Happiness has a PR problem. The right message exists, but it isn’t getting out. Everyone keeps thinking of it as that warm and fuzzy feeling. But that feeling? That’s not happiness. At least according to bestselling author, happiness expert, and freshly minted Vanderbilt professor Arthur Brooks. As he sees it, equating happiness with feeling happy is like saying that the smell of turkey is what constitutes Thanksgiving dinner.
“Feelings of happiness are evidence of happiness,” says Brooks. “They’re not happiness itself.”
It’s a misrepresentation that basically kicked off the latest and most successful portion of Brooks’ already storied career. It was around 2019 that he realized much of the science on happiness only addressed how people felt and did very little to tackle the underlying phenomena. So, to fix this, and to help people actually figure out how to be happy, Brooks set out to establish a clearer definition of what happiness is.
“My number one goal was to define happiness in a scientifically robust way that would lead to actual conclusions about how people could behave differently,” he says. From there, he noticed that, while behavioral science was moving quickly into neuroscience, happiness research wasn’t, so he set out to bring neuroscience into the field. After that, he used the data and research to design concrete habitual changes that anyone could implement—changes that would stick. “I needed a method that would bring the highest level of science to ordinary people and make the conclusions sticky.”
All of this became the foundation for Leadership and Happiness, the elective course that Brooks taught at Harvard Business School, and that he is now bringing to Vanderbilt’s Owen Graduate School of Management. It also became the framework for the Leadership & Happiness Laboratory, a research facility housed within the Center for Public Leadership at the Harvard Kennedy School.
Brooks has authored three New York Times #1 bestselling books on the subject of happiness, including From Strength to Strength: Finding Success, Happiness, and Deep Purpose in the Second Half of Life, Build the Life You Want (co-authored with Oprah Winfrey), and The Meaning of Your Life. Like his coursework, each book fuses elements of ancient wisdom traditions, neuroscience, behavioral science, psychology, and lived experience.
To put it all together, Brooks found that the best approach was to mimic the model for nutrition science. “Food is defined by macronutrients,” he says. “Protein, carbohydrates, and fat. So, I defined happiness in terms of what the literature clearly showed the happiest people had in abundance: enjoyment, satisfaction, and meaning.” And, just as a lack of protein will lead to physical malnourishment, a lack of meaning can lead to emotional malnourishment.
To combat this, Brooks developed a system of practices that he calls happiness protocols. Protocols that he successfully taught for seven years at Harvard Business School, and that he will now deploy in his new Executive Education course, Leadership and Happiness.
As for why he decided to make the switch from Harvard to Vanderbilt, Brooks says it was simple. “I wanted to go to the most entrepreneurial place.” It’s the Wayne Gretzky mentality, he says. You go to where the puck is headed, not where it is. And Vanderbilt is where the puck—or, in this case, higher education—is headed.
“I see the writing on the wall,” he says of Vanderbilt. “Great leadership, motivated students, tons of philanthropy, greater and greater selectivity.” He calls it the university of the future. “It’s super entrepreneurial, it’s getting better, and it’s rising fast. That’s where I want to be.”
He also sees Vanderbilt Business as an opportunity to fulfill his mission of teaching midcareer professionals. “I believe that the modern university should be 18 to 100. So, I’m really interested in education for midcareer people, older people, all different kinds of people.”
It’s a mission that Vanderbilt Business is certainly excited about. “To have one of the world’s leading thinkers on human flourishing at Vanderbilt Business is such an incredible opportunity,” says Thomas Steenburgh, Ralph Owen Dean and Professor of Marketing. “We’re really excited to offer this executive education course to help business leaders find meaning and balance in their life and work, and ultimately, to help them become better leaders.”
Ultimately, Brooks’ vision is to help not only leaders find happiness, but to help create happier organizations. “What you end up with in an organization with happy leaders is a stronger organization,” he says. Studies have shown that stock prices for companies in the top 20 percent for employee happiness have outperformed those in the bottom 20 percent by nearly 6 percentage points. And recent research by J.P. Morgan showed that happier employees are more productive. “Top-down happiness really is the goal at this point,” says Brooks. “It’s a win-win.”
It’s certainly a win for Vanderbilt. On top of already being a world-class university, thanks to Brooks, it can now stake its claim as the new academic hub of happiness.
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Leadership and Happiness is a new, eight-session online Executive Education course that begins on Sept. 28 and runs through Nov. 30, with live virtual classes on Mondays from 10 to 11:30 a.m. CT. The course culminates in an optional in-person retreat in Boca Raton, Florida, from Dec. 7 to 9.