On a Tuesday morning earlier this summer, Arthur Brooks strutted around a lecture hall at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government, preparing to kick off an event called the “Leadership and Happiness Symposium.” The symposium was a relatively staid affair, but Brooks had forgone the drab attire of academia in favor of a more colorful getup: a sleek blue-gray patterned suit jacket, a bright pink pocket square and brown dress shoes with bright blue laces.
“I like color,” Brooks confessed to me later that morning, when I asked him about his outfit. “It makes me happy.”
And Brooks knows a thing or two about happiness — or at least the hundreds of thousands of Americans who turn to him for advice every week believe he does. In the past four years, Brooks has undergone one of the more unusual professional transformations that Washington has witnessed in recent decades. Between 2008 and 2019, Brooks rose to prominence in D.C. as the president of the American Enterprise Institute, the conservative think tank that he helped elevate into a bastion of free-market orthodoxy and center-right policy wonkery during the Obama years. Since leaving AEI in 2019, though, Brooks has embarked on a new career as one of the country’s most prominent “happiness experts” — part social scientist, part self-help coach, part motivational speaker and part spiritual guru.
At Harvard, where Brooks holds dual appointments at the Kennedy School and the Harvard Business School, he teaches a massively popular course on the “science of happiness,” which he recently recorded as an online course to meet ballooning public demand. His weekly column for the Atlantic, which offers upbeat advice for living a happier life, is one of the magazine’s most popular items, having gained something of a cult following among the magazine’s readers. (Brooks told me the column reaches an average of 500,000 readers every week; a representative from the Atlantic declined to confirm that figure.) Last year, the bookmarking website Pocket named Brooks the most-saved writer of the year on the platform, and in May 2022, the Atlantic tapped him to host a multiday conference on happiness at the Ritz-Carlton in Half Moon Bay, Calif., where tickets ran for $700.
Earlier this week, Brooks claimed the crowning achievement of self-help gurus — and their publishers — the world over: co-authoring a book with Oprah, titled Build the Life You Want.
Brooks with his new co-author, Oprah Winfrey (right).
Huy Doan/Harpo Inc.
“It’s pretty great,” Brooks said when I asked him about the collaboration, which has drawn breezy coverage this week from People, Elle, CBS Mornings and CBS Sunday Mornings. “I mean, it’s Oprah.”
The thrust of Brooks’ new book will be familiar to readers of his column in the Atlantic, which he started writing in 2020 after retiring from AEI. The column, titled “How to Build a Life,” follows a straightforward and pleasantly predictable format: After opening with a pithy anecdote drawn from art, literature or his own life, Brooks offers a nugget of practical advice for living a happier life, which he fleshes out with references to the relevant social science literature. (Recent selections include “A Crucial Character Trait for Happiness,” “The Not-So-Secret Key to Emotional Balance” — spoiler: It’s crying — and “How to Pick the Right Sort of Vacation for You.”) In tone, the column is somewhere between a self-help pamphlet and a sermon, if you swapped out all the Bible verses for citations to academic journal articles. On the Atlantic’s website, Brooks’ pieces are illustrated with whimsical technicolor cartoons, many of them featuring stylized bright yellow smiley faces.
Brooks’ transformation from conservative think tank president to happiness guru is a testament to his own unusually strong powers of self-invention — as he is fond of telling audiences, he spent his 20s as a professional French horn player before becoming a professional policy wonk — but it’s also a measure of the dramatic changes that have swept over the conservative movement in the past decade. As recently as 2015, Brooks served as the public face of an ascendant brand of conservatism centered on an unorthodox approach to economic policy and a bold anti-poverty message — an agenda that many in pre-Trump Washington believed to be the future of the Republican Party.
On Capitol Hill, Brooks had the ear of key Republican politicians, such as Paul Ryan, Eric Cantor and Marco Rubio, and was poised to transform AEI into the most influential conservative policy shop in the country whenever the next Republican entered the White House. In 2015, the Washington Post’s Jennifer Rubin hailed Brooks as “arguably the most important conservative voice of his time.”
But Brooks’ rise within Republican circles came to an abrupt halt with the emergence of Donald Trump, whose foreboding vision of “American Carnage” quickly overtook Brooks’ cheerful, Reaganesque conservatism. Now, less than a decade out from the height of his peak influence in Washington, Brooks has shed his identity as a conservative power player in favor of a sunnier and avowedly less political persona. His days in public policy are behind him, he assured me, but he’s still engaged in a very public — and very lucrative — battle for Americans’ hearts and minds.
In Cambridge, Brooks’ new persona was on full display as he shook the hands of the 200 or so academics, business executives, life coaches, educators and happiness-seeking citizens who had registered for the free, two-day symposium. The event had been organized to mark the launch of Harvard’s “Leadership and Happiness Laboratory,” an academic center that Brooks founded this year with mission of “sharing the science of happiness with leaders in academia, government and business.” The agenda featured some of the biggest names from the emerging field of happiness studies: Laurie Santos, the Yale psychologist whose course on happiness became the most popular undergraduate course in the history of Yale, was slated to lead a session on “teaching happiness in the classroom,” followed the next day by a virtual session with Martin Seligman, the founder of positive psychology. In the hallway in between sessions, I met an attendee who taught courses on leadership at the U.S. Naval Academy and an executive from Coca-Cola who ran something called “a compassion lab” in California. She stared at me blankly when I asked her if she had followed Brooks’ work as president of AEI.
As the opening session got underway, Brooks — a slender, 6-foot-1, 59-year-old with a bald head and a manicured gray beard — took his place at the front of the lecture hall. For the next 45 minutes, he led the audience through a crash course in Happiness 101, surveying the ways that different spiritual traditions and academic disciplines explain the meaning of happiness: The Buddha identified it with contentment; Jesus said that it’s God’s love; Sartre argued it was the search for meaning; neurobiologists claim it’s the presence of dopamine. The lesson, said Brooks, is that happiness isn’t just a feeling that washes over us. It’s a habit that you have to cultivate. (Brooks himself tracks his happiness levels via an elaborate spreadsheet on his computer.)
“The whole idea is that you are your own enterprise,” said Brooks, pausing to flash a smile at the audience. “You are the CEO of You, Inc.”
“I like color,” Brooks confessed when asked about his outfit. “It makes me happy.”
