The key ideas

Build the Life You Want: The Art and Science of Getting Happier

Arthur C. Brooks, Oprah Winfrey, 2023

Many people put happiness off until better times. Harvard professor Arthur C. Brooks and Oprah Winfrey show that there's no need to wait: you can get happier in any circumstances. The book is about managing your own feelings and building a life on family, friendship, work and faith.

Who it is for

For anyone waiting for happiness to arrive once work gets better, the right partner shows up or the problems finally end. And for everyone who wants to know what they can change in themselves right now.

Happiness is not a destination. Happiness is a direction.

Happier at ninety-three

Albina Quevedo is ninety-three. Since a fall two years ago she has barely left her bed in her Barcelona apartment. And one day she tells her son-in-law that she's much happier now than she was in her youth.

Her son-in-law, Arthur Brooks, teaches the science of happiness at Harvard. He admits that by nature he's noticeably less happy than the average person, so he had to learn how to be happy.

Years earlier, Albina's husband had walked out, leaving her with three children and no money, and for several years she cried at the window almost every day. At forty-five she stopped waiting for the world to treat her better and enrolled in college to become a teacher. As she put it, for a long time she felt stuck in a bad job at a terrible company, and then she realized she had been the CEO all along.

That turn holds the book's main idea: your circumstances don't decide for you what you feel. The authors break Albina's path into three steps: understand what happiness is, learn to manage your emotions, and build your life on four pillars.

You can't arrive at happiness, but you can get happier

Lots of people say, “I want to be happy, but...” and then name the reason: the wrong job, no friends. Brooks sees two mistakes here. People believe complete happiness can be reached, and they believe they can't move toward it until their problems are solved.

Searching for complete happiness, the author argues, is like searching for El Dorado, the legendary city of gold that no one ever found. Happiness is not a destination but a direction: you can't get it for good, but you can get happier wherever you are in life.

So what is it made of? Brooks compares happiness to a meal. Pleasant feelings are only the smell of dinner, while the meal itself has three parts. The first is enjoyment: pleasure shared with the people you love and experienced mindfully. The second is satisfaction, the reward for a goal reached through hard work. It fades quickly, and chasing it has a name: the hedonic treadmill. The third and most important part is purpose.

Each of the three parts contains a little unhappiness. Enjoyment takes effort, satisfaction takes sacrifice, and purpose is often born from suffering. That's why unhappiness isn't the enemy of happiness: good and bad feelings can live in a person at the same time.

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About the author

Arthur C. Brooks teaches the science of happiness at Harvard and writes a column about happiness for The Atlantic. Oprah Winfrey hosted one of the best-known talk shows in television history for twenty-five years.

All books by this author: Arthur C. Brooks, Oprah Winfrey

Terms from the book

  • Prefrontal cortex
  • Frankl
  • Limbic system
  • Jefferson
  • Adenosine
  • Hofmann
  • Alex
  • Uber
  • Quevedo: Albina Quevedo, Arthur Brooks's mother-in-law, a teacher from Barcelona. Her story opens the book.
  • El Dorado: The legendary South American city of gold that people searched for over centuries and never found. For Brooks it stands for happiness pursued as a final destination.
  • Hedonic treadmill: A psychologists' term: people quickly get used to good things and have to keep chasing something new to feel satisfied again.
  • Metacognition: Literally “thinking about thinking”. In the book it means the skill of noticing your feelings, separating them from your actions and not letting them run you.
  • Caffeine: A substance found in coffee and tea. It takes the place of adenosine in the brain and so removes the feeling of tiredness. For Brooks it's an image of one emotion replacing another.
  • Stockdale: James Stockdale, a US Navy vice admiral who spent more than seven years as a prisoner of war in North Vietnam.
  • Optimism: The belief that things will turn out well. Brooks separates it from hope: hope doesn't promise a good outcome, but it trusts the power of your own actions.
  • Waytz: Adam Waytz, an American psychologist at Northwestern University.
  • Medici: Cosimo de' Medici, a fifteenth-century Florentine merchant and banker and the de facto ruler of Florence.
  • Earned success: Brooks's phrase for the feeling that you're getting results through your own effort and getting better at what you do.

All terms

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