Arthur C. Brooks

Tyler Mathisen (00:01):

Welcome to Enduring Excellence, a podcast from the University of Chicago Graham School. I’m Tyler Mathisen, your host. In each episode, we speak with remarkable leaders who have built lives of purpose, impact and meaning across every chapter of their personal and professional journeys. Join us as we explore what it takes to lead with purpose for a lifetime. Today I’m delighted to welcome Arthur Brooks, bestselling author, Harvard Professor, social Scientist, and one of the world’s leading voices on the science of happiness and purpose. A former professional French horn player turned economist and thought leader. Arthur has spent his career exploring what it means to build a life of deep meaning, enduring success, and genuine joy. His research and writing have inspired millions to think differently about purpose fulfillment and the pursuit of excellence across every stage of life. Now, Arthur’s background is anything but ordinary, and that’s part of what makes his perspective so compelling.

 

Tyler Mathisen (01:14):

From his early days performing as a classical musician to leading one of the nation’s most influential think tanks and now teaching at Harvard, his journey defies easy labels. In fact, when President George W. Bush once interviewed him, he looked at Arthur’s resume and said, quote, I’m just going to call you a weird dude. And honestly, that mix of curiosity, creativity, and courage might be exactly what makes Arthur’s work so powerful. In our conversation, Arthur brings forward insights that will challenge how we think about happiness and achievement. He reminds us that happiness isn’t a feeling, it’s a skill, something we cultivate through intentional living, not something that simply happens to us. We discuss that excellence is its own reward by focusing on mastery and contribution rather than just achievement, we cultivate fulfillment that endures. We also explore the difference between optimism and hope. While optimism predicts positive outcomes, Arthur shares that hope is action oriented. It’s the belief that one can make a difference even amid uncertainty. And finally, he reminds us that relationships and purpose, anchor excellence, that love, mentorship, and service to others are the foundation of both happiness and lasting success. Arthur, it’s wonderful to have you here. So let’s begin with a question that feels both simple and profound. You’ve been called the professor of happiness, so are you happy and were you always happy? What did you have to change to become happy?

Speaker 2 (02:53):

Yeah, happiness is hard for me, and one of the things that I’ve learned over the course of my life as a behavioral scientist is that about half of your happiness is actually genetic. About a quarter of it is circumstantial and only a quarter of it comes from habits, and I didn’t know that. So most people who are searching for the feeling of happiness and they’re feeling really frustrated, they don’t understand that maybe your mother did make you unhappy because a lot of it is genetic, is the way that it actually turns out. But that’s empowering information as well. When I learned that there’s a whole lot that I could do to manage my genetics and change my circumstances, my life really started to change when I started to use the science of happiness in my own life. Wow, Tyler, everything opened up for me. As a matter of fact. It was so exciting for me as a matter of fact, that I dedicated myself to the science of happiness in the public interest to lift people up and bring ’em together in bonds of happiness and love using science, and that’s what I plan to do for the rest of my life. It worked for me. It can work for anybody.

Tyler Mathisen (03:46):

Your writings are complex and fascinating because so much of it is science. It really is science based, but it’s also you draw on philosophers, St. Thomas Aquinas, as well as religious traditions and so forth. I guess maybe the follow-up question is why is happiness so hard for so many people to achieve? If God wants us to be happy,

Speaker 2 (04:08):

Why

Tyler Mathisen (04:08):

Is it so damn hard?

Speaker 2 (04:10):

One of the reasons that there are many answers to that, but one of the most important things to give in mind is that most people don’t know what happiness is. One of the most fundamental errors when you’re looking for something is not knowing what you’re looking for. If you don’t know where Chicago is or what Chicago is, good luck finding Chicago. And the truth of the matter is that most people have been sort of propagandized in the modern milieu into thinking that happiness is a feeling. Happiness isn’t a feeling. Feelings are related to happiness in the same way that the smell of your Turkey is related to your Thanksgiving dinner, feelings are evidence of happiness. To become a happier person, you need to live in a different way. You need to have deeper understanding. You need to share the ideas with other people, and it starts with a proper working definition of happiness, not a feeling, but rather a combination of enjoyment, satisfaction and meaning, all of which have deep psychological and neurophysiological roots and all of which we can become far more excellent at than we currently are.

Tyler Mathisen (05:09):

Enjoyment, satisfaction and meaning. Those are the three constituents of happiness. I suspect that they play in the definition of excellence. So let’s stick with the definitional. We went there. What does enduring excellence connote or mean to you?

Speaker 2 (05:27):

Enduring excellence has everything to do with living up to your greatest potential, and that means knowing what it is that what your potential should be. And many different traditions have tried to define that in different ways. The Japanese have a particularly elegant way of understanding that, which is the iki guy definition of excellence. It’s what you’re good at, what people will pay you for, what the world needs and what you love. The confluence of those three things, and this is ultimately what we’re looking for is how these things come together and when you find them, that’s excellent. For me, this was the study of happiness. For you, it was to become a journalist of reputation around the world. And when you’re no longer in the confluence of those four circles, that’s when you need to move. And the way that you know that is when your interests have shifted.

Tyler Mathisen (06:15):

I want to explore excellence and compare it to something that’s I think related but very different, and that is success. So how is excellence different from success and to sustain excellence? Are extrinsic rewards which you write and talk about things that money, fame, notoriety, extrinsic, rewards sufficient to sustain excellence, or do you need something more, something that is more internal, more intrinsic to you to sustain excellence?

Speaker 2 (06:47):

That’s an important question because the truth is that mother nature lies constantly to us. Mother nature tells us that if we get a lot of extrinsic rewards and we’re successful in the worldly terms, then we’ll automatically be happy, which of course is a lie. Grandma said that money doesn’t buy happiness, and all the rest of us said, well, let me try power, comfort, security, pleasure, fame, Instagram followers. This is what we think will actually bring us the happiness that we crave, and that’s all wrong. So if success is determined in what Thomas Aquinas would’ve called the idols of life, woe be unto us. I tell my students on the first day of class, mother Nature’s telling you that if you have worldly success, you’ll get happiness automatically. But the truth is that if you shoot for happiness, then you’ll have enough worldly success. Now, of course, my students are thrivers.

(07:37):

There’s one word in that sentence that makes them panic. What do you think it is, Tyler? Here’s the sentence. If you shoot for happiness, you’ll have enough success enough. Exactly right. Thrivers hate enough because there’s never enough. They want more. That’s right. And that’s what Mother Nature is telling us to do is there’s never enough. It’s called the hedonic treadmill. And so the truth of the matter is that we have a moral and spiritual obligation to look at excellence through moral terms, to look at excellence in human terms and intrinsic terms. And when we do that in terms of our faith and our family life, in our friendship, in the way that we serve the world with our jobs, then when we’re looking for excellence in that area, then the worldly successfully will be enough. Our success

Tyler Mathisen (08:23):

And excellence at one or at war with happiness,

Speaker 2 (08:29):

So they’re not at war, we need to have properly ordered goals is the way that that works. When our goals are improperly ordered, when our desires are improperly ordered, then they will be at odds when our happiness, and that’s something that the Buddha taught right? Desire is critically important to us. We need to want the right things. And so one of the things that I talk about with my students is don’t try to get the right things. What you need to do is you need to want the right things and learning how to want the right thing is critically important. And so for example, one of the things that people learn when they get married, when they get married, they don’t need to just hope that they want to be with their spouse. They need to work on wanting to be with their spouse for the rest of their lives. It’s working on their right desire. Anything that you’re trying to do to be truly excellent, to be truly successful has to do with managing your own desires. And that means knowing yourself, knowing your brain, knowing your heart, knowing your spirit.

Tyler Mathisen (09:24):

You say want the right things. I sense that there were probably times in your life where you were not the happy person that you are today. How did you discover what the right things were for you that led you to not only excellence across a variety of things? I didn’t even mention the fact that you led the American Enterprise Institute for about a decade of major think tank as everyone knows, but what were those things that you needed to discover?

Speaker 2 (09:49):

Well, the truth is I needed to fail a lot. I needed to be frustrated constantly. I wish I would’ve had this knowledge when I was 31. I’m 61, and the truth of the matter is that we get a certain number of decades in life to figure this out. Thank God if everybody lived to be 25 years old, most people would die miserable because we make a lot of mistakes and we chase a lot of lures and a lot of false promises and a lot of propaganda and Mother nature lies to us, and we get a certain number of decades to actually come to a little bit more wisdom. Now, in my own case, personally, I was, as you mentioned, I was the CEO of a big nonprofit think tank in Washington dc, the American Enterprise Institute, which is a great organization. I loved running it.

(10:27):

I was proud of running it, but I was deeply tired and burned out at the age of 55. My goodness, what am I going to do? So I did. In order to find out what I was supposed to do, I actually did what people have done for thousands of years or at least 1,100 years. I went on a long walk. This is a pilgrimage. There’s an ancient idea that if you go on a long walk with an intention, you’ll find the answer to your question. I walked the community of Santiago, which is hundreds of miles across northern Spain. My wife agreed to do it with me reluctantly. And that the saying is when you end the walk in Santiago de Compostela, which is a medieval city, northern Spain, you’ll be granted what you seek. And I was asking the question, what can I do? So finally I can find the deep life satisfaction that I seek. What am I supposed to do? This is in 2019 and I had just finished this decade of the American Enterprise Institute and entering into the city of Santiago or the Compostela, I gained this knowledge. I think it was almost divine that I was supposed to spend the rest of my life lifting people up and bringing them together in bonds of happiness and love, using science and ideas to return to my roots as a scientist in the public interest such that people could live better lives starting with my own.

Tyler Mathisen (11:40):

That’s really your mission statement, isn’t it? It’s what you just said there. I’m sensing. I just want to touch base and then move that you feel strongly that frustration and failure and setbacks and maybe even personal crises can be foundational to ultimate excellence, success and happiness.

Speaker 2 (11:56):

They’re absolutely necessary. As a matter of fact, one of the greatest most deleterious philosophies that is current today is kind of the opposite of the hippies that who said, if it feels good, do it. That’s a great way to ruin your life. If it feels good, do it. But an equal way to be unsuccessful in your life and to be unhappy in your life is to say, if it feels bad, make it stop. Eliminate the pain. That’s exactly wrong. The truth of the matter is that life requires a lot of discomfort. We have negative emotions because our limbic system alerts us to threats. This is how we stay alive. We have negative experiences because that’s life on earth and from the negative experiences we learn and grow if we allow ourselves to do so. True excellence really starts with this. I guess it would be a motto, a first thing, and this is what I say every day when I wake up. I’m truly grateful for the lovely and pleasant things that are going to happen this day, but I’m also truly grateful for the difficult and painful things that are going to happen this day because through these things, excellence can be mine, but only through these things

Tyler Mathisen (12:56):

Are people who have achieved enduring excellence, and we can probably all think of them, some of them people that would be in the public eye, others, people who are our neighbors or friends or live a much quieter life. Are people who have achieved enduring excellence necessarily happy, or is there only a faint correlation between sustained excellence and happiness or relation at all?

Speaker 2 (13:19):

Yeah, well, what people understand who are generally excellent in the things that matter the most, which is not the worldly success that we hear about, the idea of being rich does not mean that you’re excellent and successful in life. It just doesn’t. And Tyler, you and I know lots and lots of wealthy people who are tremendously unhappy and have unsuccessful marriages and have a pretty bad relationship with their kids, and the successful people who are excellent in life per se, they are happy, but that doesn’t mean they’re not unhappy. Happiness and unhappiness are not irreconcilable. On the contrary, they’re not even opposites. Negative and positive emotionality. They occur in different hemispheres of the brain, largely different parts of the limbic system of the brain. They exist because they’re both part of a truly full life. What you find is that people who excellent and successful, they’re at peace with the fact that they’re living a full life, including the negative experiences that so many people are being told today through the sort of the therapized world tells them that they should be eliminating, which is just, look, I understand you need to manage negative emotionality when it’s exaggerated or dysregulated, but the whole idea that we should be eliminating sadness and anxiety is almost a perfect recipe for an unfulfilling life.

Tyler Mathisen (14:28):

One of the things I think I recall reading in one of the books I’ve read was that you can’t really get to pure happiness, but you can get to happyness. Yeah,

Speaker 2 (14:39):

I

Tyler Mathisen (14:39):

Mean, and that’s kind of what you’re describing there. Happiness does not mean the absolute absence of some unhappiness. It means something different than that, of course. Let me turn back to excellence and success. Can you have excellence without success or success without excellence and where does happiness figure in

Speaker 2 (14:59):

That? It’s a good question and it really depends on how you define excellence and how you define success. The truth is that you can have all kinds of worlds of success and not be excellent as a human being. You can be an excellent human being and not have worldly success, but to have intrinsic success in the things that matter, you must be excellent in those things as well. It’s just the metaphor of sports is always really interesting. You’re not going to be successful in sports unless you’re excellent at your sport. As a French horn player, I couldn’t have been successful as a French horn player unless I was excellent as a french horn player, all the things that matter, all the things that you have to work hard on, it requires this discipline and human effort, and that’s also true in virtue. If you want to live a life, a good life well lived and you want to be successful in doing so, you have to be excellent at it, and that’s the central idea behind all of Aristotle’s writings. You need to understand what success in life is all about and live that excellent life. That’s what he’s talking about.

Tyler Mathisen (15:58):

I know it’s not boil down to simple practices, but are there common habits or practices of people who achieve excellence and happiness? Is ritual or routine something that’s important to have? And I know that you live by a fairly rigorous routine every single day. You get up at four 30, you spend some time in silence, you go to mass every day, you work out every day. Where does routine and practice and habit and what are some of those habits and practices of enduringly successful people?

Speaker 2 (16:33):

So there are a lot of them and different people design their lives in different ways. For me, it’s been very important to be extremely disciplined about managing high levels of negative affect. That’s what behavioral scientists refer to as negative mood, and there’s nothing wrong with having high negative affect a quarter of the population. I should say a half of the population, of course is above average and the intensity of their negative emotionality, and that includes most high performing individuals, most CEOs and entrepreneurs, I mean you’ve been interviewing these people for decades at this point. You know that they tend to be high in positive emotion but also high in negative emotion, and that’s because they fall into the quadrant, the affect quadrant that we call the mad scientist and a lot of people watching us right now, they’re happy, but they’re also unhappy a lot of the time and they’re big challenges managing negative affect.

(17:20):

That is certainly the case for me, and I’ve used my knowledge base as a scientist to design my life in a way that’s best at managing high levels of negative affect starting in the morning. The reason I get up at four 30 is because getting up before dawn is excellent for managing negative affect. I pick up heavy things first thing in the morning because that’s good for negative affect. I go to mass every day or worship or meditation depending on if we’re religious or not. That as well the way that I use coffee, the way that I administer bolus as a protein, the way that I design my day is really about that. I use science in the interest of what I’m actually trying to do at the broader scope. If we zoom out to 30,000 feet, however, those are micro disciplines. The macro disciplines are really important as well, to be more successful, to be more excellent and to be happy and well, and by that I mean happy and healthy.

(18:08):

This comes from work of the Harvard Study of Adult Development or my colleagues at the Harvard Medical School have been running a study for 85 years looking at people year after year as kind of a crystal ball. How did they live when they were younger so they could be happier and well when they were older? And they all, by the way, Tyler, they have seven things in common, seven macro disciplines that they have in common, which is really important to have successful excellent lives of virtue, happiness and wellness. Some of them are really obvious. They have to do with diet and exercise and smoking and drinking. They don’t use substances, they don’t get addicted. They don’t eat like four year olds. They move around because it’s very, very happy, hard to live and be healthy and happy if you’re not doing these things. But then the three other things are really important as well.

(18:53):

They’re lifelong learners, so they’re really interested in things in life. So it’s really, really encouraging that as you’re at this node in your career, you went back to a great university because you’re a lifelong learner, which is so exciting. The next thing is that have a technique, a personal technique for dealing with difficult parts of life. For some they’re really good at therapy, some are good at their worship, some are good at their meditation practice, but they’re really good at dealing with the difficult parts of life, something they’ve gotten excellent at. And last but not least is their relationships. If there’s just one that has no substitute is love, happiness is love is what it comes down to. Usually a good marriage but not always very close. Friendships are critically important, and these are the macro disciplines we all should be paying attention to live the best lives.

Tyler Mathisen (19:39):

You have written, and I’ve read it several times in your books and in your columns that quote, excellence is its own reward. I note that you don’t say success is its own reward. Excellence is its own reward. So that distinguishes the two. What do you mean by it? And does that mean that excellence somehow is more intrinsically meaningful than mere success?

Speaker 2 (20:02):

It’s a good question. There’s an old expression that the key to the treasure is the treasure or that the journey is the destination. These are sort of zen Buddhist concepts, almost Cohen, but what this tells us is the process of working towards success through excellence is its own reward. You don’t know what the outcome is going to be. The unhappiest people, by the way, are those only working for the outcome. There’s a very funny thing, a very strange and sad truth, which is that a huge proportion of Olympic gold medalists fall into a clinical depression after winning their Olympic gold. And the reason is they’ve fallen into something called the arrival fallacy that we talk about in psychology. The arrival fallacy says, I love the progress I’m making toward my goal, and so when I hit my goal, it’s going to be ultimate bliss that’s going to last forever. But of course that’s not true. That isn’t true at all. Emotions are not there to give you a permanently good day. If you had a permanently good day, you’d be distracted from a saber-tooth tiger sneaking up behind you who would eat you and you wouldn’t pass on your jeans. Emotions are there to give you a reaction to a threat or an opportunity, and that’s it. That’s the reason that when you get a new car, it’s great for a month, you get a new house, a new relationship, a new watch. It wears off fast,

Tyler Mathisen (21:15):

And

Speaker 2 (21:15):

If you keep seeking it and seeking it, if it’s the success at the end of the day all you’re looking for, that’s an exercise in frustration. That’s why we should seek excellence and occasionally enjoy a little success.

Tyler Mathisen (21:26):

As you’ve looked at people or examined excellence in your scholarly work and the science of it, broadly speaking, do people who achieve enduring excellence over sample or over register on optimism or hopefulness? In other words, is it easier to thread the excellence needle if you’re an optimist?

Speaker 2 (21:46):

So it turns out that hope is more important than optimism. Optimism is a prediction. It’s nothing more than a probability. To be an optimist is to say, I think everything’s going to be okay. I’m sure everything’s going to be okay. To be hopeful is a theological virtue. It’s an action. It’s something that says something can be done and I can do it. That’s the essence of excellence is hope. Optimism is a point of view, is the way that this turns out. And optimism can frequently actually be a burden on people. There’s the famous Stockdale paradox that we all heard about where Admiral Stockdale, who came to real prominence in America, he was a hero and he was captured during the Vietnam War and tortured and lived in the famous Hanoi Hilton, the prisoner of war camp of the North Vietnamese. He noticed that the optimists were the ones who always died, and he said they died of a broken heart. They said, by thanksgiving we’ll all be out. And then they weren’t out and they said by Easter we’ll all be out and they weren’t out. And pretty soon they just faded away the hopeful ones who said that we can do something to lighten the load of other people. We can make the time pass in a productive way even though we don’t know what’s going to happen. We don’t know what the probability is. Those are the people that had true excellence, and those are the people who had the best outcomes. Hope not optimism.

Tyler Mathisen (23:04):

Should your concept of excellence or really how should your concept of excellence change or evolve as you age, what is the relationship of that evolution in one’s definition of excellence to what you write about the transition from fluid intelligence, the problem solving, the high creative intelligence of youth to crystallize intelligence, the wisdom of your later years? So how should your definition of excellence evolve and change?

Speaker 2 (23:34):

So this is something that I did not know until I was in my mid fifties. I started to do the behavioral science research. What I started to see a change in my own abilities and my own interests that I didn’t understand. One of the things that’s most disconcerting about people is when they get into their forties or fifties and they’re really burning out, they don’t know why things they used to be fascinated by, they’re not fascinated by anymore things they used to be really good at and were easy are now hard. What’s happened? And the truth of the matter is that your abilities change because your intelligence changes. Now, I’m not talking about your raw iq, I’m talking about the manifestation of your intelligence, and this is a neurophysiological phenomenon with the conduct of your prefrontal cortex. Early on as an adult, you have a lot of what neuropsychologists often call fluid intelligence.

(24:19):

That’s your ability to use your working memory for intense focus, for innovation, to crack the case, to do things better by yourself and figure things out faster than other people. And when you’re learning and you have a lot of fluid intelligence, man, you’re on fire. That’s how you become a star litigator or a great surgeon or an unbelievable stockbroker or hedge fund manager, journalist or professor for that matter. But later on that tends to wane in your late thirties, it tends to peak and goes into decline. In your forties, you tend to be less innovative. Your working memory starts to decline, and that’s when people start to feel like they’re not making progress and they burn out. You have a different kind of intelligence that’s coming on in your forties and fifties and sixties that stays high in your seventies and eighties, and as long as God gives you your marbles, which is called crystallized intelligence, not based on working memory, thank God, it’s not based on innovative capacity.

(25:13):

It’s based on pattern recognition, teaching ability and wisdom. Wisdom. This is why you would never want the managing partner of a law firm to be 30 years old. You want the star litigator to be 30 years old. That’s because teaching and mentoring and talent scouting, that’s crystallized intelligence figuring stuff out, that’s fluid intelligence. That’s why startup entrepreneurs are usually in their early thirties, but venture capitalists were successful in their late fifties, early sixties. That’s why I was writing mathematical treatises in my thirties that were so sophisticated. I can’t read them today, but today I have an audience of 500,000 people a week in my column in the Atlantic, and I go on television on your network talking about neuroscience in a way that people can understand because now I’m a teacher, because I’m a crystallized. Intelligence. Excellence is understanding which curve you’re on. Are you on the fluid intelligence curve or are you on the crystallized intelligence curve? If you walk from one to the other at the appropriate time, your excellence will only grow.

Tyler Mathisen (26:14):

Let’s have a handful of popcorn here by way of this next question. It’s kind of a toss up. I’m curious if you could name for me three people living or not. Hopefully one is alive at least who you would say whose lives you believe epitomize excellence. And I’m going to ask you to exclude the divine like Christ, but I’ll spot you the Dalai Lama because I know he’s a great inspiration to you and has much to teach and we have much to learn from him. Can you name quickly three people whose lives epitomize excellence to you?

Speaker 2 (26:51):

Yeah, there are people like this, and again, it’s important for us to remember that nobody is completely excellent, nobody is completely successful. We have a tendency to idealize people’s lives in a way that actually dehumanizes them, that turns them into cardboard cutout, two dimensional characters, and that’s actually bad for us and bad for them. One of the reasons that famous people, they are often extremely unhappy is because they’re trying to live up to their own press releases that they are the portrait of perfect excellence. And it’s important for all of us that have public careers, you me, and many of the people watching us to be completely human and completely vulnerable, defenseless as a matter of fact in the way that we live our lives because then people can aspire to the little bit of excellence that we’ve been able to achieve to be sure.

(27:35):

Now, there are people that have really done this. I absolutely love the Dalai Lama with whom I’ve been working very closely for the past 13 years. He never disappoints. He is the living Bodhi sattva. It’s the most extraordinary thing I’ve ever seen living up to it morally as a wise individual. There are other people as well, many people watching us know about the famous Bishop Robert Barron. One of my great heroes is a moral leader. He is a bishop in the Catholic church, but a great author and writer as well, amazing thinker when I met him. He lives up to it. I love George W. Bush when I’ve met him as a person, become friends with him as a person. Nobody’s perfect. He made mistakes, but I like to think that I would’ve made the same mistakes myself. And he’s somebody who personally lives up to a standard of excellence and somebody I really admire.

(28:20):

And by the way, that’s not a partisan point. There are many people on the political left that I admire very, very much as well. People throughout history that I’ve admired who’ve lived up to this, my favorite philosophers, Ralph Waldo Emerson. I’m a real Emersonian in my thinking, and he lived up to the excellence of hearing your own call and living up to it, not withstanding the strictures and the restrictions of society around you. A lot of people read Ayn Rand today, but Ralph Waldo Emerson was the OG in being, being your own person is what it comes down to, and he lived it in his own time. He also founded the magazine that I write for today, which is The Atlantic, which I admire a lot.

Tyler Mathisen (29:00):

I thought you were going to mention Johan Sebastian Bach.

Speaker 2 (29:03):

That’s a fair point. Johan Sebastian Bach, the greatest composer who ever lived in my view, somebody who’s inspired me and who said that the aim and final end of all men and women is to glorify God and to edify humankind. The idea that all music should just lift people up and all of our work should lift people up this the aim and find the end of what we’re doing. He was somebody who when history passed him by in his own lifetime, didn’t become bitter. On the contrary, became the greatest teacher of his time. Getting onto his crystallized intelligence curve only became the great composer we know today, a hundred years after his death and died a happy man. By the way, Tyler, he also had 20 kids, which is pretty productive.

Tyler Mathisen (29:41):

He did, and his wives were working hard, believe me,

Speaker 2 (29:44):

He only had two by the way.

Tyler Mathisen (29:45):

He only had two wives. That’s amazing. I mean, just amazing. Let’s talk a little bit about faith. You’re a person of faith. You say that among other things, that one of the pillars of happiness is faith or a spiritual life is excellence. Does excellence in some way depend on having faith or a spiritual life? And how does the decline in faith or religious practice in the United States make excellence harder to achieve?

Speaker 2 (30:13):

Yeah, that’s a good question and I think the answer to that, I could answer that as a Catholic, but I prefer to answer it as a scientist, which is that what excellence requires is not faith, let alone my faith. It requires transcendence. And what transcendence means is to transcend yourself. Mother nature wants you to be stuck in your psychodrama, my job, my car, my money, my television programs, my kids, my worries, me, me. It’s just so boring and mediocre. And the trouble is it traps you in a psychodrama of mediocrity, and that’s what holds people back. If you can get above that by standing in awe, then you’re free in ways that you can truly become excellent in all the ways that really matter. And there’s a lot of studies on this. This is what William James called going from the me self to the eye self in which I’m looking out on the world, the most excellent performers in every field. They can stop looking at themselves and they can start seeing the outside world and all of its marvels and participate in it with true excellence. So how do you do that? Maybe that’s the stoic philosophers, and maybe that’s walking without your device before dawn or studying the fumes of Ilhan Sebastian Bach or Vipassana meditation practice or for me, it’s going to mass every day, but we need something to become transcendent, to be excellent.

Tyler Mathisen (31:34):

So is having a spiritual life or faith important for someone who is trying to live a life of enduring excellence?

Speaker 2 (31:41):

For me, it’s very important. It doesn’t necessarily take the form of religion or spirituality for many people, but it must zoom you out on yourself such that you can stand in awe of the universe and things greater than You

Tyler Mathisen (31:55):

Write a lot about addictions, notably workaholism.

Speaker 2 (32:00):

Some

Tyler Mathisen (32:00):

People are addicted to success,

Speaker 2 (32:02):

Some

Tyler Mathisen (32:02):

People are addicted to work. Are some people addicted to excellence? Do we call that perfectionism? And can addiction to excellence backfire?

Speaker 2 (32:11):

Yeah, I mean, most people who are addicted to excellence and are perfectionist are actually not addicted to true excellence in life. What they are is they’re addicted to details about certain parts of their lives, and being absorbed with and obsessed with details is different than any sort of macro understanding of excellence per se. And we all know this to be true. There are things that we do and there are things that we leave because we’re trying to prioritize in life, but perfectionism doesn’t lead you to the greatest, greatest excellence. I’ve been a professor for a long time and I noticed that when I give an exam, somebody who’s a perfectionist will do perfectly the first three questions on the exam run out of the time and leave the last seven. And that’s a metaphor for life. And that’s not excellence, except unless you’re only looking at the first three questions

Tyler Mathisen (32:55):

In your book, love Your Enemies or with that book in mind, I want to broaden that. I wonder if you think our society is in any way addicted to hate to the dopamine rush that people can get? I believe when they get angry or hateful,

Speaker 2 (33:10):

Yeah, they do. There’s a reward that Mother Nature gave us for hating our enemies. In other words, feeling right and feeling justified in our hatred because of our rightness. We love to feel right. This is a bias that we all have, my side bias that we all have and it’s built into us. And there are all sorts of evolutionary reasons why this might be the case. Unfortunately, it’s largely manipulated by people all around us and the political media industrial establishment that are trying to fire this thing up to give us this dopamine hit of I’m right and they’re wrong. Furthermore, they’re evil and stupid because they don’t actually have my particular point of view. But this is straight on manipulation of neurophysiology, not in the public interest that we see today. A lot of that we see today,

Tyler Mathisen (33:54):

A lot of it. And then relatedly, I have to guess that you believe that social media and the addiction to devices is a deconstructive way to live. Talk to me about that.

Speaker 2 (34:05):

Oh yeah. Very, very destructive social media. And again, social media is not necessarily destructive. On the contrary, as with all technology, if a technology is a substitute for your relationships, it lowers your happiness. If it’s a compliment to your relationships, it improves your happiness. And right now, a lot of technology is substituting for human relationships, and that’s a problem. It opens up us up to manipulation, but more importantly, our brains literally work in the wrong way. We noticed that when we’re using technology, we’re on the left hemisphere of our brain, which is for tasks and analysis. The right side of our brain is kind of the dark consciousness in which we assess questions of meaning and love and happiness. And we’re not there when we’re actually using the lot of the technologies that we see today. We’re distracting ourselves with our screens small and large, which people are doing all day long. The average social media user looks at it five hours a day and checks their phone 205 times a day, which is simply shoving yourself into the wrong hemisphere of your brain and making the meaning of your life inaccessible. That’s a really dangerous business. And if furthermore, when you’re over there looking at your small screen, you’re being fired up, alienated from other people being told that you shouldn’t talk to your sister-in-law because she voted for or against Donald Trump. Well, now we’re really on the wrong side of things, and this is the recipe from misery.

Tyler Mathisen (35:23):

You have written that human beings are excellence machines. What do you mean by that and how do you keep that machine in good tune?

Speaker 2 (35:30):

We’re excellence machines because we’re built for progress. And this is the most beautiful thing about happiness. Human beings want to do things well. We want purpose. Purpose is part of the meaning of life, and purpose means goals and direction. There’s a word in sailing, it’s the rum line. The rum line is the direct course from where you are to where you need to go. And you can’t do anything meaningful as a sailor unless you know what the rum line is. Now, the rum line is important because it gives you goals and direction and it gives you a sense of what progress is. It doesn’t mean you’re going to be on the rum line the whole time. There’s wind and there’s navigational errors, and who knows? Maybe you think you’re going to India and you wind up in Espanola like good old Christopher Columbus. But the whole point is with knowing your goals and direction, you make progress. And that is the essence of both excellence and a good deal of the satisfaction that we enjoy in life. Satisfaction is the joy of achieving something with effort, and that requires goals, that requires purpose, and that’s why we’re excellence machines.

Tyler Mathisen (36:34):

You’re a professor of leadership and management, and I wonder as you look at excellence, are there certain leadership styles or organizational cultures that are more prone to foster or produce excellence than others?

Speaker 2 (36:50):

That is no doubt the case. There are families that foster it more than others. For example, there are individuals, there are friendships that foster it more than others, and those are the societies or the companies. And you and I have been looking at interested in business, we’ve looked at companies that are really, really excellent, and what we’re looking at is the culture inside the companies, the companies, the cultures, the societies, the families that foster the most excellence are the ones in which we lift people up together in which we hold each other to very high standards in which we’re impeccable in our own standards, and which we take joy in the accomplishment and success of other people. That’s what they all have in common. Now, there are certain systems that make it a little bit easier. I happen to believe that the free enterprise system is really good for that.

(37:33):

Not perfect. Of course, we need a lot more than just that, but I think it’s an excellent system for that if we design it in the right way. And by the way, if we share it with everybody, especially people at the periphery, at the margins of our society, which is really important, so that they have equal opportunity too through the right kind of public policies. That’s the reason that I care so much about the safety net, for example. But the truth is what we really care about is celebrating the success and excellence of other people and supporting and loving each other as brothers and sisters in our own pursuit of success and excellence together. And separately,

Tyler Mathisen (38:06):

I’m going to do something I’m famous for and that is mush. Two questions into one. The first part of the question is, do different cultures around the world define or look at excellence in different ways? That’s number one. And as you have gone through your career achieving what many people would say objectively is excellence in very different fields, from academia to music to public policy, to running war simulations for rand, are there common things that allowed you to achieve excellence? So one is excellence viewed differently across cultures, and two, what were the common things that allowed you to achieve excellence in your various careers?

Speaker 2 (38:49):

Excellence is seen differently in different cultures and no small part because people tend to congregate together who have different values. If you have a society, for example, that’s based on immigration, then you’re going to have a highly entrepreneurial society. Immigration is the most entrepreneurial thing that people do because they put all their capital at risk in search of explosive rewards. And that’s one of the reasons that in the United States, adventure is so critically important to people compared to contentment. And this is one of the things that I’ve studied a great deal in a lot of countries that have an outflow of immigration. Contentment is really important, and the inflow is adventure that people actually want people move around a lot. And so the concept of what success and excellence is definitionally different, and so excellence is going to be different in those two places. The second thing is that, and it’s related to this, is when you’re going through your own career, you’re going to see the coin of the realm differently depending on what you’re actually doing. Now, personally, I’m a real adventure guy. I really, really want to conquer new vistas and see new things and have a great time and learn new things constantly. But to do that, I actually have to figure out the system that I’m working in and figure out what’s rewarded in that system, what’s valued in that particular system. And it was very different playing in a symphony orchestra in Spain than it is being a professor at Harvard and wandering around talking to people about the signs of happiness. That’s for sure.

Tyler Mathisen (40:11):

It’s interesting that you mention adventure because I went through a workshop called halftime, which you may or may not be.

Speaker 2 (40:16):

Of course. That’s Bob Buford’s thing.

Tyler Mathisen (40:17):

Bob Buford’s thing.

Speaker 2 (40:19):

Yeah.

Tyler Mathisen (40:20):

In my mission statement, you told me what yours was. I don’t have it right in front of me, but I said I wanted to live a life of filled with adventure because it’s really important to me, and

Speaker 2 (40:29):

That’s great.

Tyler Mathisen (40:31):

I wanted time for solitude, but I want it to be busy so that I didn’t get bored. I’d be too busy to get bored or get old. I’m going to come back in just a minute with a concluding question or two, but let me invite Seth to come in and maybe share some questions from the audience with you.

Speaker 3 (40:46):

Well, let me start by saying this has been a phenomenal conversation, and you have also sparked a lot of questions, Arthur, and so building on this adventure theme is a perfect segue to the first question I have for you from our audience. How do you determine the best time to walk from the first curve to the second curve, age and circumstances aside? Are there markers, milestones or symptoms perhaps, that are recognizable and indicate this is the right moment for you to begin thinking about this important transition between chapters?

Speaker 2 (41:18):

Yeah. Yeah. So a lot of people wait too long, and the reason they wait too long is they tend to be highly risk averse, and I’m very sympathetic to that. So people who are very risk averse or extremely conscientious, they tend to wait a really long time. My father was a college professor, his father was a college professor. You might say this is the family profession as a matter of fact. And my father stayed in the same job for a very, very long time, and in retrospect, I think he probably should have changed. He was a highly, highly conscientious individual as a result of that. Here’s the way to think about it. I’ve written a lot about gut. Gut is something people talk an awful lot about, and all it is is data. Data that’s largely residing in the right hemisphere of the brain in your dark consciousness where you don’t have words for it, but you do have access to the data and you can’t quite describe it, but your gut tells the story.

(42:06):

So I have a series of rules when people want to take a new job, how to decide if they should take a new job or a marriage proposal or moving to a new city based on gut. I have rules on how to do that. I talk about with my students when it comes to when you know that it’s time to move to your second curve, the gut has everything to do with what you’re finding Interesting. Your interest never lies. It’s weird because people will say, and they’re 43 years old, I used to be super interested in being a dentist, and I don’t know why I’m not anymore. I’ll tell you why you’re not interested in being a dentist anymore, and it’s because you’re not getting better at it, and you’re not getting better at it because you’re no longer on the meaty part of your fluid intelligence curve. And I can show you the neuroscience, but it’s true. That’s why dentists start taking Fridays off and they golf when they’re in their mid forties, not because they like golf, but because I don’t know, I’m getting better at it, at least is kind of what it comes down to. So your interest never lies. That’s when it’s time to start thinking about making a change in midlife.

Speaker 3 (43:04):

So there’s another question here about how we can become more comfortable with mistakes. And what I’ve noticed, Arthur, is this is particularly true for many people who we see who are highly accomplished because they’ve spent decades being the person that others went to for advice or mentorship and being in the role where they’re the learner again, can be daunting because it’s been so long since that moment. And even these individuals who spent a lot of their early career having wild mistakes and failures then get to a place where they coast for a couple decades and they lose that muscle. So can you talk generally about this, but maybe in particular for some of the individuals that you’re seeing who are reading your book, the strengths who are in our world around leadership in society, how do we help them to get comfortable again with this discomfort?

Speaker 2 (43:51):

Yeah, no, this is a really hard thing. And by the way, this is not just about going back to school. This is people who, they have an unexpected divorce in their fifties and they have to date again, people who move to a foreign country, they immigrate because they have to in their forties. They have to learn a foreign language. This stuff is really, really hard because adults are not supposed to actually have these failures. We have a kind of permission structure for failure when we’re kids and when we’re young adults. Now, this is actually changing, Seth. This is an important thing. One of the things that I see in my students that’s really changed over the past 35 years is a much, much higher sensitivity to failure. People are way more afraid of failure in their twenties than they were before. And I talked to people in the mid twenties today who’ve never been on a date, and I was like, what are you talking about?

(44:37):

When I was in my twenties, that was all that mattered, and why not? And they say, I don’t know. I don’t know how to do it. Well, you just go do it. What are you afraid of? She’ll say, no. I mean, so I mean, that’s the whole point. Get shot down, risk, have a bad breakup, learn, try again. That’s kind of what it comes down to. And so what we have is an increasingly risk averse, failure averse society, and that’s a learning averse society is what it comes down to. So what I work with my students, I actually take ’em through a little exercise. It’s called the marati failure meditation. Now, marati in the theta Buddhist tradition is that in which you contemplate stages of your own death. Monks in theta Buddhist monasteries in Southern Asia will look at photographs of cadavers in various states of decay.

(45:24):

It sounds really morbid, but what they’ll say is, that is me. That is me. To expose themselves to the truth of their own death, therefore, helping them to accept it and setting them free so that right now they can be alive. The same thing is true with failure. I walk my students through a visualization exercise of their own existential failure. Step four is I think my parents feel sorry for me. That’s when they cry, and then they walk through it and they do it every day and every day. And they get set free. They get set free

Speaker 3 (45:53):

Because

Speaker 2 (45:54):

The solution to learning to fail is to fail.

Speaker 3 (45:58):

Well, so we can have a whole discussion. I another time maybe about great inflation and how that has done a huge disservice in this regard. Totally,

Speaker 2 (46:05):

Totally. I know you guys are better at that. University of Chicago don’t get anymore,

Speaker 3 (46:09):

And then that sets up a sort of way of understanding the world. But let me ask one final question, then I want to turn it back to Tyler. This is a really interesting one because I think it also speaks to there’s huge value in the discipline and habits that you’ve built. We’re talking about excellence because we believe that is a virtue, but here’s the question, should we allow for some lack of excellence or some openness in our schedule? Inefficiencies, you might call them as an opportunity for unexpected roads to take. How do you see these two at the same time? Because you’re an adventurer, but you also believe in the value of discipline and habit. And so how do you see those? They’re not irreconcilable, but I imagine you need to be intentional so that you don’t over optimize in a way that then limits your ability for some of this expanding horizons and dynamism that you may also want in your life.

Speaker 2 (47:00):

No, absolutely. That’s exactly right. It’s very important for us to program into our lives things that are new. That’s Tyler’s adventure. That’s why he’s back at the University of Chicago, not because he spent his whole career in academia, but because I don’t want to speak for Tyler, but because he wanted to try a new thing is what it came down to, and learn a new thing. And you need to systematically expose yourself to these new things. A lot of your life should be dedicated to getting really, really good at what you’re doing. Morally excellent, technically excellent, professionally excellent, excellent in your relationships, but it also should be dedicated to having new brand new novel experiences. Openness to experience is one of the great markers of living a happy life.

Speaker 3 (47:40):

Well, Tyler, last question to you.

Tyler Mathisen (47:42):

Lemme ask. I want to squeeze in two. You talk a good bit about detachment and how important detachment in a kind of, I guess, Asian philosophy or Buddhist philosophy sense is to having happiness, but it seems like detachment would be the opposite of one of the ingredients you would need for excellence. Is it so

Speaker 2 (48:02):

Detachment? What it really means is this, and it gets back to the earlier part of the conversation. Buddhists always talk about the fact that you need intentionality in your life, but without attachment. So intention without attachment, what does that mean? That means you have the rum line in Spanish. There’s a better word for it because you use it in common parlance. It’s el rumbo. Rumbo means that means the rum line, and that’s the intention of your life, but without dogged attachment to the arrival of what you’re trying to get. And that’s how detachment actually is completely compatible with excellence. Excellence is about excellence along the journey, not attainment of the ultimate reward. Go toward that thing. Absolutely live each life each day of your life with this intentionality. That’s what Dale Carnegie talked about, living in day tight compartments, but each day tight compartment goes in this particular direction. But if we can manage intention with that attachment, that’s where detachment leads to excellence as well.

Tyler Mathisen (49:04):

I began by asking you if you’re happy, I’m going to conclude by asking you if you are hopeful.

Speaker 2 (49:09):

I’m super hopeful. I’m more hopeful than I’ve been in years and years, and there’s a lot of reasons to be hopeful. I have seen so much positive change in people. I’m in the midst of a project to expose a billion people around the world to the happiness, science. And last but not least, I live in the United States of America, which is a hopeful country always renewing itself, even in the darkest times, tough times, Tyler, we know this right now, but that means it’s just a new day to do more good. And that starts by lifting each other up and bringing each other together in bonds of happiness and love, and I get to do that. So I’m really hopeful.

Tyler Mathisen (49:49):

Thank you for listening to Enduring Excellence, a podcast from the University of Chicago Graham School. Be sure to subscribe for more conversations about purpose, leadership, and lifelong growth. To join us, visit graham dot u chicago.edu for upcoming event details. I’m Tyler Mathisen.

Speaker 2 (50:17):

This podcast was edited by Resonate recordings.