January 19, 2026 • 36 mins
It’s easy to fixate on the usual markers of success — your resume, your net worth, or how “impressive” you seem on paper. But how much do those things really speak to our wellbeing? And what do we miss when we only focus on them?
Author and cultural commentator David Brooks reflects on what he learned when he moved beyond ambition, and shares some practical ways to get unstuck.
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Speaker 1 (00:15):
Pushkin. When we're feeling stuck or unhappy with the way
our lives are unfolding, we often fixate on certain kinds
of self improvement, things like getting into shape, making more money,
eating healthier, or landing a promotion at work. Goals like
(00:36):
these are super common at the start of the new year.
But what we don't tend to hear about our goals
that are less self focused, trying to become a better
friend or committing to supporting our surrounding communities. Could goals
like these be a more effective path to becoming unstuck
in the new year. Could intentionally building our character be
a more happiness inducing strategy than we think? These are
(00:57):
the questions that we'll be tackling with today's guest.
Speaker 2 (01:00):
Mining David Brooks. I am a columnist at The New
York Times and a former fellow at the Jackson Institute
at Yale University.
Speaker 1 (01:07):
David is also the author of self books on the
importance of character development, huge bestsellers like The Road to
Character and his most recent work, How to Know a Person.
David's interest in character development began as a personal self
help project.
Speaker 2 (01:21):
I'm not a naturally deep person, and so I think
I've read all these damn books, and I go to
religious services, and I do all this stuff to try
to make myself a little deeper than I was yesterday.
Speaker 1 (01:34):
And one of his early realizations was that he and
so many others were focused on the wrong kinds of
goals when it came to living the good life. So
way back in the road to character, I know you
made this distinction between resume and eulogy virtues, which lots
of folks know. But for listeners who don't know that framework,
can you explain what you mean and what the difference
is between these two sets of verdues.
Speaker 2 (01:54):
Yeah, dualisms turn out to be really powerful. If you
put one in the book, people remember it forever. So
the decision I made was between the resume virtues, which
are the things that make you good to your job,
whether you're capable of being a great lawyer, accountant, teacher,
whatever it is, and the eulogy virtues are the things
they say about you after you're dead, whether you're honest, honorable, courageous,
(02:14):
capable of great love. And we all know the eulogy
virtues are more important. And yet our schools, often our
families emphasize the resume virtues. And somebody did this study
years ago where they asked junior high school students, do
your parents care more about whether you do your homework
or whether you are kind? And in the eighty percent,
the students said they care more about homework than being kind.
(02:36):
So parents pressure their students into being good little resume
achieve atrons, and they have tremendous for your failure as
a result of that.
Speaker 1 (02:44):
I think one of the things that makes it so
hard is that these resume virtues come with metrics, right,
we can measure them really easily, and I think that,
especially in modern culture, when we have so many tools
for measurement, we've become really susceptible to kind of doing
better on those because it's like, well, I know what
it looks like when I increase my time when I'm
training for a marathon, or I know what it looks
like when my salary goes up. I might not know
what it looks like to increase my potential for being
(03:06):
a good person.
Speaker 2 (03:06):
In the same way, my view is, anytime you find
yourself quantifying a human being, you should stop and watch
what you're doing, because some things are quantifiable. And if
I want to know how strong you are, can figure
out how much you can lift. But the things that
really matter in life are the things like your determination,
your social skills, your curiosity, your ability to be resilient
(03:28):
in the face of failure, your ability to be kind,
your ability to cast the just and loving attention on
other human beings. One study I saw, I've found when
people are fired, in eighty nine percent of cases, they
were fired because they were jerks. Basically, they were not coachable,
they were not good teammates, they didn't want to learn.
They're not fired because they lack intelligence. They're not fired
(03:49):
because they lack technical skills. And so it's those what
is stupidly called either soft skills or even worse, non
cognitive skills, that are actually the hard and most important
things of life. And there's just no such thing as
a non cognitive skill. Everything we do is cognitive. And
so the very idea that we define the most important
things in opposition to the least important things which we prioritize,
(04:13):
is a symptom that our society has really lost track
of what matters in a human being.
Speaker 1 (04:17):
So this time of year, people are looking for big changes.
It's like new me, Right, you know you're going to
revamp your whole self, and that might work maybe with
some of the achievement virtues, wealth I think there's an
open question about that. I think it doesn't work so
much with the eulogy virtues because one of the things
you so nicely pointed out is that character development isn't
this huge, massive transformation. You're asking people to think about
(04:39):
something much quieter, these kind of tiny, little practice changes.
So talk to me about this idea that character is
an everyday practice. What do you mean by that?
Speaker 2 (04:48):
In all our jobs, there's a materialistic drag, a corrosion.
For doctors who I've spoken to, the drag is the
lure of money and the need to make everything efficient
and have a patient every sixteen minutes or less. And
in journalism the drag is I want to tell the
truth as I see it. I also want to generate clicks,
(05:11):
and so that's the seduction. And so to push back
against that seduction and try to stay within the moral lens.
Is I find a daily challenge. And that's not a
challenge you solve with some miracle growth.
Speaker 1 (05:23):
It's a challenge you solve with tiny changes of actions.
Speaker 2 (05:26):
Well, I mean characters forged the way we learned crafts
by small habits. And you know, I do dumb things.
I always have some spiritual book going on, reading a
book by Thomas Merton on contemplation. That's how I try
to aspire. One of the things you can do to
become a better person is to just read books of
people you admire and unconsciously be a little more like them.
(05:49):
I read a crazy biography last week called A Woman
of No Importance, about an American woman who basically joined
and organized the French Resistance during World War Two. And
she did crazy stuff of organizing hundreds of French resistance
fighters under constant threat of death. And now I'm not
going to do that. I don't have that, but you
(06:09):
can't help having some of that rub off on you.
And you think, you know, when I'm searching for meaning
in my life, who are the exemplars that I care
about right now? In times of my life? I literally
have taken the postcards and portraits of the people I
admire and stuck them on the wall. I'm a big admirer.
A guy named Samuel Johnson an essays to really wrote
himself into being a beautiful human being, and I see
(06:30):
Sam Johnson's face over there. Maybe I won't to shoot
out my taxes today. We want to surround ourselves with
the eyes of the dead and the eyes of the admired.
It'll lift our spirits.
Speaker 1 (06:42):
I think one of the things that we often get
stuck on, which can prevent our moral development, is seeking
out comfort. We are a modern society that avoids discomfort.
So tell me a little bit about how that can
keep us stuck and can prevent our moral development in
ways that we might not realize.
Speaker 2 (06:59):
Yeah. I read a book recently called What I talk
about When I talk about Running, by a Japanese novelist
Namara Kami. He ran a jazz club for a little
while and he decided one day, while watching a baseball game,
I think I'm going to write a novel. And so
he quit his jazz club. And as he started writing,
he started getting heavier because he had no exercise or
(07:20):
he wasn't hauling around kekes of beer anymore, and so
he said, I'll take up running. And he's a pretty
committed guy. So he started running six miles a day,
and he ran marathons every year. And when you read
his book, The Thing that Leaps out at you is
he hates running and then pasted it, just like I
was on the twenty third mile. I hated running. I
finished the marathon. All I wanted to do was stop
(07:41):
running and never run again. It's just one sentence after
another of how much he hates running. So why does
he do something he hates. Well, he did it because
he thought it's about embracing challenge. I think, in part
because he thought it made him a better person, in
part because he thought it made him a better writer.
And I think perversely he got deep fulfillment out of running.
(08:05):
And I can relate, not because I can run six
miles today. But I'm here in my office and every day,
seven days a week, I come into this office and
I write my twelve hundred words. And I've been doing
it for forty years. And I do not like writing.
It's not easy. It hasn't gotten any easier with the experience.
(08:27):
Even just organizing the structure of a piece or a book.
It's just really hard. So I don't like to write,
but I want to write. And I've learned that we
have two different systems in our brain. There's a liking
system and a wanting system. And I have found in
my life that if I pay attention to the wanting system,
that's more reliable than the liking system because it leads
(08:49):
to the hard and sometimes challenging things that make you
feel fulfilled. And I guess the one thing I would
ask people to ask themselves is, deep down, at the
core of yourself, what do you really want? I had
a professor at Umer of Chicago where I was an undergrad,
named Leon Kas who's still with us, and he said,
(09:09):
what defines people is not their opinions, It's not their success,
It's the ruling passion of their souls. Some people are
lovers of pleasure, some people are lovers of understanding, some
people are lovers of justice. And so I often ask
people what is the ruling passion of your soul? And
you want to answer, I get back a blank look.
They have no idea. People have to ask themselves this question.
(09:31):
But understanding your own desires is really important. I teach
a class now in Chicago for people who are retiring,
and one of the things that I've noticed they do
so they are sixty five, they're retiring, they're beginning the
next third of their life. One thing it helps them
to ask is what did I leave behind in childhood?
What gift do I have that I currently hold in exile?
(09:53):
And if they can go back and find that little
kid they used to be and what horizon that kid
was chasing toward, then they can touch something pretty deep
in themselves and they can retap into a desire that
is the endorment in their lives. Markami was seized by
the desire to write and the desire to run. And
it's a great skill, the capacity to be seized. Some
(10:14):
people are seized by God, some people are seized by
a hero. Some people are seized by poetry. And when
you're seized, it's almost like you don't have a choice.
You're in the double negative. I can't not do this.
And I think the willingness to be seized, to be
open to being seized, is just a tremendous and underrated
skill which we almost beat out of young people at school.
(10:38):
We prescribe so much of what they must do. You
should go through life as if you're just wandering through
a bookstore, just willing to be captured by whatever interests you.
You never know what can lead to what.
Speaker 1 (10:51):
I absolutely adore this idea of being seized. It really
plays on what psychologists call this notion of moral elevation
when you see something that challenges you or gets you
wanting to think about it in a new way. But
I think to do that we have to have a
particular moral virtue that we don't often have, which is
that we have to have some humility. You have to
know go in with a plan that you know is
your plan and you're stuck to it. You actually have
(11:12):
to be open. And humility seems to be the kind
of thing that we're losing. It seems like we're in
a modern culture that celebrates self promotion and acting like
you know what you're doing, even if you don't know
what you're doing. Any tips for generating a little bit
more humility, especially in the face of a culture that
really doesn't like that virtue.
Speaker 2 (11:29):
Yeah, go to work at the New York Times.
Speaker 1 (11:30):
It'll too read the comments section.
Speaker 2 (11:34):
I wanted to write a book. I was going to
have the title of Humility in small Letters and then
by David Brooks and really big Lis my Humility book.
There's a nice distinction to be made between wilfulness and willingness,
and wilfulness is when you take control and willingness is
when you're willing to be led. And the artists, I know,
the painters, the musicians, they have a great capacity for willingness.
(11:57):
They're willing to go wherever the muse leads them. And
if you're going to a concert or seeing one of
their shows, and you're going to take advantage of what
they've given and produced, then you have to be willing
to go where they're taken. You just have to be willing. CS.
Lewis define humility is not thinking lowly of yourself, but
really not thinking of yourself. I define it a little differently.
(12:19):
I define humility as radical self awareness from a position
of other centeredness. It's the ability to get outside yourself
and see yourself accurately and honestly. And when you have
that level of self awareness, you have stability in your life.
You're not always searching to impress. And there's debates I've
had with friends over what's the most important virtue to
(12:40):
add And I have a lot of friends who think
courage is the most important virtue, but I think humility
is the most important virtue.
Speaker 1 (12:47):
And true humility, David says, starts with how we think
about ourselves. We need to switch from a self focus
to one that's turned towards others. But how can we
do that better? After the break, David will share some
strategies for turning our mindsets outward. We'll see why service
and connection are an effective path for developing a deeper
sense of meaning and getting psychologically on this stuck The
(13:10):
Happiness Lab will be back in a moment. Author and
cultural commentator David Brooks has argued that we can get
unstuck in twenty twenty six not by chasing more achievement,
but by developing our character. And one of the practical
ways to do that, David says, is through acts of service,
(13:31):
especially at the local level.
Speaker 2 (13:33):
First, look around the neighborhood and motroun Every neighborhood has
its own unique problems. I have a conversation about what's
the problem here, what's ailing us? And then what do
I bring to the table, What skill do I have
that really will enable me to help? And I have
a little nonprofit called Weave the Social Fabric Projects, and
we help people who live in the neighborhood where they work,
(13:56):
and they are the ones who are holding their neighborhoods together.
Some of them are in organizations. Some of them are
just One lady said, I practice aggressive friendship. She's the
lady on the block who posts everything no again, helps
kids in the West Side Chicago stay at a gangs.
They just want to serve the community. We ran to
a lady in Florida and she was helping kids cross
(14:19):
the street after elementary school and we said, are you
getting paid to do this? And she said no, but
it was safer for the kids if an adult can
help them walk across the street. And this wasn't voluntarying.
This is what neighbors do. And I think she was
tremendously fulfilled.
Speaker 1 (14:35):
I know, when you see these moments of interdependence of
people that are doing stuff for their community, you've called
these folks weavers. What do you mean by this term weaver?
Speaker 2 (14:43):
When we start weave, we had a theory that if
you're going to do social change, creating a new identity
really matters. For example, in nineteen fifty five, nobody called
themselves a feminist. By nineteen seventy five, millions and millions
of people called themselves a feminist, and that identity had
great power in shaping how they saw the world. And
(15:05):
so we created this term weaver because we wanted term
and seemed apt. And people embrace the idea that I
want to be a weaver or I am a weaver.
And our real theory of social change was society changes
when a small group of people find a better way
to live, and the rest of us copy, and so
weavers have found a better way to live. A more
(15:26):
formal organization you can join and say, for example, I'm
a big admirer of an organization Baltimore called Threat and
Thread surrounds kids from the Baltimore schools with four volunteers
and then a network of people they call grandparents and
then counselors, and so it's an elaborate network surrounding these
young people, basically another form of extended family. And they
(15:49):
helped the kids go to school, if they need lunch,
anything an extended family would do for a young person.
And the young people have been betrayed by life, and
so when the volunteers first showed up at their door,
the kids often slam the door in their face. And
the rule of Thread is there's no leaving. It's like family,
there's no leaving. So short of a court order, you're
(16:10):
going to show up with the kid's door again and again,
and the founder of the Woman named Sarah Hemminger says,
if you reject people and they keep showing up for you,
it's identity changing, and it's identity changing to be the
one who shows up. And so it's those kinds of
discrete actions that take place in communities every day. And
(16:31):
some of them are heroic and some of them are mundane.
And we don't have to be as heroic as some
of them are. But if we bent our lives a
little in that direction, America would be a more trusting place.
I will say, the people I've met through Weave are
some of the most fulfilled people, and anybody can do that.
Speaker 1 (16:49):
So that's interdependence at the community level. But your most
recent work is really focused on becoming a little bit
more interdependent relationally, like person to person. And so tell
me a little bit about the origin story of How
to Know a Person. Where did the idea for that
book come from. It's much more kind of one on
one than some of your other character development books.
Speaker 2 (17:07):
When I was working on Weave, using all these words
like community and relationship, and it struck me these words
were abstractions that a relationship or a community is really
built out of discrete, second by second encounters. But a
lot of young people and a lot of old people
(17:28):
have not been taught basic social skills like how do
you sit with someone who's depressed, how do you break
up with someone without crushing their heart? How do you
ask for an offer for forgiveness? Nobody ever taught me the
skill of how to end a conversation gracefully. So I
went to my high school reunion in my fifth one,
so I was younger, and my only move to get
out of a conversation in a cocktail like setting was
(17:51):
to say, I'm going to go to the bar and
get another drink. So twenty minutes into the reunion, I'm
so drunk I have to leave the reunion. I've had
like six drinks and twenty minutes. And so nobody had
ever taught me. And the apex skill is the skill
of making others feel seen, heard, and understood. And that's
a skill, just the way learning tennis is a skill,
the way learn carpentry is a skill.
Speaker 1 (18:10):
It also seems like a skill that we're losing in
modern society. Give me a sense of how bad we've
gotten when it comes to making others feel seen and hurt.
Speaker 2 (18:17):
We happen to be in a moment of deep spiritual
and relational crisis. And I don't need to tell you
of all people that data on rising mental health, rising
suicide rates, the number of people who say they have
no friends, there's up, the number of people who rate
themselves the lowest happiness categories, up, the number of people
not in a romantic relationship, the number of people who've
broken with a member of their intimate family. There's just
(18:38):
a lot of sadness out there. And when their sadness,
there's meetness. Because if you feel yourself unseen and invisible,
you feel it as an injustice, which it is, and
as a threat, and so you're prone to lashing out.
And when you're on a level of distrust, then it's
very hard to reach out feel good. Social trust statistics
(18:59):
used to be sixty percent of Americans said that I
can trust their neighbors. Now it's send a thirty percent.
Among millennials it is nineteen percent. So if you're thinking
that this person is fundamentally in trust worthy, then of
course you're not going to be vulnerable to them. And
friendship is a successive series of vulnerabilities, as you know,
and so it's just going to be harder, and there's
going to be more distance, there's going to be suspicion,
(19:22):
and that makes it extremely hard to practice the skill
of seeing others.
Speaker 1 (19:27):
I know you've talked so much about how this skill
is needed for society, but given that you wrote the
book on this, was this something that you struggled with
as an individual? Were you good at seeing and hearing
others or was this something that you had to work on.
Speaker 2 (19:38):
My wife and I have been married for nine years
and she takes a looks at me from twenty years
ago on videos. She says, well, I wouldn't I marry
that guy. I was the kind of person nobody would
confide in. I was always busy. I had a clock
in my head. It's a very good way to destroy relationships.
But mostly I think I was raised in a super cerebral,
(19:58):
academic household and it was easy to get buy on
brain power and ignore your heart. And so I think
I was feeling things, but there was no highway between
my heart and my mouth and even my conscious mind.
There's an episode that happened to me maybe fifteen years
ago that symbolized for me the old way of being,
which is, I'm a big baseball fan. I've been to
(20:20):
a thousand ball games. I've never caught a foul ball.
So I'm in Camden Yards in Baltimore one day with
my youngest son and somebody loses control of the bat
and it lands in my lap. And getting a bat
is a thousand times better than getting a ball, and
so I should have been jumping up and down, I
fiving everybody around me, hugging people, getting on a jumbo tron.
(20:41):
I just took the bat and put it at my
feet and I stared straight ahead like a turtle. And
I look back on that guy and I think, show
a little joy. And there was just a level of inhibition.
And I went through a period in twenty thirteen when
I was in a valley. My marriage was coming apart,
my kids were even school. I was lonely. I did
(21:02):
what any middle aged male idiot would do, which is
I tried to work my way through the problem. Workoholism
is a very ineffective social therapy for a spiritual and emotional.
Speaker 1 (21:11):
Crisis, but it looks very good from the outside. You
get a lot of resume virtue.
Speaker 2 (21:14):
Too, very good from the outside, because it looks like
you're cruising. But I experienced loneliness as sort of a
burning in the stomach. Then I read a passage by
Frederic Beekner, the novelist, and he says, in moments of pain,
you can either be broken or broken open. You can
be broken by making yourself invulnerable, by covering up, callousing over.
(21:35):
When you're broken open, you make yourself, even though it'dst
of pain, more vulnerable. But that's really the only pathway
to growth. And so I began to work on this,
and so I did it in a good old University
of Chicago fashion. I wrote a book about emotion. But
then I tried to practice it. And a couple of
years ago, I was at a conference in Nantucket. I
(21:56):
was in the audience. Speaker gave us all a piece
of paper, and on the piece of paper was lyrics
to a love song, and he said to us, I
want you to find somebody you don't know, gaze into
their eyes, and sing the love song to them. And
if you had asked the old me to do that,
I would have spontaneously combusted. I found some guy, I'm
(22:16):
sanging in his eyes. There are no sparks between us, sadly,
but I did it and it was a happy day
for me, a proud day because it shows you it's
never too late to change. You can change at seventy,
you can change it eighty, you can change at ninety.
It's never too late to change a bit who you are.
Speaker 1 (22:31):
One of the great things about your book is I
think you talk about how we can change to become
better at connecting with one another, but you do this
in this really practical way. You almost look at relationships
at a real micro level, about the things we can change.
And one of the things I love that you focused
on is just changing our level of attention. What can
we do with our attention to do better?
Speaker 2 (22:50):
Yeah. Simond Veyo French mystic, said attention is the ultimate
act of generosity. For her, attention really was the foundation
of all morality. One of her students, not liberally, but
someone who learned a lot from her, is Irish Murdoch,
the philosopher and novelist, and Murdoch said, you know, we
usually look at each other through self centered eyes. Is
(23:12):
this the person going to be good for me or
bad for me? Is going to make me feel good?
Make me feel bad and she said what we should
do is cast what she called a just and loving
attention on another, so to see people with just and
loving eyes. I wrote about this in the last book.
I was in a diner in Waco having breakfast with
a ninety three year old lad named LaRue Dorsey, and
(23:33):
she presented herself to me as a strict disciplinarian, like
a drill sergeant. Lady. She'd been a teacher, and she said,
I love my students enough to be tough for them.
And I was intimidated by this formidable lady, and into
the diner walks a mutual friend of ours, a pastor
named Jimmy Drell, who pastors to the homeless in Waco,
and he comes up to us. He knows us both,
and he grabbs Miss Dorsey by the shoulders and he says,
(23:54):
missus Dorsey, you're the best. I love you. And that
stern disciplinarian lady I had been talking to, who turned
in an instant into a bright eye, shining nine year
old girl. He brought forth a different version of her
with the power of his attention. And it shows that
power of that skill, and it can even achieve almost
a spiritual quality. One of my favorite stories which I
(24:16):
read somewhere and I hope it's true, but it sounds apocryphal,
but I'm going to say it anyway. It's about Dan
Rather interviewing Mother Teresa, and Dan Rather said to Mother Teresa,
when you pray to God, what do you say to
And she said, Oh, I don't say anything. I just listen.
And Rather says, well, what is God saying to you?
And Mother Teresa says, oh, he's not saying anything, He's
(24:36):
just listening, listening. This just tremendously powerful.
Speaker 1 (24:41):
Well, it's also something I feel like we've lost in
modern society. Explain some of the challenges that make this
sort of attention harder these days.
Speaker 2 (24:48):
Well, the obvious ones are the phones. The deeper one
is we really value autonomy, and I'm one of those
who does, but it's sometimes extremely self destructive. If I
get up and I look at my calendar and there's
like one call or one meeting, I think, oh, this
day is so crowded. Oh, and I want to just
(25:10):
sit and write alone, Like it's easy to be alone.
But somehow we're over autonomizing, if that's a word. And
it seems easier in the short term, but it's poorer
in the long term.
Speaker 1 (25:22):
So how do we fight this tendency to overvalue autonomy
so that we can connect again When we get back
from the break, David will share some practical strategies for
rebuilding interdependence, ones that are essential for getting spiritually unstuck.
In the new year, The Happiness Lab will be right back.
(25:44):
In his recent book How to Know a Person, author
and political commentator David Brooks contends that we'd all be
happier and feel less stuck if we connected better with
the people around us. But to do that, David says,
we need to better understand the concept of empathy.
Speaker 2 (25:59):
I think empathy is three things. One, it's an emotional
connection and that's just like physically sharing an emotion. And
then it's mentalizing. I'm using my experiences to deliver theories
about what you're probably going through. And then the third
part of empathy is caring. If you go on the
street and play three card MONI with a card shark,
(26:21):
he empathizes with you. He knows what you're feeling, he
knows how to manipulate that, but he doesn't care. We
want effective care. It's not doing what's comfortable for you,
but doing what the other person needs at that exact moment.
When I was at Yale, had a student named Jillian
whose dad had died of pancreatic cancer. After she got
out of college, I had with Gradston and her dad.
(26:45):
She had the conversation that he would probably not be
there for her big life events like her marriage, and
a couple of months after he died, she was nobody
to be a bridesmaid at her friend's wedding, and she
watched the father of that bride give a beautiful toast
to his daughter, and then it came time and the
reception for the father daughter dance, and said, just too soon.
(27:12):
So she went to the lady's room to have a cry.
And when she got out of the lady's room in
the hallway, all the people at her table at the
reception and the adjacent table were just standing there in
the hallway and they gave her a supportive hug. Nobody
said anything. They just gave her a hug and went
back to their tables, and she said, it was exactly
(27:33):
what I needed at that moment. So somebody at one
of those tables said, let's go be in the hallway
for Jillian, and that is empathy horror x lots. That's
knowing just what she needs, but not too much.
Speaker 1 (27:48):
It seems like there's so many things to get in
the way of that. One is something we've talked about before,
which is time. Right, We're just too busy, we don't
have time to notice. The other is a tension, which
we've talked about. We're not there, But the only thing
is a mistaken notion that we have about this culture
of achievement that like putting in the work for that
kind of empathy is going to kind of give a
hit to our own individual success, our individual ability. And
(28:10):
this is psychologically just really painful for me when folks
describe this, because I think what all the work shows
is that this act of being empathic makes us feel
really good. Right, Everyone who left their table to go
stand in that hallway for Jillian felt amazing afterward. What
is it about this modern sense of achievement that gets
empathy wrong, that kind of puts us on this wrong
track of not realizing how valuable it is.
Speaker 2 (28:31):
Yeah, I think partly we've been schooled in the idea
that the more selfish we are, the more will succeed
and we've even more been schooled in the idea that
other people are selfish. And I often ask my students
do you think human beings are fundamentally selfish or fundamentally
cooperative and altruistic? And I think more than in generations past,
(28:54):
the high number of people say selfish. There's a guy
at you know, Chicago, a friend of mine named Nick Eppie,
who asks his business school students what drives you to
go into business? And they say, oh, you know, I
really value service and I want to be a service
to other people. And he says, what about your classmates?
What drive them to go into business? And everyone says money, money,
(29:17):
And so I think we ascribe darker motivations to others.
And when you do that, you develop a dark world mentality.
And I'll start with our politics, not to get too political,
but I think the guy who sits in the White
House right now has a very dark world mentality that
life is about doggy dog and it's if you don't
(29:39):
screw them first, they're going to screw you. And a
lot of people, not only Donald Trump, a lot of
people have a dark world view that you really have
to protect yourself, you really have to guard your heart,
and I think they have an overly negative view of
reality I found in my life and you know, obviously
I've got a lot of privileges and all that, but
(30:00):
if you act in ways that are trusting, preemptive, vulnerability,
you will be betrayed sometimes and they will hurt you.
But it's better and most of the time it pays
off and you're glad you led with trust. But that
is not something that often gets talked about, and we
have this negativity. I read a story I forget what
(30:21):
it was, in some online magazine a couple of years ago,
and it was about a bunch of books that were
coming out about motherhood, and the books had these negative titles,
like it was all how dark and how rotten it
was to be a mom, And the reporter notes in
the middle of the piece, she said, the funny thing
happened to me while reporting this piece. The old woman
(30:42):
I was interviewed and pulled me aside and said, we
have a word off the record, And she said, I
don't want you to put this in the article, but
I kind of like being a mom. I love my kids,
my partner is equitable, but please don't put that in
public because they're afraid of. If they say that, it'll
seem in sensitives people who are going through hard time.
And when you're in a culture where you can't admit
(31:04):
that you love being a mom or a dad, you're
in a pretty pessimistic culture. And if you just look,
if you do Google and brand, what words we use
to describe the world. The usage of negative words like anger, horror,
pain is surging, and the usage of positive words joy, success, whatever,
(31:26):
is plummeting. So public culture and public conversation has become
very negative. And that's in part because of the Internet.
Because people in my profession in the media, the number
of headlines we write mean to generate fear and anger.
It just creates this negative climate. And in this negative climate,
it's hard to lead with vulnerability and trust and the
sorts of things that would actually lead to the connection.
Speaker 1 (31:48):
But it seems like when we take action ourselves to
make those connections, when we really try to see others,
we wind up creating the opposite cycle.
Speaker 2 (31:55):
Right.
Speaker 1 (31:56):
We can be in this kind of dark cycle where
everything feels bad and we just continue to see more
evidence of it. But it feels like when we do
the act of putting good out there ourselves. Then we
wind up seeing it more, and then other people reciprocate
that good to us, and then we can build these
more positive cycles.
Speaker 2 (32:09):
Let me tell him one other Nick Keppley's story. He
and I were on stage at Chicago and he was
interviewing me and bet something. After forty five minutes in
the interview, he says to the audience, Okay, I want you,
all of you to find somebody in the audience you
don't know, and for the next ten minutes, you're going
to talk about the high point of your life, the
low point of your life, in the turning point of
your life. And the audience groaned, and he said, how
(32:32):
many of you don't want to do this? And eighty
percent of the hands went up, and Nick said go
and then and they started sharing their high points and
low points at the hurning points. And ten minutes later,
when we were supposed to get them back to paying
attention to us, they wouldn't shut up. They were having
such a good time that they would not shut up.
And finally, twenty minutes going by, and finally they stopped
(32:53):
talking to each other and they listen to us again.
And Nick said, how many of you enjoyed that, and
eighty percent of the hands went up. And one of
his findings, and he's got a book about this coming
out soon, is that we underestimate how much we'll enjoy
talking to strangers. We underestimate how deep people want to get,
and so we have this dark and pessimistic pew which
is not accurate. And now, because of Nick, when I'm
(33:15):
on a plane sometimes and I'm word with my reading
with like an hour left to go on the flight,
I take out my headphones and I start talking to
my neighbor. And I will tell you I've never had
a moment where the conversation with whoever I was with
was less interesting than the book. It's always more interesting somehow.
And so it's a good habit to force yourself to do,
even if you think it'll be worring.
Speaker 1 (33:36):
You have to be more vulnerable than you think. I
think one of the great things about Nick's Deep Questions
is that they're sharing things that you're kind of a
little bit embarrassed about. Their questions like when was the
last time you cried, you know, or your house was
on fire. What's the thing you don't like to admit
but that you take with you anyway, because it matters
to you. We're sharing these darker, more vulnerable parts of ourselves,
and we assume that that's going to feel terrifying, but
(33:57):
in fact it feels great.
Speaker 2 (33:59):
My job as a journalist is to ask people questions
and often about their lives, and often and difficult moments
of their lives. And so how often has someone said
to me, none of your damn business. The answer is zero,
and so you should ask. There's another guy who you
probably know much better than I named Dan McAdams said Northwestern.
(34:20):
He studies a lot how people tell their life stories,
and he interviews people over four hours, and then he
wants to slide him a little check to compensate them
for their time, and a lot of people push the
check back and say, I don't want money for this.
This has been one of the best afternoons of my life.
No one's ever asked. And so that's just a clues
you go through life that the quality of your conversations
(34:41):
is really the quality of your interaction.
Speaker 1 (34:44):
So we've talked about all these ways that we can
boost our character, that we can become more connected both
to our communities and just relationally with other people. There's
so many of the great strategies you've shared today, But
I worry that there's a risk that people hearing this
will then try to turn character development into another New
Year achievement project. Just you know, they swap in a
new scorecard, but now they're going for that. Any final
(35:06):
tips to make this really more about character and not
about achievement and optimization.
Speaker 2 (35:12):
Yeah, I'm all about mixed motives. If you're doing something
for a selfish region and an altruistic reason, that's just
a sign that society is well structured. And so if
you're trying to become a better person because you think
it'll win you friends and admirers, I'm fine with that.
There's a difference between ambition and aspiration, and ambition is
(35:32):
to try to build up outward success, and aspiration is
just try to be a better person.
Speaker 1 (35:38):
The next time you're feeling stuck, ask yourself what you're
putting your energy into. Is it ambition and all the
usual resume virtues, or are you following David's advice and
going for aspiration instead, Because the science shows that focusing
on eulogy virtues is likely to give you a way
longer happiness boost than the typical selfish goals. And if
(35:58):
you're looking for inspiration, why don't you follow some of
the advice you heard today. Check out the biographies of
people you admire so that you can learn about the
values that guide them. Look around your own community to
see what's needed and figure out what you might have
to offer. And finally, don't underestimate small moments of connection.
Even a brief few minutes of attention can make all
(36:20):
the difference. In next week's installment of this special season
of the Happiness Lab, we'll explore how to get unstuck creatively.
We'll meet an expert on the science of innovation to
see how we can break out of our creative blocks
to get some new ideas flowing. In twenty twenty six.
Speaker 2 (36:36):
The research suggests that it's in fact those ideas that
we maybe feel a little bit uncomfortable or anxious about
that wind up being the most promising
Speaker 1 (36:45):
That's coming up next week Unhappiness Lab with me Doctor
Laurie Santo's
Pushkin. When we're feeling stuck or unhappy with the way
our lives are unfolding, we often fixate on certain kinds
of self improvement, things like getting into shape, making more money,
eating healthier, or landing a promotion at work. Goals like
(00:36):
these are super common at the start of the new year.
But what we don't tend to hear about our goals
that are less self focused, trying to become a better
friend or committing to supporting our surrounding communities. Could goals
like these be a more effective path to becoming unstuck
in the new year. Could intentionally building our character be
a more happiness inducing strategy than we think? These are
(00:57):
the questions that we'll be tackling with today's guest.
Speaker 2 (01:00):
Mining David Brooks. I am a columnist at The New
York Times and a former fellow at the Jackson Institute
at Yale University.
Speaker 1 (01:07):
David is also the author of self books on the
importance of character development, huge bestsellers like The Road to
Character and his most recent work, How to Know a Person.
David's interest in character development began as a personal self
help project.
Speaker 2 (01:21):
I'm not a naturally deep person, and so I think
I've read all these damn books, and I go to
religious services, and I do all this stuff to try
to make myself a little deeper than I was yesterday.
Speaker 1 (01:34):
And one of his early realizations was that he and
so many others were focused on the wrong kinds of
goals when it came to living the good life. So
way back in the road to character, I know you
made this distinction between resume and eulogy virtues, which lots
of folks know. But for listeners who don't know that framework,
can you explain what you mean and what the difference
is between these two sets of verdues.
Speaker 2 (01:54):
Yeah, dualisms turn out to be really powerful. If you
put one in the book, people remember it forever. So
the decision I made was between the resume virtues, which
are the things that make you good to your job,
whether you're capable of being a great lawyer, accountant, teacher,
whatever it is, and the eulogy virtues are the things
they say about you after you're dead, whether you're honest, honorable, courageous,
(02:14):
capable of great love. And we all know the eulogy
virtues are more important. And yet our schools, often our
families emphasize the resume virtues. And somebody did this study
years ago where they asked junior high school students, do
your parents care more about whether you do your homework
or whether you are kind? And in the eighty percent,
the students said they care more about homework than being kind.
(02:36):
So parents pressure their students into being good little resume
achieve atrons, and they have tremendous for your failure as
a result of that.
Speaker 1 (02:44):
I think one of the things that makes it so
hard is that these resume virtues come with metrics, right,
we can measure them really easily, and I think that,
especially in modern culture, when we have so many tools
for measurement, we've become really susceptible to kind of doing
better on those because it's like, well, I know what
it looks like when I increase my time when I'm
training for a marathon, or I know what it looks
like when my salary goes up. I might not know
what it looks like to increase my potential for being
(03:06):
a good person.
Speaker 2 (03:06):
In the same way, my view is, anytime you find
yourself quantifying a human being, you should stop and watch
what you're doing, because some things are quantifiable. And if
I want to know how strong you are, can figure
out how much you can lift. But the things that
really matter in life are the things like your determination,
your social skills, your curiosity, your ability to be resilient
(03:28):
in the face of failure, your ability to be kind,
your ability to cast the just and loving attention on
other human beings. One study I saw, I've found when
people are fired, in eighty nine percent of cases, they
were fired because they were jerks. Basically, they were not coachable,
they were not good teammates, they didn't want to learn.
They're not fired because they lack intelligence. They're not fired
(03:49):
because they lack technical skills. And so it's those what
is stupidly called either soft skills or even worse, non
cognitive skills, that are actually the hard and most important
things of life. And there's just no such thing as
a non cognitive skill. Everything we do is cognitive. And
so the very idea that we define the most important
things in opposition to the least important things which we prioritize,
(04:13):
is a symptom that our society has really lost track
of what matters in a human being.
Speaker 1 (04:17):
So this time of year, people are looking for big changes.
It's like new me, Right, you know you're going to
revamp your whole self, and that might work maybe with
some of the achievement virtues, wealth I think there's an
open question about that. I think it doesn't work so
much with the eulogy virtues because one of the things
you so nicely pointed out is that character development isn't
this huge, massive transformation. You're asking people to think about
(04:39):
something much quieter, these kind of tiny, little practice changes.
So talk to me about this idea that character is
an everyday practice. What do you mean by that?
Speaker 2 (04:48):
In all our jobs, there's a materialistic drag, a corrosion.
For doctors who I've spoken to, the drag is the
lure of money and the need to make everything efficient
and have a patient every sixteen minutes or less. And
in journalism the drag is I want to tell the
truth as I see it. I also want to generate clicks,
(05:11):
and so that's the seduction. And so to push back
against that seduction and try to stay within the moral lens.
Is I find a daily challenge. And that's not a
challenge you solve with some miracle growth.
Speaker 1 (05:23):
It's a challenge you solve with tiny changes of actions.
Speaker 2 (05:26):
Well, I mean characters forged the way we learned crafts
by small habits. And you know, I do dumb things.
I always have some spiritual book going on, reading a
book by Thomas Merton on contemplation. That's how I try
to aspire. One of the things you can do to
become a better person is to just read books of
people you admire and unconsciously be a little more like them.
(05:49):
I read a crazy biography last week called A Woman
of No Importance, about an American woman who basically joined
and organized the French Resistance during World War Two. And
she did crazy stuff of organizing hundreds of French resistance
fighters under constant threat of death. And now I'm not
going to do that. I don't have that, but you
(06:09):
can't help having some of that rub off on you.
And you think, you know, when I'm searching for meaning
in my life, who are the exemplars that I care
about right now? In times of my life? I literally
have taken the postcards and portraits of the people I
admire and stuck them on the wall. I'm a big admirer.
A guy named Samuel Johnson an essays to really wrote
himself into being a beautiful human being, and I see
(06:30):
Sam Johnson's face over there. Maybe I won't to shoot
out my taxes today. We want to surround ourselves with
the eyes of the dead and the eyes of the admired.
It'll lift our spirits.
Speaker 1 (06:42):
I think one of the things that we often get
stuck on, which can prevent our moral development, is seeking
out comfort. We are a modern society that avoids discomfort.
So tell me a little bit about how that can
keep us stuck and can prevent our moral development in
ways that we might not realize.
Speaker 2 (06:59):
Yeah. I read a book recently called What I talk
about When I talk about Running, by a Japanese novelist
Namara Kami. He ran a jazz club for a little
while and he decided one day, while watching a baseball game,
I think I'm going to write a novel. And so
he quit his jazz club. And as he started writing,
he started getting heavier because he had no exercise or
(07:20):
he wasn't hauling around kekes of beer anymore, and so
he said, I'll take up running. And he's a pretty
committed guy. So he started running six miles a day,
and he ran marathons every year. And when you read
his book, The Thing that Leaps out at you is
he hates running and then pasted it, just like I
was on the twenty third mile. I hated running. I
finished the marathon. All I wanted to do was stop
(07:41):
running and never run again. It's just one sentence after
another of how much he hates running. So why does
he do something he hates. Well, he did it because
he thought it's about embracing challenge. I think, in part
because he thought it made him a better person, in
part because he thought it made him a better writer.
And I think perversely he got deep fulfillment out of running.
(08:05):
And I can relate, not because I can run six
miles today. But I'm here in my office and every day,
seven days a week, I come into this office and
I write my twelve hundred words. And I've been doing
it for forty years. And I do not like writing.
It's not easy. It hasn't gotten any easier with the experience.
(08:27):
Even just organizing the structure of a piece or a book.
It's just really hard. So I don't like to write,
but I want to write. And I've learned that we
have two different systems in our brain. There's a liking
system and a wanting system. And I have found in
my life that if I pay attention to the wanting system,
that's more reliable than the liking system because it leads
(08:49):
to the hard and sometimes challenging things that make you
feel fulfilled. And I guess the one thing I would
ask people to ask themselves is, deep down, at the
core of yourself, what do you really want? I had
a professor at Umer of Chicago where I was an undergrad,
named Leon Kas who's still with us, and he said,
(09:09):
what defines people is not their opinions, It's not their success,
It's the ruling passion of their souls. Some people are
lovers of pleasure, some people are lovers of understanding, some
people are lovers of justice. And so I often ask
people what is the ruling passion of your soul? And
you want to answer, I get back a blank look.
They have no idea. People have to ask themselves this question.
(09:31):
But understanding your own desires is really important. I teach
a class now in Chicago for people who are retiring,
and one of the things that I've noticed they do
so they are sixty five, they're retiring, they're beginning the
next third of their life. One thing it helps them
to ask is what did I leave behind in childhood?
What gift do I have that I currently hold in exile?
(09:53):
And if they can go back and find that little
kid they used to be and what horizon that kid
was chasing toward, then they can touch something pretty deep
in themselves and they can retap into a desire that
is the endorment in their lives. Markami was seized by
the desire to write and the desire to run. And
it's a great skill, the capacity to be seized. Some
(10:14):
people are seized by God, some people are seized by
a hero. Some people are seized by poetry. And when
you're seized, it's almost like you don't have a choice.
You're in the double negative. I can't not do this.
And I think the willingness to be seized, to be
open to being seized, is just a tremendous and underrated
skill which we almost beat out of young people at school.
(10:38):
We prescribe so much of what they must do. You
should go through life as if you're just wandering through
a bookstore, just willing to be captured by whatever interests you.
You never know what can lead to what.
Speaker 1 (10:51):
I absolutely adore this idea of being seized. It really
plays on what psychologists call this notion of moral elevation
when you see something that challenges you or gets you
wanting to think about it in a new way. But
I think to do that we have to have a
particular moral virtue that we don't often have, which is
that we have to have some humility. You have to
know go in with a plan that you know is
your plan and you're stuck to it. You actually have
(11:12):
to be open. And humility seems to be the kind
of thing that we're losing. It seems like we're in
a modern culture that celebrates self promotion and acting like
you know what you're doing, even if you don't know
what you're doing. Any tips for generating a little bit
more humility, especially in the face of a culture that
really doesn't like that virtue.
Speaker 2 (11:29):
Yeah, go to work at the New York Times.
Speaker 1 (11:30):
It'll too read the comments section.
Speaker 2 (11:34):
I wanted to write a book. I was going to
have the title of Humility in small Letters and then
by David Brooks and really big Lis my Humility book.
There's a nice distinction to be made between wilfulness and willingness,
and wilfulness is when you take control and willingness is
when you're willing to be led. And the artists, I know,
the painters, the musicians, they have a great capacity for willingness.
(11:57):
They're willing to go wherever the muse leads them. And
if you're going to a concert or seeing one of
their shows, and you're going to take advantage of what
they've given and produced, then you have to be willing
to go where they're taken. You just have to be willing. CS.
Lewis define humility is not thinking lowly of yourself, but
really not thinking of yourself. I define it a little differently.
(12:19):
I define humility as radical self awareness from a position
of other centeredness. It's the ability to get outside yourself
and see yourself accurately and honestly. And when you have
that level of self awareness, you have stability in your life.
You're not always searching to impress. And there's debates I've
had with friends over what's the most important virtue to
(12:40):
add And I have a lot of friends who think
courage is the most important virtue, but I think humility
is the most important virtue.
Speaker 1 (12:47):
And true humility, David says, starts with how we think
about ourselves. We need to switch from a self focus
to one that's turned towards others. But how can we
do that better? After the break, David will share some
strategies for turning our mindsets outward. We'll see why service
and connection are an effective path for developing a deeper
sense of meaning and getting psychologically on this stuck The
(13:10):
Happiness Lab will be back in a moment. Author and
cultural commentator David Brooks has argued that we can get
unstuck in twenty twenty six not by chasing more achievement,
but by developing our character. And one of the practical
ways to do that, David says, is through acts of service,
(13:31):
especially at the local level.
Speaker 2 (13:33):
First, look around the neighborhood and motroun Every neighborhood has
its own unique problems. I have a conversation about what's
the problem here, what's ailing us? And then what do
I bring to the table, What skill do I have
that really will enable me to help? And I have
a little nonprofit called Weave the Social Fabric Projects, and
we help people who live in the neighborhood where they work,
(13:56):
and they are the ones who are holding their neighborhoods together.
Some of them are in organizations. Some of them are
just One lady said, I practice aggressive friendship. She's the
lady on the block who posts everything no again, helps
kids in the West Side Chicago stay at a gangs.
They just want to serve the community. We ran to
a lady in Florida and she was helping kids cross
(14:19):
the street after elementary school and we said, are you
getting paid to do this? And she said no, but
it was safer for the kids if an adult can
help them walk across the street. And this wasn't voluntarying.
This is what neighbors do. And I think she was
tremendously fulfilled.
Speaker 1 (14:35):
I know, when you see these moments of interdependence of
people that are doing stuff for their community, you've called
these folks weavers. What do you mean by this term weaver?
Speaker 2 (14:43):
When we start weave, we had a theory that if
you're going to do social change, creating a new identity
really matters. For example, in nineteen fifty five, nobody called
themselves a feminist. By nineteen seventy five, millions and millions
of people called themselves a feminist, and that identity had
great power in shaping how they saw the world. And
(15:05):
so we created this term weaver because we wanted term
and seemed apt. And people embrace the idea that I
want to be a weaver or I am a weaver.
And our real theory of social change was society changes
when a small group of people find a better way
to live, and the rest of us copy, and so
weavers have found a better way to live. A more
(15:26):
formal organization you can join and say, for example, I'm
a big admirer of an organization Baltimore called Threat and
Thread surrounds kids from the Baltimore schools with four volunteers
and then a network of people they call grandparents and
then counselors, and so it's an elaborate network surrounding these
young people, basically another form of extended family. And they
(15:49):
helped the kids go to school, if they need lunch,
anything an extended family would do for a young person.
And the young people have been betrayed by life, and
so when the volunteers first showed up at their door,
the kids often slam the door in their face. And
the rule of Thread is there's no leaving. It's like family,
there's no leaving. So short of a court order, you're
(16:10):
going to show up with the kid's door again and again,
and the founder of the Woman named Sarah Hemminger says,
if you reject people and they keep showing up for you,
it's identity changing, and it's identity changing to be the
one who shows up. And so it's those kinds of
discrete actions that take place in communities every day. And
(16:31):
some of them are heroic and some of them are mundane.
And we don't have to be as heroic as some
of them are. But if we bent our lives a
little in that direction, America would be a more trusting place.
I will say, the people I've met through Weave are
some of the most fulfilled people, and anybody can do that.
Speaker 1 (16:49):
So that's interdependence at the community level. But your most
recent work is really focused on becoming a little bit
more interdependent relationally, like person to person. And so tell
me a little bit about the origin story of How
to Know a Person. Where did the idea for that
book come from. It's much more kind of one on
one than some of your other character development books.
Speaker 2 (17:07):
When I was working on Weave, using all these words
like community and relationship, and it struck me these words
were abstractions that a relationship or a community is really
built out of discrete, second by second encounters. But a
lot of young people and a lot of old people
(17:28):
have not been taught basic social skills like how do
you sit with someone who's depressed, how do you break
up with someone without crushing their heart? How do you
ask for an offer for forgiveness? Nobody ever taught me the
skill of how to end a conversation gracefully. So I
went to my high school reunion in my fifth one,
so I was younger, and my only move to get
out of a conversation in a cocktail like setting was
(17:51):
to say, I'm going to go to the bar and
get another drink. So twenty minutes into the reunion, I'm
so drunk I have to leave the reunion. I've had
like six drinks and twenty minutes. And so nobody had
ever taught me. And the apex skill is the skill
of making others feel seen, heard, and understood. And that's
a skill, just the way learning tennis is a skill,
the way learn carpentry is a skill.
Speaker 1 (18:10):
It also seems like a skill that we're losing in
modern society. Give me a sense of how bad we've
gotten when it comes to making others feel seen and hurt.
Speaker 2 (18:17):
We happen to be in a moment of deep spiritual
and relational crisis. And I don't need to tell you
of all people that data on rising mental health, rising
suicide rates, the number of people who say they have
no friends, there's up, the number of people who rate
themselves the lowest happiness categories, up, the number of people
not in a romantic relationship, the number of people who've
broken with a member of their intimate family. There's just
(18:38):
a lot of sadness out there. And when their sadness,
there's meetness. Because if you feel yourself unseen and invisible,
you feel it as an injustice, which it is, and
as a threat, and so you're prone to lashing out.
And when you're on a level of distrust, then it's
very hard to reach out feel good. Social trust statistics
(18:59):
used to be sixty percent of Americans said that I
can trust their neighbors. Now it's send a thirty percent.
Among millennials it is nineteen percent. So if you're thinking
that this person is fundamentally in trust worthy, then of
course you're not going to be vulnerable to them. And
friendship is a successive series of vulnerabilities, as you know,
and so it's just going to be harder, and there's
going to be more distance, there's going to be suspicion,
(19:22):
and that makes it extremely hard to practice the skill
of seeing others.
Speaker 1 (19:27):
I know you've talked so much about how this skill
is needed for society, but given that you wrote the
book on this, was this something that you struggled with
as an individual? Were you good at seeing and hearing
others or was this something that you had to work on.
Speaker 2 (19:38):
My wife and I have been married for nine years
and she takes a looks at me from twenty years
ago on videos. She says, well, I wouldn't I marry
that guy. I was the kind of person nobody would
confide in. I was always busy. I had a clock
in my head. It's a very good way to destroy relationships.
But mostly I think I was raised in a super cerebral,
(19:58):
academic household and it was easy to get buy on
brain power and ignore your heart. And so I think
I was feeling things, but there was no highway between
my heart and my mouth and even my conscious mind.
There's an episode that happened to me maybe fifteen years
ago that symbolized for me the old way of being,
which is, I'm a big baseball fan. I've been to
(20:20):
a thousand ball games. I've never caught a foul ball.
So I'm in Camden Yards in Baltimore one day with
my youngest son and somebody loses control of the bat
and it lands in my lap. And getting a bat
is a thousand times better than getting a ball, and
so I should have been jumping up and down, I
fiving everybody around me, hugging people, getting on a jumbo tron.
(20:41):
I just took the bat and put it at my
feet and I stared straight ahead like a turtle. And
I look back on that guy and I think, show
a little joy. And there was just a level of inhibition.
And I went through a period in twenty thirteen when
I was in a valley. My marriage was coming apart,
my kids were even school. I was lonely. I did
(21:02):
what any middle aged male idiot would do, which is
I tried to work my way through the problem. Workoholism
is a very ineffective social therapy for a spiritual and emotional.
Speaker 1 (21:11):
Crisis, but it looks very good from the outside. You
get a lot of resume virtue.
Speaker 2 (21:14):
Too, very good from the outside, because it looks like
you're cruising. But I experienced loneliness as sort of a
burning in the stomach. Then I read a passage by
Frederic Beekner, the novelist, and he says, in moments of pain,
you can either be broken or broken open. You can
be broken by making yourself invulnerable, by covering up, callousing over.
(21:35):
When you're broken open, you make yourself, even though it'dst
of pain, more vulnerable. But that's really the only pathway
to growth. And so I began to work on this,
and so I did it in a good old University
of Chicago fashion. I wrote a book about emotion. But
then I tried to practice it. And a couple of
years ago, I was at a conference in Nantucket. I
(21:56):
was in the audience. Speaker gave us all a piece
of paper, and on the piece of paper was lyrics
to a love song, and he said to us, I
want you to find somebody you don't know, gaze into
their eyes, and sing the love song to them. And
if you had asked the old me to do that,
I would have spontaneously combusted. I found some guy, I'm
(22:16):
sanging in his eyes. There are no sparks between us, sadly,
but I did it and it was a happy day
for me, a proud day because it shows you it's
never too late to change. You can change at seventy,
you can change it eighty, you can change at ninety.
It's never too late to change a bit who you are.
Speaker 1 (22:31):
One of the great things about your book is I
think you talk about how we can change to become
better at connecting with one another, but you do this
in this really practical way. You almost look at relationships
at a real micro level, about the things we can change.
And one of the things I love that you focused
on is just changing our level of attention. What can
we do with our attention to do better?
Speaker 2 (22:50):
Yeah. Simond Veyo French mystic, said attention is the ultimate
act of generosity. For her, attention really was the foundation
of all morality. One of her students, not liberally, but
someone who learned a lot from her, is Irish Murdoch,
the philosopher and novelist, and Murdoch said, you know, we
usually look at each other through self centered eyes. Is
(23:12):
this the person going to be good for me or
bad for me? Is going to make me feel good?
Make me feel bad and she said what we should
do is cast what she called a just and loving
attention on another, so to see people with just and
loving eyes. I wrote about this in the last book.
I was in a diner in Waco having breakfast with
a ninety three year old lad named LaRue Dorsey, and
(23:33):
she presented herself to me as a strict disciplinarian, like
a drill sergeant. Lady. She'd been a teacher, and she said,
I love my students enough to be tough for them.
And I was intimidated by this formidable lady, and into
the diner walks a mutual friend of ours, a pastor
named Jimmy Drell, who pastors to the homeless in Waco,
and he comes up to us. He knows us both,
and he grabbs Miss Dorsey by the shoulders and he says,
(23:54):
missus Dorsey, you're the best. I love you. And that
stern disciplinarian lady I had been talking to, who turned
in an instant into a bright eye, shining nine year
old girl. He brought forth a different version of her
with the power of his attention. And it shows that
power of that skill, and it can even achieve almost
a spiritual quality. One of my favorite stories which I
(24:16):
read somewhere and I hope it's true, but it sounds apocryphal,
but I'm going to say it anyway. It's about Dan
Rather interviewing Mother Teresa, and Dan Rather said to Mother Teresa,
when you pray to God, what do you say to
And she said, Oh, I don't say anything. I just listen.
And Rather says, well, what is God saying to you?
And Mother Teresa says, oh, he's not saying anything, He's
(24:36):
just listening, listening. This just tremendously powerful.
Speaker 1 (24:41):
Well, it's also something I feel like we've lost in
modern society. Explain some of the challenges that make this
sort of attention harder these days.
Speaker 2 (24:48):
Well, the obvious ones are the phones. The deeper one
is we really value autonomy, and I'm one of those
who does, but it's sometimes extremely self destructive. If I
get up and I look at my calendar and there's
like one call or one meeting, I think, oh, this
day is so crowded. Oh, and I want to just
(25:10):
sit and write alone, Like it's easy to be alone.
But somehow we're over autonomizing, if that's a word. And
it seems easier in the short term, but it's poorer
in the long term.
Speaker 1 (25:22):
So how do we fight this tendency to overvalue autonomy
so that we can connect again When we get back
from the break, David will share some practical strategies for
rebuilding interdependence, ones that are essential for getting spiritually unstuck.
In the new year, The Happiness Lab will be right back.
(25:44):
In his recent book How to Know a Person, author
and political commentator David Brooks contends that we'd all be
happier and feel less stuck if we connected better with
the people around us. But to do that, David says,
we need to better understand the concept of empathy.
Speaker 2 (25:59):
I think empathy is three things. One, it's an emotional
connection and that's just like physically sharing an emotion. And
then it's mentalizing. I'm using my experiences to deliver theories
about what you're probably going through. And then the third
part of empathy is caring. If you go on the
street and play three card MONI with a card shark,
(26:21):
he empathizes with you. He knows what you're feeling, he
knows how to manipulate that, but he doesn't care. We
want effective care. It's not doing what's comfortable for you,
but doing what the other person needs at that exact moment.
When I was at Yale, had a student named Jillian
whose dad had died of pancreatic cancer. After she got
out of college, I had with Gradston and her dad.
(26:45):
She had the conversation that he would probably not be
there for her big life events like her marriage, and
a couple of months after he died, she was nobody
to be a bridesmaid at her friend's wedding, and she
watched the father of that bride give a beautiful toast
to his daughter, and then it came time and the
reception for the father daughter dance, and said, just too soon.
(27:12):
So she went to the lady's room to have a cry.
And when she got out of the lady's room in
the hallway, all the people at her table at the
reception and the adjacent table were just standing there in
the hallway and they gave her a supportive hug. Nobody
said anything. They just gave her a hug and went
back to their tables, and she said, it was exactly
(27:33):
what I needed at that moment. So somebody at one
of those tables said, let's go be in the hallway
for Jillian, and that is empathy horror x lots. That's
knowing just what she needs, but not too much.
Speaker 1 (27:48):
It seems like there's so many things to get in
the way of that. One is something we've talked about before,
which is time. Right, We're just too busy, we don't
have time to notice. The other is a tension, which
we've talked about. We're not there, But the only thing
is a mistaken notion that we have about this culture
of achievement that like putting in the work for that
kind of empathy is going to kind of give a
hit to our own individual success, our individual ability. And
(28:10):
this is psychologically just really painful for me when folks
describe this, because I think what all the work shows
is that this act of being empathic makes us feel
really good. Right, Everyone who left their table to go
stand in that hallway for Jillian felt amazing afterward. What
is it about this modern sense of achievement that gets
empathy wrong, that kind of puts us on this wrong
track of not realizing how valuable it is.
Speaker 2 (28:31):
Yeah, I think partly we've been schooled in the idea
that the more selfish we are, the more will succeed
and we've even more been schooled in the idea that
other people are selfish. And I often ask my students
do you think human beings are fundamentally selfish or fundamentally
cooperative and altruistic? And I think more than in generations past,
(28:54):
the high number of people say selfish. There's a guy
at you know, Chicago, a friend of mine named Nick Eppie,
who asks his business school students what drives you to
go into business? And they say, oh, you know, I
really value service and I want to be a service
to other people. And he says, what about your classmates?
What drive them to go into business? And everyone says money, money,
(29:17):
And so I think we ascribe darker motivations to others.
And when you do that, you develop a dark world mentality.
And I'll start with our politics, not to get too political,
but I think the guy who sits in the White
House right now has a very dark world mentality that
life is about doggy dog and it's if you don't
(29:39):
screw them first, they're going to screw you. And a
lot of people, not only Donald Trump, a lot of
people have a dark world view that you really have
to protect yourself, you really have to guard your heart,
and I think they have an overly negative view of
reality I found in my life and you know, obviously
I've got a lot of privileges and all that, but
(30:00):
if you act in ways that are trusting, preemptive, vulnerability,
you will be betrayed sometimes and they will hurt you.
But it's better and most of the time it pays
off and you're glad you led with trust. But that
is not something that often gets talked about, and we
have this negativity. I read a story I forget what
(30:21):
it was, in some online magazine a couple of years ago,
and it was about a bunch of books that were
coming out about motherhood, and the books had these negative titles,
like it was all how dark and how rotten it
was to be a mom, And the reporter notes in
the middle of the piece, she said, the funny thing
happened to me while reporting this piece. The old woman
(30:42):
I was interviewed and pulled me aside and said, we
have a word off the record, And she said, I
don't want you to put this in the article, but
I kind of like being a mom. I love my kids,
my partner is equitable, but please don't put that in
public because they're afraid of. If they say that, it'll
seem in sensitives people who are going through hard time.
And when you're in a culture where you can't admit
(31:04):
that you love being a mom or a dad, you're
in a pretty pessimistic culture. And if you just look,
if you do Google and brand, what words we use
to describe the world. The usage of negative words like anger, horror,
pain is surging, and the usage of positive words joy, success, whatever,
(31:26):
is plummeting. So public culture and public conversation has become
very negative. And that's in part because of the Internet.
Because people in my profession in the media, the number
of headlines we write mean to generate fear and anger.
It just creates this negative climate. And in this negative climate,
it's hard to lead with vulnerability and trust and the
sorts of things that would actually lead to the connection.
Speaker 1 (31:48):
But it seems like when we take action ourselves to
make those connections, when we really try to see others,
we wind up creating the opposite cycle.
Speaker 2 (31:55):
Right.
Speaker 1 (31:56):
We can be in this kind of dark cycle where
everything feels bad and we just continue to see more
evidence of it. But it feels like when we do
the act of putting good out there ourselves. Then we
wind up seeing it more, and then other people reciprocate
that good to us, and then we can build these
more positive cycles.
Speaker 2 (32:09):
Let me tell him one other Nick Keppley's story. He
and I were on stage at Chicago and he was
interviewing me and bet something. After forty five minutes in
the interview, he says to the audience, Okay, I want you,
all of you to find somebody in the audience you
don't know, and for the next ten minutes, you're going
to talk about the high point of your life, the
low point of your life, in the turning point of
your life. And the audience groaned, and he said, how
(32:32):
many of you don't want to do this? And eighty
percent of the hands went up, and Nick said go
and then and they started sharing their high points and
low points at the hurning points. And ten minutes later,
when we were supposed to get them back to paying
attention to us, they wouldn't shut up. They were having
such a good time that they would not shut up.
And finally, twenty minutes going by, and finally they stopped
(32:53):
talking to each other and they listen to us again.
And Nick said, how many of you enjoyed that, and
eighty percent of the hands went up. And one of
his findings, and he's got a book about this coming
out soon, is that we underestimate how much we'll enjoy
talking to strangers. We underestimate how deep people want to get,
and so we have this dark and pessimistic pew which
is not accurate. And now, because of Nick, when I'm
(33:15):
on a plane sometimes and I'm word with my reading
with like an hour left to go on the flight,
I take out my headphones and I start talking to
my neighbor. And I will tell you I've never had
a moment where the conversation with whoever I was with
was less interesting than the book. It's always more interesting somehow.
And so it's a good habit to force yourself to do,
even if you think it'll be worring.
Speaker 1 (33:36):
You have to be more vulnerable than you think. I
think one of the great things about Nick's Deep Questions
is that they're sharing things that you're kind of a
little bit embarrassed about. Their questions like when was the
last time you cried, you know, or your house was
on fire. What's the thing you don't like to admit
but that you take with you anyway, because it matters
to you. We're sharing these darker, more vulnerable parts of ourselves,
and we assume that that's going to feel terrifying, but
(33:57):
in fact it feels great.
Speaker 2 (33:59):
My job as a journalist is to ask people questions
and often about their lives, and often and difficult moments
of their lives. And so how often has someone said
to me, none of your damn business. The answer is zero,
and so you should ask. There's another guy who you
probably know much better than I named Dan McAdams said Northwestern.
(34:20):
He studies a lot how people tell their life stories,
and he interviews people over four hours, and then he
wants to slide him a little check to compensate them
for their time, and a lot of people push the
check back and say, I don't want money for this.
This has been one of the best afternoons of my life.
No one's ever asked. And so that's just a clues
you go through life that the quality of your conversations
(34:41):
is really the quality of your interaction.
Speaker 1 (34:44):
So we've talked about all these ways that we can
boost our character, that we can become more connected both
to our communities and just relationally with other people. There's
so many of the great strategies you've shared today, But
I worry that there's a risk that people hearing this
will then try to turn character development into another New
Year achievement project. Just you know, they swap in a
new scorecard, but now they're going for that. Any final
(35:06):
tips to make this really more about character and not
about achievement and optimization.
Speaker 2 (35:12):
Yeah, I'm all about mixed motives. If you're doing something
for a selfish region and an altruistic reason, that's just
a sign that society is well structured. And so if
you're trying to become a better person because you think
it'll win you friends and admirers, I'm fine with that.
There's a difference between ambition and aspiration, and ambition is
(35:32):
to try to build up outward success, and aspiration is
just try to be a better person.
Speaker 1 (35:38):
The next time you're feeling stuck, ask yourself what you're
putting your energy into. Is it ambition and all the
usual resume virtues, or are you following David's advice and
going for aspiration instead, Because the science shows that focusing
on eulogy virtues is likely to give you a way
longer happiness boost than the typical selfish goals. And if
(35:58):
you're looking for inspiration, why don't you follow some of
the advice you heard today. Check out the biographies of
people you admire so that you can learn about the
values that guide them. Look around your own community to
see what's needed and figure out what you might have
to offer. And finally, don't underestimate small moments of connection.
Even a brief few minutes of attention can make all
(36:20):
the difference. In next week's installment of this special season
of the Happiness Lab, we'll explore how to get unstuck creatively.
We'll meet an expert on the science of innovation to
see how we can break out of our creative blocks
to get some new ideas flowing. In twenty twenty six.
Speaker 2 (36:36):
The research suggests that it's in fact those ideas that
we maybe feel a little bit uncomfortable or anxious about
that wind up being the most promising
Speaker 1 (36:45):
That's coming up next week Unhappiness Lab with me Doctor
Laurie Santo's
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