Pod Insights The Happiness Lab with Dr. Laurie Santos Why Chasing Success Can Leave You Feeling Stuck (with David Brooks) About this episode 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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Transcript Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:00 Laurie Santos? This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed Human. This episode is brought to you by Choiceology, an original podcast from Charles Schwab, hosted by the amazing Katie Milkman, behavioral scientist and author of the bestselling book, How to Change. Choiceology is a show about the psychology and economics behind our decisions. You can hear true stories from Nobel laureates, authors, historians, athletes, and more about why we do the things we do and how to make better choices to help avoid costly mistakes. Listen to Choiceology at schwab.com/podcast or wherever you listen to your shows.
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1:11 Laurie Santos? Pushkin.
1:19 Laurie Santos? 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 these are super common at the start of the new year. But what we don't tend to hear about are 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 the questions that we'll be tackling with today's guest.
1:56 Speaker 02 My name's David Brooks. I'm a columnist at The New York Times and a former fellow at the Jackson Institute at Yale University.
2:03 Laurie Santos? David is also the author of several 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.
2:17 Speaker 02 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.
2:29 Laurie Santos? 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 differences between these two sets of virtues?
2:50 Speaker 02 Yeah, dualisms turn out to be really powerful. If you put one in a book, people remember it forever. So the distinction I made was between the resume virtues, which are the things that make you good at 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, 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 a 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 80%, the students said they care more about homework than being kind. So parents pressure their students into being good little
3:35 Speaker 02 resume achievatrons, and they have tremendous fear of failure as a result of that.
3:40 Laurie Santos? 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 a good person in the same way.
4:03 Speaker 02 My view is anytime you find yourself quantifying a human being, you should stop and watch out, watch what you're doing, because some things are quantifiable. And if I want to know how strong you are, I 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 in the face of failure, your ability to be kind, your ability to cast a just and loving attention on other human beings. One study I saw found when people are fired, in 89% 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 because they lack technical skills.
4:46 Speaker 02 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, is a symptom that our society has really lost track of what matters in a human being.
5:12 Laurie Santos? 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, although 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 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?
5:43 Speaker 02 In all jobs, there's a materialistic drag, a corrosion. For doctors who I've spoken to, the drag is the allure of money and the need to like, make everything efficient and have a patient every 16 minutes or less. And in journalism, the drag is, I want to tell the truth as I see it, but I also want to generate clicks. 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.
6:19 Laurie Santos? It's a challenge you solve with tiny changes of actions.
6:22 Speaker 02 Well, I mean, a character is forged the way we learn crafts, by small habits. And, you know, I do dumb things. I always have some spiritual book going. I'm 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. 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 II. 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. It's not, I don't have that. But you can't help having some of that rub off on you.
7:08 Speaker 02 And you think, you know, I'm searching for meaning in my life. Who are the exemplars that I care about right now? And 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 of a guy named Samuel Johnson, an essayist who really wrote himself into being a beautiful human being. And I see Sam Johnson's face over there, think, eh, maybe I won't cheat on 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.
7:38 Laurie Santos? 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.
7:54 Speaker 02 Yeah, I read a book recently called What I Talk About When I Talk About Running. It's by a Japanese novelist, Murakami. 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. He wasn't hauling around kegs 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. They'll let him pass it, just like, I was on the 23rd mile, I hated running. I finished the marathon, all I wanted to do was stop running and never run again.
8:39 Speaker 02 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. And I can relate, not because I can run six miles a day. But I'm sitting here in my office. And every day, seven days a week, I come into this office. And I write my 1,200 words. And I've been doing it for 40 years. And I do not like writing. It's not easy. It hasn't gotten any easier with experience.
9:23 Speaker 02 Even just organizing the structure of a piece or a book is 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 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 University of Chicago where I was an undergrad named Leon Cass, who's still with us. And he said, what defines people is not their opinions. It's not their success.
10:09 Speaker 02 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 know what answer I get back? A blank look. They have no idea. People have asked themselves this question. But understanding your own desires is really important. I teach a class now at Chicago for people who are retiring. And one of the things that I've noticed they do, so they're 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? And if they can go back and find that little kid they used to be, and what horizon that kid
10:54 Speaker 02 was chasing toward, then they can touch something pretty deep in themselves and they can retap into a desire that has lain dormant in their lives. Marikami was seized by the desire to write and the desire to run. And it's a great skill, the capacity to be seized. Some 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. We prescribe so much of what they must do.
11:37 Speaker 02 You should go through life as if you are just wandering through a bookstore, just willing to be captured by whatever interests you. You never know what can lead to what.
11:47 Laurie Santos? 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 not go in with a plan that you know is your plan and you're stuck to it. You actually have 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?
12:24 Speaker 02 Yeah, go to work at the New York Times. It'll generate humility.
12:28 Laurie Santos? Read the comments section.
12:29 Speaker 02 I wanted to write a book that was gonna have the title humility in small letters and then by David Brooks in really big letters. My humility book. There's a nice distinction to be made between willfulness and willingness. And willfulness 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. 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. A C.S. Lewis defined humility as not thinking lowly of yourself, but really not thinking of yourself. I define it a little differently.
13:14 Speaker 02 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 have. And I have a lot of friends who think courage is the most important virtue. But I think humility is the most important virtue.
13:43 Laurie Santos? 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 unstuck. The Happiness Lab will be back in a moment. You know those pieces in your closet that you find yourself reaching for over and over again? The sweater that somehow works with everything? The jeans you know will always fit just right? Those are the pieces that earn a permanent place in your wardrobe. And that's exactly what Quince does so well.
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17:31 Laurie Santos? Author and cultural commentator David Brooks has argued that we can get unstuck in 2026, 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, especially at the local level.
17:47 Speaker 02 First, look around the neighborhood and what's wrong. Every neighborhood has its own unique problems. 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 Project. And we help people who live in the neighborhoods where they work, 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. And you know a guy who helps kids on the west side of Chicago stay at a gang's? They just want to serve the community. We ran into a lady in Florida,
18:30 Speaker 02 and she was helping kids cross the street after elementary school. And we said, "Are you getting paid to do this?" And she said, "No, but it would be safer for the kids if an adult can help them walk across the street." And to her, this wasn't volunteering. This is what neighbors do. And I think she was tremendously fulfilled.
18:49 Laurie Santos? 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?
18:56 Speaker 02 When we started Weave, we had a theory that if you're going to do social change, creating a new identity really matters. For example, in 1955, nobody called themselves a feminist. By 1975, millions and millions of people called themselves a feminist. And that identity had great power in shaping how they saw the world. And so we created this term Weaver because we wanted a term, it 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.
19:39 Speaker 02 A more formal organization you can join, say, for example, I'm a big admirer of an organization in Baltimore called Thread. 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 help 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 slammed the door in their face. And the rule of Thread is there's no leaving. It's like family, there's no leaving.
20:22 Speaker 02 So short of a court order, you're going to show up at the kid's door of again and again. And the founder, there's a 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 discreet actions that take place in communities every day. And 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.
21:03 Laurie Santos? 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.
21:20 Speaker 02 When I was working on Weave, I was 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 discreet, second-by-second encounters.
21:38 Speaker 02 But a lot of young people and a lot of old people 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 and offer forgiveness? Nobody ever taught me the skill of how to end a conversation gracefully. So I went to my high school reunion, my fifth one, so I was younger. And my only move to get out of a conversation in a cocktail-like setting was to say, I'm gonna go to the bar and get another drink. So 20 minutes into the reunion, I'm so drunk, I have to leave the reunion. I've had like six drinks in 20 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 learning carpentry is a skill.
22:23 Laurie Santos? 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 heard.
22:30 Speaker 02 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 is up, the number of people who rate themselves the lowest happiness category is 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 a lot of sadness out there. And when there's sadness, there's meanness. Because if you feel yourself unseen and invisible, you feel that as an injustice, which it is, and as a threat. And so, you're prone to lashing out. And when you're in a level of distrust, then it's very hard to reach out. If you look at social trust statistics, it used to be 60% of Americans said that they can trust their neighbors.
23:15 Speaker 02 Now it's down to 30%, and among millennials, it's 19%. So if you're thinking that this person is fundamentally untrustworthy, 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 gonna be harder, and there's gonna be more distance. There's gonna be suspicion. And that makes it extremely hard to practice the skill of seeing others.
23:40 Laurie Santos? 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?
23:51 Speaker 02 My wife and I have been married for nine years. And she takes a look at me from 20 years ago on videos. She says, "Well, I wouldn't have married 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 academic household. And it was easy to get by on brain power and ignore your heart. And so I think I was feeling things, but I wasn't. There was no highway between my heart and my mouth. And even my conscious mind, there's an episode that happened to me maybe 15 years ago that symbolized for me the old way of being, which is I'm a big baseball fan.
24:33 Speaker 02 I've been to a thousand ballgames. 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, high fiving everybody around me, hugging people, getting on the Jumbotron. 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 day and I think, so little joy. And there was just a level of inhibition. And I went through a period in 2013 when I was in a valley. I, my marriage was coming apart, my kids were leaving school, I was lonely. I did what any middle aged male idiot would do, which was I tried to work my way through
25:18 Speaker 02 the problem. Workaholism is a very ineffective social therapy for a spiritual and emotional crisis.
25:25 Laurie Santos? But it looks very good from the outside. You get a lot of resume virtue digs.
25:28 Speaker 02 It looks 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 Friedrich Bickner, 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. When you're broken open, you make yourself, even in the midst 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 good old University of Chicago fashion. I wrote a book about emotion.
26:03 Speaker 02 But then I tried to practice it. And a couple of years ago, I was at a conference in Nantucket. I 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 saying to 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 70, you can change at 80, you can change at 90. It's never too late to change a bit who you are.
26:44 Laurie Santos? 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?
27:03 Speaker 02 Yeah, Simone Weil, a 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 literally, but someone who learned a lot from her, is Iris Murdoch, the philosopher and novelist. And Murdoch said, you know, we usually look at each other through self-centered eyes. Is this person going to be good for me or bad for me? Is he 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
27:43 Speaker 02 a 93 year old lady named LaRue Dorsey. And 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 with them. And I was intimidated by this formidable lady. And into the diner walks a mutual friend of ours, a pastor named Jimmy Dural, who pastors to the homeless in Waco. And he comes up to us, he knows us both. And he grabs Mrs. Dorsey by the shoulders. And he says, Mrs. Dorsey, you're the best. I love you. And that stern disciplinarian lady I had been talking to 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.
28:28 Speaker 02 One of my favorite stories, which I 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 him? And she said, 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 just listening. Listening is just tremendously powerful.
28:54 Laurie Santos? 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.
29:01 Speaker 02 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's so crowded. Oh, man, I want to just 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.
29:35 Laurie Santos? 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.
29:55 Laurie Santos? You know those pieces in your closet that you find yourself reaching for over and over again? The sweater that somehow works with everything? The jeans you know will always fit just right? Those are the pieces that earn a permanent place in your wardrobe. And that's exactly what Quince does so well. I recently pulled my fall clothes out of storage and I was so excited to see my black Mongolian cashmere full zip hoodie that I got from Quince. It's soft and warm and perfect for cozy nights. I love it so much that I now have a gray one in my quince.com cart right now. And when I buy that new gray hoodie, I know I'll feel good about my choice because everything at Quince is priced 50 to 80% less than similar brands. And as the weather gets colder, Quince has everything you need
30:37 Laurie Santos? to round out your wardrobe, from warm, reasonably sourced down jackets and cozy cashmere scarves and gloves to beautiful 14 karat gold jewelry. Find the fall pieces you'll reach for most at Quince. Download the Quince app for app exclusive offers or go to quince.com. Get free shipping on your order and 365 day returns, now available in Canada and the UK too. And when Quince asks where you heard about them, let them know it was the Happiness Lab. It's the best way to support the show.
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32:07 Laurie Santos? 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.
32:23 Speaker 02 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 develop 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 Monte with a card shark, 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, I had a student named Gillian, whose dad had died of pancreatic cancer. After she got out of college, I had her grad student.
33:07 Speaker 02 And her dad and 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 invited 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 in the reception for the father-daughter dance. And Gillian said, "Just too soon." So she went to the ladies' room to have a cry. And when she got out of the ladies' 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.
33:52 Speaker 02 They just gave her a hug and went back to their tables. And she said, "It was exactly 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 par excellence. That's knowing just what she needs, but not too much.
34:12 Laurie Santos? It seems like there's so many things that 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 attention, which we've talked about, we're not there. But the other 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 gonna give a hit to our own individual success, our individual ability. And 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?
34:55 Speaker 02 Yeah, I think partly we've been schooled in the idea that the more selfish we are, the more we'll 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, the high number of people say selfish. There's a guy at, you know, Chicago, a friend of mine named Nick Epley, 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 of service to other people. And they says, what about your classmates? What drive them to go into business? And everyone says, money.
35:38 Laurie Santos? Money.
35:40 Speaker 02 And so I think we ascribe darker motivations to others. And when you do that, you develop a dark world mentality.
35:51 Speaker 02 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 dog eat dog. And it's if you don't screw them first, they're gonna screw you. And a lot of people, not only Donald Trump, a lot of people have a dark worldview. 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 if you act in ways that are trusting, preemptive vulnerability, you will be betrayed sometimes and they will hurt you. But it's still better.
36:34 Speaker 02 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, it was in some online magazine. 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 young woman I was interviewing pulled me aside and said, can 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 husband, my partner is equitable.
37:19 Speaker 02 But please don't put that in public because they're afraid that if they say that it'll seem insensitive. People are going through a hard time. And when you're in a culture where you can't admit 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 NBRAM, what words we use to describe the world. The usage of negative words like anger, horror, pain is surging.
37:46 Speaker 02 And the usage of positive words, joy, success, whatever, 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 meant 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.
38:12 Laurie Santos? 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, right? 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.
38:33 Speaker 02 Let me tell one other Nick Epley story. He and I were on stage at Chicago and he was interviewing me about something. After 45 minutes of 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 10 minutes, you're going to talk about the high point of your life, the low point of your life, and the turning point of your life." And the audience groaned. And he said, "How many of you don't want to do this?" And 80% of the hands went up. And Nick said, "Go." And they all went up and they started sharing their high points, their low points, their turning points. And 10 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, 20 minutes went by and finally, they stopped talking to each other and they
39:17 Speaker 02 listened to us again. And Nick said, "How many of you enjoyed that?" And 80% 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 view, which is not accurate. And now because of Nick, when I'm on a plane sometimes and I'm bored 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 boring.
40:00 Laurie Santos? And 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 a 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 in fact, it feels great.
40:22 Speaker 02 My job as a journalist is to ask people questions, and often about their lives and often in 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 at Northwestern. He studies how people tell their life stories. And he interviews people over four hours. And then he wants to slide them a little check to compensate them for their time. And a lot of the 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 clue as you go through life that the quality of your conversations is really the quality of your interaction.
41:07 Laurie Santos? And 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 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 tips to make this really more about character and not about achievement and optimization?
41:35 Speaker 02 Yeah, I'm all about mixed motives. If you're doing something for a selfish reason 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.
41:54 Speaker 02 And ambition is to try to build up outward success. And aspiration is just try to be a better person.
42:01 Laurie Santos? 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 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 guided 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 the difference.
42:45 Laurie Santos? 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 2026.
42:59 Speaker 04 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.
43:09 Laurie Santos? That's coming up next week on the Happiness Lab with me, Dr. Laurie Santos.
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44:46 Laurie Santos? They're hand-blown one at a time with the kind of character you only get from a human hand. Something made that slowly has a way of reminding you to savor the moments that really matter. Find yours at simonpearce.com. That's S-I-M-O-N-P-E-A-R-C-E dot com. Simon Pierce, made by hand, one at a time. This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed human.
Previous How to Bounce Back from Life’s Curveballs (with Dr. Maya Shankar) Next The Surprising Science of Creativity (with Dr. George Newman) Page updated October 31, 2026 · transcript and summary are machine-generated
