape our approach to pursuing happiness and the two myths about happiness?
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Yeah.
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It s an interesting thing about people.
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We re very goal oriented and you need a goal to move toward, but the greatest happiness actually comes from making progress, not from hitting goals.
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And a perfect way to illustrate this is that diets usually fail.
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It s not that diets are impossible.
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You can succeed.
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The problem is you can t maintain once you hit your goal.
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And the reason for that is that every day that the scale goes down, there s a reward for not eating these things that you crave.
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But then when you hit your goal, the reward is, once you hit your goal, is never eating what you like ever again for the rest of your life, which is not a very nice goal, as it turns out.
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So what we need to do is to think about happiness in much the same way as something to make progress.
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Here s the truth.
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You can t be happy, perfectly happy.
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You re not supposed to be perfectly happy.
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That would mean eliminating your negative emotions.
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And if you did that, you d be dead a thousand times over.
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Your negative emotions are alarms, disgust that something s a pathogen.
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Fear that something s a threat.
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Anger that something is you need to fight, flight, or freeze.
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Sadness because you re not in the presence of somebody that you love, your kin, the people you need to be around.
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These are deeply protective emotions.
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And so you re always going to have them in perfect happiness.
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We re not going to find it at this side of heaven, at least.
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What we can do is to get happier.
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This was a real Oprahism in this book.
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And she said, so what s the goal?
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Is it happiness?
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And I said, no, it s getting happier.
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So she said, okay, so the goal is happierness.
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It s a made up word.
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It s an Oprah word.
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It s perfect, actually.
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And that s what we all can get.
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That s what Randy Pausch, who s a professor dying of pancreatic cancer, and ebullient with joy about the fact that in his final six months, he s growing closer and closer to God and to his friends and to his family.
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no matter how much time we all have left, none of us has a thousand years left, we should all be moving toward these particular goals by using the time at our disposal to have good happiness hygiene, to manage ourselves and then move toward the pillars of really what a happy life is built on.
2
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Well, I m going to stick with Oprah here for a second since you were just talking about her because she writes, happiness is not a state of being, but a state of doing.
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Not a thing you wait around and hope for, but an achievable change you can actively work towards, which echoes what you just said.
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What are the three macronutrients you write about of happiness?
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So if we want to be happier, we need to know what happiness is.
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And most people don t.
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Most people think it s a feeling, which is a huge problem.
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If you re going to be searching for a feeling that s evanescent, that s impermanent, it s like a moving target.
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Imagine you re an archer and you re trying to hit a target and the target is just moving all over the place all the time.
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Well, good luck with that.
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You need something that s actually static and that you can identify.
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Feelings of happiness are nothing more than evidence of happiness.
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Disregard the feelings of happiness and go for the three macronutrients of happiness, the three elements of happiness, which are enjoyment, satisfaction, and purpose.
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Those are the three things that we need in life.
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The happiest people have those three macronutrients in abundance and balance.
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It s like
2
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the healthiest people have proper levels of protein, carbohydrates, and fat.
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And if you don t get those three things in your diet appropriately, you re going to get sick.
2
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The same thing is true with your happiness.
2
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You re going to be much less happy than you could be maybe even miserable if you don t have enough enjoyment, satisfaction, and purpose in your life.
2
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And so this is where Oprah and I start the journey, defining it and talking about how to get each one of these three things.
2
SPEAKER_00
I listened to a podcast episode yesterday morning.
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It was at five o clock in the morning as I was on a walk.
2
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And one of the things I love that you talked about was the fallacy of the bucket list.
2
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Yeah.
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And another concept you talked about was the reverse bucket list.
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Can you talk about why creating this bucket list may be extremely detrimental to actually creating happiness?
2
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That has to do with that second element of happiness, which is satisfaction.
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Satisfaction is funny.
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What it is, the joy you get after struggle.
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You worked hard, you got it, and it brought you joy.
2
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Now, maybe that s trudging across the Savannah and finding something to eat on a bush.
2
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Maybe that s getting an A after studying hard for a test.
2
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Maybe that s getting to, as you are now, over 2 million downloads a month on this podcast.
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You worked for it.
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You got it.
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And it gives you joy.
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The problem is the joy doesn t persist.
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And there s a reason for that.
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This is a phenomenon called homeostasis.
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This book has a lot of neuroscience in it for neuroscience for non-neuroscientists and homeostasis is the reason that
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You can get satisfaction.
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Mick Jagger was wrong.
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You can t keep no satisfaction.
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That s the problem.
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You got it.
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It s great.
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Oops.
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It s gone.
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The reason is because your brain resets.
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And the reason it resets is so you re ready for the next set of challenges so that you ll stay in the hunt.
2
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You can t just sit there in front of the tree where you found a banana and say, that was a great banana for five days until you re starving.
2
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You need to go and you need to have that satisfaction where often go in search of the next thing.
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But the problem with that is that it makes it very hard for us to be happy people because we get into this hedonic treadmill.
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This is what we social scientists call this treadmill of running.
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and running for the feeling of satisfaction and then needing more and more so the treadmill is speeding up.
3
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And people like this all the time.
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I get this great thing.
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Oh, that s great.
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Well, that s not good enough.
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I need more.
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I need more.
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I need another house.
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I need a raise from my boss.
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I need more so I can get that feeling.
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It s going after the feeling.
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The way to defeat that is to understand that real satisfaction that lasts is not a function of having more.
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It s a function of wanting less.
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See, your satisfaction is really your halves divided by your wants.
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Think about that.
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Everybody s listening to us.
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Take out a piece of paper and write halves divided by wants.
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Now, you know that you can make satisfaction rise by increasing the numerator, but it s not very efficient and it doesn t last because of the hedonic treadmill, homeostasis.
3
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What s much better to do is to decrease the denominator in that equation.
3
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And when that happens, you get lasting higher satisfaction.
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You need to manage your wants.
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You don t need to go live in a cave and have no possessions.
3
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The question is, how can you detach yourself?
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Oprah and I talk a lot in this book about how to manage your brain.
3
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This is about the science of emotional self-management.
3
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And the key is for all of us to think deeply about these things that we want, these attachments, these desires, these ambitions, and to say consciously, I might get it.
3
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Easy come, easy go.
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But I m not going to be unhappy if I don t.
3
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And that moves that want from the limbic system of your brain, which is an animal part of your brain, to the prefrontal cortex of your brain.
3
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You experience that desire literally in a different part of your brain, and there you can manage it.
3
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Now, you brought up a key concept on how to do that, because we got to be practical.
3
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This book is a very practical how-to guide.
3
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It s like the owner s manual of your happiness.
3
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And the way to do that is to stop doing a bucket list, which is just engorging your desires and your attachments.
3
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Make a reverse bucket list on your birthday, where you take all of these worldly, dumb things that you want.
3
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I want to be more famous.
3
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I want to have more followers.
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I want more money, whatever it happens to be.
3
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And then
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One by one, consciously cross them out.
3
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That doesn t mean you re not going to get them.
3
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It means you re deciding you re going to be just fine if you don t.
3
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And I m telling you, you ll be free.
3
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John, you know what I crossed off my reverse bucket list on my birthday?
3
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I turned 59 a couple of months ago.
3
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You know what I crossed out?
3
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Half my political opinions.
3
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And I m telling you, there were attachments to me.
3
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They were holding me down.
3
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I need more friends.
3
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I need fewer political opinions in this divided nation.
3
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I want to love more people.
3
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And I don t want to be held back by these crazy attachments that I have.
3
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It s been super good for me.
3
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You can be as imaginative as you want in your reverse bucket list, but it s going to do a lot of good.
3
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I agree with you there.
3
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I have done my best on this podcast to keep it as apolitical as possible because everyone has an opinion.
3
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You can t impact people if you re going so far down one side because it doesn t allow you to hear the counter approach.
3
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That s right.
3
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And a counter intuitive approach to me is the concept of accepting unhappiness as part of our lives.
3
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Absolutely.
3
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Absolutely.
3
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Can you touch on that and share how acknowledging and working with unhappiness can actually contribute to our overall happiness?
3
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The one mistake that a lot of people make is thinking that unhappiness and happiness are opposites.
3
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They aren t.
3
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As a matter of fact, they re largely processed in different hemispheres of the brain.
3
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You can be an unusually happy and an unusually unhappy person and build the life you want.
3
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Oprah and I actually put in a psychometrically validated survey test.
3
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that everybody can take to find out if they re above or below average happy and unhappy feelings.
3
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I personally am above average happiness and above average unhappiness.
3
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I m what we call in the book the mad scientist.
3
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I m up and down, strong opinions and strong views and strong feelings.
3
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Other people are unusually happy and unusually not unhappy.
3
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These are the cheerleaders.
3
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They have strong, positive and weak, negative feelings.
3
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Some people are strong, negative and weak, positive.
3
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These are the poets.
3
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And then you have people who are low in the intensity of their happy feelings and low intensity of unhappy feelings.
3
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These are people called judges, but population goes in equal parts across these four profiles.
3
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And we need all of them, but you need to understand these things.
3
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You ll understand these things when you read the book and take the test.
3
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And then you ll learn how you can actually manage this particular emotional profile.
3
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Now, why is it that we don t want to have zero unhappiness?
3
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And the answer is because we d get zero happiness as well.
3
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For example, we know that satisfaction has a whole lot of dissatisfaction associated with it.
3
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That is to say that the joy that comes from doing things has the frustration from the satisfaction wearing off.
3
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Meaning or purpose has even more unhappiness associated with it because everybody listening to us and watching us, they know perfectly that they learn their purpose in life through pain.
3
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There s nobody who says, Oh, I really learned who I was and what I m capable of by going to Disneyland that week.
3
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No, you learn that when you get sick and when you re sad, and this is what your sister is learning.
3
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And this is one of the reasons that you can get so much joy in the part of your life that people are saying, Oh, it s so terrible.
3
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Of course it s terrible.
3
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And that s part of the point.
3
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And John.
3
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We re all going to be at that point in our lives.
3
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And we have to be ready to find the deep meaning to find out really who we are through that pain.
3
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Pain and suffering are incredibly sacred.
3
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And if we re in the business of just trying to avoid them, the hippies used to say, if it feels good, do it.
3
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If you re the kind of the anti-hippie saying, if it feels bad, stop, treat it, make it go away.
3
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You re going to miss your life.
3
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You got to get to the point where you have adequate self-management tools where you can say, bring it on.
3
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I want the whole thing, baby.
3
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I want the whole life.
3
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I want to take a big bite out of it.
3
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I m not going to be held back by that.
3
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I m not going to be held back by my fear of unhappiness.
3
SPEAKER_00
Thank you for sharing that.
3
SPEAKER_00
And I think the tool that you re talking about is the PANAS.
3
SPEAKER_00
Am I pronouncing that correct?
3
SPEAKER_00
Yes.
3
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PANAS, the Positive Affect Negative Affect Series, which is an incredibly powerful scientific tool for understanding affect, that is to say mood, both positive and negative.
3
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When the readers of this book, when they take that test, they re not going to be the same in the way they understand themselves ever again.
3
SPEAKER_00
Okay, so for the listener, the way that this book is set up is it gives you 11 principles for building the life you want, and we ve just covered a couple of them.
3
SPEAKER_00
Happiness is a direction, not a destination, and unhappiness is not your enemy.
3
SPEAKER_00
Another one I wanted to explore was your principle, choose your actions, not your emotions.
3
SPEAKER_00
Can you delve into metacognition, how it and emotional self-management play a role in making the choice of choosing your actions and not your emotions?
3
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For sure.
3
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And one of the biggest problems, once again, is that when my students or anybody that they recognize, I talk to people who are successful parents of kids and they ll often say, I m not happy.
3
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And I say, why not?
3
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And they say, because I can manage my home.
3
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I can manage my kids, but I can t manage myself.
3
SPEAKER_01
I can t manage my own feelings.
3
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Same thing as my students who say I can manage money.
3
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I can manage a company, but I can t manage my emotions.
3
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is the whole idea.
3
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Emotional self-management comes down to a big tool called metacognition.
3
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Metacognition is basically the idea of moving the experience of your emotions from your limbic system to your prefrontal cortex.
3
SPEAKER_01
Now, a couple of definitions here.
3
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The limbic system is a bundle of tissue in the brain dedicated to creating emotions.
3
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positive emotions and negative emotions.
3
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And we need both to keep us alive.
3
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What emotions are not nice to haves or things we try to avoid.
3
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That s the wrong way of seeing it.
3
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Emotions are basically a machine language where your brain is taking outside stimuli and then turning it into signals delivered to your conscious brain.
3
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So you know how to react.
3
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Emotions are a universal language.
3
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I don t care if you re born in Papua, New Guinea or Canada, you speak the same emotions.
3
SPEAKER_01
The reason is because humans, they see the same things and they need to translate what s going on in their senses and turn that into a language so you know how to react.
3
SPEAKER_01
The problem is that not all those emotions are very pleasant.
3
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And so the result of it is that if you re reactive, you re just going to react on the basis of those emotions, your life is going to feel like it s out of control.
3
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Metacognition is putting space between your emotions and your reaction.
3
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Getting as much space as you can so you decide how to react.
3
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Or you decide to take a better emotion.
3
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Or you decide to disregard those emotions.
3
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But you can t do that unless you re taking the time to make a decision.
3
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And there s a whole lot of work in this book about the techniques for actually doing so.
3
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From journaling is an incredibly powerful technique.
3
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meditation on your emotions where you observe yourself at a certain remove.
3
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John is feeling sad right now.
3
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Prayer is incredibly powerful for me.
3
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It s just been so important for my life as a Christian man.
3
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I attend mass every morning and I finish every evening praying the rosary and ancient Catholic meditation with my wife.
3
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This is metacognition or walking in nature without your devices or learning to manage yourself and understand
4
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yourself through various other techniques that we talk about in the book.
4
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The point is get space between stimulus and response so that you re actually consciously aware and managing your emotions and they re not managing you.
4
SPEAKER_00
I think that s a great one.
4
SPEAKER_00
Another principle that you bring up is to focus less on yourself.
4
SPEAKER_00
And I wanted to introduce this because earlier in the year I had on Berkeley professor Dacher Keltner, I m not sure if Dacher,
4
SPEAKER_01
Oh, I know Dacre, he s great.
4
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, he has a new book out called Awe.
4
SPEAKER_00
And one of the most profound findings from that book is when you think about experiencing, we usually think that it s looking at the Grand Canyon or some masterpiece or observing the birth of a child.
4
SPEAKER_00
And it is those things.
4
SPEAKER_00
But he said that the most common way that we can achieve awe in our daily lives is to watch someone else perform an act of gratitude or kindness towards someone else.
4
SPEAKER_00
which to me, this moral beauty is exactly what you re talking about when you re saying that we should be focusing on others to create happiness, which it s difficult to do in today s individualistic society.
4
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It is.
4
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And the way that we do that is by deciding to do that.
4
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This is why metacognition is so critically important.
4
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See, the key thing is that a lot of people say, I can t do that because I don t feel it.
4
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That s never an excuse, is not to be able to do something because you don t feel it.
4
SPEAKER_01
On the contrary, feel it and act the way you want.
4
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That s what Albina did.
4
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And that s what all of us can do if we re willing to put in the work.
4
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One way is to say, I feel this and it makes me want to react in a particular way.
4
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I m going to choose a different reaction that s more constructive.
4
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Or I have this feeling I m going to substitute a different emotion that s also appropriate.
4
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Again, this is a conscious decision.
4
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And the last way that you re talking about is actually choosing not to look inward, but rather to concentrate on looking outward such that your emotions are less relevant than they would have been otherwise.
4
SPEAKER_01
And one of the best ways to do that is to be amazed by the outside world.
4
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Another way is to simply judge less what s going on around you.
4
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This is one of the reasons that I recommend that people walk in nature without devices.
4
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It s one of the reasons I recommend that people get up at 5.30 and look at the sunrise.
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Do that.
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And just sit there and observe it.
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Just observe.
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Just look outward.
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In philosophy, that s called the I-self.
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The me-self is looking in the mirror.
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The I-self is looking at the grandeur of the world and disregarding your own emotions just by taking it all in.
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And this is one of the best ways to use metacognition to emotionally self-manage and have a much better, happier life.
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Yeah, Arthur, I have to tell you, this morning I saw the most amazing sunrise.
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I was out walking my dog.
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Sunrise is late here at this time of the year.
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I think it was at 7.04, but we just kept waiting for it to start.
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And right when it was starting, there was a big ship that happened to be going by and it worked out perfectly that just as the sun peaked across the crest,
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It was adjacent to the boat and it was such just a transcendent moment.
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And I was deep in prayer and giving gratitude right at that moment.
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So I couldn t have had a better start for this week.
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So I completely agree with what you re saying.
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That s wonderful, John.
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I love hearing that this very morning.
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I woke up, I got up early to go to the gym.
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I had a lot of stuff going on because I m teaching this week.
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And I m at a beach house that my wife and I have rented so that our adult children and grandchildren can come and see us and grandchild only one so far, but they re coming fast and thick at this point.
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And I walked out on the porch over the Atlantic ocean up here and near Cape Cod.
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And it s just this.
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sky.
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It was spectacular, better than anything on any 4th of July I ve ever seen before.
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And I just thank God for that moment.
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And I was not in the mirror.
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It wasn t about me.
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It was looking outward.
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And it gave me this profound sense of deep satisfaction.
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And the reason is because I had metacognitively put myself into the I-self state.
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And again, I can, that s clinical, I get it.
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The truth of the matter is that God gave me that gift.
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Arthur, have you happened to have watched the series called The Bear?
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I have not.
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Tell me about it.
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The acting in this is incredible.
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It s about a chef who has just been recognized as the number one chef in the world running a Michelin star restaurant.
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I think it was in Norway and he ends up having to come home.
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I m not sharing anything here that s going to ruin this show for anyone because this happens in the first five minutes of the first show.
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Brother ends up dying and he ends up coming back to run his brother s restaurant, which serves Chicago Italian beef.
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Then the story goes from there.
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But one of the things that is amazing in the most current season is the family dynamics.
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Because this is a family that you would think they just hate each other because there are so many problems that are going on amongst this family.
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And it s got Jamie Lee Curtis and other people.
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The acting is just incredible.
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Through this turbulence, the family problems end up start saving the family in this business.
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And I thought it was an interesting way to talk about one of your principles.
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Your family problems can save your family.
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The first half of the book is about emotional self-management.
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You got to get the technique right and the practice.
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And it s very clear how to do that in the book.
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The second half is once you ve cleared the decks with emotional self-management of all the stupid nonsense that we do and distract ourselves with, then we can focus on the things that really matter the most.
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And there are four pillars on which you can build the life you want.
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Faith, family, friends, and work that serves.
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Those are the big four.
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Everything else is pretty incidental as it turns out.
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When I talk about family, it s very interesting because the research on family life is quite fascinating.
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You find that the families that are least
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nutritive that build people up the least are often the ones that have no conflict at all.
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Now, conflict is scary because conflict with your family can lead to schism.
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One in six Americans is not talking to a family member today because of politics.
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It s just, John, it s insane.
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So it s really bad out there.
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I get it.
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But no conflict means no intense love.
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is the way that that comes down.
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So the key thing that what we need to talk about is how conflict can actually be generative, how conflict can be problem solving.
4
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And so in the book, I talk about how to fight with your spouse, how to fight with your parents, what not to do and what to do, what to be afraid of and what not to be afraid of, what to avoid and what to embrace.
4
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But the bottom line is there s nothing wrong with conflict.
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On the contrary, the people who don t have any conflict at all, they don t really care about each other that much as it turns out.
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I think that s funny.
4
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Another key thing that I thought was a profound statement in the book is happiness is love in action.
4
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You and I both personally know Bob Waldinger, author of The Good Life and the current director of the Harvard study of adult aging.
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How can we use happiness and love and that study to articulate the importance of relationships and the love that we show others in activating happiness in ourselves?
4
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The Harvard study of adult development that Waldinger and company run, Bob Waldinger is an incredible guy.
4
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He s a psychoanalyst and psychiatrist at Massachusetts General Hospital in the Harvard Medical School.
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He s also a Zen Buddhist priest of all things.
4
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He s a really interesting guy.
4
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And for 30 years, he s been running this enormous study.
4
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It s an 85 year longitudinal study that started when men were in their teens all the way until death.
4
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There s a few of them are still alive, but man, they re really old.
4
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The study itself has only had three directors.
4
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So the directors have as much longevity practically as the participants in the study.
4
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Bob has been doing it for 30 years, and he s very clear on what actually brings happiness.
4
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Now, some people just get lucky.
4
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50% of your happiness, your baseline mood is genetic, as it turns out.
4
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He had gloomy parents.
4
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It makes it a little bit harder.
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But if you have those gloomy genetics, which by the way, I have,
4
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You need to work that much harder on your habits.
4
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The habits are basically seven fold where the seventh is by far the most important.
4
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The first few are pretty easy.
4
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They re about diet and exercise and smoking and drinking.
4
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That s really what the first four are about.
4
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So diet and exercise means that you re not going to be healthy and happy.
4
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If you re always struggling with your health and making sure you have a healthy body weight and you exercise moderately is really important.
4
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None of this is new.
4
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Smoking is a really bad thing because lifelong smokers, seven and 10 die of a smoking related illness and they re really bad deaths.
4
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And drinking is a really interesting one because all of that about, she d have two drinks a day.
4
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It s not true.
4
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It turns out that most of that is largely from a vested interest that sponsored the research and the newest research suggests that s too much.
4
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And then if you have any alcoholism in your family, you should stop drinking right now.
4
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And again, a lot of people don t want to hear that.
4
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Don t turn off the passion struck podcast right now, because I just said that.
4
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Okay.
4
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That s pretty obvious stuff, but then it gets more interesting because the last three, number one is you need a coping mechanism for your stress and anxiety.
4
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You need to talk to somebody.
4
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You need to have a way to deal with your stress.
4
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If you don t, you re going to have too much cortisol and stress hormones in your system.
4
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And it s going to hurt your life, your happiness, and your health.
4
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Second is you need lifelong learning.
4
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You need to be
5
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It s interesting.
5
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And that gives people pleasure.
5
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There s a lot of neurophysiology that shows this be a lifelong learner podcast books, all of it.
5
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And last but not least, number seven, this is the biggie.
5
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This is the one you can t miss.
5
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Happiness is love.
5
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Full stop for most of us, that means a happy marriage, but if you don t have that close friendships, you need a happy marriage or close friendships.
5
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That s what you need.
5
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And you got to do the work, you know, just fall off a log and have a happy marriage.
5
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And you certainly don t keep up to date with your childhood or college buddies.
5
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You don t work with her halfway across the country.
5
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You got to do the work.
5
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If you re going to have that source of happiness, by far the most important of the seven.
5
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And Arthur, I was hoping along the lines of love, to me, love and gratitude go hand in hand.
5
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And I think gratitude is a powerful emotion for enhancing happiness.
5
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Can you provide some practical techniques that a listener can use to cultivate a sense of gratitude?
5
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Yeah, so gratitude is really a substitute emotion for the more natural emotion, which is resentment.
5
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And there s a reason for that.
5
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We re evolved to have a negativity bias.
5
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In other words, Mother Nature wants us to notice the bad and disregard the good all the time.
5
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The reason is because the nice things, they re nice to have.
5
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The bad things, if you miss them, you ll get eaten by a tiger.
5
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If you re looking around a room and somebody s smiling sweetly at you, okay.
5
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But if somebody s frowning at you, you better pay attention because there might be violence coming in your favorite neighborhood bar, whatever it happens to be.
5
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And so we have evolved the tendency to feel resentment, to feel negativity, to feel on edge all the time, as opposed to feeling often the more realistic sentiments about what s going on, which is the nice things.
5
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So Mother Nature does not have to dictate this.
5
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However, if we decide metacognitively to choose the gratitude when we feel the resentment, that s called emotional substitution.
5
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When you feel resentment, when you feel bitterness, then it s time for you manually to turn on the gratitude.
5
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Here s how to do it.
5
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I make my students do this and it s incredibly effective.
5
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On Sunday night, make a list of the five things you re most grateful for about your life.
5
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Five things.
5
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I don t care how dumb they are.
5
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Like, I finally got around to watching Breaking Bad and I m really grateful for that.
5
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I don t care how dumb it is or that I m a blessed child of God.
5
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That s really profound.
5
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Whatever your thing is on the five things.
5
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Okay.
5
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Every night, take five minutes and look at your list and contemplate that list.
5
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Sunday, revise the list, add another thing, take something off, but change it.
5
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Edit the list every Sunday.
5
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At the end of 10 weeks, you re going to be about 20% happier than you were before because you will be practicing emotional substitution.
5
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In the end of the evening,
5
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Yeah.
5
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Look, the day has built up a little scar tissue on you.
5
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You re going to be a little resentful.
5
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You re going to be a little tired.
5
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You re going to be a little stressed out.
5
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And instead of wallowing in that, you got your gratitude list, which is an emotional and appropriate, realistic, emotional substitution mechanism.
5
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And it will change your happiness level.
5
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So Arthur, I ve got two more questions for you.
5
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And for this next one, I m going to go all the way back to the beginning of the book.
5
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In the opening, you write that the 59-year-old you, if you went back in time and said to your younger self, you re going to learn to be happier,
5
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and teach the secrets to others, that younger you would have told the older you that you ve gone completely insane.
5
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If someone s been listening along this podcast and maybe they don t feel happy in their lives and are sitting here listening to you and I saying, no, I m hearing these two guys talk, but I don t see how this is possible.
5
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What do you think is the first step that person can take to get them on this path?
5
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Yeah, the first step is learning about happiness.
5
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Stop trying to feel happiness because it s not a feeling.
5
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Use knowledge.
5
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This is the same thing with anything else.
5
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I wish I were a better golfer.
5
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Come on, man.
5
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Don t wish you were a better golfer.
5
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Take a golfing lesson.
5
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I m going to go to a golf pro and take a lesson.
5
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Then you ll get better.
5
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The same thing is true with happiness.
5
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Stop treating happiness like a nice to have, and I hope to have start treating happiness like a skill because it is.
5
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And because if you actually put forth just a little bit of effort, that s why Oprah and I wrote the book.
5
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It s because we want an owner s manual for your happiness.
5
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If you actually just read the book, absorb the ideas, it doesn t take very much work.
5
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That knowledge per se is the first step in getting happier.
5
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It was for me, and it is for literally every single person I ve met.
5
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Okay, and then my last question would be, we are living right now in a world that is just filled with nihilism, challenges, and uncertainties.
5
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What message of hope would you and Oprah like to leave with readers of the book or listeners of today s podcast, especially those who are seeking to build the life that they truly want?
5
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Yeah.
5
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The answer is that you can be happier.
5
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Literally everybody on the planet can be happier and it s in your hands.
5
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And even better news, you can make other people happier as well.
5
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Every single person can see themselves as happiness teachers, which is extraordinary when you think about it.
5
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How?
5
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By sharing these ideas, by learning these ideas, learning them, practicing them and sharing them.
5
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And every single person can do that.
5
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Look,
5
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It s a tough world out there, man.
5
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It s just rough.
5
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And people are so bitter and having such a hard time and people are fighting.
5
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And what we need is a revolution.
5
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And the revolution starts with each one of us.
5
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And that starts with a commitment to happiness and love, bringing more happiness and love in our lives through knowledge, practice and sharing.
5
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And if we do that, I m telling you, if we commit ourselves to that, it s amazing to me.
5
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I was like a gloomy guy, 20 years ago, 10 years ago.
5
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And now people are asking my advice about happiness.
5
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If I can do it, everybody can do it.
5
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That s my promise.
5
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Well, great.
5
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Arthur, thank you again for being here.
5
SPEAKER_02
And if someone wants to learn more about you, what is the best place for them to go for all things, Arthur Brooks?
5
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Yeah, it s arthurbrooks.com is all things Arthur Brooks.
5
SPEAKER_01
And that has my columns.
5
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You can learn how to subscribe to my newsletter.
5
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You can take a class online, a nice little class online.
5
SPEAKER_01
That s a, I teach happiness for a living and you can take a video based class with a lot of activities.
5
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You can start a book group on the Oprah book and all those resources and how to teach this stuff and how you can become a teacher as well as at arthurbrooks.com.
5
SPEAKER_02
Okay.
5
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Well, Arthur, thank you again for the honor of being here.
5
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It was such a pleasure to have you.
5
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Thank you, John.
5
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Thank you for what you re doing.
5
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And I can t wait to read your book.
5
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Well, I am going to send you a copy when I get it.
5
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Can t wait.
5
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Thanks.
5
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I thoroughly enjoyed that interview with my friend, Arthur Brooks.
5
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And I wanted to thank Arthur, Molly Glaser, Olivia Ladner, and Penguin Random House for the honor and privilege of having them appear here on today s show.
5
SPEAKER_02
Links to all things Arthur will be in the show notes at passionstruck.com.
5
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Please use our website links.
5
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If you purchase any of the books from the guests that we feature here on the show, all proceeds go to supporting the show.
5
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Advertiser deals and discount codes are in one convenient place at passionstruck.com slash deals.
5
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Please consider supporting those who support the show.
5
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Videos are on YouTube at both John R. Miles and Passionstruck Clips.
5
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We are also, as I mentioned at the beginning, on syndicated radio on the Brushwood Media Network, where you can tune in every Monday and Friday from 5 to 6 p.m.
5
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Eastern Time on your evening commute.
5
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Links will also be in the show notes.
5
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My new book is also available now for pre-order.
5
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You can also find that in the show notes.
5
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I am on LinkedIn, where you can sign up for my LinkedIn newsletter, and you can find me at John R. Miles on all the other social platforms, or you can sign up for our newsletter at passionstruck.com.
5
SPEAKER_02
And if you want to know how I book amazing guests like Arthur Brooks, it s because of my network.
5
SPEAKER_02
Build those relationships before you need them.
5
SPEAKER_02
Most of the guests that you hear on the show actually subscribe to the podcast and contribute ideas for topics and guests.
5
SPEAKER_02
Come join us and subscribe and you ll be in smart company.
5
SPEAKER_02
You re about to hear a preview of the PassionStruck podcast interview that I did with Robin Steinberg, an American lawyer and social justice advocate, who is the chief executive officer of The Bail Project.
5
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We discuss her book, Courage of Compassion, A Journey of Judgment to Connection.
5
SPEAKER_00
The criminal justice system is infected at every stage of its proceedings.
5
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with systemic racism, from how we police to what we define as crime, to how we punish, to how we deal with probation and parole, to how people are treated in jails.
5
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Racism sort of pervades it.
5
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But there are also people from more marginalized, low-income communities who also have become victims of the criminal justice system.
5
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It disproportionately impacts women.
5
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It disproportionately impacts the LGBTQAI community.
5
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It disproportionately impacts immigrants.
5
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It sort of turns its ferocious attention on the most vulnerable marginalized communities in America.
5
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And so that s certainly one of its flaws.
5
SPEAKER_00
At the core, the entire system is built on the idea that isolation and punishment
5
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is the answer.
5
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Once you create a system, it s really hard to change it.
5
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Remember that we rise by lifting others, so share the show with those that you love.
5
SPEAKER_02
And if you found today s episode with Arthur Brooks useful, then please share it with those that you love and care about.
5
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In the meantime, do your best to apply what you hear on the show so that you can live what you listen.
5
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Until next time, go out there and become PassionStruck.