The Science of a Good Life

Jon Clifton:
[0:07] Arthur C. Brooks is an economist and Harvard professor, but he's also a voice of reason and empathy in a world often dominated by discord. As a former president of the American Enterprise Institute and now a sought-after speaker, author, and social entrepreneur, Arthur has dedicated his career to promoting human dignity and fostering a culture of belonging. Just recently, he co-authored a bestselling book with Oprah Winfrey. Join me as we dive into Arthur's insights on leadership, compassion, and the pursuit of happiness in our modern society.

What stood out to you the most when you first saw those results? When you first started doing your coaching session, what surprised you?

Arthur C. Brooks:
[0:42] There weren't too many surprises, actually. This is not like I was a different person than I ever thought. On the contrary, I was just more of what I thought and maybe feared. I'll give you an example. In my field, there's a sort of three time frames. Humans are incredibly adroit at time travel, mental time travel. We're like any other species in so far as we can be thinking about the past and kind of living in the past. You can be thinking about the future and planning future scenarios, and even practicing future scenarios, which is one of the reasons that we'll be thinking about the future so much. So that we can not make mistakes because mentally we've rehearsed what we might have done. Or we can be present in the moment, that kind of mindful state. Those are the three time periods that we live in.

Different people have different amounts of time they spend in a different time period depending on their personality, their proclivities, and what they do for a living. Some people are what we call highly prospective, which means they're future-oriented. They live in the future a lot. The average person, when you put them in an fMRI machine and you look at what part of their brain is illuminated and you tell them, "Think about nothing," they think about nothing. They go to what's called the default mode network in the brain. The default mode network turns out to be the parts of your brain where you're thinking about the future. As soon as you're in that fMRI machine, your brain's going, "The future, what am I going to do? What am I going to have for dinner tomorrow? What kind of conversation am I going to have? What would I like to do in 10 years?" You'll be thinking about the future.

We're prospective creatures. My great mentor, Marty Seligman, who teaches at the University of Pennsylvania, he says we shouldn't be called Homo sapiens. We should be called Homo prospectus because we're so future-oriented, unlike any other creature. The average person spends 30% to 50% of their time thinking about the future. That's the bottom line. If you're an entrepreneur or you're the kind of person that likes to dream, you're going to be spending a lot more time than that in the future. Now, that's great, but it's also bad.

Jon Clifton:
[2:38] But don't you think that's hyperactive with someone like you?

Arthur C. Brooks:
[2:40] Yes, that's the point. And my wife always said to me, "Why are you always talking about the future? Why can't you just be here now?" I got my CliftonStrengths. Number one, what do you think it is? Futuristic. It's about the future. That's my number one thing, a better future, a brighter future, and the role that I can play in it and everybody else around can play in it. When I was talking to my executive team, I would always say, "Here's what the next one, two, and five years look like. And here's your part in it. And here's your part in it." I was a coach about the future, is what it came down to. Futuristic is my greatest strength, but it's also the shadow, because it makes it hard for me to talk about right now, to think about right now, to learn from the past, and to be present with the people that I love. Seeing that was really incredibly interesting to me because this is what's so valuable about CliftonStrengths among other things, but it shows you what you're inherently good at, but it shows you what you're probably missing, too, because you're emphasizing so very much. What it really helped me on was to say, "Yeah, I'm a futurist, but I also have to be a 'right nowist' a little bit more than I am because I'm going to be missing too much of my life, and I don't want to miss my life."

Jon Clifton:
[3:57] So how do you do it? How do you be more present?

Arthur C. Brooks:
[4:00] By being conscious, by understanding. That's why the tool is incredibly effective, because it shows you something about yourself and then you start to think about it. Here's the deal: we all have these proclivities. We all have these personality characteristics. These are driven in no small part by our basic emotional profile, and that's a limbic phenomenon. The limbic system of the brain that was developed over a 40-million-year period is very automatic. The thing about it is that if you want to be fully alive and have the best possible life, you need to experience what's going on in your limbic system in your prefrontal cortex, in the executive centers of your brain. How do you do that? With knowledge, by living on purpose, by understanding. So, CliftonStrengths is kind of a PhD in you, is what it comes down to. And when you do that, when you understand yourself better, you can be more fully alive.

Jon Clifton:
[4:49] In your bottom five, you have a lot of relating themes. When you first saw those, what were your thoughts?

Arthur C. Brooks:
[4:55] What a horrible person I am. No, I mean it's like, working in teams, not my strength. A lot of things having to do with relating to other people. And again, it's not like I can't relate to other people. I'm emotionally pretty self-aware. But being a team player is not my great strength. But what I was able to ascertain from that is that I need to surround myself more with people who are good at that. Now I have a company at this point. I have a team of people, and what you find, as a teacher at a business school, is that the CEOs who are most likely to succeed replicate themselves. They like people who are just like them. They like people who, if they're a big personality, they want lots of big personalities around.

Jon Clifton:
[5:42] They're most likely to succeed or they're least likely to succeed?

Arthur C. Brooks:
[5:43] I think I misspoke, they're least likely to succeed. Why? Because there's no variety, there's no complementarity on the team of strengths. So what we know is you need to have your complements. But you have to know what's complementary to you. The way that you find that out is by not looking at your top five, but looking at your bottom five and then going and getting people who have the bottom five. My team in my company now are disproportionately my bottom five. They're fantastic and they fill in my gaps. So sometimes I don't understand them and I'm like, "Why are they doing that?" Oh yeah, that's why they're doing that. Because they have that thing that I'm missing.

Jon Clifton:
[6:25] You have Ideation number two. You're actually doing a podcast recently with Matthew McConaughey when you talked about "unchained ideation," but then at the very end you paused and said, "But it also makes it hard to get things done." Can you talk a little bit more about what that means, because you kind of described the strengths but also the weaknesses of Ideation.

Arthur C. Brooks:
[6:46] Yeah, Ideation. You're really thinking about ideas. You're thinking about the big ideas. You have your head in the clouds, is what Ideation is all about. You're getting just lit up by concepts. That's great. I mean, that's why that gives you the most satisfying late night dorm room bull session, right? All the stuff that I've learned, kind of tying it together, et cetera, et cetera. But you can't just live there. You actually have to be practical as well. If you're pure Ideation all the time and you value that to the exclusion of everything else, you're probably not going to actually get to any practical level, you know, "getting things done" part of your life. So it's important to say, "Yeah, I love ideas, but I have to be in love with execution as well." That's another reason to go looking for people that can complement you, executors to complement you. That's another thing that my team is really good at, is actually making deadlines, getting things done all the time, keeping me on schedule, keeping us very practical and very grounded. Otherwise, it's going to be, "Arthur's got his head in the clouds again." He likes ideas, but it's hard to translate that into something that can actually help somebody's life.

Jon Clifton:
[7:56] And what happens when they're like, "There's too many ideas," and they're taking action on every single one of them? Does just the very awareness that you have Ideation help them say, "Are we taking action on that or are we just ideating?"

Arthur C. Brooks:
[8:08] Well, part of it is that I empower them to actually get a funnel going, to get an idea funnel going. If you're pure in the world of Ideation, you're not necessarily discriminating against the high-quality and low-quality ideas. You have to have people around you that can say, "Okay, let's take this to the things that are actually most helpful, most realistic, most concrete, and most practical that we can actually execute on." Then one of the great strengths of people who are practical and not ideators is they tend to be human funnels. That's one of the ways that ideators can work really practically together with them.

Jon Clifton:
[8:45] What do you do in order to get great ideas? Is there a time that you set aside in order to think? Does it just kind of naturally happen all the time? Or what is it when you get your most inspiration to get great ideas?

Arthur C. Brooks:
[8:54] Well, as a social scientist, and so do you, who studies neuroscience as well, I have practical routines to maximize my creativity, neurophysiologically maximize my creativity to put my stuff in a space where my ideas are going to be highest. You usually get about two to three hours of maximum creativity time, maximum. But you have to make sure you do things right to get those two to three hours.

Jon Clifton:
[9:18] Two to three hours per day?

Arthur C. Brooks:
[9:18] Per day. Yeah. Per year. No. So, how do you do that? There are a number of ways to do that, and so I have very, very practical, disciplined routines that I follow so I get my full two to three hours. So today, for example, is a perfect, perfect example. Most people have their most creative hours, their ideating hours, in the morning. Even if you're a night person, most people tend to be most creative in the morning. Again, your results may differ, but for most people, that's the case. That's certainly the case for me. So I get up at the crack of dawn. I get up a little bit before 5 every day, 4:45 every morning. By 5 or 5:15, I'm in the gym and I'm working out. I work out hard, which means I try to do an hour of resistance training and also get steps every day. So I'm active over the course of the day. I've got a treadmill under the desk. And I get up, I make sure that every two hours I'm walking for at least 15 minutes, et cetera. But I have hard, self-abusing, resistance training, lifting weights for an hour every morning. Then I shower and I go to mass. I'm a Catholic. I go to mass every day. Body and soul every morning, body and soul. I come back from mass and then I have my coffee for the first time.

One of the ways for optimizing creativity, and there's a lot of new research on this, is actually not getting your caffeine too early. You have to have your caffeine a couple of hours after you wake up, an hour and a half, two hours after you wake up. There's a whole bunch of reasons why that's the case. Andrew Huberman talks about this a lot in his podcast. Among other things, it has to do with how the caffeine molecules actually substitute for the adenosine molecules in your brain. Adenosine is a neuromodulator that inhibits your activity, makes you feel tired, is what it comes down to. Caffeine is a molecule that looks just like the adenosine molecule, so it goes into the receptors for adenosine, blocking the adenosine molecules. So caffeine doesn't make you peppy. Caffeine blocks you from feeling lethargic is the way that it works. When you metabolize it and it's too early in the day, you still have a lot of adenosine in your brain percolating from the night. As soon as the caffeine molecules come out, the adenosine all goes back in at once, and you crash at two to three in the afternoon. Bad for work is the bottom line. So wait, anyway, that's a tangent, but you get the idea. I wake up early. I do my exercise. I worship. I get a boatload of caffeine. And then I've got my two to three hours, and it's going to be a good two to three hours. Usually 7:30 to 10:30, I am on. That's what I did today until 10:30 this morning. I wrote a whole column from 7:30 to 10:30. No Zoom meetings, no phone calls, no interruptions. I'm just going to be using the neuromodulator activity that I've optimized for to be in the Ideation space.

Jon Clifton:
[12:01] Now my next question is, how do you document these things? You mentioned it's through a column, but is it your Ideation which has driven you to write over a dozen books?

Arthur C. Brooks:
[12:11] Well, the Ideation is basically the origination of the things that actually go into the material. That's the creativity. But then what you really need is to execute. That means you have to have a lot of discipline. Discipline is kind of everything. One of the other advantages of this routine is it's highly disciplined. You get into a point where you're eating the same thing, you're doing the same kinds of workouts, you're actually praying or meditating in the same way every day. That kind of discipline then sets you up to be very disciplined in the way that you structure your work, even your Ideation work. So it's not just free flowing. I'm kind of like, "I had an idea, oh, good, there's an idea." No, no, no. "I'm writing a column" is what it comes down to. It's just a higher Ideation, higher creativity level on top of the discipline that will actually produce a product.

Jon Clifton:
[12:57] Input is your number five strength. You have an unusual ability to bring up things that you've learned, things that you cite through all your work, through all your columns, through all your speeches. But can you talk a little bit about how you use it? And also, how do you get energized by learning new kinds of pieces of information?

Arthur C. Brooks:
[13:16] Yeah, I mean, the fact that it's a natural strength means that I'm naturally curious. So Input is kind of curiosity capacity, and you want to go learn stuff all the time. Now you can be not focused and just be learning things, and a lot of people are. One of the great and terrible things about the internet is that if Input's one of your five big CliftonStrengths, you can just spend all day long surfing around learning stuff. One of my sons, he does this a lot. He knows everything in the world. I've never seen anything like it. Because he was in the Marine Corps for the last four years. He's a sniper, which means he's sitting behind his scope with time and with a phone, and so he's watching YouTube videos on everything. He knows how to fix a motorcycle. He's never had a motorcycle, he's just to fix the motorcycle because he's an Input. It's one of his strengths, which means he's highly curious. Then he has to get a curiosity satisfaction box right in front of him. That's great, but it could be terrible for your actual discipline because you can range all over the place. So the key thing with Input is using that curiosity and then focusing your curiosity. "I want to be curious within this particular range. I'm going to delimit my curiosity for the next few hours to this particular range, and I'm going to see what I come up with." That intense curiosity is really helpful for it. What I find also is that great interviewers are intensely curious. You're actually trying to learn something right now. You're not trying to make a point. You're actually trying to learn something right now. Is the Input high on yours, too? No. It isn't? Well, you've learned to cultivate it.

Jon Clifton:
[14:49] Definitely. Well, talk a little bit, too, about your Woo. I think that surprised some people.

Arthur C. Brooks:
[14:55] Four is Woo. That's right. Yeah.

Jon Clifton:
[14:57] How does that manifest itself as a professor, as a bestselling author, as a CEO? I mean, how do you use your Woo?

Arthur C. Brooks:
[15:04] I have an intense need to be loved by strangers. It's pathetic. No, it's not that. I hope I want to win people over to good ideas that are going to help them and build them up.

Jon Clifton:
[15:19] Has it always been that way?

Arthur C. Brooks:
[15:20] Well, you know, I have a personal mission statement: "To lift people up and bring them together using science and ideas." That's what I want to do. I want to create a world with more love and happiness by lifting people up and bringing them together using science and ideas. And to do that, I have to convince people these are good things for them. I have to go convince people of things.

Now you can use Woo for good or for bad. The world's worst demagogues, dictators, were incredibly charismatic orators who were probably number one on Woo. You can use that to serve your ego. You can use that to manipulate people. A lot of people who have what we call the "dark triad personality characteristics," which is, for those who haven't studied this stuff, it's narcissism, Machiavellianism, and psychopathic traits. Those things happen together in 7% of the population. Those people always have tons of Woo. They're super high in Woo. It's too bad for you if you wind up close to a dark triad that's high in Woo, because you're going to be missing your wallet or worse soon enough, is what it comes down to.

So you have to be careful with this and make sure that you truly are dedicated to something that's better for everybody. But, you know, look, I'm on the Earth, I believe, to create a better world for people. But I have to convince them that these ideas are good. And so I've cultivated that, that number four, in a big way. Today, I do 175 speeches outside of my teaching at the university. I'm talking all the time to people to try to convince them of these good ideas. This is a more technical conversation than typically what I'm talking about, but I'm using science for the public interest to talk about love and happiness that people can use in their own lives and the lives of other people. But it better be convincing and it better be winsome or it's going to fall flat, and life's too short for that.

Jon Clifton:
[17:09] In a recent book, you talk a lot about not caring as much about what others think, or at least that's what you recommend for readers. But that is unusually hard for people with Woo to do. So talk more about that for you personally, but also what does it mean as a recommendation for others?

Arthur C. Brooks:
[17:26] Yeah, that's why I joke, "Love me, love me." That's the reason that's a joke, because that's typically the case. If you're trying to convince people of these ideas a lot, you want them to like the ideas. And you kind of want them to like you, is what it comes down to. You have to fight against that. So once again, this is why the tool is so incredibly valuable. As you learn about yourself, this is not just strength. There's weaknesses in there, too. St. Paul, in talking about his own struggles, the Apostle Paul, he says, "In weakness, I find my strength." What was he talking about? He talked about "the thorn in his flesh," and historians and theologians have speculated what he meant. Perhaps some people think he had epilepsy. Other people think that he just had these worldly temptations or whatever it happened to be. But he made a very adroit observation in saying that the things that were weak for him were also his source of strength.

But the reverse is also true. The things that are your natural strengths, you'll find your weakness. And Woo is a particular case of that. If you're really good at bringing people along, you're going to want to bring people along with everything, including about yourself. You have to watch that or it can take over. It can become a tyranny. It can make you think an awful lot about that. It can make you unhappy, quite frankly. So this is one of the things that I talk about a lot with politicians. I work a lot with CEOs and politicians and leaders. And I say, "You're an incredibly charismatic leader. How happy are you?" And we work on caring less about what other people think. It turns out that that strength is a weakness too.

Jon Clifton:
[19:00] Let's talk about your Strategic. You have it number three. How do you use that as either a professor, a writer, a CEO? Is it something that you use on a regular basis? Is it something you use more in your personal life?

Arthur C. Brooks:
[19:09] Well, arguably, I could be more strategic in my personal life, but in my work.

Jon Clifton:
[19:15] Well, say more about that.

Arthur C. Brooks:
[19:16] Well, you know, it's funny because your work and your personal life don't always mirror each other very well. I know some people who are just meticulous in their work and really messy in their personal lives. That's fortunately not the case for me. But there are times when I could think a little bit more strategically about where I want to be as a person down the line.

In my professional life, I'm thinking an awful lot about, "What do I want my company to do?" But more importantly, "Where do I want my work to go? Where do I want my work to go next year? Who are the people that I actually want to touch?" When you match strategy with futurism, you get a kind of a nice combination, because you're thinking about what the future is actually going to look like in a practical way. So that's really what I try to do and put those things together. I say, "What are the next one, two, five, and 10 years going to look like?" And I do that on a regular basis.

Now, I'm trying not to be obsessed with just thinking about 10 years in the future. I try to live in "daytight compartments" to the extent that I possibly can. That's a phrase that was invented by Dale Carnegie, believe it or not. His most famous book is How to Win Friends and Influence People, but his better book, arguably, is How to Stop Worrying and Start Living. And one of the keys to worry less and have a better life is to think about the future where you want to go and then back it up to what you need to do today and then live in that daytight compartment. That's a really important thing to do. That's one of the things that I try to do. But being strategic makes it possible for me to know what that "daytight compartment" actually is. "What do I need to do today that's going to get me to the week, month, six months, one year, two years, five years, 10 years, rest of my life?" What do I want it to be? So I have to be very strategic so the futurism can be corralled and coaxed into where I want it to be. So it's incredibly practical and incredibly useful to meet the goals that I'm trying to lay out for myself.

Jon Clifton:
[21:03] One of the things that you write about in your new book is the importance of friendships. You even have this amazing reference to Edgar Allan Poe, talking about how much he struggled with his own loneliness. Throughout the book, you're doing a wonderful job recommending people stay close to their friends. But as you mentioned, you have relating themes toward the bottom. So reconcile that.

Arthur C. Brooks:
[21:26] Well, that's really important that I know that, right? Because I know a lot of people who are very, very strong, playing to their strengths, not paying attention to their weaknesses, and they're wondering why they're so lonely, for example. If I actually didn't pay attention to my bottom five relating themes, I'd be wondering why things are going so great in my life, but I feel kind of lonely and crummy. The answer is because I'm not doing enough on relating themes, notwithstanding the fact that these aren't my natural strengths. Just because relating themes are not my strengths, it doesn't mean they're not important.

This is really important for people doing the CliftonStrengths to understand. Just because something is in your top five doesn't mean that's the most important thing in life. And just because something is in the bottom five doesn't mean you can disregard it. On the contrary, you don't just play to your strengths, you also have to manage your weaknesses, manage your lesser strengths, so that you can have the best possible life. It was very important for me to see that. When I saw that, it was really helpful to me. I thought, "Yeah, I'm going to naturally neglect that. I'm going to naturally neglect that because I want to do my strengths. I want to be strengths all day long." But when I look at that, I say, "Yeah, I know what the data say about people who don't take care of their friendships." I'm going to be 60 this year. If I don't have any friends, what's life going to look like?

It's funny, I counsel a lot of people who are retiring. I'm not going to retire for a long time, but I know a lot of people retiring. One of the things that the "super strivers" kind of specialize in, these hard-driving striver types, is that they've neglected their relationships. Anybody who's watching this podcast, watching us, it's because they're strivers. There's nobody who's like, "Eh, who cares about CliftonStrengths?" Right? This is a striver thing. These are the people when they're in their 60s, for example, they're getting ready to retire, and the one thing that they've all neglected is their relationships. And you know, they'll retire and then they kind of follow their wife around the house. She's like, "I married you for better, for worse, but not for lunch. Go do something, go build a birdhouse, I don't know." The truth is they don't know what to do because they haven't built these relationships.

So I saw this in my research and then I took CliftonStrengths, and I thought in me, "No." And so I've actually taken remedial action over the past 10 years. I built up my friendships. I built up a couple of really, really critical friendships that mean a lot to me. I take the time for it, and it's been super helpful. It might not come naturally, it sure is good.

Jon Clifton:
[23:50] So there's a way that you're using your thinking themes to direct it and say, "This is more of a cognitive approach where I know as a human being, I need this in my life." Is that what it is?

Arthur C. Brooks:
[24:00] Yeah, limbically these are low, but in my prefrontal cortex, I can make them what they are, because I'm managing my feelings because they don't manage me. That's really important for us all to understand. You don't have to be driven by your strength. All this is information about you. You design the life that you want, but you have to have the information about your life so that you can actually make the right design.

Jon Clifton:
[24:27] One of the big concepts that you talk about is metacognition. What strengths do you use in order to exhibit metacognition?

Arthur C. Brooks:
[24:35] So metacognition is moving the experience of your emotions from your limbic system to your prefrontal cortex. That's really what it is. It's not having different emotions. It's managing them by moving the experience of them with a little bit of remove. So really reactive people, when you talk about somebody who's reactive, what do we mean? It means they have an emotion and they act on it. You react to something immediately. And so somebody, when they're angry, they yell. They have a really big temper problem. That's a reactive person. Little kids are unbelievably reactive. My little grandson, he's just a baby, and when he feels something, you know about it. He never suffers in silence. And the reason is because he's limbic. He's a purely limbic little dude. And a lot of adults are kind of limbic as well. A better life, what my grandson is going to grow into, what I try to be and all of us can be, is somebody who's not reactive because we're actually, we have the "c-suite" of our brain, the executive center, the prefrontal cortex is in charge.

But that doesn't come naturally. You have to actually get better at that. You have to use techniques that will let you say, "I have these emotions. What do they mean? Why am I having them? What can I do with them?" That takes work, and that's metacognition. That's really, really important. Some people it's easier for than others, but everybody can do these things. So, for example, when you study Vipassanā meditation, that's a meditation technique in Theravada Buddhism, that's a kind of insight meditation. When you sit in meditation, you say to yourself, "Arthur is feeling sad and angry today. How interesting. Arthur has a good life. Why would he be feeling this kind of sadness and anger?" "Let's dig into this a little bit more." And you're understanding your own emotions as if they were happening to another person. This is moving the experience into your prefrontal cortex, where it's no longer threatening. It's simply a source of information that you can use. That's why it's so good for your mental health to do that.

Journaling does the same thing. If you're writing about your feelings, you're not indulging yourself. On the contrary, you can't write something down if it's in your limbic system only. It's in your prefrontal cortex if it's making it to your fingers in a pencil and you're writing it down on a page. And you'll find that you always feel better when you write your emotions down because you've made it metacognitively more, more, more, more executive in the way that you're expressing it. Prayers of petition are incredibly important where you actually offer something up to God, something that's bothering you. You say, "Lord, this thing is bugging me. I'm really angry right now. Can you help me?" When you offer up something, a negative emotion or a positive emotion, you can't be offering it up to God consciously if it's fulfilling in a limbic system, just to move it into your prefrontal cortex. There are a number of ways to do that, even therapy, which is another way to do it. The best, most productive kinds of psychotherapy are giving you an expert orientation in yourself, and they're highly metacognitive. The reason you feel better after you talk to your therapist is because you've articulated your feelings. Among other things, you can do it to a lamppost if you want, although a trained therapist is better.

Jon Clifton:
[27:47] Now, for a number of your classes, you have them go through strengths to learn about their top themes. Can you talk about how it fits into the curriculum and what is it that you're trying to instill within them to have them go through that experience?

Arthur C. Brooks:
[27:59] So, I'm a leadership professor at the Harvard Kennedy School. I teach happiness at the Harvard Business School. I teach leadership at the Harvard Kennedy School. And leadership is a soft skill, but it has a lot of hard aspects to it. So as a social scientist teaching leadership, the main thing I want my students to understand is themselves. Because the most important leadership task of a leader is leading you. I've heard you say this, I mean, Gallup and Clifton. If you know anything from you guys, it's "Lead yourself and then you can lead others." That's the most important thing. If you're going to lead yourself, you have to know yourself. If you're going to know yourself, you better know your strengths and weaknesses. And the best tool that I've ever used to do that is CliftonStrengths.

Jon Clifton:
[28:38] Now, one of the things that you advise, you and Oprah, at the very end of the book is "transcendentalism." How is it that you used your strengths to do that for yourself?

Arthur C. Brooks:
[28:48] Transcendence is one of the habits of the happiest people. The happiest people pay attention to four big things in their lives. They don't include gym membership. They don't include that stuff's important, kind of. But the big four are faith, family, friends, and work. Those are the big four. "Faith," by that, I mean "transcendence." I don't mean my Catholic faith. It's really the most important thing in my life. But as a social scientist, I can tell you that having a transcendent view of life where it's bigger than you, that's really, really important. Why? Because Mother Nature wants us to be the starring actor in our own personal psychodrama. "Me, me, me, me, me." It's just so tedious. "My commute, my money and my lunch and my friends." It's just, it's all about me. But that's just so boring. It's a combination of being boring and terrifying at the same time, which is a bad combination.

The only way you can get relief and peace and perspective is by zooming out and getting small. That's what I mean by transcendence. It's a critical factor in having a happy life. Now, maybe that's reading the Stoic philosophers or having a meditation practice or walking in nature before dawn without devices or studying the fugues of Johann Sebastian Bach, or maybe that's the faith of your youth, like my case, but you have to have something. Now, how do you do that? The answer is that you, number one, do it on purpose. You take it seriously like any other part of your life. And then you can use your strengths to make it better.

So I thought about it, you know, I thought, as I was over the course of my adult life, "Where do I want to be when I'm 30 and 40 and 50 and 60?" I looked ahead in my life and I thought, "What do I want to be doing when I'm 80 years old?" The answer is, I want to be in communion with God. I want to be worshiping. I want to be reading the scriptures. I want to be witnessing to others. I want to be sharing the truth and the light with other people. Well, that's going to take some elite training. I'm not going to get there just by accident and fall into it. I know a lot of people like, "I want to retire, I'm going to go to church more." No, you're not. You don't show up at the Olympics out of shape and then run the 100-yard dash. You have to train for it. And that requires a sense of strategy about your own life. That plays to one of my strengths. So I set out my life, including my religious life, on a grid about actually where I want to be. I know it sounds so weird. It's important not to be just leaving everything to, you know, "It'll happen, it'll be." No, it won't. And that particular one of my strengths has made my life much, much better, even on religion.

Jon Clifton:
[31:25] In the book, "From Strength to Strength," you talk about the different horizons that people have throughout their life and how you need to adapt. How does somebody view that through the lens of CliftonStrengths?

Arthur C. Brooks:
[31:39] Yes, for sure. CliftonStrengths are just human strengths. They're just a way to classify human strengths. So, you know, you say "Input," other people say "curiosity," it doesn't matter. The whole point is you've got the list of the big ones that come out in a very sophisticated analytical factor analysis, where you ask a bazillion questions in the original research, and you see the things that start lighting up and you give a name to them. That's how you do this kind of analysis. The brilliance is that these are the things that you can remember, but they're based on actual data.

Okay, so when you're thinking about the cadence of your life, it's different at different times. The result of that is that my number one is Futuristic. That means different things when I'm 25 and when I'm 59. Obviously, I know math. My dad was a PhD biostatistician. I was like, "Yeah, probably got seven years left." It's important that we actually think about what Futuristic means in a productive and realistic way. When I think about what does Futuristic mean for my life, I think I took the test for the first time when I was about 45. That was maybe 14 or 15 years, almost 15 years ago, I took the test for the first time. I was looking at it, "Now what am I going to do? What does Futuristic mean for the next 40 years of my life?" Well, it's not 40 years anymore, probably, unless I'm planning to live to 100, which is possible. But it's not going to be the same 40 years, is it? So I have to be thinking about it in a different way. Here's a very tangible example of how I think about my futuristic self based on my greatest strength. I was a lot more likely to engage in long-term activities that I didn't like because they were an investment when I was 45. And I'm a lot less likely to do so now. I'm thinking futuristic in terms of the beautiful things that I can do that are also fun and an adventure for me. Why? Because I can't discount those, that cost of it, in the way that I would have in the past. That's why it's the same skill interpreted in a different way, having to do with a different timeline.

Jon Clifton:
[33:55] Now, thinking about the French horn, what strengths do you use to become such an incredible musician?

Arthur C. Brooks:
[34:03] Well, it's actually interesting because of CliftonStrengths, I understood why I was never happy as a French horn player. Because being a classical musician is wonderful because it's the greatest music in the world, but it's not a very creative profession. It sounds like being a professional musician is the most creative thing ever, but it's not. In jazz, the most important skill that you have is, within a few fundamentals of melody, harmony, and rhythm, being a composer in real time. It's all about improvisation. That's what jazz really is. There's no improvisation in classical music. You're doing what the conductor wants and most importantly what Beethoven wanted. You're following the score. There's some expression, but it's entirely secondary to precision. That's one of the reasons that I was just not as happy as I could have been. I was good at it, but I wasn't happy. Now with my CliftonStrengths profile, I understand a little bit more why.

Jon Clifton:
[34:55] What was that?

Arthur C. Brooks:
[34:56] Creativity is everything for me. I want to be creative. I would have been a much happier jazz musician. I'd still be a jazz musician.

Jon Clifton:
[35:03] Now, at a very young age, you were raised as a Protestant, but you had a very spiritual experience when you switched to becoming a Catholic. And ever since then, you've practiced Christianity and have been a very spiritual person. Was that something in your strengths that helped drive that, and if so, which one?

Arthur C. Brooks:
[35:24] I don't know. That's a good question. I would ask you that because you're probably the world's leading expert on the CliftonStrengths. When you meet somebody who has a strong transcendental sense, it's not a question of what I feel. A lot of people who aren't religious who are watching this might be like, "Oh, that guy feels really religious. That'd be awesome." No, no, I wake up not feeling religious an awful lot, but that's the person I want to be. So I choose, I make a commitment to my spiritual life notwithstanding my feelings. That's actually the secret to a serious practice of a serious transcendental practice, either to a meditation practice or to a religious practice, is making the commitment to it and then disregarding your feelings. It's the same way to get in shape too. It's the same way to be in the gym. You make a commitment to it even though you wake up and you're like, "Oh, I did it." Well, it's 5 a.m., so you're getting to the gym. Religion is much the same thing, with many of the same rewards. So that's what I would ask. I do have a thriving spiritual life, but more than anything else, I have a strong commitment to a thriving spiritual life on the basis of what I've decided to do and the discipline that I bring to it. So, which of my strengths actually serves that?

Jon Clifton:
[36:31] Well, I sincerely wasn't sure. That's the thing. It's actually one of the reasons why we say don't ever try to guess about not just what someone's strength is, but how they apply their strengths. And you know, typically, we do see that there are some strengths like Belief, for example. There are some, a lot of people who are very spiritual, very religious, tend to have themes like Belief, but oftentimes they don't.

Arthur C. Brooks:
[36:55] Belief is low for me, hence the question. Belief is low for me, but commitment is high. That strategy is high. I'm very disciplined about it. And this is the person I want to be. This is the man I want to be. This is the way I want to raise my family. This is the meaning that I want to bring to everything that I do. And sometimes I feel it, and sometimes I don't. But my feelings, I don't want to be managed by that. I want to banish that.

Jon Clifton:
[37:22] One of the things that we found is one of the biggest demands for leaders is hope. In your new book with Oprah, you talk about the difference between optimism and hope. Can you talk a little bit more about how you arrived at that conclusion, but also what of your strengths do you use to bring hope?

Arthur C. Brooks:
[37:42] Yeah, hope is a virtue. Optimism is not a virtue. Optimism is an assessment of probabilities. Optimism is, "I think things are going to be fine." That's all optimism really is. There's nothing wrong with optimism. Optimism is correlated with happiness because, obviously, if you think things are going to be okay, you're going to be happier than if you think things are going to be crummy. There's a pessimism, but that doesn't empower you. Optimism is not empowering.

Hope is "something can be done and I can do it." That's what hope really is. You can be an incredibly pessimistic but hopeful person. "I think it's going to be pretty crummy. There's something I can do." So you go to the doctor and the doctor says, "Stage four cancer, looks really bad, but there's something you can do about this. I don't know if it's going to work, but you can do something about it." If you're a hopeful person, you'd be like, "Yeah, bring it on. You want me to stop eating meat? I'll stop eating meat. You want me to take 110 flights of stairs every day? That's what I'm going to do." That's what a hopeful person actually does. "Something can be done and I can do it," notwithstanding my assessment of the probabilities of a successful or a favorable outcome. That's the difference between optimism and hope.

I want to be a hopeful person. The reason that hope is a virtue and religion is a theological virtue is because it animates people to be moving forward and behaving in a way that's positive in their own lives and the lives of other people. That's what's so critically important. I think you're going to find it across a lot of different strengths in different people profiles, but you can weave hope into anything. For me, hope is really what Futuristic is all about. It's not just, "I have a vision for the future." No, "I have a vision for a better future." That's why I want to bring the Woo to it so other people can see what it is, understand it, and how they can be part of it, which is so critically important. I want to flesh it out with Input. I want to flesh it out with Ideation. I want to express it really well. But the whole point is that for me, futurism is hope. And that's what gets me up every morning.

Jon Clifton:
[39:42] You also have a similar distinction with empathy and compassion. Interestingly enough, compassion is also one of the four demands that we see of leaders. But can you talk more about that distinction and also what strengths do you use to show and be compassionate?

Arthur C. Brooks:
[39:59] So people often use empathy and compassion synonymously, and probably you'll find them as synonyms in the dictionary, but they're not. Empathy, as a clinical matter, is about feeling somebody else's pain. You know what that feels like. Literally, there's a biological process through which we feel other people's pain, which is something called "mirror neurons." And those mirror neurons actually will turn on in response to what you see somebody else experiencing. When you see somebody else in intense pain, your mirror neurons will make you feel a kind of a simulacrum for that pain in your brain as well, as a part of the brain called the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex, DACC. And that thing actually makes you feel affective pain in your brain. When you see somebody else suffering, it makes you feel suffering. It's why when you watch a sad movie, you want to cry. That's what's really going on. That's empathy, when you're feeling somebody else's pain. The problem with empathy is it doesn't really help anybody that much. When you feel somebody else's pain, it can actually disempower them. Why? Because you might not act in a way that they need.

I have young adult children, and at one point, I had three teenagers at home. That was super fun, let me tell you. The worst parents of teenagers are the most empathetic. Why? Because you're paralyzed by feeling their constant pain. Teenagers are in intense emotional pain all the time. If you're paralyzed by that, you'll say, "Yeah, it's true. You don't have to go to school today because you're feeling kind of bummed out." Get up. Have some breakfast and go to school. Why? Because to do things that they don't like that are in their interest is compassionate even though it's not empathetic. Empathy is part of compassion. I see somebody else's distress, I feel it enough that I can act on it, but I'm not paralyzed and I'm willing to do what it takes. It's a four-part process: seeing it, feeling it, understanding it, and acting on it. That's compassion. That's really good for people. Empathy is very, is very incomplete and sometimes counterproductive.

The best leaders are not empathetic. The best leaders are compassionate. They do what needs to get done even when they become unpopular as a result. That's something that's entirely lost on a lot of CEOs, a lot of leaders, and a lot of young people. They're like, "I'm going to be really, really empathetic." No, no, be compassionate. It's a little self-serving because Empathy is in my bottom five. But I work to be as compassionate a person as I possibly can, and I think, "What am I supposed to do? What am I actually trying to do for people's good?" And I make sure that I believe it, and I make sure that people at least give me feedback in a way that suggests to me that it's successful as much as I can.

Jon Clifton:
[42:53] Alright, sir, thank you.

Arthur C. Brooks:
[42:54] Thank you for everything.

Jon Clifton:
[42:55] Thank you for everything that you're doing for Gallup, everything that you're doing for the world. All the advice you give us is hugely helpful to everything that we're working on. So thank you.

Arthur C. Brooks:
[43:04] Thank you. Gallup is a great company. The Clifton StrengthsFinder has really done a lot of good for me in my life. Everybody who takes it now is going to get a lot of information from it. Maybe take them down the road of the "PhD in themselves" that will make them the leader they want to be. Thank you for creating that and making it possible for all of us.

Jon Clifton:
[43:19] Thank you.

Transcript autogenerated using AI.