THE ASPEN INSTITUTE

ASPEN IDEAS FESTIVAL 2014

A FORMULA FOR HAPPINESS
Paepcke Auditorium
Aspen, Colorado

Wednesday, July 2, 2014

LIST OF PARTICIPANTS:
ELLIOT GERSON
Executive Vice President of Policy and Public
Programs, International Partners
The Aspen Institute
ARTHUR C. BROOKS
President of the American Enterprise Institute,
Social Scientist and Musician
* * * * *
A FORMULA FOR HAPPINESS
MR. GERSON: Ladies and gentlemen, if you could please
take your seats. We're going to get started in just a minute. Before I
introduce our guest, let me just say a little bit about this new feature of the
Ideas Festival. Some of you may have gone to the Aspen Lecture
yesterday, and a few of you may have been to some in the first session.
But one of the things we decided to do as part of our 10th
anniversary of Festivals was to add a feature that many of you had asked
for in the surveys that we do after the festival. You all know that the
standard style of things we do here at Aspen is informal, casual,

moderated conversation, and it always will be. But many people have
asked that they have an opportunity to have deeper and longer dives into
particular topics with some of our most extraordinary speakers.
So we decided to create a new feature and offer it daily which
we are calling the Aspen Lecture. Now we're going to brand it as such
and we're going to distribute it as such. So these lectures are all here in
Paepcke so we can videotape them, and we hope that they will have a
long and distinguished life on the web.
As wonderful as moderated conversations are to watch when
you are in the room, many people find them harder to watch online
afterwards. But that really isn't the case with lectures.
The lecturer we've invited today is familiar to many of you.
Arthur Brooks is the president of the American Enterprise Institute. He has
led the AEI to extraordinary success in his tenure. Before he came to AEI,
he was a professor at Syracuse. He taught economics and social
entrepreneurship. He's written I think at least 10 books including the Road
to Freedom: How to Win the Fight for Free Enterprise.
You also know him through his frequent articles in The Wall
Street Journal, and delighted to say increasingly in The New York Times as
well. He's also one of those few people who actually could be at -- as
much at home here on our campus as across the way at our neighbor's
campus at the Aspen Music Festival and School because his early career
he was actually a classical musician.
I'm also delighted to say that we have a very special
relationship with the AEI. For the last several years we've had an AEI Day
here on the Aspen campus. We're going to do it again this year. I think
it's August 15th. I'm not sure exactly the date, but I hope we'll see many of
you back at that.
It's my great pleasure to introduce Arthur Brooks.
(Applause)

MR. BROOKS: Thank you all. Thanks a lot. Thank you, Elliot.
It's an honor to be here at the Aspen Ideas Festival and to be with all of
you. Thank you for giving me an hour of your time. This distinguished
festival has led the fight for better ideas, bringing new ideas to audiences
now for this last decade.
And what a wonderful relationship it is for my institution, the
American Enterprise Institute, to be part of this. I'm going to talk not about
public policy very much today; I'm going to talk about something that's
deeper than policy. I'm going to talk about something that all of us share
which is our desire to be happy people.
And I'm going to start by asking you to think of somebody in
your life who's happy all the time. You know the person, you've got in
your head. It's very annoying. This is -(Laughter)
MR. BROOKS: You know, you work with her, you studied in
school with her, whoever it is, right? And they have this secret, and you
think to yourself, what have you got -- what is the secret to your happiness?
And you always want to know. You know, that person is my wife. I live
with that person. See, she's an optimist, and I've been living with this for
decades.
And for a long time I tried to figure out what actually it is that
she was doing that I wasn't seeing so I could get part of it. Let me give
you an example, okay? This is a true life example from last December.
We -- my wife and I, we have a houseful of teenagers, so you know, pity
us.
And we were coming back from a parent-teacher conference
that had gone sadly wrong, right? I know some of you experienced this.
And you know, it was a big grades problem with my son who is 14, had
big grades problem. So you know, we're talking to the director of the
school, and -- ugh.
And we got into the car afterward and it was a lot of

unresolved issues and I was driving and there was this icy silence. She's
sitting on the passenger side. Finally, she breaks the silence, she says, here
is how we need to think about it. At least we know he's not cheating.
(Laughter)
MR. BROOKS: See, that's an optimist. That's a naturally
happy person. What's the secret to that is my topic today. I want to tell
you about the best research on happiness, on your happiness, and mine. I
want to tell you what we can't change and what we can, and if I do my
job, you're going to leave in an hour and you're going to have four things
that you can do for the rest of the day and the rest of the week and the rest
of your life. They're going to make you a happier person.
So let's get started. Now, there are 30 years of books and
articles about the subject of happiness. A bunch of you have read them,
right? I've read them all, kind of so you don't have to, right? And 200 or
so articles and books on this subject of human happiness, economists,
psychologists, et cetera. And the most interesting thing that you find is the
similarity in the patterns of who is happy.
You think the most interesting question is who is happy, right,
how many people are happy. It's not a very interesting question because
it never changes. You find no matter how you measure, you can measure
it scientifically with functional MRI machines, or you know, these great
studies that take husbands and wives and they separate them into separate
rooms and they'll ask them independently about the happiness of the other,
right, and see if they lie.
And -- or you could just ask them in large-scale surveys
anonymously where you get -- and you execute the questions well and do
all the survey methodology the way you're supposed to, you find the same
thing in all of these studies. About a third of Americans, every year, say
that they are very happy, okay, very happy about their lives. Now, that
doesn't mean right now, that just means all things considered, given the
ups and downs, are you very happy about your life?
Yes, about a third of Americans. About half of Americans say

they're somewhat happy and the rest say they're not happy, okay? 10 to
15 percent of the population is not happy. So the interesting question isn't
who's happy because we know the answer to that and it's been stable.
Doesn't matter who's been president, it doesn't matter how the economy is
doing very much, people basically give the same responses year after
year.
Now, one of the things I'm really interested in, but I'm not going
to talk about very much today actually is unhappiness. And so for those of
you who read The New York Times I have a column monthly about not just
the news cycle, about sort of bigger issues, and my column in 2 weeks is
going to be about the subject of unhappiness.
So I'll give you a little preview if you'd like to read about this
topic. Of the 10 to 15 percent of Americans who say they're very
unhappy, the biggest single reason for unhappiness which is not the same
as happiness -- they're processed in different hemispheres of the brain these
cognitions as a matter of fact, but the biggest single reason that people
say that they are unhappy is loneliness, okay, loneliness.
Now, I bring that up because I'm going to come back to that
in the subject of happiness a little bit later, okay? But 20 percent of
Americans say that loneliness systematically makes them unhappy about
their lives, and it's especially true for men, okay? So we're going to have
to keep that in mind because there's something that we can do about that
as we move on and we go on our study of happiness.
Okay, the really interesting question about happiness is not
how many people are happy, it's what causes it, and we know the
answer. Happiness comes from three things. The three things are
genetics, circumstances, and values, okay, or actions, values and actions,
okay? And I'm going to tell you about all three and I think you'll find it
useful because knowledge in this is power.
So let's start with genetics. You know, for the longest time I
didn't want to think that my genetics affected my happiness. I didn't want
to think that my genetics affected anything because I'm an American and I
want to control everything, right? I mean, I can imagine my -- you know,

my grandfather steaming into the New York Harbor. He wasn't saying,

sure hope I can get a better system of forced income redistribution.
(Laughter)
MR. BROOKS: He was saying -- no. No, no. He was saying
I'm going to do it myself, I'm going to build this thing myself. I'm going to
be the person that I want to be notwithstanding the fact that I'm poor and
I'm an orphan, and you know, fill in the blanks. That was your -- most of
your ancestors were saying the same thing.
So as an American I want to have control over everything,
right, but I've got to face facts. And I look at the data and I look at the
studies, and it turns out that genetics matter a lot in your whole personality.
How do we know? There are psychologists at the University of
Minnesota, social psychologists that have done incredible studies looking
at twins. And in specific they have a database of identical twins that were
separated at birth, and they were adopted into different families and then
given personality tests independently at the age of 40.
They were born between 1936 and 1955. Okay, when
they're aged 40 having -- identical twins, carbon copies genetically, you
get them back together at 40 and ask them about their values and their
personalities, and you're seeing all these stories that have all the kind of
funny things, they smoke the same brand of cigarettes; you know, they
have -- their wives have the same name, you know, weird stuff like that.
Who cares?
It turns out the stuff that matters is creepily similar as well. What
we learned from this is every part of your personality that we test, which
part is nature and which part is nurture? How much of how your vote is
genetic? 40 percent, 40 percent. How much of how religious you are is
genetic? 40 percent. Turns out how much your particular religion is
affected by genetics is 0 percent, but how religious you are is 40 percent.
Your outgoing personality, your neuroticism, your tendency
toward alcohol abuse, your proclivity toward criminality, all of that stuff is
more than 50 percent genetic. And your happiness, 48 percent; 48

percent of your moods -- you know those moods you always turn back to
when your spouse says you're always such a grouch. You know, these
good things happen to you in your career and you get a raise and you
get a promotion, and you know, we bought that beautiful house in Aspen,
and you're still a grouch, all right?
That's because 48 percent of it comes from your parents. It's
their fault.
(Laughter)
MR. BROOKS: Yeah, I told my happy wife that, and she said,
see, it's true, your mother did make you unhappy.
(Laughter)
MR. BROOKS: So 48 percent of this stuff is genetic. Happy
people have happy kids, all right? But there are other innate qualities that
are -- innate characteristics of people that matter like genetics. They're not
genetic, but one of the biggest ones, one of the most interesting ones is
gender, right?
And so here's a question. Social scientists have been asking
this one for generations now. Who is happier, men or women? What's
your guess?
SPEAKERS: Men.
MR. BROOKS: That's right. So I heard -(Laughter)
MR. BROOKS: If we took a vote it would be overwhelming, so
-- but I did hear both men and women and that more or less exhausts the
possibilities, right?
(Laughter)

MR. BROOKS: You know, so what do the data say? The

data say women. But women have been converging on the happiness
level of men. For generations women were happier than men, but it -- and
it's not because they're converging now, not because men are getting
happier, but because women are converging on the misery of men.
Now, why? Social scientists won't touch that one with a 20foot pole, why women are getting unhappier. I'm going to leave it to you,
and maybe in the Q-and-A you're going to tell me why. And maybe I'll
write an Op-Ed about it in The New York Times. So women are happier
than men, and I've studied that actually looking at marital status.
I love looking at it with respect to marital status because it tells
you a lot about how we view life. Single women are happier than single
men. Married women are happier than married men. Widowed women
are way happier than widowed men, okay?
(Laughter)
MR. BROOKS: Yeah. I told that one to my wife and she said,
"Huh, no kidding."
(Laughter)
MR. BROOKS: The only group of women who are not happier
than men are divorced women, and there's actually an explanation for
that which is typically when men and women are divorced, women have
sole custody of kids or most of the custody of kids, and working and taking
care of kids at the same time is very stressful. So there is what we call in
social science an exogenous explanation for that.
It's not because of these natural gender differences. Women
basically are happier than men. Now, there's another related question
that I find really interesting, and you'll see why in a minute, and that is the
average unhappiest age in a man's life. We know this one, tons of studies
on this. I've looked at the national data and I know because I've looked
at these data very carefully that there is an average distinct unhappiest age
in a man's life.

Women don't have it very much. Women are over the years
more stable than men. Men are all over the place. Men are a mess at
particularly one age. When is it? When is the average unhappiest age in
a man's life?
SPEAKERS: (Inaudible) over 40.
MR. BROOKS: Yeah, you're really converging on the solution.
Somebody's read my books. That said, that's not fair. So 40 -- actually
it's 45. It's creeping up, but it's 45, all right? Okay, 45. How many men
in here are under 45, less than 45, okay? Yeah, you guys are on your
way down.
(Laughter)
MR. BROOKS: Yeah, yeah. Forty-five; so, 45, what's the
deal? Okay, now, looking at that, social psychologists have these really
pat explanations that are not very convincing. I talked to one of my
colleagues at Syracuse, you know, how come 45-year-old guys are so
bummed out? And he gave me all these kind of jargony, you know, the
attenuation of traditional family relationships, blah, blah, blah, I didn't
know what he was talking about.
And I said, you know, put it to me in basic language that an
economist can understand. And he said that's when your wife figures out
definitively that you're boring. All right?
(Laughter)
MR. BROOKS: Yeah, there's got to be more. There's got to be
more. So I went and searched. I went and searched. I got the data, I
looked to myself, and here's actually what's going on. It's not -- don't fear,
young guys out here, it's not all 45-year-old men who are really in the
dumps. No. It's a sizeable minority, close to a quarter who are really
struggling.
So what I want to know is what's going on with them. And I

want to know about the 45-year-old guys who are doing great too
because then I can find some secrets to what we should do behaviorally,
how we should live our lives. And what you find out about the guys who
are 45 and they're having a hard time is basically this; when you're in
your 20s and you're in your 30s, both men and women increasingly, but
traditionally more men, life and its goals are actually simple.
You want to do better, you want to be happier, you want to be
more successful, hit the gas on your career. Make more money, get the
promotions. If you want to -- if you need to move cities, you need to go
from LA to Chicago, you do it. You pick up your family and you move,
right, do it, follow your career.
And things are great and that seems to work. And then guys at
their mid-40s and they say, whoa, I'm on the wrong road. I mean, this
superhighway I've been cruising down, I don't want to be on this
highway, I want to be on a road that I chose. I want to be on that little
dirt road over there, right? There's a guy on it, on a motorcycle, okay?
No helmet, okay?
(Laughter)
MR. BROOKS: I want to be that guy. I mean, he's doing it his
way. He chose that little road. I want to be that guy, but I don't -- I'm a
lawyer and I don't want to be a lawyer. You hear it again and again
and I know some of you guys are lawyers, sorry, right? And so here's my
real question, who is the guy on the motorcycle, and what's he doing
right?
That's the real question for us today. And you know what, I
know who he is. He's me. And I'm going to tell you how that happened.
It's -- you know, Elliot kind of alluded to it a minute ago. See, I need to
start off saying, you know, when I was a little kid, a 6-year-old boy saying
when I grow up I want to run a rightwing think tank. No, no -- no, I mean
-(Laughter)

MR. BROOKS: Yeah. I wanted to be a musician, right, I

wanted to be a -- I really wanted to be a French horn player because I
started playing French horn actually when I was actually about 8 years
old, and I was really good at it and I loved music and I loved the arts.
And I went to Tanglewood every year when I was in high school. I should
have come here. And what happened was I went to college, when I was
19, and I immediately dropped out, right, dropped out, kicked out,
splitting hairs. And -(Laughter)
MR. BROOKS: And -- some of my colleagues from AEI are
watching this going, "Really?" You know -- and I went on the road as a
French horn player and I traveled all over the place, you know, I saw all
50 states. And I traveled in dozens of foreign countries and I played
concerts all over the place. And I toured with a -- for a little while with a
guitar player named Charlie Byrd, who introduced bossa nova to the
United States.
It was great stuff. I mean, it was -- I loved it, and I wound up in
the Barcelona Symphony, okay? And it was wonderful time. And actually
I went to Barcelona because I was chasing a girl and -- who was a rock
and roller, and it worked. We got married and we're having our 23rd
wedding anniversary.
(Laughter)
MR. BROOKS: She's the happy one, right, I mean she's -- so I
mean, talk about success, it was great, right? But when I was about 28,
and I was in the Barcelona Symphony, I started looking around and I
thought, you know, this is good now, but I think it's not going to be so
good later. How did I know? Because I was working with all these guys
in their mid-40's and they weren't very happy. A lot of them weren't very
happy.
I mean, some of them were, but I thought I bet I'm going to be
one of those guys who's saying I don't want to play the same music over
and over again, I want to try something else. So I hatched a plan. I said

good now, but later when I'm that age I want to be doing something
different. And I made a plan to go back to school, to get my college
degree, and I called up my dad, and I said, dad -- he was in Seattle, I
grew up in Seattle, and it was this long-distance call in those days. I said,
Dad, I've got big news. I'm going to drop out of the orchestra. I'm going
to quit music. You know, I'm going to go study math or poetry or
economics. I don't know, I'm going to improve my mind, and maybe I'll
be a college professor like you -- my dad was a college professor. And
there was silence, silence on the line, right?
And he says, what are you talking about? You know, you
started a family. You are doing well in your career. You can't do that.
You can't just quit. It's very irresponsible. Why? Why? And I said
because you know what, I don't think I'm going to be happy, right, and
that's a killer, right, killer argument. I'm not going to be happy. You know
what he says? What makes you so special?
(Laughter)
MR. BROOKS: But it was the right thing to do. I found it, but I
found it by accident. And if we want to actually turn this into something
really good, we can't do it by accident like I did. We've got to figure out
what the structural equations of that are so that we can pass on the secret
to the best life, so I can teach my kids about that so that we can spread
this around. And that's where we're going.
And I'm going to tell you what the secret turned out to be that I
accidentally found, but it's going to take about 9 more minutes. I'll have
to tell you about something first.
So 48 percent of your happiness, genetic. The big thing that
you think affects your happiness is events and circumstances, right? If only
this thing would happen, then I'd be a happy person. When I was
teaching at Syracuse, I would ask my graduate students what would make
you happy? What would give you permanently a happier life, right?
They would say things like if only I could graduate with my
degree and find a really good and stable job, then I'd be happy, right? If

only I can convince my girlfriend to marry me, then I'll permanently be

happy. Big events, right? Now, if you ask people in New Jersey where
they would most like to live, they'll usually say Colorado or California.
California, right?
Now, why? It's not the taxes. It's the weather. It's beautiful,
right? So the real question is how much of circumstance, of doing these
big things, of attaining your goals, and little things too, right, that make
you happy or unhappy as the day goes by. You know, you get a nasty email from a colleague or family member that really brings you down, how
much of that actually does affect your happiness? How much of the big
and little things that are good affect your happiness?
And we know the answer. At any given time, it's 40 percent of
your happiness. You are thrown across the seas of your circumstances;
40 percent of your happiness. It's a ton. So looking at that my advice
should be follow your dreams. Pursue your goals. I mean, that's really
traditional stuff, right? Real chestnuts in the happiness literature. Figure out
your goals and chase these goals.
That's wrong. That's wrong. Why? Not because the goals
don't matter, not because goals aren't good, not because you won't do
better things if you have good and nutritious and happy and life-fulfilling
goals. The reason is because it doesn't last, the effect doesn't last. I talked
to you about a minute ago about weather in California.
There are these wonderful studies that ask how long you'll be
happier if you actually move there. Six months. Six months. Taxes are
forever. Sunshine, 6 months, right? Don't do it. Don't do it, right? You're
doing it right, you've been spending your summers in Aspen, I mean,
you're the smart ones, right?
So why is this? And the answer is because we're very
adaptable. We always go back to our -- the moods to which -- it gets
back to the 48 percent issue effectively is what's going on. And the most
wonderful study that points this out, my favorite study on the subject comes
from Northwestern University. Social psychologists at Northwestern, they
studied two groups of people. Perhaps you've heard about this study. I

mean, it's ancient, 1978, but it's so good that people still talk about it a
lot.
They looked at paraplegics and they looked at lottery winners,
okay? And they wanted to know 6 months after the punctuating event of
their lives, what happened to their happiness. Okay, now first
paraplegics. The interesting thing is 6 months after their accident their
happiness had returned almost all the way to where it was the day before
that accident. Incredible.
Now, you're thinking I don't want to do anything -- I would do
anything, I would die before I would lose all my mobility. I bet some of
you would say that, right? No, you wouldn't. If this happened to you, 6
months later you would be you. That's a beautiful thing. Your happiness
is not about your ability to walk, it's who you are as a person, it's your soul
that actually makes this what it is.
It's very encouraging. The more interesting case perhaps is
lottery. So you know, if you won the lottery, what would you do? That's
a typical party game. You want to break the ice with people you don't
know? Go around the room. If you hit the lottery, what would you do?
It's a window on to the soul, right?
I've done it a million times. I used to do it because of what I
study, I used to do it in my classes, and I would ask my students, you
know, if you won the lottery, what would you do? They all say the same
things, right, I would travel, I would see the world, I would finish my
degree without going into debt, I would finally write that book. People
say that. You know, when young men are trying to impress women, you
know what they say? I'd start a foundation. Okay.
(Laughter)
MR. BROOKS: No, you wouldn't.
(Laughter)
MR. BROOKS: So here's the thing to notice. They always say

great things, great things. I won the lottery, good things are going to
happen, right? Now, here's what nobody has ever said, right? If I won
the lottery, it's so great, I think I'd start by buying a bunch of junk I don't
want or need. And then, then I get sort of hooked up romantically with
somebody who is just using me, but doesn't love me, right?
(Laughter)
MR. BROOKS: And then the best part of all, I'd start a nasty
alcoholic spiral, okay? That's what happens. That's what happens.
People hit the lottery, you've read all the stories, and it turns out they're
true. Now, here's the interesting thing from the 1978 study. You look at
people who hit the lottery; 6 months later, their happiness about every day
life is lower than it was the day before they won.
So I mean, not radically lower, but they just enjoy day to day
life less and permanently than the day before they won. Now, how do
you measure that? You say how much do you enjoy shopping, hanging
out with family, playing sports, goofing around with your friends, going on
a bike ride, watching a game? The answer is less, less. It's as if the
circuits have been blown out by this big experience and nothing gives you
full flavor ever again.
You know, think about what you're really looking forward to
this coming weekend. I bet if you told me, it would sound really boring. It
would be, I'm going to have dinner with somebody I love. I'm going to
spend the afternoon with people I'm really interested in and we're going to
talk about these dumb, trivial things. It's relationships. It's the love in your
life, that's what gives you enjoyment.
And that's what gets blown out by this big experience for
people we see in the data who have hit the lottery. And that's the reason
that we have these life ruining behaviors. Because they're looking for the
life in life, and it's gone, they substitute it with these audacious and
preposterous things like buying stuff they don't want or need, turning to
drugs and alcohol, inappropriate relationships.
That's actually what happens. The best thing that can happen

to you when you buy a lottery ticket is that you don't win.
(Laughter)
MR. BROOKS: So where are we? Circumstances, don't rely
on them, men, set your goals, but don't set your life rudder toward trying to
be happy as -- on the basis of this. And so where are we? 48
percentage genetic; 40 percent is circumstantial, but you shouldn't be
trying to count on that. You've got 12 percent left. You've got 12 percent
of your happiness left. Better use it right, right? The stakes are high for not
messing it up.
Here's how I figured that one out. I had this friend, this buddy.
I used to teach with him right after we finished our Ph.D.s and we were in
academia together. We were in our early 30s and he -- mid-30s, and he
was -- he had this weird thing happen to him. He went to the doctor, and
the doctor told him he had 15 years left to live. That's a weird thing to
hear. It was because of a congenital -- I mean, it's like you've got 6
months, you've got your whole life, no, no, 15 years; he had a congenital
heart defect that had no known cure at the time, all right?
Now, I'm 50 now, he would have been 50 now. He died
last year. Okay, so what did he do when he found out he had 15 years
left to live? The same thing you would do. You wouldn't come home and
mope around and be depressed for 15 years. No, no, no, you say, you
know, I thought I had 45 years, I'm going to stuff 45 years of life into these
15 years.
He changed his life. It was the most amazing thing I'd ever
seen. He said I'm going to be a better husband and a better father and a
better professor and a better citizen. I'm going to be a better church
member and community member. I'm just going to be better at everything
because I've got to live, 15 years, not that much. He'd come home. One
time he came -- he told me he came home from work and he said to his
wife, honey, we've never been to Istanbul. It's time to go.
(Laughter)

MR. BROOKS: And you know, he said, I want to have more

kids. And his wife was like, easy for you to say, right? He lived. He lived.
He lived more than most of us in 15 years. It wasn't sad. I mean, it was
sad when he died, but it wasn't sad the way you'd say, oh man, he was
too young, he had too much left to do. He did what you'd do.
That's your happiness. You have 12 percent. Use it right.
Now the good news. You can use that full 12 percent. It's under your
control completely, but you have to do four things. Here are the four
secrets. So what I'm going to give you is a portfolio of things for you to
think about and work on, your projects for the rest of your life.
And what I want you to do is I want you -- when you make
your to-do lists tomorrow, I want you to put these four things at the top,
then all the other stuff that you were going to do tomorrow underneath it,
then I want to take the pencil and cross everything out except these four
things.
(Laughter)
MR. BROOKS: Okay? The four things that are most productive
in producing your happiness are your spiritual enlightenment, your family,
your friendships, and work. I'm going to talk to you about all four of those
things.
Now, I didn't make it up. I don't necessarily want those things
to be the case. That's what comes out of all of the best data. That's what
comes from the research. If you take two -- I've looked at this myself, this is
from the general social survey, University of Chicago data, the best social
survey data available.
Two men who are exactly the same demographically, but one
of them is -- works on his spiritual life assiduously, is involved -- has a good
family life, is deeply involved in his community, and is -- works at the
highest levels. And the other person lacks all four of those things,
notwithstanding all of the rest of the demographics, race, sex, everything
else -- usually it's two men, so -- you'll find that the man has the four
characteristics is five times as likely to be very happy about his life as the

second man.
This is the key. This is the key. So let's talk about those four
things. The first two, faith and family, they're pretty standard stuff. I mean,
there's nobody who, you know, on his deathbed says, I can't believe I
wasted all that time in pursuit of spiritual enlightenment. You know, I can't
believe I wasted all that time with my kids. You know, nobody says that,
right? You say the opposite. So you understand that. And there's a lot of
data on this and I'm delighted to go into this in the Q-and-A if you want,
but I want to talk about the last two instead.
And I want to start with community, which is mostly about
charity and friendship, okay? And I'm going to especially focus on
friendship and I especially want to talk about men because I talked about
that at the very beginning. Okay, now, what do we see from the data on
friendship? Women are very adroit at making friends. Women are good
at friendship. Men are terrible at friendship.
Why? Because friendship is a skill that requires practice, and
men systematically lose practice for acquiring and cultivating friendships all
throughout their lives. Not every man. Some guys are great at it, but most
men lose their ability to cultivate and keep friends over the course of their
lives. Why? Think about it. You find this super-traditional household
where dad is working 60 hours a week. You know, he's not going to go
hang out with his buddies from work after work because he's robbing his
family.
And he's very cordial, he's very good at maintaining collegial
relationships, but he's very good at maintaining friendships and he forgets
how to maintain friendships. The loneliest group of people in our society
are men at age 60 interestingly. Now, here is something -- I went to ask
another social psychologist friend of mine.
Apparently he's going to publish this, I don't know, and I said,
tell me about this loneliness for men in -- who are about 60 years old. He
says, here's all you need to know -- here's all you need to know. What
percentage of 60-year-old men say that their best friend is their wife? 60
percent. What percentage of their wives say their best friend is their

husband?
(Laughter)
MR. BROOKS: Thirty percent. Thirty percent. The story of
typical friendship for men who are 60 is that of unrequited love and
friendship. So if you want to be happy, you better work on that. You
have to work on friendship. It's one of the "big four." And what you need
to do is to make sure that you treat it like any other goal in your life,
nourish and cherish your friendships, because if you don't, you will get
worse at it and you won't know how to do it later on in life. That's what
the data say.
Now, the biggest one that's paradoxical is work, is work. You
know, a lot of people think that work brings misery, that work brings
unhappiness, right, that work is just drudgery. I mean, think of all these
conversations we're having in America today about dead-end jobs, right?
If you don't go to college, you'll get a dead-end job. I mean, that's what
my parents kind of told me. Don't go to college, you get a dead-end job.
You know, the problem with Walmart, they create dead-end jobs. You
hear that all the time. Wrong? Right? Wrong? Wrong.
It's wrong. What percentage of Americans like or love their
jobs? 89 percent. 89 percent. You didn't know that. Nobody -- you
think in 25 percent, 30. No, very few people say it's completely spiritually
fulfilling, but that's too high a bar. Most people won't say that about their
marriages, right?
But if you say do you like or love your job, 89 percent say yes.
Now, what does that mean? The person who's going to make your
sandwich today likes or loves her job, most likely. Because I've looked at
this and it doesn't matter if you went to college or not. It turns out that
doesn't predict it. It doesn't matter if you make above or below average
wages. That doesn't predict it either.
The beautiful thing is that creating value is something that's
inherently valuable itself to the soul. Work brings happiness if you sanctify
it every single day. Now, why? Why? That's the most interesting question

is why. Now, some people will say money. I know you won't say that
because your mother taught you that money doesn't buy happiness, but
some people are thinking, it's got to be because it's remunerative than -and it's rewarding financially.
Let's just dispense with that. Money doesn't buy happiness.
Almost. When people are starving or very poor, money does relieve stress
and brings happiness. The only person who will get happiness by adding
money to them are the poor. And this is the reason personally I believe
very strongly in a government safety net for the poorest citizens because
you can improve their lives. But beyond that, huh-huh. Beyond that, a
safety net for the middle class and rich people and corporations and the
entitlement state, no happiness. No happiness. Money doesn't do it. It's
not money. It's something else.
So you go and search. What is it about work that actually is
bringing happiness to people and here's what you find. They acquire
something called "earned success." Now, earned success is the belief that
you're creating value with your life and you're creating value in the lives of
other people. If I take two people, same age, sex, race, religion, even
same level of education -- this is again general social survey, University of
Chicago data -- and both of them say that they have been very successful,
that they have earned their success, but one person earns eight times as
much money as the second, they are equally likely to say that they are very
happy about their lives.
Money doesn't buy happiness. Earned success brings
happiness, and it doesn't matter what you do if you create value for
people in your relationships with others. Here's how I learned that. Here's
how I learned this. My favorite composer is everybody's favorite
composer, Johann Sebastian Bach, okay?
My favorite composer. Always has been. What a -- I mean, so
productive; 200-plus cantatas just fell off his pen, orchestra and chorus. I
mean, he died when he was 65 with this huge corpus of work. Here's
how productive he was. He had 20 kids, all right. That's productive,
right?

(Laughter)
MR. BROOKS: He had this happy life. And he wasn't famous
when he was alive. He only became famous a 100 years after his life
because Felix Mendelssohn, the great composer resurrected his fame and
told everybody you've got to listen to this stuff. This stuff is great. You've
got to listen to it. So he just was a guy who was doing this.
And somebody asked him, and it was recorded, I don't know
why, "Herr Bach, why do you write music?" Why -- this is a question I can
ask any of you, why do you do your work? And it doesn't matter if you
work for money or you work for making great kids or to build beautiful
things or make beautiful art or volunteer or -- it doesn't matter.
Herr Bach, why do you write music? And it just stuck with me
so much. And Bach thought about it and he said, "I write music for the
glory of God and the good of man." That was his answer. You know, he
didn't say I write music because it's a living. He didn't say because I'm
good at it and I've got to pay the rent. He didn't say, what dude, I've got
20 kids. He said I write music for the glory of God and the good of man.
If you can say that -- oh, he's traditionally religious, I
understand, and maybe you're not. But if you could say I write music
because I have love for other people and I want to serve them, isn't that
what we want? Isn't that the essence of earning your success?
That's it. That's the secret. We've got to earn our success and
pass it on. Now, it has an opposite. Earned success has an opposite
and I've studied that too. That's called "learned helplessness." Learned
helplessness is a term that comes from Marty Seligman, one of the most
distinguished psychologists of our generation. He teaches at the University
of Pennsylvania. And Marty Seligman has done experiments with humans
where he takes away things that they've earned or he gives them things
that they didn't earn, and he finds they become despondent and
depressed and they give up. They learn helplessness.
You've got a choice. You can earn your success or you can
learn your helplessness. We have to choose about our lives. We have to

teach our values such that people will understand this. You know what
else, we've got to create a system that allows people to earn their success
and avoids their learned helplessness. We have a moral obligation.
If you join me in saying we should give most people the best
life, you've got to have a system. So what's the system that does that?
What's the system that actually makes that occur? You know, when I was
a kid, growing up in Seattle, I remember poverty. Now, of course there
were people in poverty around, I grew up in a lower middle class family,
and there were people on welfare around, but that's not what I'm talking
about.
I'm talking about a picture in the National Geographic of a kid
with flies on his face and a distended belly. Remember that, 1970?
There was nothing you could do about it. There was nothing I could do
about it except offer up a couple prayers and alms, right?
What's the difference between then and now, 2014 versus
1970? I'll tell you what it is. If you ask most Americans what's happened
to poverty in the world -- in the Third World since 1970, 70 percent of
Americans will say it's worse. There's more hunger.
That's wrong. If you look at the percentage of the world's
population living on a dollar a day or less, starvation-level poverty, it's 80
percent lower than it was when I was a child; 80 percent decline in
poverty. How come? How come? United Nations? U.S. foreign aid?
World Bank? You could like or hate or something in between those
institutions, but that's not what happened.
A 80 percent decline in world poverty, billions of people
pulled out of poverty. You've got to have a solution, you've got to have
an answer to what happened. It's the greatest anti-poverty achievement in
the history of the world. Has five explanations; globalization, free trade,
property rights, the rule of law, and innovative entrepreneurship Americanstyle. It was the American free enterprise system that started to spread
around the world after 1970.
I mean, we didn't just take it and put it in these places by force.

No. People around the world, they looked at you and they said I want to
have their life, I want to have their freedom, I want to have their stuff, and
they threw of their chains of their poverty and their tyranny.
You built that system. You did that for those people. You lifted
those people out of poverty because of the way that you live your life. The
fact that we can be here now talking about happiness and improving our
minds is because of the American free enterprise system that made it
possible through growth and opportunity and even taxes and government.
What an extraordinary achievement that we've been able to do here and
we've been able to do around the world.
Free enterprise does that for everybody. That's the story of
earned success. That's the story, if we do it right, of helping people to
avoid their learned helplessness. That's the reason I believe in this system.
I don't think it's perfect. I don't think that we don't need a government. I'm
not a radical about it, but if we don't fight for something as good and
beautiful and allowed us to be here to enjoy this and to learn and to show
our love for each other in a spirit of global brotherhood, we're not
sharing. We're not giving our gift. We're not sharing the secret to
happiness.
So here's where I'm going to leave it, and I'm going to turn it
over to you. My personal advice after looking at this data, after reading
these studies, is you've got to think about four things; faith, family,
community, and work. That's your agenda. That's your happiness
portfolio. Define it the way you like, but don't neglect it and keep it in
balance because if you don't, you're going to be unnecessarily unhappy.
And for public policy, I'm not going to tell you how to get it
done. If you want you can look at the website my organization or you
can go to the website of any organization that you want in public policy.
But I will tell you this. If we don't have a set of policies based on
America's gift to the world which is the American free enterprise system,
we're not going to be able to do our job by passing on the spirit of
earned success to our kids, our grandkids, to people all around the world
who may even be Americans in their hearts, but even if they're not, they
deserve this secret as well.

I'm really honored to be able to talk about this and I'm looking
forward to what you have to say. But for the fact that you've been part of
this -- that you've been part of this forum and you're part of the system and
that you're part of the country that can make this possible for more people,
my only last two words are thank you.
(Applause)
MR. BROOKS: And we have time for a little bit of Q-and-A
and the mics are coming. So I think we have mics, and I've learned that
the ground rules are please wait for the -- I'll call on you, please wait for
the mic, state your name, and put your protest statement in the form of a
question. Okay.
(Laughter)
MR. BROOKS: So let's see, right down here. Right here in the
black shirt. Thanks.
SPEAKER: Hi. I'm Jan (phonetic).
MR. BROOKS: Hi, Jan.
SPEAKER: This was wonderful.
MR. BROOKS: Thank you.
SPEAKER: Just marvelous. There's a tiny little film that you can -anybody can download and it's on happiness. You can download it, it's
streaming, it's -- I don't even know who it's made by, but it's called
"Happy." The happiest man in that film was the poorest of the poor in
India because he had all of these things you talked about.
MR. BROOKS: Yeah. That's right.
SPEAKER: Watch it everybody and listen more to -- then watch
your lecture again.

MR. BROOKS: Thank you. Thank you so much.

SPEAKER: Thank you. Thank you.
MR. BROOKS: I appreciate it very much. Thank you so much.
I do endorse the film "Happy" as a very good one. And I'll let you know
by the way we're going to embark on a -- AEI has this -- our biggest new
program is called "The program in human flourishing." It's like what a
weird thing for a Washington think tank, right?
And the thing -- one of the things that we're going to do is bring
out a handbook for human flourishing, we're going to publish it in 2015,
and a four-part 4-hour miniseries on the secrets to happiness and human
flourishing. They're going to do this, and it's going to go into so much
more depth than this. So watch for that.
My guess is it will be in partnership with PBS or one of the forprofit companies that do this. Can we come right down here, and then
we'll go over there after that? Thanks.
MS. DAVIS: Hi, Jolly Davis (phonetic). Words move mountains
-MR. BROOKS: Yeah.
MS. DAVIS: -- and words are powerful. What would -- the
motivating words you would use to help somebody who's stuck,
somebody who's in the unhappy mode, especially they're young and they
don't know where they're going in their lives or they're older and they're
just unhappy, what are those words to de-stuck them, to enlighten them?
MR. BROOKS: I'm going to give you four words for people
who are unhappy, okay? Actually I'm going to start by the four words that
explain why you're unhappy. Now, the biggest reason that people are
unhappy besides circumstance is what they're doing, is the mistakes that
they're making.

They're looking for -- I mean Thomas Aquinas, the great doctor

in the Catholic Church, he said that -- he explained unhappiness, right?
You don't have to be a catholic to dig this, right? It helps. Anyway, so -(Laughter)
MR. BROOKS: Aquinas said people are unhappy because
they're looking for substitutes for God, and the four substitutes for God are
money, power, pleasure, and honor. And we mean -- honor, you mean
fame, right? Money, power, pleasure, and honor, those are the four
substitutes for God, he said, right?
Okay, now you think about it, sure, I mean all these studies that
show that the more you post to Facebook the unhappier you are; that the
more you search for money for the sake of it, the unhappier you are; the
more you search for pleasures of the flesh, the unhappier you are. It's all
true. I've got the data.
Read it in The New York Times in a week-and-a-half. I promise
you it will be compelling. Okay, but I don't have to convince you
anyway, and you know why? Because people follow a simple deadly
erroneous formula. You know what it is? Use people and love things.
That's the formula to make you miserable. You want to be
happy? You want to not be unhappy? Turn it over. Love people, use
things. That's it. Materialism, bad. A unbridled desire, bad. The whole
idea that people are out there for your satisfaction, bad.
Love people, use things, you'll be on the right track. Right here.
Yes, ma'am.
SPEAKER: Hi, I'm Charlotte (phonetic), and I was a kind of a
frontier working woman. Now I teach executive women.
MR. BROOKS: Great.
SPEAKER: And I have a proposition on why women are
getting to be equal opportunity with men in unhappiness.

MR. BROOKS: Okay.

SPEAKER: And I think it's because we move up these giant
corporations and we realize that meaningfulness is hard to come by.
MR. BROOKS: Yeah. Yeah.
SPEAKER: And so we are, I think, all of us in the process of
trying to change at the top how influence is rendered and how we live in
the world as corporations that are profit-driven and it's a horserace.
MR. BROOKS: Yeah.
SPEAKER: And so we struggle with it. And I think it affects
women disproportionately.
MR. BROOKS: Yeah, thank you. The evidence suggests
exactly what you're saying, that women are getting very, very good at the
formula for unhappiness just as men have been good at that for
generations and probably millennia. And that means that what we need
is we need a cultural revolution.
We need a moral revolution in this country for women and
men. Look, you can't keep doing this. We can't keep converging on the
using people and loving things. It's not right. It's not just not right for our
society, not right for others, it's not right for us, it's not right for our hearts.
And until we have a moral revolution inside each one of us
notwithstanding what we do for work and what we do to be successful
overtly in the material things in life, if we don't understand these structural
equations of what brings people to their best selves and gives them a life in
life, it's going to be for nothing.
You're on the right track. Thank you. Who is next? Let's go to
the back here and he's waving his arms, and so that actually got my
attention because I'm a shallow person.
(Laughter)

MR. BROOKS: So let's -- oh, no, here, here, here. And then
we'll go back over there, yeah, yeah, yeah. That's right. That's right. I'm
just letting the market decide here, you know, a big capitalist.
SPEAKER: First, thank you. Second, I'm here to confess that I
went to a session like this 2 years ago. On the test I was 19 out of 20 in
the most happy that you can possibly be and I walked out thinking, wow,
happily married, son, all my cards went right.
I fell into a manhole that was so dark it took me a year to get
out of it. And I mention it to you because it was genetic, and I want
everybody here to know that it can happen to you and you can get out of
it. I'm not going to talk about the meds.
(Laughter)
SPEAKER: The other thing -- the other thing that I think is
material, and forgive me for a screed, is that when you talk about love,
we have heard in many iterations, and I infer what I assume you meant to
imply, that love is work for others. So service is an enormous component
of all of the four headliners that you gave.
MR. BROOKS: Yeah. Thank you.
(Applause)
MR. BROOKS: Service -- the truth of the matter is one of the big
misconceptions that people have about love is that it's easy. It isn't easy. I
mean, serving others is really hard, and it's really -- you don't want to do it
all the time. But think about it, all the things that are most meaningful in life
are those for which you sacrifice and love is something for which you have
to sacrifice as well.
Love is a purposive assignment to yourself and to others. That's
what we understand about love. If you only love when it's convenient,
you're going to run into a lot of problems. And those of you who've been
married for a long time, you know exactly what I mean. But that's true

with everything. Are you going to love your enemies? You're going to
love the strangers. You're going to love -- you're going to have meaningful
relationships, at least show some sort of love toward everyone.
I recommend that you do it because this is (inaudible) secret,
but it's not an easy thing to do. And the best single way to do it is to serve
others and force yourself into a service-type environment. I completely
agree. I can -- this is -- this really is what -- incidentally, cognitive
behavioral therapy for depression which is very effective when used in
conjunction with a medication regimen often talks about serving others to
forget oneself.
Congratulations on your success.
SPEAKER: And gratitude.
MR. BROOKS: Beg your pardon?
SPEAKER: And gratitude.
MR. BROOKS: And gratitude, absolutely. Gratitude is part of
love. Congratulations on your success. I recommend to all your interest
Andrew Solomon's great book The Noonday Demon about the subject of
unhappiness in the form of depression, for those of you who are either
suffering from that or who are very interested.
Who has got the mic next? We've got time for two more
questions, so I'm going to go here and then we're going to go in the back
as you were waving your arms wildly. So we're going to -- and then
we're going to finish up. Yes, ma'am?
SPEAKER: Well, it sort of falls on with the last comments, more
of a question, he was talking about value -MR. BROOKS: Yeah.
SPEAKER: -- so it seems that everything is -- all the four cores are
tied to value.

MR. BROOKS: Yeah.

SPEAKER: But can you be a little bit more tangible about what
you mean by value? I know we're talking about social -- creating social
value, creating value, it seems sort of still quite intangible to me.
MR. BROOKS: Yeah. I studied social entrepreneurship for a
long time. I taught social entrepreneurship at a business school. And one
of the most interesting things is when you look at the orientation of
entrepreneurs, it doesn't matter if they're commercial entrepreneurs or social
entrepreneurs.
It doesn't matter if they are saving souls or cleaning up the
environment or teaching kids to read or helping the starving or making tons
of dough. They have the same kind orientation. Basically value is
something that you denominate yourself. It's basically you need to ask
yourself is what's the coin of the realm?
What will actually denominate this that I can count? That's the
important thing because you know what's written on your heart about the
value that you uniquely integrate. You know your vocation. The biggest
thing that we can do for our kids is help them ascertain their vocation. The
process of discernment is the greatest favor, the greatest blessing that we
can give to our kids.
Why? Because when they discern, when they know, then they
know what value actually means. Nobody should tell you what value
actually means because that's your personal assignment. That's your life's
course to figure that out. And that's the reason I left it ambiguous.
Because for every single one of us in here, all 400 of us, it's
slightly different. Helping a fellow man, making a lot of money, it doesn't
matter how you measure it, but you have to understand it and accumulate
it in a meaningful way. Last question, right in the back.
MR. MARIANAS: Hi guys, how's it going? I'm Joshua
Marianas (phonetic) from Denver North, and my question is what impact

does over-justification effect have unhappiness such that you replace a

intrinsic reward with a extrinsic reward?
MR. BROOKS: Okay, explain over-justification to our friends
here.
MR. MARIANAS: Such that, like, if you go for a run and you
get those endorphins out, like, you're doing it for yourself, for your growth
-MR. BROOKS: Yeah.
MR. MARIANAS: -- and actually a extrinsic reward is like
eating a big chocolate cake after it because you ran and all that.
MR. BROOKS: Yeah. Okay. Extrinsic versus intrinsic, right?
There's a wonderful set of studies that look at children. I mean, we use
children as human subjects. Imagine being my kids, all right? I mean,
they're -(Laughter)
MR. BROOKS: -- total human subjects, right? And when you
take -- there are wonderful social psychological experiments using kids.
And what they do is they -- first they ask them what's your favorite toy. All
right, and they say truck or blocks or dolls or whatever, and -- in the first of
the experiment and then they measure how much enjoyment they're getting
from playing with their favorite toys.
Second part of the experiment, they say if you go play with that
Barbie doll, if you go play with that truck, their favorite toy, I'll give you a
cookie. They enjoy the toy less. Same thing is true using college students,
where they're having college students working on these really interesting
puzzles, and in the first part they work on the puzzles and they do it
voluntarily.
In the second part they're paid to work on the puzzles, and as
soon as they get a break they stop, they put the puzzles down. It's less fun

when you're motivated extrinsically. This is a big deal for those of us who
run companies. Be very careful when people truly love what they do.
Bribing them to do what they do -- make sure that part of the reward is
inherent because the extrinsic rewards really matter.
Here's what it means for happiness, here's what all of this stuff
means for happiness. Aristotle had it right. You know what Aristotle said
is the secret to doing things that make you happy? Do useless things.
That's it. If you're doing it for some other reason, it brings us happiness.
It's the useless things that bring you bliss, right?
It's the conversation about the World Cup that brings you
happiness, it's not the conversation about work because work is
instrumental -- you might like the conversation, I love my work, I'm crazy
about my work, but it's instrumental.
It's the useless things in life. Do more useless things. Now, you
know they're not useless. I mean they're -- your pursuit of spiritual
enlightenment is far from useless, but it sure looks useless, right?
I mean, what you do in your sacramental life is the ultimate
useless act, yet it is what will bring you bliss. It is spending your resources
on a bunch of kids you don't want or need. Useless.
(Laughter)
MR. BROOKS: It's the secret to happiness. It's the secret to
happiness. The last word I'm going to leave you with is do more useless
things today. God bless you.
(Applause)
* * * * *