I teach at Harvard University’s business school. People usually assume that I teach something practical, such as finance, accounting, or marketing. When I tell people that I teach happiness, they think I’m lying because that doesn’t seem like part of a business curriculum. Most people think it’s a weird thing to study, but the neuroscience, social psychology, behavioral economics, and strategies that make up the science of happiness can elevate people who, in turn, can lift others.
My class is an elective course with 180 students enrolled and 400 on the waiting list. There also was an illegal Zoom link for my class, which the students think I was not aware of. I love it when my students’ parents watch the Zoom lectures because happiness is what everybody wants. The question is, How do we get it?
On the first day of class, I start with this question: “What is happiness?”
My students always say the same things: “Happiness is the feeling I get when I’m with people I love” or “Happiness is how I feel when I’m doing what I enjoy.”
And I respond, “Beautiful. That’s lovely. That’s wrong.”
Happiness is not a feeling—and that’s very good news. Happiness has feelings associated with it, but the feelings are not the happiness. Feelings are evidence of happiness. If your happiness were feelings, you’d be chasing feelings for the rest of your life. That’s what most people do, and that’s the reason they’re so frustrated. They try to get rid of negative emotions, which is no way to live. Furthermore, getting rid of negative emotions is dangerous. You need them to keep you safe.
Let’s define happiness, and then I’ll share strategies to pursue it more meaningfully, strategically, and seriously.
Three Macronutrients
What’s in a Thanksgiving dinner? You might say turkey, stuffing, and potatoes. Or—if you’re a nutrition nerd like I am—you’d say, “Thanksgiving dinner is protein, carbohydrates, and fat.” That’s not very romantic, but that’s the truth. Those are called macronutrients, and all food is based on a threefold macronutrient profile.
I’m not here to give a nutrition lecture, but this is a perfect metaphor for happiness. Happiness has three macronutrients: enjoyment, satisfaction, and meaning. And you need all three in abundance.
Enjoyment
Happiness is not a destination; it’s a direction. People often say enjoyment is pleasure. That’s wrong. Pleasure is an animal phenomenon, an impulse. Enjoyment is a human phenomenon, almost a divine phenomenon. Back in the 1960s the hippies used to say, “If it feels good, do it,” but that’s the perfect strategy for ruining your life.
The human brain is divided into basically three functions. At the lowest level of evolution is the detection category, in which you’re doing autonomic things: breathing, walking, talking. The lower-order parts of your brain are detecting signals the same way a lower-order animal, such as a snake or a lizard, would.
The second part of the brain, the limbic system, was developed between 2 and 40 million years ago. We take these lower-order signals and turn them into emotions, feelings, cravings, and desires. There are no such things as good or bad feelings. There are positive and negative emotions that are dedicated to telling you if something is a threat or an opportunity. That’s it. You should not think about having fewer bad feelings. It’s just information.
The third function comes with what you do with your emotions. You send them to the most human part of your brain—the neocortex—which has only been in its current state for 250,000 years and oversees functions such as perception, cognition, reasoning, and language. The most advanced part of the neocortex is called the prefrontal cortex, a bumper of brain tissue right behind your forehead—the C-suite of your brain. There’s no computer that is currently on the face of the earth or that will ever exist that can come anywhere near the creation that is inside your head. It’s an incredible miracle.
Pleasure is limited. It’s what will make you survive another day and what will make it more likely for you to have offspring. That’s all pleasure is. If you’re tapping pleasure centers all day long, that will lead to addiction. Pleasure isn’t bad; it’s just incomplete as a life goal. If you want happiness, you need to add two things to your pleasure: people and memory. That’s why you don’t eat Thanksgiving dinner by yourself in your apartment. You have it with your family. That’s where enjoyment comes from.
Satisfaction
Satisfaction is the joy that you get after you struggle for something. It’s the weirdest human thing. Humans want to struggle for things—they even want to suffer. The reward is sweeter the more you struggle, which is hard to explain, but you know it’s true. My students could very easily cheat on their exams and get A’s, but they wouldn’t get any satisfaction. I told my kids when they were little, “Don’t snack before dinner because you’ll spoil your dinner.” That really means if you have a little hunger, food will taste better.
My father-in-law passed away at 89 years old. He was born in 1929 in Barcelona and lived through the Spanish Civil War from 1936 to 1939. His family suffered a lot. He spent a couple of years in a refugee camp in France and had family members who were assassinated.
One time he said, “Do you want to know why people aren’t happy anymore? They don’t enjoy their dinner because they’re never hungry. In my day, the best day of the year was Christmas because we saved up food all autumn and would eat it all on Christmas. It was the only day of the year that we weren’t hungry, and it was wonderful.”
I don’t want hunger in the world, but I take the point that we need suffering so the reward is that much sweeter. Understanding that is something we need on our own path to happiness. The paradox of needing to struggle is weird enough, but the mystery gets even deeper after you get your satisfaction, because you think that if something happens that you work and struggle for that you’re going to enjoy it forever. But you’re not.
The Rolling Stones sing, “I can’t get no satisfaction.” But you can get it. The problem is you can’t keep satisfaction. People often say in our society, “If you marry me, you’ll make me happy for the rest of my life.” It doesn’t work that way. Marrying might—not because someone said yes to marriage, but because the couple worked on it together for the rest of their lives.
Mother Nature has two goals for us: survival and gene propagation. She does not care if you’re happy; happiness is part of the divine path in your life. The formula that’s inside your head for happiness and satisfaction is to have more—more worldly goals, more money, more promotions, more prestige, more admiration.
But that doesn’t work because it leads to a hedonic treadmill. Hedonic means feeling, which is fleeting because you’re always running on your treadmill. You get ahead by one inch, but if you stop, you go backward, which is why billionaires are unsatisfied when they make their first billion and conclude they need another billion.
That’s an illusion you can break if you think about a better formula: Your satisfaction is not all your haves. Your satisfaction is a function of all your haves divided by your wants. Here’s the real secret to increasing satisfaction: Manage the denominator, your earthly wants. A wants-management strategy doesn’t come naturally to people. We don’t want to manage wants; we want more haves. You’ve learned this principle in Sunday School since you were a child, but we have to put it into practice in practical ways.
When I was younger, I used to have a bucket list—a metaphor that holds all your worldly ambitions, cravings, and desires. The idea is that it motivates you to do more. The problem is that it makes you feel inadequate because it’s blowing up the denominator. It makes you want more. Here’s what I do instead: I have a reverse bucket list. I write down all the things I want, and I cross out those things. I don’t want those things to be governed by my limbic system. I want to move the management of the desires into my prefrontal cortex where I can manage the desire, and the desire does not manage me.
One of the things that I’m putting on my reverse bucket list is a bunch of political opinions because they’re holding me back. I’m too attached to being right. I’m going to cross out my political opinions, and I’m going to gain more friends. I still hold the opinion, but I’m not attached to it. That opens me and my heart up, and I’m going to be happier. That’s the secret to lasting satisfaction.
Meaning
Meaning is the why questions in life. I’m going to give you a two-question exam to interrogate whether you have adequate meaning in your life. This is the exam I give to my students—a lot of them are suffering, and they figure out why when I give them this exam.
Question 1: Why are you alive?
Question 2: For what would you be willing to die?
When somebody finds the answers to those questions, it’s like watching a miracle unfold in front of you—a transformation. The day that you gain a conviction of those answers, your life changes. That’s meaning.
Happiness Strategies
Why are some people naturally happier than others? Because they have different metabolisms for happiness. I can give any two of you the same Thanksgiving dinner and one person would gain more weight than the other because you have different metabolisms for calories. Metabolisms are based on genetics, circumstances, and habits. The same thing is true for happiness.
Genetics
Genetics matter a lot—your genetics are about 50 percent of your baseline happiness. Maybe that’s depressing to you, but it should be empowering. If you come from a gloomy family, you can manage your habits more effectively. We get this data from studies of identical twins who were adopted at birth into separate families. Then we look at their personalities when they’re 40 years old; we’ve developed a perfect statistical method that decides what parts of their personalities are genetic and what parts are circumstance.
The tendency to abuse drugs and alcohol is 50 percent genetic, but I have a special technique that can turn that genetic tendency to zero: Don’t drink. Habits are powerful, but you also must know your tendencies.
Circumstances
The second part of your general happiness level is circumstance, and most people think circumstances are everything. If I can get the job, if I can get the promotion, if I can get the marriage, if I can get the kids, then happiness will fall into place. But that’s not true because of the hedonic treadmill—your satisfaction won’t last. Twenty-five percent of your happiness is due to your circumstances, but they’re very temporary.
Habits
Pay attention to your good habits; they let you directly manage 25 percent of your happiness. I could give you thousands of strategies, but there are four main areas to focus on: your faith, your family, your friendships, and your work.
If you serve a mission for your faith, you are spreading happiness. Data shows that missionaries are Christian apostles and witnesses, but they’re also happiness apostles and witnesses. Thank you for making the world a happier place with your mission work. It’s a great gift.
The second part is family life. Family is the mystical relationships that are important to all of us and that we didn’t choose. There’s a neuropeptide in the brain called oxytocin that links us to our kin, almost magically. The biology is not important; what’s important is the common experience we have with the people who we love, who are related to us, or who are given to us as a gift.
Third is friendship—the people who really know you and love you. I work with CEOs all day; they’re the loneliest people I’ve ever met. Leaders are never alone, but they’re lonely because they don’t have many real friends. You need people who just love you, and that’s the kind of friendship that will reliably be a happiness habit.
Finally, your work. By work, I don’t mean the type of job that you have, the money that you make, or your title. You need two things to make you happier in your job. First, you need to believe that you’re earning your success—that you’re creating value in your life and value in the lives of other people and that you are acknowledged and rewarded for it. Second, you need to serve. You need to believe that you are needed. If you have those things, your job will bring you joy.
If people believe they’re earning success and serving others, they won’t quit. That’s what we all need. That’s what we’re destined to be as those who are in the service of our fellow human beings; typically, the best way we can do that is the way we earn our daily bread. Faith, family, friends, and work—that’s what we need to think about each day.
Spreading Happiness
Here are the points I want you to remember.
Number one, you can’t be perfectly happy, but you can be happier—and that starts with understanding enjoyment. You need an enjoyment maximization—not a pleasure maximization—strategy in your life. This means managing your wants, not just your haves, and it means answering two questions: Why am I alive? For what would I be willing to die? The happiness habits are fourfold, but they all come down to one big principle: love. Happiness is love. If you can’t remember what to do, just love more.
If you want to make your work into a holy vocation, you need to earn your success. Most importantly, you need to serve other people. This is something we need to teach if we’re ultimately going to remember it. Many of you have served missions. Missions are teaching operations, and the person who is the greatest beneficiary is the apostle. You want to be happier? Bring happiness to others; explain happiness to others. Help people understand how they can change their habits and encourage them to become teachers. You’re happier, they’re happier, and we have a movement.
Every Thursday morning, I have a column published in the Atlantic called How to Build a Life. It always contains three tips for habit change—all validated by science—but you must do them. You can’t just understand them. You have to participate. It’s an active sport, this happiness business. Thinking about how you can do these things and then actually going out and doing them is the key to everything.
My mission is to lift people and bring them together in bonds of happiness and love using science and ideas, but I can’t do this by myself. Join me as a professor of happiness, and let’s start by teaching these ideas to others.
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Q&A
Question:
Do the things you teach about happiness apply to people who are experiencing clinical depression, anxiety, or another mental illness?
Answer:
Mood disorders are an outsized, exaggerated form of normal negative emotion. I teach the neuroscience of emotion, and it’s important to understand that you do not want to eradicate negative feelings because that would be dangerous. Negative emotions come in four varieties: fear, anger, sadness, and disgust. You need all four to keep you safe. The problem is that they can be maladaptive. However, when somebody tells you that you have a condition as if it were a binary switch, that’s wrong. All of these emotions—positive and negative—are dials, not switches. The problem comes when they’re turned up so high that they interfere with the way you live your life. That’s when you need help from other people.
Remember, having negative, aversive emotions does not make you weird or broken. It makes you human. Those of you who are Christian like I am, we worship a God who suffers. Are you joining in the sufferings of the Savior? There’s nothing wrong with you. On the contrary, you have the divine within you.
We have all sorts of ways negative emotions can be turned up so high that they interfere with our ability to engage in our daily activities—what we call generalized anxiety or clinical depression. That’s when we need help. There’s nothing wrong with getting help, but there’s nothing strange about the existence of the emotion either. Anxiety and sadness are part of your daily journey. I tell my students, “You study at Harvard. If you’re not stressed and sad, then you need therapy.” More or less, that’s the case for all of us.
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Speech by Arthur Brooks
Illustrations by Alexei Vella
About the Speaker
Arthur Brooks is an author, a professor, a public intellectual, and a former president of the American Enterprise Institute. Since 2019, Brooks has served as the Parker Gilbert Montgomery Professor of the Practice of Nonprofit and Public Leadership at the Harvard Kennedy School. He is also a professor of management practice and a faculty fellow at Harvard Business School. He coauthored his most recent book, Build the Life You Want, with Oprah Winfrey. These remarks were adapted from a presentation Brooks gave at BYU on March 28, 2024.
