Build the Life You Want: The Art and Science of Getting Happier

by Arthur C. Brooks

The truth is that I write, speak, and teach about happiness precisely because it’s naturally hard for me, and I want

more of it.

Don’t need to have a sunny disposition to be happy

for a long time, my knowledge didn’t help me very much. I knew a lot, but it wasn’t practical in any way.

She found a career that gave her a sense of service and earned success. She walked her own spiritual path. And she taught others how to live this way, too.

All about service to others and purpose!

Building the life you want takes time and effort. To delay means waiting for no good reason, missing more time being happier, and making others happier as well.

Never too late

1. I can be happy . . . 2. . . . but my circumstances are keeping me stuck in unhappiness. The truth is that both those beliefs, as persuasive as they sound, are false.

Boom!

Some people do have more happiness than others, but no one can master it consistently.

Not a one and done…it’s a dynamic

happiness is not a destination. Happiness is a direction.

Not a one and done…it’s a dynamic

happy feelings are not happiness; they are evidence of happiness.

The macronutrients of happiness are enjoyment, satisfaction, and purpose.

BIG takeaway

Enjoyment takes an urge for pleasure and adds two important things: communion and consciousness.

the hedonic treadmill, in which we adapt quickly to good things and have to keep running and running to keep feeling satisfaction.[9] This is especially true with worldly things like money, power, pleasure, and prestige (or fame).

Wrong path that masquerades and the right direction

The common strategy of trying to eliminate suffering from life to get happier is futile and mistaken; we must instead look for the why of life to make pain an opportunity for growth.

Hustle culture, intention setting, personal power B/S that also leads down a false path

Happiness is a combination of enjoyment, satisfaction, and purpose.

The litmus test

Enjoyment takes work and forgoing pleasures; satisfaction requires sacrifice and doesn’t last; purpose almost always entails suffering.

you could have high happiness and high unhappiness at the same time, or vice versa.

your happiness does not depend on your unhappiness.

we are better suited to processing unhappy feelings than happy ones,

As uncomfortable as it is, regret is an amazing cognitive feat. It requires that you go back to a past scenario, imagine that you acted differently to change it, and with that new scenario in mind, arrive at a different present—and then compare that fictional present with the one you are experiencing in reality.

Tracks with Daniel Pink’s work in The Power of Regret

while uncomfortable, regret leads to learning.

My experience with Dan S, feeling so awful at hotel in Manhattan Beach, driving home and essentially creating the website and business model outline for Candor Advisors in one afternoon.

allows us to focus intensely on other complex problems as well—like writing a business plan, or a book, or a symphony—or to figure out a solution to a complicated life problem.[26]

The secret to the best life is to accept your unhappiness (so you can learn and grow) and manage the feelings that result.

happiness is not the goal, and unhappiness is not the enemy.

Great paradigm for when you’re ‘in the hallway’ and not quite to ‘the room’ - the in between

Part of the good feeling is a deep and powerful sense of having everything I need right there.

you already have everything you need to do so, within you, at any moment, at this moment, today.

Your emotions are only signals. And you get to decide how you’ll respond to them.

Don’t treat feelings as facts

“Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.”

Tracks with Edith Egar’s work in ‘The Choice’ and ‘The Gift’

Negative emotions are protective against threats like predators; positive emotions reward us for things that we need, like good food.

Interest is pleasurable. Humans hate boring things and love interesting things.

humans make progress and prosper when they learn new things.

The Choice - Edith Eger. We’re in prisons of our own making. The ONLY thing we can control is our mind.

Between the conditions around you and your response to them is a space to think and make decisions.

In this space, you have freedom.

In the modern world, however, stress and anxiety are usually chronic, not episodic.[13] Odds are, you no longer need

your amygdala to help you outrun the tiger without asking your conscious brain’s permission.

Consider the emotions that your circumstances are stimulating in you. Observe them as if they’re happening to someone else, and accept them.

Embrace everything, push away nothing. Tracks with The Five Invitations

“So true is it that nothing is wretched, but thinking makes it so,” he wrote, “and conversely every lot is happy if borne with

equanimity.”[16]

when you experience intense emotion, simply observe your feelings.

Your limbic system is designed to send alarms, not make lists.

Your feelings at any moment are being produced to give you an effect that your brain believes is appropriate.

Think of all the ways that life is better today than it was when you were a child, and notice that we still always seem to be complaining.

the “sensitivity” of your negativity bias is too high. You need to be able to turn it down so you can see the difference between negative signals and pay attention only to the very few that matter.

Don’t swing at pitches in the dirt

Gratitude isn’t a feeling that materializes in response to your circumstances. It is a life practice.

Amen!

Accept the things you aren’t really grateful for; give thanks for the things you truly are.

humor is excellent emotional caffeine.

First, reject grimness.

there are instances in which humor is misplaced (remember, timing is everything), but fewer than you think. Some of the best eulogies at funerals are the most humorous.

for happiness, it’s better to consume humor

To get the happiness benefits of humor, let others tell the jokes; listen and laugh.

pessimism isn’t generally even a helpful view of the world.

Used to think it staved off disappointment but it really just has us simmer in it earlier and then longer