Book notes: Build the Life You Want by Arthur C. Brooks & Oprah Winfrey

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Build the Life You Want: The Art and Science of Getting Happier by Arthur C. Brooks & Oprah Winfrey

Synopsis:

“In Build the Life You Want, Arthur C. Brooks and Oprah Winfrey invite you to begin a journey toward greater happiness no matter how challenging your circumstances. Drawing on cutting-edge science and their years of helping people translate ideas into action, they show you how to improve your life right now instead of waiting for the outside world to change.

With insight, compassion, and hope, Brooks and Winfrey reveal how the tools of emotional self-management can change your life―immediately. They recommend practical, research-based practices to build the four pillars of happiness: family, friendship, work, and faith. And along the way, they share hard-earned wisdom from their own lives and careers as well as the witness of regular people whose lives are joyful despite setbacks and hardship.

Equipped with the tools of emotional self-management and ready to build your four pillars, you can take control of your present and future rather than hoping and waiting for your circumstances to improve. Build the Life You Want is your blueprint for a better life.” -Audible

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Opening thoughts:

I heard of Arthur Brooks from the Tim Ferriss Show podcast while he was promoting this book. I heard that Oprah also co-authored this book, and I love her other book The Path Made Clear and loved it. So this was an easy choice to pick up as one of the first reads of the year.

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Key notes:

Introduction: Albina’s Secret

• Her secret to learned happiness was shifting her focus from the outside world to something she could control: herself
• She set about making more conscious choices about how to react to negative emotions
  • Her efforts were to transform her emotions into more productive and positive ones like hope, gratitude, compassion, and humor
  • Also focusing on the world around her instead of her own problems 

Chapter 1: Happiness Is Not the Goal, and Unhappiness Is Not the Enemy

Book Reference: The Last Lecture by Randy Pausch

• Happiness is not a destination, it’s a direction
  • No positive circumstance can give us happiness, and no negative circumstance can make getting happier impossible either 
• You can get happier even if you have problems, and sometimes maybe because you have problems
• The biggest reason people don’t get happier is because they don’t know what they’re trying to increase, and they can’t get out of their unhappiness is because they can’t define what it is
• Happiness can be defined as a combination of 3 components: enjoyment, satisfaction, and purpose
  • Enjoyment takes an urge for pleasure and adds 2 important things: communion and consciousness 
  • Satisfaction is the thrill from accomplishing a goal that you worked for. It’s how you feel when you do something difficult that meets your life’s purpose as you see it
  • Satisfaction is temporary
  • Purpose is the most important component. Having a sense of meaning and purpose gives us a sense of hope and inner peace
  • We must look for the why of life to make pain an opportunity for growth

Book reference: Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl

• All 3 have elements of unhappiness in them
  • Getting happier requires that we accept unhappiness in our lives as well
  • And it’s not an obstacle to our happiness
• These two emotions can coexist, and happiness is not the absence of unhappiness
  • We all have our own natural mix of happiness and unhappiness, depending on our circumstances and character
• Happiness quadrants: mad scientist vs judge vs cheerleader vs poet
  • Be thankful for your unhappiness
  • The human brain saves space specifically to process negative emotions 
• True freedom requires that we put regret in its proper place in our lives and learn from it without letting it weigh us down
• Negative emotions can help us assess threats. Too much good feeling can lead us to disregard these threats
• Enjoy the honey but appreciate the bees responsible for it 

Section: Managing Your Emotions

Section: A Note From Oprah

• Part of a good feeling is a deep, powerful sense of having everything you need right there
  • If you want to make yourself happier, you already have everything you need to do so within you at any moment, today
• Your emotions are signals to your conscious brain that something is going on that requires your attention and action.
  • Your emotions are only signals, and you get to decide how you’ll respond to them
• Gratitude is a powerful and important emotion she highly recommends for anyone going through any trial in life

Chapter 2: The Power of Metacognition

• You can’t choose your feelings, but you can choose your reactions to them
• The process of managing your emotional “weather” is called metacognition
  • It technically means thinking about thinking, which is the act of experiencing your emotions consciously, separating them from your behavior and refusing to be controlled by them
  • Metacognition begins with understanding what emotions are and how they work. Then you can learn basic strategies for reframing emotions and with some practice be able to stop letting your feelings direct your feelings
• Negative emotions protect us from threats, positive emotions reward us for things we need
• Primary negative emotions: sadness, anger, disgust, and fear
• When you can’t change the world, change how you experience it instead
• You can’t alter history. You can however change your perception of it
  • You can rewrite the story of your memories using metacognition making the baggage of your past a little lighter as you travel through the present and future
• Modern neuroscience shows that memory is more about reconstruction than retrieval
• When you have strong emotions, try to observe them as a 3rd party
• Journal your emotions
  • It’ll make you feel instantly better and is one of the best ways to achieve metacognition
  • This creates emotional knowledge and regulation

Chapter 3: Choose a Better Emotion 

• Emotional substitution is a skill that requires practice 
• Gratitude is a life practice that you can soar to bring into your focus
  • Contemplating your death can also improve gratitude
• Find a reason to laugh
  • Humor is excellent emotional caffeine
  • Reject grimness
• For happiness, it’s better to consume humor than to supply it
• Stay positive
  • The type of humor you consume and share matters
  • Humor when it doesn’t belittle others or when it makes you laugh at your circumstances, is associated with self-esteem, optimism, and life satisfaction with decreases in depression, anxiety, and stress.
• Choose hope
  • One of the worse emotional maladies is pessimism
  • Pessimists don’t just detect threats, they invent them 
• Optimism and hope aren’t the same things
  • Hope focuses more directly on the personal attainment of specific goals, whereas optimism focuses more broadly on the expected quality of future outcomes in general
  • Optimism is the belief that things will turn out alright
  • Hope makes no such assumption, but is a conviction that one can act to make things better in some way
  • Hope is an active choice
• Turn empathy into compassion
• As virtues go, empathy is overrated
  • When used excessively and on its own, it can bring harm to both parties
  • Empathy is mentally putting yourself in a suffering persons shoes to feel their pain.
  • Empathy can reduce the pain of the suffering person slightly but at a cost to the empathizing person
• Compassion can be defined as recognizing suffering, understanding it, and feeling empathy for the sufferer, but also tolerating the uncomfortable feelings they and the suffering person are experiencing and crucially acting to alleviate the suffering
• To become a more compassionate, and therefore happier person, start by working on your toughness
  • Tough is being able to feel the pain without being impaired to act
• Compassion can feel like tough love, giving honest counsel that’s difficult to hear

Chapter 4: Focus Less on Yourself

• Focusing more on others makes you happier
  • Of course this isn’t to suggest you stop taking care of yourself or your own needs
  • You need to observe, but also be observed to have a sense of self
  • Most of us care more about how we look to others (being observed) rather than observing and being outward-focused, which leads to unhappiness
• Self-absorption is linked to anxiety and depression
  • Make more observation statements rather than judgment or value statements
• Awe diminishes the sense of self
  • Spend more time enjoying things that amaze you
    • Use a free day to wander
• Caring about and paying attention to others is very different from worrying about what others think about you
  • Caring about other people’s approval makes you their prisoner. But you make this prison
• Truth: no one cares
  • Others have many fewer opinions about you than you might imagine
• Don’t water the envy weed
  • Envy is a happiness killer and the only one of the seven deadly sins that is no fun at all
• Steps to “not watering” envy:
  1. Focus on the ordinary parts of people’s lives
     • Think of the ups and downs that others surely experience in their own lives
  2. Turn off the envy machine
     • Social media is a machine that fuels envy and comparison
  3. Reveal your un-enviable self
     • Live outward and stop trying to be envied yourself. When people are honest about their successes and failures, it reduces envy of others
     • But failures have to be authentic, no humble bragging

Section: Building What Matters

• 4 idols that waste our lives:
  • money
  • power
  • pleasure
  • prestige
• These idols make getting happier harder
• The 4 idols are distractions to numb us to emotional circumstances we don’t like and feel like we can’t control
• Unhappy people make great consumers, which is why there are endless commercial options to indulge those distractions
• 4 big happiness pillars:
  • family
  • friendship
  • work
  • faith

Section: A Note from Oprah

• Different/complimentary personalities that mesh together well are what makes for the strongest and longest-lasting relationships
• The inner-outer paradox: the surest way to improve your inner world is to focus on the outer world because happiness inside comes from looking outside
  • Our lives are spent in connection to other people, to our work, to nature, and to the divine
  • The more we do to improve those connections, the better off we are
• Whom and what do you surround yourself with?
  • What do you do in the face of conflict?
  • How can you show up more intentionally and serve more meaningfully?
• The happiness paradox: detached attachment
  • Live your life attached to the work you do, the things you create, the people who matter to you, but not in a way that involves expectations

Chapter 5: Build Your Imperfect Family

• Families can bring both the highest highs and the lowest lows
• Challenges are actually opportunities to learn and grow in this unique and powerful area of love, as long as we use the tools we developed earlier

Challenge 1: Conflict

• Conflict is the cost of abundant love
• The objective is not to make it go away, it is to manage it meta-cognitively, replace it when possible with positive emotions, and blunt it as necessary
• Family conflict is generally a misalignment between how family members view their relationships and the roles they each play
  • In other words, mismatched expectations
• The most extreme form of unmet expectations is a values breach in which one family member rejects something about the other’s core beliefs
• Acknowledging family conflict is good because it improves communication and gives you opportunities to solve problems
  • Conversely, denying them is unhelpful because these conflicts generally don’t die of old age, but rather stay strained
• 3 ways to lessen family conflict:
  1. Don’t try to read minds
  2. Live your life, but don’t ask them to change their values
  3. Don’t treat your family like emotional atms
     • Treat your family like friends in which you’re generously giving and gratefully accepting emotional support

Challenge 2: Insufficient Complementarity

• The more we achieve compatibility, the harder love gets to find and maintain
• Seek out differences in personality and tastes when dating to diversify your love life
• Focus on what really matters, not the meaningless differences

Challenge 3: The Negativity Virus

• We can help our loved ones through their problems and accept their emotions without taking on their unhappiness
• Being around happier friends and family can also make you happier too
• Sometimes people unload their unhappiness on others because they trust them
• You can “catch” others emotions physiologically at least in part because of mirror neurons- emotional contagion

• 4 lessons to help manage emotional contagion in your household:
  1. Put on your own oxygen mask first, and work on your own happiness and happiness before trying to help others
  2. Don’t take negativity personally
  3. Break the negative culture with surprise
     • It is more effective to get the negative person engaged in an activity that they like, instead of trying to reframe the situation
  4. Prevent the spread
     • Remember that if you’re the unhappy one, your loved ones might want to help and it might make them happy too to help you. Actively communicate with others to keep your relationships healthy

Challenge 4: Forgiveness

• Conditional forgiveness and pseudo-forgiveness don’t actually help or resolve anything even if they look attractive
• Choosing not to forgive only hurts yourself
  • Studies show that forgiveness benefits the forgiver mentally and physically
• Widen your conflict resolution repertoire especially when what you’ve tried before isn’t working
• Don’t dismiss minimization too quickly
  • In many cases, abandoning a conflict instead of trying to resolve it is the perfect solution

Challenge 5: Dishonesty

• Maybe the true act of love is to stop avoiding problems, look outward, and say what you see
  • Be courageous and work toward a family that can take it

Book reference: Radical Honesty

• The research favors families with a culture of honesty
  • This leads to more happiness and intimacy as people don’t have to hide and can bring their full selves
• When a lie is discovered, it can harm trust
• A commitment to honesty starts with being honest with yourself, and an effort to seek out and accept complete honesty from others, especially loved ones
  • Ask people for the truth as they see it, and make a commitment not to be offended when they give it
  • And note that their opinions are not facts, so use your judgment on letting the truth affect your actions
• Offer truth to heal, never to harm
• Never give up

Chapter 6: Friendship That Is Deeply Real

Challenge 1: Your Personality

• There’s no formula that fits all. But generally, you need at least one close friend besides your partner, and there’s perhaps an upper limit of 10 friendships you can realistically spend enough time on to regard them as close
  • The exact number depends on you and your personality
• Reference: Big 5 theory aka OCEAN
• One source of happiness for almost everyone is hope about the future, a sense of life purpose, and self-esteem
• Introverts can learn to open up to other people about their hopes and dreams, and extroverts can schedule one-on-one time with friends to deepen their relationships
  • This is how each type can learn from their opposites

Challenge 2: Excessive Usefulness

• Useful or expedient friendships, or “deal friendships”
  • These are the most common type of friends
  • These friendships are not an end in themselves but instrumental in a goal. They are pleasant but they don’t bring lasting joy or comfort
• Aristotle argued that friendships can be classified across a ladder
  • At the bottom are the friends of utility, middle are the friends of pleasure (when you like or admire someone based on something like intelligence or humor), top are friendships of virtue or “perfect friendship”
    • These friendships are an end in themselves, and not instrumental to anything else
    • They are complete and pursued for their own sake
• Go back to your list of 10 friends and see if you can label them with their primary function in the ladder
• Note which of the “real” friends know you really well and would notice when you’re slightly off
  • How many are you comfortable discussing personal details with? 
• Try meeting and making friends with people who don’t have inherent or initially obvious usefulness 
• One of the great paradoxes of love is our need for people whom we do not need at all
  • The best real friends are ones you can say “I don’t need you, I just love you”
  • Perfect friendships can be hard to maintain. Deal friendships can show up often
• Make a concrete plan for staying in touch with your real friends in order to maintain them

Challenge 3: Attachment to Opinion

• Buddhism teaches that attachment is the root of human suffering
  • Opinions of others can be the most harmful attachments
• Epistemic humility is the recognition that someone else’s viewpoint may be interesting, useful, or at least doesn’t mean you can’t love the person

Challenge 4: Magical Thinking

• Passionate love is about you, it’s egocentric. It doesn’t bring you happiness and it doesn’t last 
• The early flush of romantic love must turn into fomenting that is stable and lasting, which is one of the greatest secrets to getting happier
• The key to successful romance isn’t keeping passion front and center, it’s letting it evolve
• Companionate love is a special category of friendship
• Idealistic but unrealistic beliefs about romance can do a lot of damage to your relationships (love at first sight, soulmates, etc)

5 ways to develop deep companionate love:

1. Lighten up, best friends bring out the lighter side of each other
2. Make the companionate love about the two of you and less about each individual
   • You shouldn’t be afraid of arguing, but you have to do it right
     • Use “we” words when talking with each other, and also as your default pronouns when talking with others
3. Put your money on your team, pool your financial resources, and manage together 
4. Treat your arguments like exercise
5. Make your companionate love exclusive

• Friendship should not be exclusive, as the happiest people have at least one other close friend outside of their partner

Challenge 5: The Virtual World

• Technology that crowds out our real-life interaction with others will lower our well-being and thus must be managed with great care
• We should use digital tools in ways that enhance our in-person relationships with family and friends
• Choose interaction over vegetation
• Friendship requires attention and work
  • It must be built on purpose
• Studies show that job satisfaction and life satisfaction are positively related and causal
  • To build a career that makes you happier means understanding yourself
  • It means being the boss of your own life even if you aren’t technically the boss at work

Challenge 1: Career Goals

• You need extrinsic rewards to get by, but intrinsic rewards to get happier
• Some studies show that satisfaction can drop when compensation is added to an activity 
• Earned success gives you a sense of accomplishment and personal efficacy, the idea that you are effective in your job. Which pushes up commitment and a good measure of job satisfaction

Challenge 2: Career Path

• Different career models: linear, steady state, transitory, spiral (dramatic career shifts every decade or so, but uses skills from one career in another, while getting a variety of experiences for fulfillment)

Challenge 3: Addition

Challenge 4: Identity

• Don’t self-objectify with your profession
  • Put some space between your job and your life
• Seek intrinsic rewards to get the greatest satisfaction: earned success and service to others

Chapter 8: Find Your Amazing Grace

• The science shows that transcendental beliefs and experiences aid dramatically in our efforts to get happier
  • Focusing less on ourselves and getting a zoomed-out perspective alleviates worries and makes us happier
• She believes life is always speaking to us, trying to urge us to be the best version of ourselves
  • For her, having a spiritual practice has provided an accelerated route to building the life she wants

Challenge 1: Your Monkey Mind

• 3 challenges to spirituality: difficulty focusing, finding our path, and holding the right motives
• The quintessential humanness of the mind is the ability to rerun past events and pre run future scenarios
• Mindfulness is very beneficial, but is not natural and really hard
  • Mind wandering to avoid emotions makes things worse, not better

Challenge 2: Getting Started

Challenge 3: The Right Focus

• Your goal shouldn’t be getting happier, but to seek truth and the good of others 
• Knowledge is never really complete until it’s shared
• Happiness multiplies when we share it 
• A teacher is not one who knows everything, just simply one who shares what they’ve learned

Conclusion: Now, Become the Teacher 

• If you can explain something coherently, you’ll absorb the information and remember it
• The best happiness teachers are the ones who have to work to gain the knowledge they offer
  • Don’t hide your own struggles, use them to help others understand that they’re not alone, and that getting happier is possible
• Your pain gives you credibility, your progress makes you an inspiration
  • And sharing with others increases that progress making it the perfect win-win
• Fluid intelligence, such as skills that involve analysis and innovation, makes you good at what you do as a young adult, and declines in later years
• Crystalized intelligence is an increasing knack for combining complex ideas, understanding what they mean, recognizing patterns, and teaching others
  • This rises throughout middle age and can stay high well into old age
• Research shows that people should hold different roles throughout their lives that complement each type of smarts
  • But they should always tend toward teaching and mentoring others as the years pass because that is your increasing natural strength
• The most important building block towards getting happier is: love 
• Start the day thinking: I don’t know what this day will bring but will love others and allow myself to be loved

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Closing thoughts:

I absolutely loved this book and even enjoyed this recap as I was putting together these book notes. I feel like this is one of those practical books that applies to everyone, and has a lot of solid insights and concrete action steps to implement the ideas within the book.

Overall, this is one of those books that will change the way you think, and is worth a reread (or at least a review of this book summary) at least once a year.

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One Takeaway / Putting into practice:

One of the most insightful takeaways I got from this book that I thought was very counterintuitive was this:

• One of the great paradoxes of love is our need for people whom we do not need at all. The best real friends are ones you can say “I don’t need you, I just love you”

I think this really makes me think of how I see my friendships. I’ve been trying to get to this point of not needing my friends, and being self sufficient, so that I won’t have to put expectations on them and burden our relationship. It’s so freeing to know that I have friendships where we don’t want or need anything from each other, and can just love and accept each other as we are.

And of course this isn’t to say we shouldn’t rely on our friends when we need help, or to open up and be vulnerable, which makes us grow closer. But I do like the idea it proposes, especially categorizing our relationships in terms of either utility, pleasure, or virtue.

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Nutshell:

Arthur Brooks and Oprah Winfrey share the secrets of building our four pillars of happiness through tools of emotional self-management in order to improve our own lives.

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Similar books:

• The Last Lecture by Randy Pausch
• Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl
• Solve for Happy by Mo Gawdat
• 10% Happier by Dan Harris
• The Purpose Driven Life by Rick Warren
• The Path Made Clear by Oprah Winfrey

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Rating:

4.5/5

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