How to Build a Life, Live

On Sept. 9, Harvard’s John F. Kennedy Jr. Forum opened the fall semester featuring Professor Arthur C. Brooks in conversation with Tarek Masoud. Drawing on his new book, “The Happiness Files: Insights on Work and Life,” Brooks offered a practical blueprint for contentment, urging his audience to take leisure seriously, embrace calibrated risk, and treat burnout as an opportunity to grow. 

Brooks holds the Parker Gilbert Montgomery Professorship of the Practice of Public Leadership at the Harvard Kennedy School and is a Professor of Management Practice at the Harvard Business School. He also writes “How to Build a Life,” a weekly column in The Atlantic that translates scientific research into practical guidance for living a more fulfilling life. 

Reflecting on burnout, Brooks drew on his own unique career path. “It’s bad mood that is extremely persistent, and where it manifests itself, typically in your career, is you start losing interest in what used to be interesting. This is the dead giveaway,” Brooks said at the start of the conversation. However, rather than treating burnout synonymous to failure, he suggested reframing it as a cue to pivot. Specifically, he used the metaphor of a “spiral” to describe the recurring cycle of interests that pulls people into new work. “Burnout is a gift to you because burnout is a big signal it’s time for the spiral to turn again,” Brooks said. 

The transition period between burnout and new beginnings, Brooks noted, can be unsettling. “It puts you into a period in your life that behavioral economists and social psychologists call liminality. Liminality means a time between two things. But that’s the most creatively fertile period in your life.”

As the talk progressed, Brooks shifted from discussing burnout to the process of restoration. He acknowledged that stepping away from one’s daily responsibilities is not always feasible. “If you’re working at the plant down, you don’t get a sabbatical. I got it. I completely got it,” he said. “But what it means to withdraw and restore yourself is highly dependent on what your circumstances are. And everybody can actually do that every day if they know what they’re doing, because one of the great things that we have even across economic classes in this country is an ability to spend some time not working.” 

Even among lower economic classes, Brooks argued, the trouble is not a lack of but rather a misuse of time: “The biggest mistake that people make when they’re starting to burn out or they’re really tired or they’re really grumpy or things aren’t right—they waste their time not at work.” 

Brooks drew upon philosopher Josef Pieper’s concept of how leisure defines our quality of life to support his advice. “If you want to get more burned out faster, the best way for you to do that is to go home and watch Youtube Shorts and look at Instagram Reels in your bed until you finally fall asleep,” Brooks noted. The alternative, he said, is to take free hours seriously: “Whether you’ve got three hours of leisure or three months of leisure or whatever it happens to be, you better use it with real seriousness—spiritual seriousness, emotional seriousness—in service to other people, learning, love, and the divine.” 

Moderator Masoud then steered the conversation toward Brook’s reflections on midlife. 

“In our culture and in our lives as you get older, you focus a lot on what you’re losing and you don’t focus very much on what you’re gaining,” Brooks said. “Your negative emotions get your attention because that’s what keeps you alive. Your positive emotions give you a nice moment, but they better not be predominating over your negative emotions.”

That instinct, Brooks argued, runs counter to the data, pointing to the research of Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky. He told the audience, “loss aversion is so much more powerful than ambition to gain. And that’s how we see our lives. You see in the rearview mirror all the things that could have been, all the things that you regret, all the things you used to be able to do.” Yet he also insisted that the evidence points toward a different story. 

“As an empirical matter, the best is ahead…. So is the worst…but the truth of the matter is your best memories are about to be generated further out, especially if you make the right set of decisions, and that’s the thing actually to focus on.”

He then turned to his second prescription for navigating midlife: choosing subtraction over addition. “The second part is focusing on less, not more,” Brooks said. “Your satisfaction in life as you get older is all the things that you have divided by what you want. You can maximize the numerator, which is very inefficient and won’t last long… Or you can manage your wants. You can have more or you can want less. Your choice.”

For Brooks, this discipline takes the form of what he called a “reverse bucket list.” “All of the happy people later in life stand up to their animal impulses, and they learn to want less,” he explained. 

Before moving on, he added a final caution: “There’s nothing wrong with your desires and aspirations and goals and motivations and ambitions…but you don’t want them to manage you. You want to manage them.”

As the conversation drew to a close, Brook extended his reflections on aging into family life. “All that matters is what they see,” he said. “They will become you whether you like it or not. So, be the person you want your kid to be.” For religious families, he added, visibility is important: “They see you sincerely in worship every single day, and they don’t see you cutting corners. It’s the most physically imposing parent bowing in obeisance to a greater power that has this huge cognitive impact on kids.”

To round off the discussion, Brooks relayed some final advice to the audience: real growth requires deliberately stepping outside of one’s comfort zone. 

“When I give advice to people to take a little bit of risk, that doesn’t mean the same risk for everybody,” he said. “What’s scary to you might not be scary to me… We have to calibrate this to the right level of risk. It’s a little bit beyond what you’re comfortable with. For some of you, that risk might be standing up on this stage and saying something in front of people that you’ve never done before. Actually, for some of you, jumping out of an airplane is easier than doing that.”

But for many young adults, he argued, the scarcest risk today is falling in love. “The likelihood of saying ‘I’m in love’ when you’re in your 20s today is a third lower than it was when I was in my 20s,” he said. “People date less, people get married less, people move in less, people have fewer relationships. For the very first time in American life, more than half of adults are living alone.”

That advice, he stressed, was especially aimed at young students. “One of the pieces of advice I give a lot to my students again and again is date more. Have your heart broken more. You want to be an entrepreneur, start with your life, right? Because your life is the only enterprise that really matters.” 

Across topics, whether burnout, midlife, or parenting, Brooks returned to the idea that struggle itself can be instructive. What people may instinctively resist might be the very material out of which happiness is built. 

“Take risks in search of the fortune that matters, which is love and happiness,” Brooks concluded. “That’s the currency that matters.”

Nashla Turcios ’28 (nashlaturcios@college.harvard.edu) writes News for the Harvard Independent.