ARTHUR C. BROOKS: Success Won’t Make You Happy — Here’s What Will

I'm Rufus Griscomb and this is the next big idea. Today, your life is a startup. Here's how to run it. Arthur C. Brooks is an unlikely happiness guru.

He's not a psychologist or a philosopher or a mystic. He's an economist and public policy analyst. For years he ran the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank. that advocates for private enterprise and small government. That job, rubbing shoulders with heads of state and titans of industry, it made him miserable.

Confronted with the sobering realization that for too long he'd privileged work over connection, status over happiness, He left the C-suite and set about, as he put it in the conversation you're about to hear, renovating the mission of his life. Before long, Arthur was teaching at Harvard Business School, but he wasn't teaching hostile takeovers and leveraged buyouts, he was teaching happiness from a scientific perspective. As he writes in his new book, The Happiness Files, which is drawn from the weekly column he's written for The Atlantic since 2020. My classes cover a lot of neuroscience, social psychology, and behavioral economics to help my students build happier lives and understand how happiness science can serve them in their management careers.

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