There's four big habits that the happiest people have that they engage in every day. This is the happiness pension plan. These are the deposits that you put in every day. These are the things to pay attention to.

Number one, all of the happiest people who have the highest levels of enjoyment, satisfaction, and meaning, which are the macronutrients of happiness, they are paying attention, every day, to their faith or philosophical life, which is religious or not, but is transcending themselves and standing in awe of something bigger. I'll talk about that in a second.

The second is their family life. They're taking their family life seriously.

The third is that they're taking their friendships seriously. And that's super hard for people in business, especially the higher you go in management, the fewer real friends you have and the more deal friends that you have.

And deal friends don't count. They're good. But that's not the nutrient that I'm talking about.

And last but not least is dedicating your work to earning your success and serving other people.

It's faith, family, friends, and work that serves. Those are the big four.

ADI IGNATIUS: Your book debuted at number five on the New York Times bestseller list. What does that say about us as a society?

ARTHUR C BROOKS: It says that there are four books that people like more. Not that I'm super competitive, but the truth of the matter is that we have an opportunity in our society right now that we often see as a crisis.

There is a happiness crisis. I've been looking at the data on human happiness in the United States and around the world for a long time. And American happiness has, in general, been in decline since 1990, in general decline.

I mean, it's kind of a climate of happiness, ticking down little by little by little. And then starting in about 2008, there were three major storms that created downward pressure on happiness that was really fast.

And so the result of it is that crisis in happiness is an opportunity for all of us. And this is the entrepreneurial mindset. We're at the temple of entrepreneurship and business right here.

And the best business publication in the world should be all about seeing crises as opportunities. And that's, in point of fact, what we're doing. This book is buying the dip of happiness, I guess you'd say.

ADI IGNATIUS: So many questions to follow up on, but let me-- a basic question, because I couldn't tell from what you just said, are we basically happy? Is anybody happy? And how do we measure whether we're happy or not?

ARTHUR C BROOKS: We're not. And we are, in fact, not. And that's an important thing for us to keep in mind.

I ask people all the time, what do you want? And they say, I want to be happy. I say, wrong, you can't be happy.

You can be happier than you were because it's a direction. Happiness is not a destination. We have negative emotions. This is part of life on Earth.

We have a limbic system. And it was developed between 2 and 40 million years ago in our brain that processes negative emotions as an alarm system to keep us safe, to pass on our genes, to not starve.

It's very important that we have negative emotions. We also have negative experiences because that's part of the human-- that's part of human life as well.

The result of that is that perfect happiness doesn't exist in the mortal coil. Perhaps sometime later, that's above my metaphysical pay grade.

But I will say that the idea of trying to attain perfect happiness right now is one of the greatest reasons that people are actually pretty miserable because they wake up and say, I'm not happy today.

Well, yeah, of course you're not. But you can be happier today if you actually have the skills, change your habits, and share it with others. You can be happier.

ADI IGNATIUS: You have said often that money, power, the trappings of success, do not necessarily translate into happiness. And I feel like we all know that. And yet we live our lives in pursuit of all these things, not just for ego gratification or for material well-being, but because I think we sense that they will provide us happiness.

ARTHUR C BROOKS: Yeah.

ADI IGNATIUS: Are we--

ARTHUR C BROOKS: Why? Right?

ADI IGNATIUS: Well--

ARTHUR C BROOKS: It's weird, isn't it?

ADI IGNATIUS: Why not? Is maybe the question.

ARTHUR C BROOKS: Well, so the first big myth about happiness is that you can be happy. And the correct attitude is you can be happier.

The second big myth is that mother nature wants you to be happy. She doesn't care. Mother nature has only two goals for all of us, which is survival and gene propagation.

We have urges. And we think-- that come from mother nature-- we think that if we satisfy these urges for money, and power, and pleasure, and fame, and admiration, and Instagram followers, or whatever, that we will achieve the happiness that we deeply want.

But that's wrong. And so the result of it is that we get into a trap.

Now, most people are able to escape that trap because their worldly dreams never come true. And so they have to settle for the second best, which is just lovely relationships, and a fun family, and good friends.

But a few unlucky individuals, their dreams come true in worldly terms. And they find out pretty, pretty quickly that they have the wrong dreams. And a lot of my students are going to be among those people.

So the first thing that I tell them in my class right here on this campus is I say that you believe mother nature is telling you that if you attain your worldly dreams, that happiness will come for free.

And then I say something that makes them panic. And think about this, I'm going to tell you the sentence, and there's one word in the sentence that makes them panic. The truth is, if you shoot for happiness, you will have enough success.

What's the word that freaks them out? "Enough," "enough."

ADI IGNATIUS: It's never enough.

ARTHUR C BROOKS: It's never enough because mother nature says it's not enough. And so that's one of the things that I have to help them understand.

When you understand the science of what's actually happening in your brain, then you can actually tailor your habits. Human life is funny because of the prefrontal cortex, this incredibly-- the 30% of our brain by weight, the supercomputer in the front of our heads, it gives us two parts in life.

There are animal instincts. And there are moral aspirations. And what we need to do if we want to live a happy life is not be content with the animal instincts, but rather, to choose the moral aspirations that, a large part of the time, are standing up to mother nature.

ADI IGNATIUS: So you've kind of called BS on what some of us might think, one, we can be happy. No, we can be happier. Two, that maybe the normal state is happiness, and you're saying that's probably not what mother nature intended. Who sold us this idea that we could be happy? I think we all kind of grew up thinking that's attainable and normal.

ARTHUR C BROOKS: Yeah, well, part of it is that there are moments in our lives when we do feel happy. The problem with that is really the third myth about happiness, which is that happiness is a feeling. And it isn't.

Feelings are evidence of happiness like the smell of your turkey is evidence of your Thanksgiving dinner.

And so when people are searching for a feeling, what they're searching for is positive emotions, which once again, exist only to give you information about the outside world.

When you have positive emotions, there's a part of your brain that says, you have just sensed something that's an opportunity. You should approach it.

When you're feeling negative emotions, you're sensing that something is a threat. And you should avoid it. That's what emotions are.

Happiness is not an emotion. Happiness has positive emotions associated with it. And we feel that when we want it, and we want it to be as continuous as possible. And that's as old as humanity itself.

The right approach is to understand that happiness is something actually to be pursued and divided into three big scientific categories, which are enjoyment, satisfaction, and meaning.

That's an approach that can reliably help you to become happier every year, not every day, but certainly every year.

ADI IGNATIUS: All right, so let's say you're concerned about the political situation. OK, like can't sleep at night concerned. And your response to that is to bury your head in the sand, and not really follow events, because there's too distressing, so you work in your hobbies, you play tennis-- asking for a friend, by the way--

ARTHUR C BROOKS: Yeah, yeah, I hear you. Yeah, yeah.

ADI IGNATIUS: But that feels like a dereliction of one's civic duty, a path, possibly to peace of mind, happiness, perhaps. But where do you come down on that?

ARTHUR C BROOKS: So it's absolutely the case that one of the things that's happened in our technologized world is that the outside world has become very small and come to us in ways that we can't affect it.

I mean, there are whole parts of the world that we can't affect, but we feel as if we could because the information is arriving so quickly.

Everything that's far away feels local in the world of social media, for example, in the 24 hour news cycle. And that creates a profound cognitive disruption for us. It creates a dissonance for us.

All these bad things are happening. I should do something, but I can't do anything. So I feel helpless. And that leads me to anxiety, and sadness, and fear. And that's what a lot of people are feeling all the time.

The result of that is not to check out, not ever check the news. But I do have protocols that I recommend to people all the time.

You should not be reading more than half an hour of news a day, ever. And it should be in one block. And not more than half of it should be political.

You're not going to get any more information than you had this morning by looking at the newspaper tonight and seeing if something has actually happened in Congress. Nothing happened in Congress. And that's an important thing for us to keep in mind.

And then how do we spend the rest of our time, our ample free time? What do we do with the habits?

Funny, when you break a habit, which is reprogramming a part of your brain called the nucleus accumbens, you feel like you're so at loose ends because you have so much time on your hands.

When I quit smoking, I felt like I had all the time in the world because I would have been smoking before. And so I had to do something with my time.

When you're not checking the news, and you're not looking at politics, and you're not trading information with the people who already agree with you, that so and so is terrible, terrible, terrible, and everything is awful, awful, awful, you feel like you have a lot of time on your hands.

How do you spend that time? And the answer is by affecting change that you can change. And that's profoundly local. That's your family, that's your neighborhood, that's your community, that's your town, that's your university.

That's where real change happens, getting more local, more active with the time that's actually freed up from the things you can't do. And watch your happiness start to rise.

ADI IGNATIUS: Thank you. OK, I'm going to take that from that very high altitude to the workplace. There's a feeling that the tasks you do at work, you're going from one performance anxiety filled moment to the next.

And there's not a through line of joy, exactly, because we have these tasks we have to deliver. How do we get out of that particular perception trap?

ARTHUR C BROOKS: Yeah, well, the truth of the matter is that most people don't feel a lot of anxiety in their jobs. They don't. It depends on the performance, the kind of job that you find yourself in.

So people in leadership jobs have a lot of anxiety. The more leadership responsibility that you have, the more anxiety, in general, you're going to have. And that's something that's actually chosen.

And that's a big surprise to a lot of CEOs. The number oine and two emotions in the first 24 months of an average CEO's tenure, the number one and two emotions are loneliness and anger, not joy and contentment, not joy and lovely surprise.

No, that's not how it works. The only surprises you get as CEO is like the general council called. That's bad, or whatever it happens to be.

And a lot of them are really caught by surprise because once again, your ancient limbic system says, climb, man, the brass ring. That's where it's at. It's going to be so great.

And they get there, and they don't like it. The number one predictor of CEO demise, by the way, is not liking the job of CEO.

And there are CEOs all over this country, there are managers all over this country and all over the world who want to be CEO, but don't want to do CEO, because the negative emotionality is so intense and so high.

And one of the things that I recommend leaders do a lot is actually step into more creative roles, step into more contemplative roles, step into more supporting roles. And they can actually be happy.

You have to be really, really suited to bear up under a lot of anxiety. Anxiety is nothing more than unfocused fear. That's the definition of anxiety, unfocused fear, which is usually a maladaptation of the amygdala in the limbic system of the brain.

You need to how it works and be incredibly self-managing.

ADI IGNATIUS: So I want to talk a little bit about what has happened in the workplace. There was a period, and we certainly wrote a lot about it, where it was in vogue to really try to make sure your employee base was happy, was seeing that they could be totally there, bring their full self.

I'd say there's a backlash to that now, articulated by Mark Zuckerberg. We need more masculine energy, which I'm not sure what that means, but I think it means less of what I'm talking about.

But do you have a view as to whether this-- let's say those are two legitimate paradigms, that you-- the second is like command, you do what I say. This is a company who cares about your whole self. We're just doing work here.

Do you have a view as to which is better in terms of creating joy, both for the individual and then creating positive results for the institution? I mean, that's a big question. But do you have thoughts on that?

ARTHUR C BROOKS: I have the data on this. It's very, very clear. Happier employees are more profitable, more productive employees. That's just the way it is.

If you can have a happier workforce, you're going to have a better company. And the results are going to be there.

And I know this because of the work of Irrational Capital, which is a research firm on Wall Street, which I've done some informal advisory unpaid to them because I'm so interested in their data.

And what they do is they've looked at 7,500 companies, all publicly listed companies, the entire S&P 500, the entire Russell 1000, big companies, little companies.

And they've looked retrospectively at these companies. And they have some proprietary data on workplace well-being. And they measure it in a whole bunch of very robust ways.

And what they find is, for example, if you're in the top 20% of workplace well-being, you will be, on average, about 520 basis points above the S&P 500 in your stock price over the past year.

This stuff is really performing. It really, really is a good investment.

The problem is people don't what workplace happiness means. It's ill-defined. I spent a lot of time in California. And I'm talking to Silicon Valley firms.

And they'll ask their employees, what would make you happier? And the employees don't know. They just know they're not happy.

And so they'll say stuff like, I don't know, a ping pong table. How about avocado toast? I don't know.

And so it'll be like OK, avocado toast and ping pong tables. And the people are still not happy. And that's because that's not what they want.

They want friendship. They want to be actually have friends at work. They want to feel empowered and they're getting better at their jobs.

They want to feel like management is listening to them and taking their suggestions. They want efficiency. They don't want to have their time wasted with stupid meetings all day long.

By the way, those are the top four of the six variables that we're talking about here. And if you get that stuff right, you use the data, you be a bit of a social scientist, you win. You win.

ADI IGNATIUS: All right, let's talk about meetings for a second.

ARTHUR C BROOKS: Yeah, I've written about meetings. I wrote in a volume together with you.

ADI IGNATIUS: I have some colleagues here, so this is for you, too. So we all know meetings are terrible. We all know about the tyranny of meetings. You've written about, they're the worst. They sap your energy. They sap your happiness.

And maybe we go there, we respond. And there are no meetings on Fridays for a while. And then they come back, they come back, they come back. And it makes us feel miserable.

And it feels like it's taking away from our real jobs. It's hard to remember what they were because it seems to be meetings and email.

So help us here because so much good intention, so much understanding of everything you said, and yet none of us seems to be able to break the tyranny of the meeting.

ARTHUR C BROOKS: And part of the reason is because they are a necessary evil, but we focus on the necessary, not on the evil. And that's the thing to keep in mind.

The truth is we should be minimizing meetings. And we should have good meeting hygiene at every company, every organization around the world.

And universities are the worst. Faculty meetings, they'll say, we really only have half an hour of business, but we're going to set aside 90 minutes in case something comes up.

And if you're in management, you say, we're probably not going to use all this time. And I'm like, yeah, sure, here we go.

And then you get to the end of the 30 minutes of actual business and say, does anybody have anything else on their mind? And it's always the same cast of characters. And this is very, very common in nonprofits in particular.

The problem with that is that drives out the people that are most-- that want to go back to their offices and do their work.

This is the people who are most interested in their own productivity and efficiency, are most discouraged by that kind of behavior.

And so the way to fix this is by having actual distinct protocols that are well studied. And I talk about in this book.

So for example, meetings should never involve people who don't need to be there. And anytime it looks like a meeting isn't necessary, make it Christmas morning at work and cancel it.

Everybody will love you if you're known for canceling meetings.

No meetings should be over 30 minutes. You don't need more than 30 minutes, I'm sorry.

And what the result of it is that there's no throat clearing. There's no preambles. There's no did you go sailing this weekend? How's your Cape House? Did you get those steps fixed? None of it.

It's like get to business. Get to business, because you've only got 30 minutes. And people are going to leave after 30 minutes.

And having some of these protocols in place mean that people are going to say, yep, we need to have these meetings. If I'm at the meeting, it's because I'm going to have to present or somebody's going to have to present to me. It's only going to last 30 minutes. And if it's not necessary, it's going to get canceled.

Those are the three iron laws. There are some more.

ADI IGNATIUS: OK, so let's keep going on how to build a relatively happy work culture. So the ping pong table and the avocado toast may or may not help. What you just talked about, it may or may not help. To what extent can leaders create a happier workplace?

ARTHUR C BROOKS: They can do a lot. The number one predictor of somebody hating their job is a bad boss.

That's the number one predictor, bad leadership. And it has a lot to do with the character, personality, and leadership style of the boss.

If you're the boss, you can ruin the workplace very, very quickly. And that's one of the reasons that we need a lot of emotional and psychological equilibrium, a lot of emotional self-management.

That's why I'm training managers here at HBS. I want them to be happy people. That's the number one predictor of being a good boss is working on your own happiness.

And a lot of bosses don't understand this. By the way, the worst parenting advice ever is you're never happier than your unhappiest child.

That's just bad parenting, straight up, because nobody wants to have an unhappy mother or father. And nobody wants to have an unhappy boss.

If you're in any position of leadership, you have an ethical responsibility to be working on your happiness because it's your gift to the people over whom you're a steward.

ADI IGNATIUS: And we're probably picking the wrong people as managers.

ARTHUR C BROOKS: Well, we do sometimes. But there are some spectacular managers as well, self-equilibrating, very well self-managing people.

People who are not stuck in the empathy trap, but are really paying attention to compassion, who really want the best for the people around them.

And there are some wonderful, wonderful managers.

ADI IGNATIUS: So all right, so I want to talk about the consequences, then, of all this unhappiness. OK, so individually it's probably apparent. In terms of the workplace, you've got the data. But in terms of society more broadly, what is the consequence of this lack of contentment?

ARTHUR C BROOKS: When people aren't happy, the first thing that happens is that they don't lift each other up. It's interesting because this is the first thing that you see in couples is when one becomes unhappy, it spreads like a virus in families.

That's called emotional contagion. Emotional contagion is very, very, very strong.

And so that's why it's so critically important that there be some form of quarantine, emotional quarantine, and that we be-- that we emotionally understand ourselves.

And we understand that it's no service to anybody in a family or a workplace that we be bringing unhappiness to it.

So that's the first thing that we actually see is trying to contain emotional contagion. Those are the things that we can all pay attention to. And we can create an inventory in each one of our lives. Am I doing it or not? Am I doing it or not?

And then what am I going to do to get after this? And I have very specific protocols in each one of these areas that I recommend to my students and anybody who wants to hear about them.

And I'll give you one example of this on the faith side, people, how do I get started? I wasn't raised religious. And I don't want to be religious. No problem.

But there's a funny thing here at Harvard, one of the most popular classes among the undergraduates is astronomy. It's like, who cares? Astronomy, right?

And they're not astronomers, like English majors, or economics majors, or something. And you ask them, and they'll say, I don't know, but on Thursday morning, I go into my astronomy class, and I'm all stressed out because I had a big argument with my mom, and I don't think my boyfriend likes me anymore, and I'm worried about my grades.

And I come out an hour and a half later, and I realize I'm just a speck on a speck on a speck. In other words, they get small. And they make the universe large.

That's transcendence, which you can get from walking in nature before dawn.

By the way, walk in nature before dawn while the sun comes up. That's called the brahma muhurta, an ancient Vedic thinking.

And it's very well studied in neuroscientific terms, a really important idea. Without devices, never with devices, or study Bach fugues, or start a Vipassana meditation practice, or study the stoic philosophers.

I go to mass every day. I'm a Catholic, most important thing in my life. Do you. But you got to have something. That's an example of the protocols that we talk about.

ADI IGNATIUS: All right, so I'm going to go to another audience question. This is anonymous. And it's got some sass. I'm an overachieving millennial. And a majority of my friends are now talking about moving to compounds and giving up on the corporate hustle. Is that the right move?

ARTHUR C BROOKS: No, no, that's not the right move. I mean, you do you, for sure, but the whole idea of-- it's interesting because there was last year, there was a news story some of you may remember.

Hedge fund manager, I mean, being a hedge fund manager is just the world's worst job. I mean, it's just super hardcore. And you're on all the time. It's incredibly stressful if you're going to be successful at all.

And this guy, he does it, and he quits. He had a couple of down years. And he quit. This is not a friend of mine. I just read about it in the news, like everybody else.

And they asked him, what are you going to go do? He says, I'm going to go sit on a beach. I'm going to go sit on a beach.

And I'm like, yeah, for four days. And then you're going to be driving your wife crazy. And you're going to start to get really uncomfortable. And you're going to want something more than that.

Most people are not made for the chill life, let alone the monastic life. Some people are made for the monastic life, but certainly nobody who's actually been in the hustle culture to begin with.

What you need to do is to get serious about what hustle culture means, so it can be generative, and productive, and loving toward the world.

If you're not loving the world, you're doing it wrong is what it comes down to. If you're loving yourself to the exclusion of the world, you're doing it wrong is what it comes down to.

And so the protocols from that involve how can you be in the hustle culture by designing what we would call leisure with the same kind of seriousness that you do your work.

Now, the authority on that is Josef Pieper, the great mid 20th century German philosopher, who his most famous book is really, really worth reading.

It's on the reading list on my website for those of you who are interested. It's called Leisure, The Basis of Culture. The basis of culture.

And he's not talking about chilling on a beach, man. He's talking about learning, and worshipping, and developing your soul with as much seriousness as you actually would your career.

And I've had to help a lot of millennials, hard-charging millennials, and workaholic types like you and me, Adi, to redesign their lives in such a way that it has that kind of profound moral and emotional seriousness. And that's the solution.

ADI IGNATIUS: So I want to talk about more about AI. So I guess I'm in the camp of people who think AI is incredible. It will get exponentially better and better and better. It will wipe out many, many, many white collar jobs.

Even the techno optimists don't seem to be able to plausibly say, oh, but we're going to create new jobs in some other fields.

So a reasonable chance of a very large displacement of labor that won't simply be absorbed. But anyway, go with me for a second. You might disagree with that.

So then the conversation inevitably goes to universal basic income. And some people are appalled by the idea. Some people embrace it.

But it's interesting to me if, look, I'm a person who lives to work. I'm not proud of that. But as opposed to working to live.

So I get the satisfaction that we get from work. But I'm not sure it's the only way to get satisfaction. And so I'm imagining a world where maybe there is some form of universal basic income, but basically, we're thinking not about material wealth, but thinking about happiness, gross national happiness, but individual happiness.

So that if you got away from the idea I need to work 40 hours or 50 hours to make money, and that defines me, the UBI concept may not be so horrible. It may be a recasting of how we do work-life balance and how we find value in our life. What do you think about that?

ARTHUR C BROOKS: I've written a lot about unearned income. And I've written about lotteries. I've written about inheritances. And I've written about welfare payments.

And they have much the same effect on all three populations, which is to say that they tend to demotivate people.

Now, I believe in a safety net, strongly believe in a safety net. To me, that's the greatest achievement of the capitalist system is creating the largesse where we can actually support people above a certain level of subsistence.

That's a wonderful miracle. I'm really grateful for that. But the truth of the matter that is it's incredibly demotivating to not earn your way.

Human beings want to earn their way. Why? Because to be needed as a human being is the essence of dignity. To be unneeded is the basis of despair.

And people aren't stupid. They know it. If you're from a rich family, and you're kind of a wastrel layabout, and your parents treat you that way, but they say, OK, you go do open your candle shop downtown and I'm going to subsidize it.

That's a great candle shop or whatever it is, you're gonna know that you're on welfare from mom and dad. And that's going to be incredibly demotivating because we have 100 ways from Sunday to understand whether or we're being treated with dignity, whether we're treated as an asset being developed or a liability being managed.

And that's the big problem that we have with a lot of our public assistance programs. That's a lot of-- almost any system in which people are systematically on unearned sources of income is a society that's going to get less happy.

That's the inherent problem from that. That's one of the reasons that I'm most interested in making people more productive. How can people actually be more productive?

How can we have better education systems that develops what people are good at?

And that's where we actually need to start actually using our expertise and our ingenuity is figuring out how to teach people, and how to learn different ways, and how to actually find the effectiveness that people naturally have.

Because people, every single person has incredible gifts. And it's a stain on our society that we've just decided that certain people who do well in traditional classroom settings, that they're the ones who've got the gifts. And they're the ones who get the prizes. It's not right.

ADI IGNATIUS: People are asking for Arthur to say more about the empathy trap.

ARTHUR C BROOKS: Yeah, oh, yeah, I just threw that one out there like a big matzo ball. So probably the most overrated emotion that we have in modern society today is empathy.

And empathy sounds really, really good. But what it is is feeling the pain of another.

And on it's own, it's not effective. And actually can be quite destructive. And we all know this.

I mean, the most unsuccessful parents of teenagers are extremely empathetic. The most successful parents of teenagers are compassionate. And that's the distinction that we have to make.

Compassion has four parts to it. You understand what somebody's problem is. You feel it enough to be able to connect to it. You know that there is a solution and know what it is.

And you have the courage to undertake the solution, even if the person you're helping doesn't like it.

That's what it means to be a good boss. That's what it means to be a good mother. That's what it means to be a good leader. That's what it means to be a good citizen is to be a compassionate all the time, with no exceptions.

But if you're just walking around holding people's pain, you're going to be paralyzed. And you're not going to actually help the people that actually need to change.

Because most of you have had kids. They don't know the changes they need to make. And they don't want to make the changes they need to make.

And you found yourself saying, look, I'm your dad, not your friend. That's an expression of compassion, not empathy right there.

And that's what we need to take on. And that we have to have the courage, and strength, and emotional fortitude to do just that.

ADI IGNATIUS: So if you could remake the modern office, a few steps, or create it from scratch. What does it look like?

ARTHUR C BROOKS: A lot of avocado toast, man. That stuff's great.

ADI IGNATIUS: I knew that was it.

ARTHUR C BROOKS: Yeah, yeah. I mean, it's one in which people are highly collaborative and working with each other. It's a workplace in which--

and I have a workplace that I'm really fond of. It's a company that I was privileged to be able to start some years ago, where everybody has a functional skill that's 75% of what they do.

But 25% of their time is everybody else's business. And so everybody else is in everybody else's grill.

Where the higher up you are in the org chart, the lower you are, because you're taking orders from the seven direct reports above you who are coming into your office and saying, you're the only one who can solve this problem for me.

That's the kind of workplace that I actually want, where people are coming in because they have friends in the workplace, and there's a feeling of FOMO when you're actually doing it just by Zoom.

That's the kind of workplace that I actually want. And maybe it has a ping pong table and maybe it doesn't. But the whole point is that there's a sense of mission. And there's a sense of duty. And there's a sense of love. That's what I want in the workplace.

ADI IGNATIUS: So you've given some tips, but even they were a little complicated. What's one thing people could do tonight.

ARTHUR C BROOKS: Yeah, let me give-- let's put together a formula to remember, OK? And the formula, there's the world's formula that's a big lie. And that's not just capitalism. It's mother nature.

This is wired into the human genome. This is your limbic system at work. And it says, basically, if you want to be happy, do three things.

Use people, love things, and worship yourself. That's what you should do. I mean, stuff is an awesome, more stuff in your cave, more stuff in your house, more stuff, love it, love it, love it.

Because you'll find happiness that way. Use people because they're there for your gratification and for your ambition. And worship yourself because you're the center of everything.

Do that a lot, and you'll actually find happiness. That's completely wrong, but it's so close to the truth. It's so close that it beguiles you.

You need to change the verbs and the nouns. Here's the formula. Love people because only people are worth loving.

Use things with gratitude and abundance because they're beautiful, but only use them. Don't love them.

And worship the divine as you understand it because that's worth worshipping. That's the transcendence that I'm talking about.

Do that. Live that formula, and life absolutely starts to change. And all the other things that we're talking about starts to make sense.

ADI IGNATIUS: Arthur C. Brooks, thank you for being our guest on the HBR IdeaCast.

ARTHUR C BROOKS: Thank you.