Arthur Brooks on How Businesspeople—and Everyone Else—Can Get Happy

Arthur Brooks in 2023: “People think happiness is a feeling, which it isn’t.” (Roy Rochlin/Getty Images)

The grandmother of a friend of mine used to tell him, “You are unique and special—just like everybody else.” True, though like in Orwell’s Animal Farm, some of us are more singular than others. And Arthur Brooks comes pretty close to being a category-of-one kind of guy.

A former professional French horn player and now a professor of management practice at Harvard Business School, he is known to be somewhat of a conservative, and is a practicing Catholic as well. Brooks is also perhaps the world’s leading expert on happiness—and he’s pretty darn good at waxing on about all of the above.

As such, Brooks isn’t only worth listening to, but refreshingly so. Still, what is there to know about happiness, anyway? Turns out, a lot. I spoke with Brooks recently as part of our At Barron’s interview series upon the release of his latest book, The Happiness Files: Insights on Work and Life, a collection of his essays from the Atlantic, where he’s a columnist.

I began by asking Brooks how happy we are as a nation. “Most Americans are fairly happy, but everybody could be and wants to be happier,” he says. “The problem is that happiness is utterly mysterious to most folks. People think happiness is a feeling, which it isn’t. Feelings are related to happiness. Like the smell of your turkey is related to your Thanksgiving dinner. It’s evidence of happiness. Happiness itself is a combination of three phenomena in people’s lives: their level of enjoyment, their level of satisfaction in their accomplishments and activities, and their sense of meaning.”

Brooks argues that happiness isn’t just for tree-huggers. Businesspeople, and all of us, should strive to be happy.

“A quarter of the population is above average in happiness and unhappiness,” he says. Brooks calls that particular mood profile “the mad scientist.”

“Guess where I find the most mad scientists? The answer is CEOs. One of the most important skills I can give the future mad scientists of America is to self-manage their intense levels of positive and negative. You can be a mad scientist until the cows come home and be very successful, but happy people need to concentrate on four things: their faith or philosophical lives, their family lives, their friendships, and serving people through their work.” (Regarding his first point, Brooks says he goes to mass every day.)

Brooks is the author of 15 books, including From Strength to Strength: Finding Success, Happiness, and Deep Purpose in the Second Half of Life, which was recommended to me by Ralph Schlosstein, co-founder of BlackRock and later CEO of Evercore. “I loved the book because it strongly affirmed the post-CEO life that I had selected for myself—one of mentoring, teaching, and doing my best to help others be as successful as possible,” he told me.

Speaking of that book, Brooks says: “You go from one strength as a young professional to your better strength as an older professional, not by doing what you used to do. Our intelligence changes. We have a fluid intelligence curve based on innovation, working memory, and indefatigable focus. But after about 40, what’s really salient and growing is crystallized intelligence, which is our inner teacher. It’s our ability to recognize patterns, to use our wisdom and the vast library of information in our heads. We don’t have to remember everything in a split second. We have to be able to teach people.”

Brooks was the president of the American Enterprise Institute, a center-right think tank, for a decade. “The reason that I’m often called a conservative is because I’m pro-capitalism,” he says. “I’m an Americanist—and I don’t mean pro-America, like everybody else is terrible. On the contrary, we have a responsibility as Americans to make a richer, better, freer, happier world. That’s the golden opportunity of what America is supposed to be, and that’s what I’m all about. I believe the free-enterprise system is America’s gift to the world.”

Unfortunately, Brooks says, happiness is declining in America. “We have this scourge right now of ideological and political polarization,” he says. “People in the 5% margins politically telling us that we have to hate each other. This has been incredibly deleterious for Americans. I have data that show that 80% of Americans agree on almost everything, but we’re being told [otherwise] constantly by a media and political establishment that are productizing and monetizing us through our hatred of each other.”

What’s wrong at Harvard right now? “It’s not a Harvard problem, it’s a higher-ed problem, which is that there’s been too much activism and not enough inquiry,” Brooks says. “The job of higher ed is to have dangerous ideas floating around in people’s heads so they learn how to think, not what to think.”

Finally, I asked him how each of us can be more happy. “Don’t think that the world needs to change for you to become a happier person. A lot of people say, ‘When the economy gets better, when my marriage improves, when my health gets better, then I’ll be happier.’ No. Don’t try to change the outside world. Work to change yourself—there are a million resources for doing that. Change your habits, change your own life, start managing yourself.”

Write to Andy Serwer at andy.serwer@barrons.com. Follow him on X and subscribe to his At Barron’s podcast.