Fifteen Questions: Arthur Brooks on Barcelona, Baldness, and the Science of Happiness

Arthur C. Brooks is a professor at the Harvard Kennedy School and the Harvard Business School. His research centers on human happiness. Before coming to Harvard, he served for 10 years as president of the American Enterprise Institute, a public policy think tank in Washington, D.C.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

FM: You’ve had a lot of different career transformations, and articles about you have really portrayed them as transformations. You’ve been a liberal French horn player to a conservative academic to a think tank president to now a happiness guru, as some describe you. Do you think describing it as a transformation is accurate?

ACB: I learned how to perform and do music, and then I went to college late. I graduated a month before my 30th birthday, by correspondence. I never set foot on a campus, except for the first pass through where I was there for 10 months — and then they asked me to pursue my excellence elsewhere for not doing work — when I was 18.

Then I went to graduate school and got my Ph.D., and I studied art, music, and beauty as a behavioral scientist — connected, right? I learned how to lecture, and I learned how to teach. That was a new skill.

Then I left because I had gotten super interested in this idea of opportunity. I went to the best possible place to try to instantiate opportunities for people who needed them, which is the American Enterprise Institute. Enterprise! Enterprise! Right? Also, I wanted to see if I could run a nonprofit and see what it would be like to be an administrator. It was hard.

After that, I realized what I was called to do was to lift people up and bring them together in bonds of happiness and love for the rest of my life. And so this was the culmination of everything I’ve done.

FM: You’ve previously said that you converted from Protestantism to Catholicism at age 15, after a “mystical experience” at the Basilica of Our Lady of Guadalupe in Mexico. Can you tell us more about that experience?

ACB: I came from a really Christian family, a strong Christian family, but I didn’t know any Catholics. And I was at the Shrine of Guadalupe, and I had this very strange experience.

The shrine of Guadalupe is in living remembrance of an apparition of the Blessed Virgin Mary to a peasant named Juan Diego. It was during the time of the Spanish conquests, which were going very poorly for Catholicism because they had a bad marketing plan. The legend has it — reality to a lot of Catholics — that the Virgin Mary appeared to Juan Diego as a mestiza, which is a woman of mixed race, which was super, super transgressive at the time.

But that’s the transgressive nature of divine love — crazy, man! When that was explained to me, that was explained to me as kind of a historical fact. What it did was it helped me understand, as a Christian, the nature of divine love itself, and that I wanted more of.

I went home, back to the United States — I grew up in Seattle — and I couldn’t get it out of my head. So I went to a Catholic Church. Kept thinking about it. It was the weirdest thing. I don’t know, is that mystical? Is it non mystical? As a scientist now, I look back on it and say that I’m sure there were some biological correlates to it or something else that was happening in my life. But the bottom line is that I made my own way, and within a year, I was a Catholic.

FM: Was there anything else that drew you to Catholicism that you hadn’t found in Protestantism?

ACB: Probably adolescent rebellion.

FM: How did you choose the French horn?

ACB: It chose me. I learned to read music when I was four or five, and I started on the violin, then I went to piano. Then, at eight, I took up a French horn, because that’s what you do. You chose an orchestral instrument. I grew up in Seattle, which has a long classical music tradition and a great Youth Symphony system.

I was really good at it, and I really, really liked being good at something.

When you’re a kid, you get a ton of dopamine from the reward of being great at something. And so, why was I — Was I passionate about the French horn? No. I play the French horn, and people are like, “Oh my God, that kid is really good.”

That’s why I did it. And I love music, too, by the way.

FM: Did you ever play in a high school band?

ACB: I had to. I was actually on a high school band trip in Guadalupe.

FM: Was it a marching band?

ACB: I didn’t do very much of that. It’s very hard on your embouchure. It’s very, very hard on the musculature of your face. I was a serious player studying with the members of the Seattle Symphony from really young ages, and they were like, “No, you’re not doing that.” That would be as if you were a serious athlete and doing something dangerous.

FM: Your wife is from Barcelona. Did you learn how to speak either Spanish or Catalan?

I speak both fluently, actually, because I lived there.

I joined the orchestra there when I was 25, and I lived there until I was 28. I’ve been back and forth continuously for the past 30 plus years.

FM: Did you speak any before moving there?

Not a single word. And my wife didn’t speak a word of English. I moved to Barcelona after having dated her for a week on the bet that this was my soulmate. I took a job in the orchestra, and then set about learning the language to try to convince her that I was worth taking a chance on.

FM: A couple articles describe how in your 20s, you reevaluated the liberalism you grew up with and became a conservative after learning about free market principles in an economics course. Do you personally feel like your views really took a 180, or do you feel like reading conservative political thought just helped you put your ideas into words?

I found not in conservative ideas, but in the ideas of free enterprise, the best way to execute what I thought was a better world. I was really, really concerned in my 20s, and I still am today, about poverty around the world.

What I learned was that poverty had been to a very large extent, eradicated many places around the world, and it wasn’t because of big government ideas. It was because of market principles. It was because the ideas of the free enterprise system had been propagated around the world, and people had lifted themselves up out of poverty, and 80 percent of starvation level poverty have been eradicated since my youth. And I said, why? It was the free enterprise system.

What I care about is lifting people up from the margins of society. That’s what I really, really care about in public policy, and then I found out later, “Oh, that means you’re a conservative.” But that’s not meaningful to me in that particular way.

I have kids in the military, and I’m traditionally religious. But again, I don’t want that to be conservative. I want that to be just the way you see the world, and I want to be with people who don’t see the world in that particular way. So the sort of conservative, liberal dichotomy is problematic for me, because that’s sort of tribal, and that’s not how I see it.

FM: Coming from AEI, what’s it like being in a majority liberal environment at Harvard?

It’s like a family Thanksgiving dinner in the Brooks household.

I come from a liberal family. I was a classical musician. I played in a symphony orchestra. I became an academic. The only time in my life that I’ve been around other conservatives is when I was at AEI. So this is just normal for me. It’s completely comfortable.

FM: Is there an environment you prefer?

I like being around creative people. I like being around people who care about ideas and who appreciate new ideas. What I don’t like, conservative or liberal, is when people are really close-minded or really offended by ideas outside their own wheelhouse. And that’s a bigger problem in America. That’s not about conservative or liberal, that’s just being a siloed environment. In academia, a lot of people don’t want to hear things that they don’t agree with, and that’s a huge problem.

FM: You’ve written a lot about how workaholism — specifically, an addiction to success — can be deleterious to happiness. After graduation, many HBS students plan to start the type of jobs that really signify success and also require mountains of work. How do you advise these students about their life and career choices with happiness in mind?

We’re wired to believe that money, power, pleasure, and fame will bring happiness.

The things that bring happiness authentically are transcendental experiences like faith or life philosophy: the why of your life; family life, which is your kin-based relationships; friendships, which are your elected relationships; and your work, where you serve other people.

Pursue happiness the right way, and you’ll be successful enough. That’s the truth. That’s scary to a lot of people, because it’s actually easier to turn the crank on success. I got into Harvard, I got out of Harvard, I got a good job, I got into business school. I got out of business school. Somebody offered me $210,000 to start. I’m going to be happy now, right? No.

There’s nothing wrong with $210,000 — it’s what you do with the money, of course. What you need to be thinking about is the elements of happiness that will actually, authentically bring you what you want, and then you will be successful enough. And that’s a leap of faith for a lot of people.

FM: Where is the favorite place that you’ve lived?

ACB: Barcelona. I love Barcelona. It’s my favorite place. That’s an easy one for me.

I don’t have a home anyplace because I’ve moved a lot. I’ve obliterated a sense of home.

I’m from no place at this point. But the city I know best is Barcelona because I’ve lived there for years at a time and summers at a time and months at a time, and I go four times a year.

I have way, way, way more family there than anyplace else and tons of friends.

FM: A couple articles have said that you track your happiness on a spreadsheet. Can you tell us a bit more about how that works?

ACB: There are about 20 aspects that are weighted in particular ways that will be the factors behind your wellbeing and ill-being. And I keep track of them every six months.

What happens is, during the year, some of them have gone down and some of them have gone up, and then I weight them such that I have a composite score, but really it’s the factors that matter. I look at the ones that go down and say, “Why did that go down?” And then I can actually say, “What’s responsible for my current level of well being?” I’ve got a granularity to it that I wouldn’t have otherwise.

I make a strategic plan to get those numbers back up and continue making progress. And it’s been really, really successful.

Now a bunch of people have gone to me and said, “Let’s appify it.” But I haven’t done it. I don’t know why, I’m reluctant to do it.

FM: You’ve written about baldness. What advice would you give to balding college students?

ACB: Twenties is early, but that’s how old I was. I wasn’t in college — because I was out of college — when I started realizing that. And I remember going, “Oh my god. No, no, no, no, no, no, no.”

Do I wish I had hair? Yeah. Do I care very much? No. It’s a low intensity preference. That’s what it comes down to, so focus on the intensity, not the preference. This is really important for lots of things.

When you’re looking at the menu at a restaurant, you have a preference, but you have an intensity of preference. If you pay more attention to the intensity, you’ll be a much happier person. And when something bad happens, think, “Yeah, I don’t want it to happen. How much do I care? Not that much.” That’s what it comes down to.

But if you gave me hair today, I’d take it.

—Associate Magazine Editor Sage S. Lattman can be reached at sage.lattman@thecrimson.com. Follow her on Twitter @sagelattman.