09/20/2025
A bit long but some good advice from Arthur Brooks new book The Happiness Files
Your life is the most important management task you will ever undertake. It is, in fact, like a startup, where you are the founder, entrepreneur, and chief executive.
The right denomination of rewards for the startup life is happiness itself, with a focus on love, enjoyment, satisfaction, and meaning.
It emphasizes that in leadership over your life, YOU are the most important employee.
Humans get satisfaction not from arriving at a destination but rather making tangible progress toward it.
For busy, ambitious people, family and friends are often the relationships that are sacrificed and become desiccated and malnourished.
You need a rhumb line (the direction that ships follow) to see and measure progress toward a goal
Rather than protecting you against future disappointment, a cycle of rumination after failure can set you up for more failure, or at least missed opportunities to succeed. You become fearful, lose confidence, and miss opportunities for new success.
Failure can be crushing when you set a goal of success and prioritize that over learning and improvement.
Walden wrote: “The cost of a thing is the amount of what I will call life which is required to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run.” Translation: bad choices can hurt you immediately or in the future.
Time is wasted when you engage in something that crowds our more productive or edifying activities, and when you deliberately engage in something that, on balance, we don’t even like.
We all have the impulsive toddler in our heads who has no concept of tomorrow and dominates our executive function. That leads us to overestimate the value of a little short-term pleasure and underestimate the value of our long-term well-being.
Consider your “non-working” time on the internet in terms of wages. If you earn an average hourly wage of close to 30 dollars an hour and spend the average amount of time on social media (142 minutes per day), you’re spending 71 dollars of your time scrolling.
Workplace burnout can manifest as (1) emotional exhaustion, (2) cynicism or depersonalization, or (3) negative view of personal effectiveness.
One of the most glaring sources of workplace burnout is meeting fatigue. Meetings are too long, unproductive if more than a few people involved, and get in the way of work. Good leaders will minimize meetings and keep them under 30 minutes. Eliminating or minimizing meetings at work is one of the most straightforward ways of improving employee well-being. Cancel all meetings that do not have a clear agenda or purpose if you’re the one scheduling them. Workforce engagement is maximized with 4 meeting free days per week and stress is minimized with zero meetings in the average week.
Zoom fatigue has several causes. When it comes to human interaction, it is like junk food: filling and convenient, but no substitute for a healthy diet. There are 6 common causes (1) asynchronicity of communication (rhythm is impacted by connection), (2) absence of body language, (3) lack of eye contact, (4) increased self-awareness (looking at yourself), (5) interaction with multiple faces, (6) multitasking opportunities (most of are doing other things when in a Zoom meeting….I never do this when Zooming with a patient, but guilty when Zooming on other meetings).
Working at home is often the antithesis of creating space between work and life.
Procrastination is defined as “delaying a task for a maladaptively long time.” It’s typically thought of as a time management issue, but may be more of an emotion management issue. People may avoid a task due to the negative feelings surrounding a particular task. Although usually a negative, sometimes a bit of procrastination can help the right ideas for a project show up than one completed too early. I probably suffer from “precrastination” as I’m always in a hurry to lower my “cognitive load.” Sometimes putting off tasks that require innovation and research in order to mull them over might improve performance. Finishing a task to 90% and then saving the last 10% for the next day can improve the outcome.
The strategic use of NO can save your life. Many people say no to something that becomes a source of regret, but more often than not this isn’t the case.
Be particularly aware of narcissists who have two characteristics…they’re exploitive and entitled. They’re exploitative because they think if you’re willing to be taken advantage of, that’s YOUR problem. They’re entitled because they think they deserve whatever they’re asking for. It’s taken me a long time to learn how to handle the narcissists in my practice. Certain people are VIP’s but are humble and don’t use it unfairly...while others use it excessively. My definition of class is someone who could skip the line, but who waits in line like everyone else. We have an important choice: “Behave with controlled grace, or uncontrolled entitlement.” Most, but not all, of my patients are the former.
Worrying can steal your peace and sucks up valuable time. Worry is a recursive mental attempt to resolve a situation that has an uncertain, potentially negative outcome. It is repetitive and self-focused and features an inability to shift attention from negative thoughts. It harms attention, erodes problem solving, and worsens mood. Worry centers on events that have not yet occurred.
Worry can mute the vividness of our mental picture, interfering with some of the pathways in the brain that could help us devise a real solution. Worriers believe that their worrying will help them to handle a situation better or increase their control of it.
Chronic worrying has a genetic component. In some way, our genetics influence this and this is why there is a “worrier” and a “warrior” genetic profile. I would not have survived 36-hour shifts unless I had the warrior genetics as warriors remain calm under fire.
Chronic worriers deal poorly with uncertainty, are narrowly focused, self-conscious, and tend to have more social anxiety. Worry does correlate with higher performance in many things.
Worrying is not based on reality most of the time. In one study, 91% of the things studied participants worried about never came to pass, meaning chronic worriers suffer 9 out of 10 times needlessly. Writing your worry down makes it more emotionally manageable. Focus on writing down the best, the worst, and the most likely outcome of a problem. Give up the magical thinking that if your torment yourself with enough worry about something it’ll improve the situation. Perseverating on something will not provide unique insight.
Remember that worry robs you of valuable time in your life, and researchers have found that worry induced psychological distress is associated with early mortality.
The biggest predictor of happiness at work is happiness outside of work.
In order to max out the benefits of happiness derived by giving to others, you’ll get deeper, lasting happiness from a good deed no one knows you did. Sure, the admiration, thanks, and praise you get giving a big donation somewhere to help others gives you a hit of pleasure, but those who gifted others and kept their gift unpublicized derived greater happiness from it. Publicized gifts when given from someone with “high moral character” might make a self- reflective donor doubt their own motivations. Volunteer without posting about is what Arthur Brooks suggests we do sometimes.
Money doesn’t buy happiness past a certain level required to meet needs. Spending more time fruitlessly chasing well-being up the income curve often means spending less time on love. Spending money on experiences, buying time, and giving money away does seem to raise happiness, but designer shoes do not. Using money to create memories with friends and family help happiness.
Early in life, success often comes from addition: more money, more responsibility, more relationships, more possessions. Early in life, you’re filling an empty canvas. By midlife, choose subtraction, not addition. The most important impediment to chipping away is a belief that success = more. This is bad math in mid-life. Work to reengineer your life later in life so that you can step away from more responsibility and make more time to think, love, read, and pray.
Prospection means mentally living at the finish line, which subjects you to an “arrival fallacy” which means you expect a specific goal will be the be-all end-all for your happiness.
People unable to accept criticism are those who score low in self-esteem and high in neuroticism, who are fearful of negative evaluation, and who tend to be pessimistic. Many of us tend to analyze the critic more than the criticism, and we tend to consider the criticism a judgement on our inherent abilities rather than our performance. Try moving the focus from emotion to analysis.
If you’re criticizing to help, you’re doing it right. If you’re criticizing to harm, you’re not. Good criticism should have (1) the care of the recipient in mind, (2) respectful delivery, (3) good intentions, (4) a pathway to improvement, and (5) appropriate targeting of the recipients needs.
Praise in public, criticize in private.
The happiest couples had a 5:1 ratio of positive to negative interactions.
An honest compliment is given with nothing asked or expected in return.
Good health practices seem to lower unhappiness rather than raising happiness.
No surprise, parental warmth and affection (slanted toward the fathers behavior a bit more than mom’s) has a large impact on a child’s happiness and psychological adjustment. Make sure your kids know you love them unconditionally, even at their worst and least deserving moments.
Kids pay attention to everything their parents do, rather than what they say. I saw my parents exercising 7 days a week and thought “that’s a part of life.” My kids saw my wife and I doing the same thing, and now they do it and will likely model it for their kids one day.
Real friendships have (1) companionship (like being together), (2) help (help each other when in need), (3) intimacy (can confide without fear of betrayal), (4) reliable alliance (we can count on each other to be there for each other), (5) self-validation (they support and encourage each other, genuinely hoping for success), and (6) emotional security (comfort and reassure each other through tough times).
Top 10 ways to improve happiness:
1. Invest in family and friends
2. Join a club (social capital)
3. Be active physically and mentally
4. Practice your religion
5. Purposeful exercise
6. Act with kindness
7. Be generous
8. Check your health
9. Experience nature
10. Socialize with colleagues out of work
Progress, not goal achievement, is more likely to bring happiness.
“Courage is not the absence of fear, but the triumph over it. The brave man is not he who does not feel afraid, but he who conquers fear.” Nelson Mandela
If you want success, pursue happiness. Instead of trying to get success and hoping it leads to happiness, work on your happiness and you’ll have a higher likelihood of succeeding at everything in life (work, marriage, friendships, etc…)
