When we think about work, we often think about stress, burnout, and overwhelm. And to some extent, that’s normal, says bestselling author and Harvard professor Arthur Brooks—work isn’t meant to be easy.
But there are ways to find more connection, meaning, and happiness in our work. In September, we hosted a conversation with Brooks to discuss these topics alongside the release of his new book, The Happiness Files. Here’s an excerpt of our conversation, where we narrow in on how happiness and success are related, helpful morning rituals, AI, and more.
Kia Afcari: Could you talk a little bit about what readers can expect to find in your book and why you wrote it?
Arthur Brooks
Arthur Brooks: I write a column in The Atlantic—I’ve been doing it for five years—called How to Build A Life. It’s based on the idea that you can get happier and the happiness will be sticky if you do three things: if you understand the science, if you change your habits, and if you become the teacher.
By the way, that’s the three-part formula for making golf skills sticky or making mathematics sticky. You have to understand, you have to change your habits, and you have to teach others. In medical schools, if you’re becoming a surgeon, they’ll say, “Watch one, do one, teach one.” It works for happiness just like anything else. That’s the formula for my column every Thursday morning: Here’s the science, here’s how you change your habits, here’s how you explain it to other people, so that you can become the teacher.
With the editors, I looked at the 33 columns that people found most impactful over the past five years about life and work, and we put them together in one volume, 33 essays. And so it’s the kind of book that you can read each night for a month. Read one before you go to bed. Read one to your beloved before you hit the sack. You’re putting your phone away, and you open the book and read it, and then discuss a little bit about what your resolutions are tomorrow to live out some of these ideas that are based in science. And I wrote it as an offering to people to do something like that. It’s gratifying to see that people are doing just that.
KA: In your book, you say if you want success, pursue happiness. But a lot of people go about it in the opposite way. Why do you think it’s much more effective to start with happiness?
AB: Mother Nature lies constantly about happiness. One of the key ways that Mother Nature lies to us is by saying that if you follow your impulses toward worldly success, then you’ll get happiness.
There are four worldly success impulses. This comes from Aristotle, and it was brought to more modern audiences by Thomas Aquinas. He said that people follow idols; we would think of them as these impulses. The four idols are money, power, pleasure, and fame. And there’s nothing wrong with these things. The problem is that when these things become an end in and of themselves, they lead to unhappiness.
If you’re pursuing money for the sake of money, if you’re pursuing power—which is just to say, influence over other people—if you’re pursuing pleasure, feeling good all the time, you know it’s going to end in tears. If you’re pursuing fame, the admiration of strangers, you’re going to make these incredible sacrifices with your own life that lead to deep dissatisfaction, loneliness, and misery. Or, as Lady Gaga famously put it, fame is prison.
The reason that we do that is because Mother Nature is saying, Do it. Do it. Here. You know you want it—and then you’ll be happy. But that’s wrong. What the data show is that if you pursue the sources of deep satisfaction, which are faith or philosophy, contemplation, family, friendship, and work that serves others, then you’ll be successful enough.
Now, I tell my MBA students at Harvard University to pursue happiness and you’ll be successful enough. There’s one word in that sentence that freaks them out. What do you think it is?
KA: Enough.
AB: You got it, baby. And that’s because we’re success addicts. We’re not wired to have enough. Enough is for losers, man. It’s for slackers. We’re strivers. But that’s the wrong way to think. Because the truth of the matter is that there will be lots of worldly success when worldly success, per se, is an intermediate goal to get what you really want—which is love and happiness, lifting other people up and bringing them together with your talents. Then life is really, really fulfilling and truly you will have enough.
KA: How do we foster connection in an online working community? We’re constantly on these screens. We come into the office and we’re still on the screens, even though we’re right next to each other.
AB: The pandemic was the mother of invention. But this is not a substitute for human contact. There’s a lot of research on the neuropeptide oxytocin, which functions as a hormone—also known as the love molecule of human bonding—which you need if you’re going to feel human to be connected to other people. It’s largely transmitted through eye contact and touch.
During the coronavirus pandemic, one of the reasons that people spent so much time bingeing social media is because they were starving for oxytocin and they weren’t getting it. You get very little of it over Zoom, because you don’t have actual eye contact. You need in-real-life touch and eye contact to get sufficient amounts of oxytocin.
The Happiness Files: Insights on Work and Life (Harvard Business Review Press, 2025, 272 pages)
The result of it is that people are like, Why am I sleeping so crummy? Why am craving so much highly glycemic carbohydrate? And the answer has to do with the fact that oxytocin levels are in the cellar and you’re not feeling human and that loneliness that actually creeps in.
If you’re working remotely, you have to make sure you’re getting proper amounts of oxytocin. If you live with somebody, you need to have lots and lots of eye contact. That means you have to have strict protocols with your devices. No devices in the first hour of the day. No devices in the last two hours before sleep. No devices during dinner. If you live with a romantic partner, every time you’re talking, staring into each other’s eyes. Every time you’re together, you better be touching, because you’re just not going to get enough oxytocin otherwise as a result of this. In other words, like everything else, when the modern world changes the circumstances, we have to take our lives into our own hands and manage it appropriately.
KA: What one morning ritual would you suggest that would have the biggest impact on people?
AB: I actually think that it’s worship or contemplation—to dedicate your day to love and service every single day. To have something that you do that says, I’m truly grateful for the beautiful things that are going to happen this day, the lovely things, the fun things, the enjoyable things. And I’m also grateful for the hard things, for the things that bother me, for the challenges I’m going to have to overcome. Bring on this day. I am truly grateful for this day. And to set that resolution and to set it in the presence of the divine or to set this in the presence of yourself in a way that’s really meaningful and contemplative. Doing that every day, I think that’s a really important thing to do so that the day doesn’t manage you, but that you manage the day at its onset.
KA: AI is a topic du jour. What do you think are its implications for happiness?
AB: The answer is almost certainly that it will help some people a little, it’ll hurt other people a little, and for most people, it won’t really affect their happiness very much. That’s how technology usually works out at the end of the day.
Here’s the way to understand all technology and happiness: If any technology is complementing your relationships with other people, it’s helpful. If it’s substituting for your relationships with other people, it’s a problem for your happiness. Happiness is love. That’s just the way it is. And if any technology is getting in the way of real-life, in-person relationships that involve eye contact and touch, you’re in trouble. If it connects you to other people more effectively, then it can be a complement and it can be life-enhancing.
Now, it’s not going to solve human problems the way that it’s promising. Lots of technical problems, yes, of course. Already I use it in my work every single day. Everybody uses AI constantly. I use it constantly when I’m doing literature searches, etc. But here’s the thing: The problems that it solves are what we call complicated problems, which are very difficult problems but once you solve them, they’re solved once and forever. These are problems that we’re thinking about using the left hemisphere of our brain. That’s the task side of our brains.
The things we really care about are called complex problems. Complex problems are easy to understand and impossible to solve, like love and meaning and happiness and a football game and your cat. Those are all complex problems. I mean, they’re easy to comprehend and impossible to solve, which is why you can’t solve them. You live them. And that’s the beauty of it.
I’ve been married 34 years. My wife and I know each other deeply. This morning, before I left, my wife said, “I love you.” And she does. And when I get home tonight, she might be super mad at me. I don’t know! And that’s the point. That’s why I love my marriage, because it’s a complex problem. If you think a complicated solution like AI is going to solve complex problems in your life like love, you’re sadly mistaken and you’re going to wind up becoming frustrated and wasting your time.
KA: The quote from your book that really stuck with me is that “your life is the most important management task you will ever undertake.” What does that mean to you?
AB: That means that you don’t have to leave your life up to chance. There are lots and lots of uncertainties in life, to be sure. There is lots of risk in your life. There’s a lot of unknowns in your life. There’s a lot of fun adventures that you’re not expecting in your life, not just bad things. But fundamentally, you don’t have to leave the big things up to chance. Your life doesn’t have to manage you. You can manage your life, but you have to know how it works, and that’s the task at hand.
I came to this because I was retiring as the CEO of a big think tank in Washington, DC, and I was 55 and I was really at wits’ end. Not knowing what I was going to do next, I walked the Camino de Santiago, which is a very long walking pilgrimage across northern Spain. People have been doing it for years. And the ancient idea is that you will be granted what you seek on the last day. And sure enough, as I entered the medieval city of Santiago de Compostela, I was filled with this idea I was going to spend the rest of my life lifting people up and bringing them together in bonds of happiness and love using science and ideas. And all this work is the fruit of that.
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