Producers' Pick | Arthur Brooks: Finding Success & Happiness in the Second Half of Life

Radio that makes you think. This is the Brian Kilmeade Show. Welcome back everybody. Joining me now is Arthur Brooks.

I always love having him on. Harvard professor and the Atlantic's happiness columnist and a best-selling author. Arthur's latest book you're going to love.

It's From Strength to Strength. Finding success, happiness, and deep purpose in the second half of life. Arthur, welcome back.

Hey Brian, how are you? Hey, when did you start thinking big picture like this? Instead of getting involved in the next political campaign or the next platform, political platform? Yeah, well life is short, right? And what happened was, you know, as you know, before I started teaching at Harvard, I was running a think tank in Washington DC, which was a thrill.

It was great. The American Enterprise Institute, the kind of place that you and I really, really like. But I started thinking to myself, what do I want to do with the last few decades of my career? And the answer is I want to dedicate it to lifting people up and bringing them together. So I teach a class at Harvard on happiness.

I read about it in the Atlantic. And this new book is is really about how each of us can make the investments in our lives so that we can get happier as we get older and practically guarantee that we get happier as we get older. And that's what this book is. It's a guidebook on how to do it based on science. So based on science, so for example, if I, let's say, want to teach the Civil War, I would have to sit there and read everything I could then set up a curriculum around it.

But I knew exactly where to go. There's written material. How do you research something as amorphous as happiness? That's the class that I teach at Harvard based on neuroscience and social science. And over the last 30 years, there's been an explosion in the science of the understanding of human happiness. Now, a lot of it's based on, you know, the questions that were posed by Aristotle and in the Bible. But most of it is really looking at the data on the happiest people, what they do and what they don't do. And what I find are the big seven practices of the people who get happier as they get older. And a lot of it's really counterintuitive. Some people think if I get a lot of stuff, if I make a lot of money, if I'm super successful, then I'll be satisfied when I'm older. And that's completely wrong, as it turns out. It turns out that a lot of people who are kind of the strivers, they work as hard as they can.

When their career ends, they tend to be really disappointed, really unhappy. So I talked about the seven big investments that each person needs to make. And the earlier you start, the better it is. This is a book for people at 25 or 45 or 65. But you can remarkably change the odds of getting happier as you age.

So give me an idea of the seven that people can be asking ourselves now. Well, the first big one is that everybody thinks they get one kind of success curve in their life. And I'm not talking about making a ton of money or getting really famous.

I'm talking about doing well in your life, whether it's well in your job or in your community or whatever it is. And there is one big success curve where you get better and better at what you do through your 20s and your 30s. But that tends to start to decline a little bit. You kind of lose your edge in a lot of things that you do in your 40s and 50s, even while you're still in your physical prime. Well, you get a second success curve where you're better at new things in your 50s and 60s.

It stays high in your 70s and 80s. And that's what I call the teaching curve. Now, there's a lot of science on this. The first one is called fluid intelligence. You're really fast at solving problems. You can work harder than other people. The second curve is your crystallized intelligence curve.

It's your wisdom curve. You're a much better teacher. You're a better mentor. You're a better team leader in the later part of your career. So redesigning your life around what you're really good at is the first habit. And I go through all of the specifics on exactly how each one of us can identify the skills and double down on those skills as we get older.

Well, I mean, it is. What did you know? I know if you study famous people and you mentioned things like Charles Darwin or Bach, very successful, impactful people that people always know their names through generations. But what do you find about what is the commonality between people that are happy, whether they're truck drivers or they're CEOs of major corporations?

Well, the thing is, it's pretty interesting. You know, there are a lot of really successful truck drivers. They support their families. They work hard, et cetera. But everybody follows the same trajectory of what you're good at early is not what you're good at later. So there's some life skills that the really happiest people that they develop as well.

One of them is that they develop the root system in their life. People are unhappy when they're older. They don't have real friends. They just have deal friends. They just have people that they've worked with, people they kind of know, people who can help them professionally. But people who are happy when they're older, they've cultivated a few really deep friendships.

That's number one. The second thing that all of the happy people do and all the data, it's really clear, is that they stop building up all the stuff and possessions and the kind of work relationships and the prestige in their life. And they start taking things away later in the second half of their life. So you think of your life as kind of an empty canvas that you're filling up with paint. But in the second half of your life, you've got to think of yourself as kind of a sculpture that you're chipping away. Your success to make it really beautiful is chipping away all the parts of you that aren't really central to you.

Happy people build up in the first half of their life and take away in the second half of their life. These are the kind of things that I talk about in the book that we can all do in the earlier we start, the better off we are. Well, what did you discover about this even before you decided to be a professor and teach this level of courses? As you explore this, what were some of your revelations for you personally? Well, one of them is that I was actually falling prey to something that happened to a lot of strivers, a lot of hard workers that are listening to us right now.

And once again, this is not about being rich, not about being famous. It's about being a striver in your life. We tend to fall prey to and I was falling prey to what's called the success addiction. I worked really, really hard, but really what I was doing is I'm getting all my rewards from outside validation.

Good job, you know, you know, working harder, getting the raise, getting the promotion, getting the admiration of other people. And then what that's doing is working the part of the brain, the neurotransmitter called dopamine. And that's behind all addictions, whether it's the cigarettes or alcohol or gambling or bad stuff like pornography. This is what actually is making people addicted is dopamine. And if you get all of your validation, all of your thrills, all your little satisfactions from people rewarding you for what you do, you become a success addict.

And I was, it's not like I'm the most successful guy in the world, but for Pete's sake, I felt terrible. And once I had this constant stream of validation and seeing this with other people and seeing where it leads to a really bad place, I had to get off that wheel and boy, it really helped me a lot to know this knowledge, Brian, about yourself and about your happiness. Knowledge is power.

And this is a book about knowledge to give power to people as they age. Get off the stage. They had to put the instrument down. You know, you couldn't go to work. No one, there was nobody to network with. There was nobody to look for that. Nobody was hiring. They told you to go home, told you to get on zoom and put on a camera.

You can't really shine there. So what do you think that did? And especially on in the Ivy league schools like yours, they told all those students to go home, right?

Immediately told you couldn't play sports and everything. So what did you find that it put a new wrinkle into your into your book? It really did. And what it did for, uh, it did something really good and something really bad.

I found. So the coronavirus epidemic people, we look back on it, we say, I mean, I hope we're looking back on it that, that, you know, we say that was really kind of completely unfortunate, but a lot of people got into a pretty interesting space. They got in kind of a tenderness that a contemplation, they started asking big questions about themselves. Anytime you start questioning the nature of your life and the nature of your own desire, that's a really, really good thing. Remember the only startup that matters, the only enterprise that really matters at the end of the day, that's under your control is the enterprise of your own life.

And when you're starting to pay deep attention to what you want, your desire, the way you, you work with others, that's great. The bad thing is that people still are much lonelier than they think. There's a major wave of mental illness problems of mood disorders, of depression, anxiety coming toward this country, like a tidal wave. Part of the reason is because a lot of people are still afraid to go back to work.

And what this does is it impedes the executive function of our brains. People are quite lonely and depressed. We have almost a threefold increase in depressive symptoms. So the good thing is that people are looking internally, looking in the interior of their lives.

The bad thing is that they're still really suffering a lot. And that's one of the big reasons I wrote this book. This book will provide relief. Well, very interesting. We're talking with Arthur Brooks and his book is now Out from Strength to Strength, Finding Success, Happiness, and Deep Purpose in the Second Half of Your Life.

Fascinating topic. I think that everyone can really jump into, but he also wrote a column about regret, which is a subset of what you're talking about. So a lot of people have regrets they can't get over and had to turn the page. You say you should not run from regret. You know, you ask people and they did studies about how often do you think about the mistakes you made and regrets you have. What do you think the right balance is and how could regret not be a bad thing? Yeah, I know people are getting no regrets tattooed on their bodies.

And I get it. I mean, I get the basic philosophy of not wanting to be stuck in the past and feeling bad about things. But the truth is people who have no regrets, they don't learn from their mistakes. The reason for regret is an evolutionary thing. You've got to learn. You've got to get better.

So here's the point. If regret is weighing you down and you're ruminating on it and being depressed about something that happened in the past, you're doing it wrong, basically. When you regret something, which is normal, you need to write it down. You need to, what we call in my business, metacognitive. You need to move it to the front of your brain where you can manage it so it doesn't manage you.

Write it down. What did I do wrong? What did I learn from it? How am I going to move forward? In doing that, you will really free yourself.

You will no longer be chained to the regret bringing you down, but at the same time, you'll learn from it. And that's the right balance. Wow. And do you find your students are receptive? You have these elite students, even to get accepted into Harvard. What is it like teaching them? Are they open to this? Are they engaged in this topic or are they like, give me the physics, give me the science, show me business?

No, they're great. I teach a class called Leadership and Happiness at the Harvard Business School. I have two sections of 90 students and a lot of students on the waiting list for this class. And the reason is because they want real life skills and how they can maintain themselves as they actually go through life. They realize that they're really quite good at managing businesses and, you know, taking risk appropriately, but nobody's ever talked to them about the number one, two, and three in importance on their life. You know, how to build relationships, how to have close friendships, how to look forward to a romance in their life that can be really, really meaningful.

And so that's what they're interested in. They have an acute sense that they need to learn this and they're digging in and they're great, I have to say. My MBA students at Harvard are just wonderful. And one of the things that I teach them, Brian, is that all of us should be happiness teachers.

This is a key point of this book from Strength to Strength. If people are going to read the book and I say, go teach other people, you are now the happiness professor, it's not just me. And I tell my students that as well. They get credit, final credit in the class for setting up a class outside the class for people who didn't get in.

They take my PowerPoint slides, they download them, put their name on them, and recreate the lectures. I mean, that's the point is passing on happiness. You want to be happier? Love more. Make other people happier. That's the beautiful secret. I guess I lied.

I do have a last question. A lot of people don't want to get back in the workforce. They all of a sudden realize they don't see their self-image through their work. They kind of like having control of their schedule.

Maybe there's some things built up and money they receive that they don't have to get back in. They're finding a new balance. Whatever their answer is, they're finding a new balance.

They might be listening to us right now. What do you say to people who got off the pandemic treadmill and don't want to get back on? Well, I understand there's basically two types of situations under those circumstances. The one is that they they're a little bit afraid to go back. And, you know, a person at home tends to stay at home. Ask yourself, is it possible that I'm lonelier than I think? Is it possible that it's actually quite important for me to have an opposite signal strategy of saying, I think it's actually important for me to go on and get out there? Ask yourself that honestly. For other people, they're actually doing kind of a good thing, which is leaving things behind that stopped during the pandemic that they didn't like.

And that's really good too. The truth of the matter is the world is not going to go back to the way that it was. All of us are going to have more flexibility in our workplace. Many of us can be working at a distance much more than we did in the past. That's fine, but you've got to take care of yourself. Only do it to the extent that it serves you.

If you need to be more with people, you need to take that into your own hands because of basically the inertia of staying at home. You must, must actually fight that so that you can actually have the love and the contact of the people that you physically need. Got it. Arthur Brooks, thanks so much. Congratulations on this from strength to strength. Appreciate it, Arthur.

I'll talk to you soon. Thanks, Brian. Yeah, go pick up that book now.

I mean, what could, you won't have any regrets. How about that? From the Fox News Podcast Network, subscribe and listen to the Trey Gowdy Podcast. Former federal prosecutor and four-term U.S. Congressman from South Carolina brings you a one-of-a-kind podcast. Subscribe and listen now by going to FoxNewsPodcasts.com.