Pod Insights The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett Most Replayed Moment: Why You’re Never Satisfied! The 4 Pillars of Lasting Happiness About this episode Arthur C. Brooks is a Harvard professor, social scientist, and bestselling author who studies the science of happiness, meaning, and human fulfilment. He advises leaders and high achievers on how to build lives rooted in purpose, satisfaction, and emotional wellbeing.
In today's Moment, Arthur breaks down the four scalable areas of life to work on for lasting happiness. Learn the science behind long-term satisfaction, emotional resilience, and building meaning and purpose in a pleasure-driven world.
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Transcript Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:03 Steven Bartlett? So people in memory turn pleasure into...
0:06 Speaker 01 Enjoyment. That's right. So alcohol add people in memory. You know, the Anheuser-Busch Corporation doesn't put out advertisements of, you know, a dude alone in his apartment pounding a 12-pack. That's how a lot of people use the product. But that's, everybody knows that's an irresponsible, dangerous thing to do that can lead to alcoholism. What they show is the same guy with his brothers and friends, you know, clinking bottles together, having a great time. That is pleasure, alcohol, plus people, plus memory equals enjoyment, and at least happiness, because they want to join their brand to happiness, not just to pure pleasure, and certainly not to addiction.
0:43 Steven Bartlett? Same with like Coca-Cola. All the Coca-Cola ads are like the World Cup with your friends, and in summer with your friends.
0:49 Speaker 01 Yeah, and that's actually less addictive. I mean, there are certain, you know, the sugar and caffeine are certainly addictive, but they don't have the same properties of brain capture in the same way for sure, because they don't stimulate as much dopamine as, you know, something like alcohol does. And so they're less likely to make you really addicted, but the whole point is that they're, it does give you a little bit of pleasure, but it makes you way happier if you get to enjoyment, and you only get that when you're doing it with people.
1:15 Steven Bartlett? Satisfaction.
1:16 Speaker 01 Satisfaction is the joy you get after struggle. You're an entrepreneur, you understand this one really well. You're good at deferring your gratification. All entrepreneurs are good, successful entrepreneurs are good at deferring gratification, which means I'm gonna do this hard thing, and it's gonna get a big payoff, and that payoff is gonna be sweet. That's satisfaction. A really funny thing about humans is that we need struggle and suffering for us to actually get the joy that we seek, and that's a really important part of our happiness. So you find that people who are better at deferring their gratification get more satisfaction, and they're happier. There's a lot of, remember, you've heard about the marshmallow experiment?
1:54 Steven Bartlett? Yeah.
1:54 Speaker 01 And, you know, people have debunked it, but they actually haven't. So the marshmallow experiment was taken place, it took place in the late 60s, where Walter Michel was a psychologist at Stanford out in Palo Alto. He had a, you know, a little laboratory setup where he would come in and sit down on one side of a table, and it was a kid on the other side of the table, between four and eight years old, and in front of the kid was a marshmallow. And so he says to the kid, "You want the marshmallow?" The kid's like, "Yeah." He says... I'll tell you what, I have to go take a phone call in the back here. But when I come back, if the marshmallow is still there, I'll give you another one. Can you wait? Every kid's like, yeah, totally, totally, totally worth it. He comes back five minutes later or so. Eighty percent of the kids had eaten the marshmallow. Twenty percent of the kids hadn't. Now, that's a lot.
2:37 Speaker 01 Eighty percent of the kids could not defer their gratification. So the real question is, who's the 20%? It's Steve Bartlett. That, these are the people that went on to do distinguished things. They did better in school. They got better grades. They went on to have more job success. They had better relationships. That's what they found, that the most successful kids, now, that, what people fight about now is why? Whether it's nature or nurture, it's probably 50/50. Like everything else in life, it's both nature and nurture. But the bigger point is, good things come to those who wait. And when you wait, you suffer. And you need that suffering as part of the basic satisfying experience. Now, the bigger problem with satisfaction is that Mother Nature has a big lie at the
3:22 Speaker 01 end of it. Mother Nature says, if you get it, you're gonna love it forever. And that's not true. See, the, the, the brain, the brain works emotionally and physically in an environment of homeostasis. Homeostasis means that you always return to your baseline physiologically and emotionally. Because you can't stay in a, in a, in an unusual physiological state. Unusual states are a reaction. You need to be ready to react. And so, you know, you step off the treadmill, your heart is elevated, your heart goes back to where it was, so you're not dead in a week. The same thing is true for you emotionally. Something really good or bad happens to you, you think it's gonna last forever, so that
4:04 Speaker 01 you have an incentive to avoid or approach the thing, but it doesn't last forever, does it? That's the problem. We actually think that if I get that billion dollars, it's gonna be really great. And the first thing that somebody who has a billion dollars says to her or himself is, I guess I needed another billion because of homeostasis. And that puts you on something called the hedonic treadmill. More, more, more, more, more, more, more, more. So that's the great conundrum of the striver is that there's never enough, never enough, never enough. I deal with people all day long. I really specialize in people who are incredibly successful, but not happy. And a lot of what I do is explain one simple equation that both explains that,
4:48 Speaker 01 but also gives you the solution, which is that your satisfaction doesn't come from all the things that you have. So have more is not the right strategy. Satisfaction is all the things you have divided by the things that you want. Haves divided by wants. Successful people need to manage their wants even more than they need to manage their haves. They need to want less. And that's a whole kettle of fish. That's spirituality, that's discipline, that's fitness, that's diet. That's a whole lot of things that go into that. And that will help you actually get enduring satisfaction.
5:25 Steven Bartlett? Sounds like a contradiction though, doesn't it? It sounds like a contradiction to that the striving and the struggle is going to make me happy, but I should want less.
5:32 Speaker 01 Yeah. What people actually who crack this code and a lot of, you know, eastern traditions actually get into this is not that striving is bad, but that striving in itself has a reward to it. That the process and what you find out along the way is that what you wanted was not arrival. What you wanted was progress. And then you start to get the reward from the progress itself. There's a funny thing in the research on dieting. We all know that it's the most expensive unsuccessful industry in the world, right? 95% of diets fail, which means within a year, people have gained back all the weight that they've lost. But they're successful insofar as that almost everybody loses weight when they go on a diet. Here's the thing about diets.
6:15 Speaker 01 Every day, you're willing to forego the food you like in exchange for the reward, which is the scale going down. When you hit your goal, it's gonna be so great. It's gonna be so great. You know what the reward is, Dave? You never again get to eat the things that you like for the rest of your life. Congratulations.
6:32 Steven Bartlett? Once you've got there.
6:32 Speaker 01 That's why you fail. And the arrival fallacy, which is an identifiable phenomenon in my field, is that it's gonna be sweet when I get to the goal. It isn't. What you're gonna have is homeostasis when you get to your goal, frustration and disappointment. Therefore, you need to want less. You need to think about less about wanting these arrival experiences and get more satisfaction from the progress, from the journey. That's really what it comes down to. And people who crack that code over the course of self-discipline, self-understanding, self-management, they can actually experience remarkably higher satisfaction. The Dalai Lama, I've been working with the Dalai Lama closely for the past 11 years. And I asked him this question. How can I get lasting satisfaction?
7:16 Speaker 01 And he said, you need to want what you have, not to have what you want. And that's what it comes down to. It's the management of my wants, not my haves.
7:32 Steven Bartlett? On that point, we're at the time of year now where so many people are thinking about diets. You mentioned that there. So for those people that are approaching that moment and that, you know, they're gonna be setting their goals and stuff and all those kinds of things. What is a better goal to set if not a weight number or a financial number or whatever? What's a better, more realistic goal to set that has more chance of success?
7:52 Speaker 01 Yeah. It's interesting because there are certain things that we can accumulate that won't homeostatically return us to the baseline, that won't throw us onto this hedonic treadmill over and over and over again. Those goals are the goals that actually do lead to the happiest life. And the more you have, the better off you are. Or more actually is better. But they don't fall into the categories of money, power, pleasure and fame, which are the typical kind of goals that we get or related goals like weight loss or, you know, whatever it happens to be. The four goals that... Really matter are faith, family, friendship and work that serves others. Those are the four really great and transcendent goals that we can have. Now, there's nothing wrong with money or power or pleasure or fame.
8:35 Speaker 01 There's nothing wrong with those things, but only as intermediate goals to make it easier for us to pursue and accumulate deeper faith or philosophical life. I'm not talking about traditional religious faith necessarily. Better family relationships, which are very mystical, poorly understood, even in neuroscience in a lot of ways. Friendship, deep friendship, which is hard for a lot of people, especially successful people. And work that where you earn your success and serve other people. That's what it comes down to. So those are the right New Year's goals that we need. You know, this year, what am I going to do? What, how am I, how am I going to grow closer to the divine? How am I going to do that? This year, what am I going to do to draw closer to my family? And to have a more intimate relationship with my family? How am I going to have deeper friendships this year?
9:20 Speaker 01 And how am I going to take my work and find it more meaningful and satisfying? On the basis of serving other people, how am I going to do that?
9:29 Steven Bartlett? What is?
9:31 Speaker 01 We haven't gotten to meaning yet.
9:32 Steven Bartlett? Yeah, we haven't got to meaning yet. You said the word there, but, but I want to make sure I close off on this point about a better goal, because there's still going to be a huge group of people that go, listen, I get it. Love it. I believe it.
9:41 Speaker 01 Yeah.
9:41 Steven Bartlett? But I hate this belly fat.
9:43 Speaker 01 Yeah, I got it.
9:43 Steven Bartlett? And this belly fat yo-yos every year.
9:45 Speaker 01 So I get it. So those are intermediate goals and there's nothing wrong with those things. The problem is where they become satisfying and self-destructive is when that's the final goal. Because by the time you get there, you think, why? Why? That wasn't as meaningful as I thought. That wasn't as good as I thought. That's the arrival fallacy that when I actually get rid of the belly fat, then I'm actually going to have somehow a more wonderful life. That's actually not true. The reason that you're doing that is because you want to live longer with your spouse and see your, and, and you're dandily your 11 grandchildren on your knee. That's the reason you want to do this, because you need to do it for some intrinsic reason, as opposed to an extrinsic reason, having to do with people will love me more. I mean, it's amazing to me because like, you know, I'm. I do a lot of wellness and fitness and stuff as it interacts with happiness.
10:30 Speaker 01 I work with a lot of people who are very big in the longevity community because I have sort of the happiness console, the science of the happiness console that I put into those things. And so I meet a lot of people that are really into the fitness part. And what a lot of guys will tell me is that they'll have these fitness goals, like I'm going to put on 15 pounds of muscle this year and I'm going to get rid of all my belly fat and the whole thing. And if they stick to it by September or October, what they're finding is that, you know, they're not getting any more attention or compliments from women, but a lot of dudes are going, "Looking good, dude." And it's like, "That's not what I wanted." And part of the reason is because the arrival fallacy is you build up this image of what
11:12 Speaker 01 will actually come from the satisfaction that will come from hitting these intermediate goals. These aren't the right final goals. You've got to have the right final goals and then set some intermediate goals along the way, but not, let's not kid ourselves. And when you think carefully about that, that losing your last five pounds of belly fat so you can see your lower abs, which by the way is not necessarily that healthy, is going to materially improve your life and your relationships. It's not, it just isn't.
11:41 Steven Bartlett? What's a better end goal then as it relates to fitness? Would it be something more centered on health?
11:46 Speaker 01 Yeah. It is. It's something that's actually sustainable and having to do with health, also with happiness is the way that this works. So I work out 60 minutes a day. It's not because I'm vain. Look, I've got a face for radio, Steve.
11:57 Steven Bartlett? You look good. I don't know what you're talking about.
11:59 Speaker 01 I know, but it's age adjusted, I look good.
12:01 Steven Bartlett? I think you look good, period. And I'm not, you know, I've got a girlfriend, but credit where credit's due.
12:08 Speaker 01 Thank you, Steve. I appreciate that. But you made my week. See, this was my goal.
12:13 Steven Bartlett? Yeah.
12:16 Speaker 01 The reason that I do this is because I find that for me, that working out as much as I can is much harder than working out every day. Working out every day is much easier than working out as often as I can. Right? Yeah, and practicing my religion every day is much easier than practicing my religion when it when it comes naturally to me, or when I find it convenient. Eating healthily is much easier when I do it every day. And so the result of that is that I find that with those particular routines, I program those things into my life, and I'm a much happier guy. Look, it lowers my cortisol levels, which are naturally very high. I'm a very anxious person, and I understand anxiety, I understand the cortisol production, I understand how to manage it, and this is one of my management techniques.
12:58 Speaker 01 Thing about fitness to understand is, when I say it makes you happier, it actually doesn't. It lowers your unhappiness. Happiness and unhappiness, largely the experiences of happiness and unhappiness, which is to say positive and negative affect, they're produced in different parts of the limbic system. So you can both be very high happiness and very high unhappiness. I have tests for that, that I put my students through. You're probably somebody who experiences both very high positive affect and very high negative affect. We've only met, but my guess is that you're a mad scientist. That's the profile. And so that means is you've got two strategies. You want to keep your positive affect high, and you want to manage your negative affect. And one of the best ways to manage your negative affect is physical exercise, vigorous
13:43 Speaker 01 physical exercise. Today, today for me was leg day. I hate leg day, but I feel pretty good right now.
13:51 Steven Bartlett? Okay, that makes sense. I've got an answer there that I that I'm super clear on. I should be aiming at the end goal of happiness ultimately, even if the intermediary goals are things like belly fat and these short term things that are measurements of my progress towards the bigger goal. And the real key here is consistency.
14:09 Speaker 01 Yeah.
14:10 Steven Bartlett? I, this was the big unlock for my whole fitness thing, because I was that person, which will be 90% of people listening now, that made the goal every year that I was going to go to, you know, change my life every year. Never worked.
14:19 Speaker 01 Right.
14:20 Steven Bartlett? Because I was aiming at getting a six pack for summer. So when I arrived with the six pack.
14:25 Speaker 01 And it worked.
14:26 Steven Bartlett? Awesome. It was great. I looked great. I got, I actually got, I think I got a couple of compliments, which was nice. However, the minute summer finished, or the six pack arrived, I could not find for the life of me the motivation.
14:37 Speaker 01 No.
14:38 Steven Bartlett? So I'd go into winter and I'd become like a.
14:39 Speaker 01 There's no willpower that can, that can, like, you cannot muscle these things out, unless they become a part of your life.
14:45 Steven Bartlett? Consistency, making my goal consistency.
14:48 Speaker 01 Habits.
14:49 Steven Bartlett? And so was the big unlock for me.
14:50 Speaker 01 For sure.
14:51 Steven Bartlett? Because then, okay, the goal becomes. If I go to the gym every day, if I make that part of my habits, I'm gonna be healthier, happier, better at my job. Fucking, is there anything more important? Is that less important than a six pack? And that mindset shift changed my life.
15:06 Speaker 01 For sure.
15:07 Steven Bartlett? Meaning then? Meaning was the last of the three.
15:09 Speaker 01 Yeah. Meaning is the why of your life. This is the hardest for most people, especially young adults. This is really, really hard. So, meaning is really a combination of three things. It's coherence, purpose and significance. Coherence is things happen for a reason. And so, meaning in your life means you gotta have a theory about why things happen. Like, it's one damn thing after another. I mean, you gotta have some concept of why things happen. Purpose is my life has direction and has goals. That's what purpose really is. I'm going in this direction toward these things without getting stuck on the arrival fallacy. And the last, but not least, is significance, which is it would matter if I weren't here. I'm significant. Those are the three parts of meaning in people's lives.
15:53 Speaker 01 According to philosophers and social psychologists. So, there's a test that I give my students that kind of encompasses these three ideas. So, you can remember them into two questions. And you have a meaning crisis if you actually don't have answers to these questions that you believe. And there's no right answers. You just gotta have your answers. You wanna play?
16:13 Steven Bartlett? Yeah.
16:13 Speaker 01 Here's the quiz. Question number one. Why are you alive?
16:20 Speaker 01 You can answer that in terms of who created you or what you're on earth to do.
16:24 Steven Bartlett? Yeah. Okay, so why am I alive? That's something that I get to answer every single day. I get to define that by what I chose to do this morning when I woke up.
16:33 Speaker 01 What was it?
16:34 Steven Bartlett? I went to the gym. I was on the running machine, because I know I'm not gonna be able to today. And then I came here and had this conversation with you.
16:41 Speaker 01 Yeah. But why are you, why are you doing this conversation with me, Steve?
16:45 Steven Bartlett? The Ikigai theory comes to mind when you ask that, which is it's incredibly selfish. I learned a tremendous amount already just from this conversation. And I know that it pays, pays it forward to other people who are gonna, gonna learn from it as well. And that makes it feel worthwhile.
17:00 Speaker 01 So, you said two things, fun and service.
17:02 Steven Bartlett? Yeah.
17:03 Speaker 01 Right? Which is more important to you?
17:06 Speaker 01 Transcendentally, which is more important to you?
17:09 Steven Bartlett? It's the service part.
17:10 Speaker 01 Yeah. Okay, good.
17:11 Steven Bartlett? That gives me all my, that gives me all my worth.
17:14 Speaker 01 The more you focus on that, the better it gets. Now we uncovered that. So now, thinking about that, you put the order of operations into the podcast to say, does it serve? Is that guest gonna serve? Is this question gonna serve? Is this show gonna serve? Is this sponsor gonna serve the people who are watching this podcast? Then, suddenly, meaning starts to go, starts to really sprout out of the soil. Because you, we got to that. If it's like, is it fun? Yeah, good. So, look, my whole, I have a company. And that, that, that rides alongside what I do academically. And everybody that works with me, we have an order of operations. And the order of operations are, these are the four goals, but they have to be in this order.
17:57 Speaker 01 You just told me that the order of operations is serve other people and have fun for your work. That's what you basically said. It's probably more like lift people up and have an adventure. That's probably an intellectual adventure, right? But the order of operations has to be right. If you're having fun more than you're serving other people, you're not gonna find your sense of meaning based on that first question. So you see, you see where we're going with that, right? So, the second question's harder. For what are you willing to die today?
18:26 Steven Bartlett? There's a couple of people in my life that I'd die for. I'd die for my romantic partner. I'd die for my brothers and sisters, any of them.
18:35 Steven Bartlett? Interestingly, I don't know if I'd die for my parents, which is interesting.
18:39 Speaker 01 Would you die for an idea?
18:42 Speaker 01 Would you die for your country?
18:45 Steven Bartlett? I would die, when you say for my country, do you mean to save the country?
18:50 Speaker 01 I don't know. I mean, if you were called to, even if it were ridiculous, even if you thought it were ridiculous, would you die? Because you love your country.
19:01 Steven Bartlett? It depends what you mean by that. What's the cost if I stay alive?
19:05 Speaker 01 No, I know. And it's, everything is context specific to a certain extent. But really what I'm trying to see is what's your, what's your kind of reaction is to this? You know, to see what the, there are good things in there. You are willing to die for your girlfriend.
19:21 Steven Bartlett? Yeah.
19:21 Speaker 01 You are willing to die for your brothers and sisters.
19:23 Steven Bartlett? Yeah.
19:24 Speaker 01 Mom and dad, that's like, is your mom listening to this podcast?
19:28 Steven Bartlett? They do, but I'm just being honest because I think, I think, I don't know why I said that, but I just, I don't.
19:34 Speaker 01 No, for sure. This is good. This is really important, right? This is worth thinking about, right? Now, the worst answer is, I don't know, or nothing. Those are the worst answers. And that doesn't mean it's a problem. On the contrary, it's a huge opportunity, huge entrepreneurial opportunity to realize you don't have answers to these questions because you don't have to go to, you know, get your PhD in philosophy. You don't have to sit at the mouth of the cave with a guru someplace in the Himalayas. You need to look for your answers to these questions. That's it. That's the quest. That's the vision quest. So, and when you see somebody find these things, like a lot of young adults have, they're nowhere near you, where you are in your journey. You're solid, Steve. I mean, this is good stuff, but I meet a lot of people like, why am I alive?
20:18 Speaker 01 Because an egg met a sperm.
20:21 Steven Bartlett? Really?
20:21 Speaker 01 Yeah. And what are you willing to die for? Nothing really, or I don't know. Right? A lot of people, and then they uncover that they don't have a why, is what it comes down to.
20:31 Steven Bartlett? Repeat the questions again.
20:33 Speaker 01 Why are you alive? And for what are you willing to die this very day? There's no wrong answers.
20:41 Steven Bartlett? What you just listened to was a most replayed moment from a previous episode. If you want to listen to that full episode, I've linked it down below. Check the description. Thank you.
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