Arthur C Brooks Quotes

The more control you have over your life, the more responsible you feel for your own success - or failure.

Satisfaction comes not from chasing bigger and bigger things, but paying attention to smaller and smaller things.

Your satisfaction is what you have, divided by what you want.

We don’t have an anger problem in American politics. We have a contempt problem. . . . If you listen to how people talk to each other in political life today, you notice it is with pure contempt. When somebody around you treats you with contempt, you never quite forget it. So if we want to solve the problem of polarization today, we have to solve the contempt problem.

Anyone who can’t tell the difference between an ordinary Bernie Sanders supporter and a Stalinist revolutionary, or between Donald Trump’s average voter and a Nazi, is either willfully ignorant or needs to get out of the house more. Today, our public discourse is shockingly hyperbolic in ascribing historically murderous ideologies to the tens of millions of ordinary Americans with whom we strongly disagree. Just because you disagree with something doesn’t mean it’s hate speech or the person saying it is a deviant.

Conservatives have the most effective solutions for human flourishing in our intellectual DNA. Our ideas have lifted up people all over the world. But the American people do not trust us to put those principles into practice to help those who need help right here.

Get old sharing the things you believe are most important. Excellence is always its own reward, and this is how you can be most excellent as you age.

There is evidence that as we become less exposed to opposing viewpoints, we become less logically competent as people.

Knowledge is knowing that a tomato is a fruit; wisdom is knowing not to put it in a fruit salad.

No one sighs regretfully on his deathbed and says, “I can’t believe I wasted all that time with my wife and kids,” “volunteering at the soup kitchen,” or “growing in my spirituality.” No one ever says, “I should have spent more time watching TV and playing Angry Birds on my phone.” In my own life, nothing has given my life more meaning and satisfaction than my Catholic faith and the love of my

One of the nastiest and most virulent addictions I have seen is workaholism

capitalism as an economic and social system that makes people unhappy by making them into part of a human machine in which humanity is expunged and only productivity remains.

Your emotions are only signals. And you get to decide how you’ll respond to them.

There is a lot to be mad about in America today, but we must never forget that our cause is a joyous one. Conservatives should be optimists who believe in people. We champion hope and opportunity. Fighting for people, helping those who need us, and saving the country—this is, and should be, happy work.

Devote the back half of your life to serving others with your wisdom. Get old sharing the things you believe are most important. Excellence is always its own reward, and this is how you can be most excellent as you age.

In the Tao Te Ching, the ancient Chinese philosopher Lao Tzu wrote, “Care about people’s approval and you will be their prisoner.

The macronutrients of happiness are enjoyment, satisfaction, and purpose.

Do you dream about being remembered for your professional successes?

Sharing weakness is hard because it is the ultimate act of subversion against your special, objectified self. You won’t go down without a fight!

The Stoic philosopher Marcus Aurelius said that “the universe is transformation, life is opinion.

There are two pillars of happiness. . . . One is love. The other is finding a way of coping with life that does not push love away.”[8] And

Remember, a classic sign of addictive behavior is when something not human starts to supplant human relationships.

she stopped waiting for the world to change and took control of her life.

To see weakness as purely negative is a mistake. Weakness befalls us all, and in many ways. It has its discomforts to be sure and entails loss. But it is also an opportunity—to connect more deeply with others; to see the sacredness in suffering; even to find new areas of growth and success. Stop hiding it, and don’t resist it. Doing so has another benefit for strivers—maybe the most important one of all: you can finally relax a little. When you are honest and humble about your weaknesses, you will be more comfortable in your own skin. When you use your weaknesses to connect with others, love in your life will grow. And finally—finally—you will be able to relax without worrying about being exposed as less than people think you are.

From my drive to be superior to others, deliver me. From the allure of the world’s empty promises, deliver me. From my feelings of professional superiority, deliver me. From allowing my pride to supplant my love, deliver me. From the pains of withdrawing from my addiction, deliver me.

This is just an example of the age-old debate over two kinds of happiness that scholars refer to as hedonia and eudaimonia. Hedonia is about feeling good; eudaimonia is about living a purpose-filled life. In truth, we need both. Hedonia without eudaimonia devolves into empty pleasure; eudaimonia without hedonia can become dry.

The way in which a man accepts his fate and all the suffering it entails, the way in which he takes up his cross, gives him ample opportunity—even under the most difficult circumstances—to add a deeper meaning to his life.

When I call for a standard of love, I am asking us all to listen to our hearts, of course. But also to think clearly, look at the facts, and do difficult things when necessary, so that we can truly lift people up and bring them together.

What I found was a hidden source of anguish that wasn’t just widespread but nearly universal among people who have done well in their careers. I came to call this the “striver’s curse”: people who strive to be excellent at what they do often wind up finding their inevitable decline terrifying, their successes increasingly unsatisfying, and their relationships lacking.

Liberals are more likely to see people as victims of circumstance and oppression, and doubt whether individuals can climb without governmental help. My own analysis using 2005 survey data from Syracuse University shows that about 90 percent of conservatives agree that “While people may begin with different opportunities, hard work and perseverance can usually overcome those disadvantages.” Liberals — even upper-income liberals — are a third less likely to say this.

That’s because happiness is not a destination. Happiness is a direction.

He possessed an unflinching belief that all people — the poor, children, the elderly — were human assets, waiting to be developed so they could earn their success.

pessimists see people as liabilities to manage, as burdens or threats that we must minimize.

Meaningful progress toward social justice cannot be made in sclerotic education systems that put adults’ job security before children’s civil rights.

Thus, psychologist Carl Jung noted, “what is a normal goal to a young person becomes a neurotic hindrance in old age.

But you must be prepared to walk away from these achievements and rewards before you feel ready.

You need strong human connections to help you get on the second curve and flourish.

• No matter how introverted you are, you cannot expect to thrive into old age without healthy, intimate relationships.

Marriage and family are not an adequate substitute for close friendships, which should not be left up to chance.

What is my why?

Robert Waldinger, popularized the study even more with a viral TED Talk, “What Makes a Good Life?

Even better, research shows that we tend to see important past events—even undesirable ones at the time—as net positives over time.

At the nexus of enjoyable and meaningful is interesting.

Another way to understand Brown’s point is that, as we all know, defensiveness is a terrible quality and never helps us. The right goal is defenselessness.

The lemonade-making, silver-linings-finding, bright-side-looking glass-half-fullers.

find peace in all things and play after every storm.

But at the same time, a bloated welfare state that nudges middle-class citizens away from the labor force is moving our society away from the dignity of earned success.

To adopt parts of life that will make you happy, even if they don’t make you special.

Only a shift to intrinsic goals will give you what you really want, and prepare you to get on the second curve, which requires relationships and sharing wisdom in the spirit of love.

here are the main lessons to make each challenge into a source of growth. 1. Don’t avoid conflict, which is your family’s opportunity to learn and grow if you understand where it originates and manage it appropriately. 2. You naturally think compatibility is key to relationship success, and difference brings conflict. In truth, you need enough compatibility to function, but not all that much. What you really need is complementarity to complete you as a person. 3. The culture of a family can get sick from the virus of negativity. This is a basic emotional-management issue, but applied to a group instead of to you as an individual. 4. The secret weapon in all families is forgiveness. Almost all unresolved conflict comes down to unresolved resentment, so a practice of forgiving each other explicitly and implicitly is extremely important. 5. Explicit forgiveness and almost all difficult communication require a policy of honesty. When families withhold the truth, they cannot be close.

Crystallized intelligence, relying as it does on a stock of knowledge, tends to increase with age through one’s forties, fifties, and sixties—and does not diminish until quite late in life, if at all.

This means being good to others as selflessly as possible—as the preceding experiment suggests, of course—but more subtly, it means deflecting your own constant attention from yourself and your desires—by looking in the mirror less, disregarding your reflection on social media, paying less attention to what others think about you, and fighting your tendency to envy people for what they have but you don’t.

One last point: If your relationship with your family is especially difficult, working to improve it might sometimes feel like a lost cause. It’s easy to throw up your hands. Almost every day, we hear from people all over the world who feel stuck in family problems that seem like they have no solution. Maybe you have said, “I just want to turn my back on those people and get on with my life.” Giving up is almost always a mistake, because “those people” are, in a mystical way, you. Your spouse is a completion of you as a person. Your kids provide a rare glimpse into your own past. Your parents are a vision of your future. Your siblings are a representation of how others see you. Giving that up means losing insight into yourself, which is a lost opportunity to gain self-knowledge and make progress as a person. Never give up on the relationships that you did not choose, if at all possible. But what about the relationships that you have chosen? These are your friendships, and that’s the next part of our lives to build.

The ideals of free enterprise and global leadership, central to American conservatism, are responsible for the greatest reduction in human misery since mankind began its long climb from the swamp to the stars.

Let’s take a little quiz. 1. Do you define your self-worth in terms of your job title or professional position? 2. Do you quantify your own success in terms of money, power, or prestige? 3. Do you fail to see clearly—or are you uncomfortable with—what comes after your last professional successes? 4. Is your “retirement plan” to go on and on without stopping? 5. Do you dream about being remembered for your professional successes?

Further, my connection to others makes my jump to the second curve all the more natural and normal. Indeed, the crystallized intelligence curve is predicated on interconnectedness. Without it, my wisdom has no outlet.

In your journal, reserve a section for painful experiences, writing them down right afterward. Leave two lines below each entry. After one month, return to the journal and write in the first blank line what you learned from that bad experience in the intervening period. After six months, fill in the second line with the positives that ultimately came from it. You will be amazed at how this exercise changes your perspective on your past.

If you’re experiencing decline in fluid intelligence—and if you are my age, you are—it doesn’t mean you are washed up. It means it is time to jump off the fluid intelligence curve and onto the crystallized intelligence curve.

Cattell himself described the two intelligences in this way: “[Fluid intelligence] is conceptualized as the decontextualized ability to solve abstract problems, while crystallized intelligence represents a person’s knowledge gained during life by acculturation and learning.”[6] Translation: When you are young, you have raw smarts; when you are old, you have wisdom. When you are young, you can generate lots of facts; when you are old, you know what they mean and how to use them.

The secret to happiness isn’t falling in love; it’s staying in love, which depends on what psychologists call “companionate love”—love based less on passionate highs and lows and more on stable affection, mutual understanding, and commitment.

Wealth is like sea-water; the more we drink, the thirstier we become, and the same is true of fame”—that’s philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer, writing in 1851, more than a century and half before social media was invented and made the whole problem ten times worse.

If we want more unity and less contempt, however, we need to get out of our comfort zones, go where we are not welcome, and spend time talking and interacting with people with whom we disagree—not on lightweight stuff like sports and food, but on hard moral things.

It’s difficult to describe adequately the depth of the rewards that one enjoys when relationships become your “official” source of meaning and fulfillment. People compare it with finding buried treasure, with the only sadness being that it didn’t happen earlier in life.

Tomorrow, try a new tactic. During the day, take a few minutes every hour or so, and ask, “How am I feeling?” Jot it down. Then after work, journal your experiences and feelings over the course of the day. Also write down how you responded to these feelings, and which responses were more and less constructive.

Christensen died a few months after I arrived at Harvard, but his legacy looms large at HBS, in no small part because of his famous book, How Will You Measure Your Life?[51] Christensen analyzes a good life well lived in the same way he would assess a company, and the book is well worth reading in its entirety.

Franklin Roosevelt had warned in his 1935 State of the Union address that “continued dependence” on government support “induces a spiritual and moral disintegration fundamentally destructive to the national fiber. To dole out relief in this way is to administer a narcotic, a subtle destroyer of the human spirit.

As we grow older in the West, we generally think we should have a lot to show for our lives—a lot of trophies. According to more Eastern thinking, this is backward. As we age, we shouldn’t accumulate more to represent ourselves but rather strip things away to find our true selves—and thus, to find our second curve.

the romance of companionate love seems to make people happiest when it’s monogamous. I say this as a social scientist, not a moralist: in 2004, a survey of sixteen thousand American adults found that for men and women alike, “the happiness-maximizing number of sexual partners in the previous year is calculated to be 1.

What the United States needs is for a unifying, positive, aspirational force to sweep through our national community. American conservatives have a generational opportunity to become precisely this kind of force. We have a shot, if we take it, to help every single American build a better life, and unite our nation in the process.

I decided to write down the three things I want for each of the people I love the most and then ask: Am I investing in those things in their lives? Am I putting my time, energy, affection, expertise, and money toward the development of these assets and qualities? Am I modeling them with my own behavior? Do I need a new investment strategy?

Over the next several days, the truth emerged to Siddhartha—that release from suffering comes not from renunciation of the things of the world, but from release from attachment to those things. A Middle Way shunned both ascetic extremism and sensuous indulgence, because both are attachments and thus lead to dissatisfaction. At the moment of this realization, Siddhartha became the Buddha.

She switched from wishing others were different to working on the one person she could control: herself. She felt negative emotions just like anyone else, but she set about making more conscious choices about how to react to them. The decisions she made—not her primal feelings—led her to try to transform less productive emotions into positive ones such as gratitude, hope, compassion, and humor.

Cicero believed three things about older age. First, that it should be dedicated to service, not goofing off. Second, our greatest gift later in life is wisdom, in which learning and thought create a worldview that can enrich others. Third, our natural ability at this point is counsel: mentoring, advising, and teaching others, in a way that does not amass worldly rewards of money, power, or prestige.

We are pouring huge amounts of energy into the biological effort to understand where life came from, how it arose on planet Earth, because it matters to us; it is, perhaps our deepest question. Really, it boils down to this: Are we special? The best summation has been attributed to the science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke: "Sometimes I think we're alone in the universe, and sometimes I think we're not," he said. "In either case the idea is quite staggering." Clarke is right. If we are alone, that's extraordinary. If we are not , that's even better. Were we to discover that we are one of many life-forms on a planet that is one of many inhabited worlds, we would have a new perspective on being human - on being alive, even. And if we discover that some of that life beyond Earth is intelligent, a whole new vista of possible human experience opens up before us.

It is well-known that a big percentage of all marriages in the United States end in divorce or separation (about 39 percent, according to the latest data).[30] But staying together is not what really counts. Analysis of the Harvard Study data shows that marriage per se accounts for only 2 percent of subjective well-being later in life.[31] The important thing for health and well-being is relationship satisfaction. Popular culture would have you believe the secret to this satisfaction is romantic passion, but that is wrong. On the contrary, a lot of unhappiness can attend the early stages of romance. For example, researchers find that it is often accompanied by rumination, jealousy, and “surveillance behaviors”—not what we typically associate with happiness. Furthermore, “destiny beliefs” about soul mates or love being meant to be can predict low forgiveness when paired with attachment anxiety.[32] Romance often hijacks our brains in a way that can cause the highs of elation or the depths of despair.[33] You might accurately say that falling in love is the start-up cost for happiness—an exhilarating but stressful stage we have to endure to get to the relationships that actually fulfill us. The secret to happiness isn’t falling in love; it’s staying in love, which depends on what psychologists call “companionate love”—love based less on passionate highs and lows and more on stable affection, mutual understanding, and commitment.[34] You might think “companionate love” sounds a little, well, disappointing. I certainly did the first time I heard it, on the heels of great efforts to win my future wife’s love. But over the past thirty years, it turns out that we don’t just love each other; we like each other, too. Once and always my romantic love, she is also my best friend.

In your next phase of life . . . What activities will you keep? What activities will you evolve and do differently? What activities will you let go of? What new activities will you learn? And to start . . . What will you commit to doing in the next week to evolve into the new you? What will you commit to doing in the next month? What will you commit to doing within six months? In a year, what will be the first fruits to appear as a result of your commitments?

As Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote in his joyful essay “Friendship,” I awoke this morning with devout thanksgiving for my friends, the old and the new. Shall I not call God the Beautiful, who daily showeth himself so to me in his gifts? I chide society, I embrace solitude, and yet I am not so ungrateful as not to see the wise, the lovely, and the noble-minded, as from time to time they pass my gate. Who hears me, who understands me, becomes mine—a possession for all time. An

the goal can’t be satisfied; the success addict is never “successful enough.” The high only lasts a day or two, and then it’s on to the next success hit. “Unhappy is he who depends on success to be happy,” wrote Alex Dias Ribeiro, a former famous Formula 1 race car driver. “For such a person, the end of a successful career is the end of the line. His destiny is to die of bitterness or to search for more success in other careers and to go on living from success to success until he falls dead. In this case, there will not be life after success.”[

Or take historians, the quintessential assemblers of existing facts and ideas. Weirdly, they fall way out of the typical range for decline, peaking 39.7 years after career inception, on average. Think what this implies: Say you intend to pursue a career as a professional historian and finish your PhD at thirty-two. The bad news is that in your fifties, you are still pretty wet behind the ears. But here’s the good news: at age seventy-two, you still have half your work to go! Better take care of your health so you can write your best books into your eighties.

There is one way to leave a legacy that will help you live better right now. In his book The Road to Character, the writer David Brooks (a friend, but no relation) distinguishes between “résumé virtues” and “eulogy virtues.”[10] Résumé virtues are professional and oriented toward earthly success. They require comparison with others. Eulogy virtues are ethical and spiritual and require no comparison. Your eulogy virtues are what you really would want people to talk about at your funeral. As in, “He was kind and deeply spiritual,” and not, “He had a lot of frequent flier miles.

Perhaps you don’t love your work, especially if you are past your prime and tormented. Perhaps it is like a tense marriage. Still, quitting feels like death or divorce, and before you do it, it is like standing at the edge of a cliff. You’re letting go of what you have, what you’ve built, a professional life that answers the question “Who am I?” It is a professional death with a rebirth that is uncertain. You are looking out over a precipice, unsure whether what awaits will bring net pleasure or pain—or, most likely, both. But you know what you have to do. Don’t think, dude. Just jump.

First, we should concentrate each day on the happiness portfolio: faith, family, community, and earned success through work. Teach it to those around you, and fight against the barriers to these things. Second, resist the worldly formula of misery, which is to use people and love things. Instead, remember your core values and live by the true formula: Love people and use things. Third, celebrate the free enterprise system, which creates abundance for the most people—especially the poor. But always remember that the love of money is the root of all evil, and that the ideal life requires abundance without attachment.

Without being aware of it, Carlos was making a distinction in relationships that Aristotle had made more than two thousand years earlier in his Nicomachean Ethics. Aristotle wrote that there is a kind of a friendship ladder, from lowest to highest. At the bottom—where emotional bonds are weakest and the benefits are lowest—are friendships based on utility: deal friends, to use Carlos’s coinage. You are friends in an instrumental way, one that helps each of you achieve something else you want, such as professional success. Higher up are friends based on pleasure. You are friends because of something you like and admire about the other person. They are entertaining, or funny, or beautiful, or smart, for example. In other words, you like an inherent quality, which makes it more elevated than a friendship of utility, but it is still basically instrumental. At the highest level is Aristotle’s “perfect friendship,” which is based on willing each other’s well-being and a shared love for something good and virtuous that is outside either of you. This might be a friendship forged around religious beliefs or passion for a social cause. What it isn’t is utilitarian. The other person shares in your passion, which is intrinsic, not instrumental. Of

I read an article in the New York Times in which the columnist Arthur C. Brooks cites a study arguing that, when it comes to politics, extremists are the happiest: “Correcting for income, education, age, race, family situation and religion, the happiest Americans are those who say they are either ‘extremely conservative’ (48 percent very happy) or ‘extremely liberal’ (35 percent). Everyone else is less happy, with the nadir at dead-center ‘moderate’ (26 percent).”2 Brooks presents this research as if it is surprising, but it seems obvious to me: The more conviction you have, the more sure you are of your place in the world. Unhappiness tends to lie with rumination, with doubt.

Once, my wife and I were at the home of close friends, eating and drinking out in their garden. It was dusk, and they asked us to gather around a plant with small, closed flowers. “Watch a flower,” one of them instructed. We did so, for about ten minutes, in complete silence. All at once, the flowers popped open, which we learned that they did every evening. We gasped in amazement and joy. It was a moment of intense satisfaction. But here’s the interesting thing: Unlike most of the junk on my old bucket list, that satisfaction endured. That memory still brings me joy—more so than many of my life’s earthly “accomplishments”—not because it was the culmination of a large goal, but because it was a small and serendipitous thrill. It was a tiny miracle that felt like a free gift, freely given.

So ask yourself: Which type of person do you want to be? One who declines with seeming indifference while suffering privately? Or one who—like Paul—acknowledges loss openly and yet maintains faith, believes in the power of love, and continues to serve others? Your decline, as painful as it is, should be experienced—and shared.

It’s a gift to exist, and with existence comes suffering,” replied Colbert. “I don’t want it to have happened . . . but if you are grateful for your life . . . then you have to be grateful for all of it. You can’t pick and choose what you’re grateful for.

Further, we have a tendency to assume that traumatic events, from accidents to illnesses to all kinds of personal loss, can only provoke pain and lingering problems, especially if we talk about them with others. However, this isn’t generally the case.

The key, as Colbert and Frankl suggest, is finding meaning in the suffering and sharing that meaning. I

He opened up a new world in music,” said French Romantic master Hector Berlioz, who idolized the deaf composer. “Beethoven is not human.”[23]

Joy! A spark of fire from heaven . . . Drunk with fire we dare to enter, Holy One, inside your shrine.

For example, when asked in 2009 what “being old” means, the most popular response among Americans was “turning eighty-five.”[2] In other words, the average American (who lives to seventy-nine) dies six years before entering old age.

But family, friends, work, and faith are the Big Four on which almost everything else rests.

Fulfillment cannot come when the present moment is little more than a struggle to bear in order to attain the future, because that future is destined to become nothing more than the struggle of a new present, and the glorious end state never arrives. The focus must be on the walk that is life with its string of present moments.

What accounts for family conflict? Generally, it is a misalignment between how family members view their relationships and the roles that they each play—in other words, mismatched expectations. For example, parents tend to see the benefit of family bonds primarily in terms of shared love; children generally view the benefit in terms of exchanges of assistance. According to research, fathers report higher levels of involvement in the relationship than their kids perceive.[5] Similarly, children tend to think that they are doing more to help than their parents think they are.[6] All of this creates resentment, which is only natural when people you love fail to meet your expectations; it is exacerbated when the other party doesn’t even seem to notice.

feels like a kind of weakness to lean on spirituality after a lifetime of holding up oneself. And if there’s one thing strivers hate, it’s weakness. As I have shown in this chapter, however, wanting spiritual depth is not a weakness, it is a new source of strength—strength needed to jump to the crystallized intelligence curve.

Epicurus (341–270 BCE) led a school of thought named after himself—Epicureanism—that argued that a happy life requires two things: ataraxia (freedom from mental disturbance) and aponia (the absence of physical pain).

happiness is rooted in words related to fortune or positive fate.

In fact, happiness comes from the Old Norse happ, which means “luck.”[6] Meanwhile, in Latin-based languages, the term comes from felicitas, which referred in ancient Rome not just to good luck but also to growth, fertility, and prosperity.

1. I feel my competence declining 2. Those close to me begin to notice that I am not as sharp as I used to be 3. Other people receive the social and professional attention I used to receive 4. I have to decrease my workload and step back from daily activities I once completed with ease 5. I am no longer able to work 6. Many people I meet do not recognize me or know me for my previous work