Scottie Scheffler raised questions about happiness and fulfillment. This professor has answers

New York Times

2 days ago

Editor's note: This story is a part of Peak, The Athletic's desk covering leadership, personal development and success through the lens of sports. Follow Peak here.
In the days before the Open Championship this week, Scottie Scheffler, the No. 1 golfer in the world, revealed something honest and fascinating.
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He had spent his entire life trying to become the best golfer in the world and rack up major championships. But when he wins — and it happens a lot — the feeling of fulfillment is fleeting.
'There's a lot of people that make it to what they thought was going to fulfill them in life, and you get there, you get to No. 1 in the world, and they're like, what's the point?' Scheffler said. 'I really do believe that. Because what is the point? Why do I want to win this tournament so bad? That's something that I wrestle with on a daily basis.'
'(Golf) is one of the greatest joys of my life, but does it fill the deepest wants and desires of my heart?' Scheffler added. 'Absolutely not.'
It's an idea we all can relate to on some level. We think career success, promotions, financial rewards and other external validation will make us happy.
But will it actually? And what do we do when it doesn't?
To unpack this idea, I called up Arthur Brooks, a professor at Harvard Business School who teaches a course on happiness. Brooks is a symphony musician turned behavioral scientist turned public policy analyst turned best-selling author who has focused on these exact ideas. He teaches a class at Harvard called Leadership and Happiness and his next book, out next month, is titled 'The Happiness Files: Insights on Work and Life.'
We talked about career burnout, why so many great strivers struggle with success, if money actually offers happiness, and the key to finding meaning in life.
Yes, all the easy stuff.
He voiced something that we all relate to. Certain rewards or rewards will make us happy or fulfilled. However, that feeling is fleeting. Why is that?
There's a lot of philosophy that goes into it, there is a lot of neurobiology that goes into it, but the bottom line is that human beings are built from the ancestral environment to make progress. Our species is most successful when we're doing better today than we were doing yesterday. So, more skins in your caves. More success in the mating market and all that, and so progress is inherently incredibly satisfying. When you're doing better today than you were yesterday, it's incredibly satisfying.
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Now, to make progress, you have to have a direction. That's called the Rhumb line in sailing. You have to have a straight line from where you're going to where you want to get, or you don't know what progress means. It means nothing if you don't have a goal. Humans naturally set goals, and then they get all their satisfaction from making incremental progress toward the goals. But that's where a cognitive error comes in. The belief is that once you actually achieve your goal, once you get to that finish line, that's when the ultimate satisfaction will occur and that will last. It will be bliss and it'll be good forever.
Now, why is it that, by some estimates, a majority of Olympic gold medalists suffer from clinical depression in the three months after winning their gold medal? Because it doesn't satisfy.
That's called the arrival fallacy.
The arrival fallacy is that mistaken belief that incremental progress is great, and so arrival at the goal is the best, and it just isn't. Arrival at the goal is nothing more than an intention, such that it's a pin in the map, so that you know which direction to go. So you can make that progress that you actually crave.
People who are extraordinarily successful, unbelievably hardworking and lucky — that's the combination for people who get the right genetics and the right parents and the right brain and all that. But they're also extremely hardworking. These are the people who have outsized success. They get these big jumps and adulation from strangers and all these worldly rewards. And they fall prey more than anybody in the world to the arrival fallacy. I mean, it's unbelievable.
Man, I remember thinking, 'If I have a book that's No. 1 on The New York Times' bestseller list, it's going to be so freaking awesome,' and you get there and you're like, 'Yeah, but the next week, it's a book by some politician,' and you're like, 'Oh.' That's how we're wired. That's how the arrival fallacy works. In a nutshell, that's what Scottie Scheffler was talking about.
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How do you solve the arrival fallacy?
That takes years of work — interior work. That takes work on oneself. But the Buddhist answer to that — I'm a Catholic, not a Buddhist — but it's still, nonetheless, good wisdom. It's called intention without attachment.
In other words, the trick is to recognize that your brain is playing a cognitive trick on you. Your brain is lying to you.
Your brain lies to you all the time. Mother Nature lies. Mother Nature says if you get money, power, pleasure and fame, then you'll be happy. And the truth is that, if you work on your happiness, then you will have enough success. Which creates panic in super strivers because the word enough makes them break out in hives.
But the goal for living a successful life of outsized merit and achievement is to have intention. Yes, yes, yes. Without attachment. To say, 'I am going in this particular direction. I offer up this reward. I'm going to go where I'm supposed to go. I hit this or I don't. And even when I do, it's just another day.' And actually truly beginning to believe that. That's the equanimity that actually comes from somebody who's philosophically balanced and also a super striver.
There aren't very many of them.
You've discussed before how career burnout is prevalent among people in their 40s. People climb throughout their 20s and 30s, then they hit a peak, then it becomes a plateau and then there's a feeling of stagnation. It made me think of athletes who reach the pinnacle of their sport at a relatively young age. And then they have to keep going.
There's a lot of neuroscience and social psychology around the two kinds of intelligence that come with age. That's what my book, 'From Strength to Strength,' was about. What that research shows is that fluid intelligence, which is based on innovation, working memory and incredible energy that people have in their 20s and 30s, peaks about age 39 and then starts to decline.
That doesn't mean that you suck. That just means that the parts of your excellence that come from your learning and intelligence and focus and innovation, which is all of us, basically, that that actually stops getting better and starts getting worse. You notice it; nobody else does. But given the fact that all of human motivation comes from progress, when you're not making progress, you hate it and that's burnout.
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So you're like, 'Dude, I thought I would love this forever and I don't and I don't know why.'
And then what happens behind it is there's another intelligence curve that increases through your 40s, 50s, 60s and 70s. That's called your crystallized intelligence, which is based on pattern recognition and teaching. You don't need a lot of working memory for it. You don't need what made you good at what you do in your 20s and 30s. And if you can figure out a way to transform yourself from a fluid intelligence super-striver into a crystallized intelligence leader, that's where bliss comes.
That's the trick.
That's people who go from playing to coaching, and they love it more, and they don't know why, even though they make less money. I used to conduct mathematical research that was so sophisticated I can no longer read it today. And today, I write books and articles that are read by millions of people because I'm now a teacher.
I was an innovator then, I'm a teacher now. And that's because I'm on my crystallized intelligence. I'm 61; I am on my crystallized intelligence curve.
I was a professional classical musician in my 20s. I was playing in the Barcelona Orchestra, just at the pinnacle of that business. I was the principal French horn in the Barcelona orchestra. And I started getting worse and I didn't know why, and I started freaking out. I went to the greatest teachers in the world, and what I accidentally did, I accidentally started studying something else to figure out something else I could be good at. I became a behavioral scientist, unknowingly starting to learn the stuff that actually lay behind my own professional decline. And so I've seen these curves in my own life.
What I do with athletes, actors, entrepreneurs and geniuses is I explain to them that they've peaked and they're declining in their fluid intelligence. And I help them find their crystallized intelligence curve and build the second half of their lives on that.
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There is this idea of the burden of high achievement. It came from some academics at the University of Texas. It feels relevant to almost any professional athlete.
The burden of high achievement is that when you set yourself up for unbelievably high standards in childhood — adolescence and early adulthood — you're almost certainly going to disappoint yourself later in life. Notwithstanding the fact that you had a really, really good life, you weren't number one. That's all you pay attention to.
This is related to the Olympic medalist research that shows that the happiest Olympic medalists are the bronze medalists. The bronze medalists compared themselves, the rest of their lives, to the losers who didn't medal. The silver medalists compared themselves for the rest of their lives with the gold medalists, and they're the unhappiest by far of the three. They die earliest and they're unhappiest.
There are two sets of studies: one looks at their life trajectory, their health and death over a hundred years, looking at Olympic medalists going back to the early 20th century. And the other actually reads their expressions on the podium.
Both of them show the same thing: It sucks to be silver.
The high achievers are kind of like the silver medalists of life. It's very hard. There's only one gold medalist, man.
I wanted to be the greatest French horn player in the world, literally, and I wasn't. I wasn't because it's like one guy. It is not likely to be me. I was just bitter and resentful. And then I started getting worse.
If you were identified as super special before you were 20, you're more likely than average to be disappointed with your life after 80.
To go back to something that Scottie Scheffler said: 'Winning is fulfilling from a sense of accomplishment, but it's not fulfilling from a sense of the deepest places of your heart.' So, to pivot into something a little bit more philosophical. How do we find meaning?
Meaning comes from human relationships, meaning comes from love. We're built for love. The happiest people are the people who are serious about their faith or their philosophical lives, who have serious family relationships, have deep, real friendships, not just 'deal' friendships. Strivers are all deal, no real, is the problem.
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And then (people) who feel that their work serves other people. I'm writing a book right now, coming out in April, called 'The Meaning of Your Life.' The people who have the most meaning in their lives, they do six things: They ask deep questions. They fall in love. They look upward. They're very spiritual or philosophical. They find calling in their work, not just achievement in their work. They seek a lot of beauty in nature, art, music.
And they understand the nature of their suffering. They're not afraid of their suffering. That's what people who find meaning actually do.
When people think about professional athletes, they can understand the idea that external rewards probably don't always bring happiness. However, they are also like, 'Well, my life would be a lot better if I made a million dollars a year or more.' How much does financial achievement correspond with happiness, according to the research?
Very little.
There's the old research from Deaton and Kahneman that says that your happiness stabilizes at $75,000 a year. That was overtaken by events. Matt Killingsworth at Wharton found it's more like $250,000 a year, and it keeps going up. But the truth of the matter is, it doesn't matter. At some point, it gets really flat and it's below a million dollars.
What happens is that money never raises happiness. Money lowers the sources of unhappiness.
There's the one thing that Mother Nature tells you will bring happiness, which is a lie, and the four things that really will bring greater happiness. So buying stuff and having status, Mother Nature says you'll be a lot happier with that million dollars. That's a lie. The things that really do bring happiness are buying experiences and spending time with people you love, buying time with people that you love or spending time with them in edifying activities, giving your money away to things that you care about, and putting your money in the bank, because that's progress and humans are wired for progress.
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Go buy the watch. Go buy the boat. Go buy the car. That's momentary satisfaction; that's Scottie's win at the Masters. That's what your Ferrari is.
Instead, go away with your kids and make a memory that will last forever. It's funny because, you know, I've been married for 34 years and 33 years ago I was having this big argument with my wife. We didn't have any money. We were really, really poor, like minimum-wage poor, and we had just immigrated to the United States. She's like, 'We need to celebrate our first wedding anniversary.' We had enough money to do one of two things. We could go away to the local beach for three days or we could buy a couch because we didn't have a couch. I'm a thrifty, practical guy. I'm like, 'Couch.' She's like, 'No, beach.' And we go back and forth.
Finally, we compromise and go to the beach. Later, I realized that she was completely right. I thought that the couch would give us permanent satisfaction because it's a thing and the beach would give a temporary satisfaction because it's an experience. And the exact opposite is the truth.
Achievements are more like couches than they are like beaches.
Another thing that I came across that you said that resonated with me was that we have too many mirrors in our lives. Mirrors, as in literal mirrors and also metaphoric mirrors, like social media. We're constantly evaluating ourselves.
The human prefrontal cortex is the greatest achievement of evolution. That's the supercomputer of nature. It has the equivalent of 880 trillion transistors in it, and it enables unbelievable things. That's 30 percent of your brain that sits right behind your forehead, the prefrontal cortex. It's unbelievable.
One of the most amazing things that it creates is consciousness. Consciousness is the ability not just to see and perceive the outside world, but to see and understand the inside self. Those are the two philosophical perspectives that William James called the 'I' self and the 'me' self. The 'I' self is what you're looking at outside, right?
I'm in Big Sky, Montana, right now, looking at a mountain. The 'I' self sees the mountain. The 'me' self perceives me talking to you, thinking, 'Am I making a good impression and getting my points across?' That's what consciousness allows us to do. I go through my life and I can get through traffic. But I can also think about the fact that I'm getting older and, sooner or later, I'm going to die and what's going to happen then, and do I have kale in my teeth?
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And … and … and.
The problem is that for happiness, we spend too much time in the 'me' self and not enough in the 'I' self. That's normal and that's natural because of consciousness and the nature of the prefrontal cortex, but it's misery-inducing, and so the trick, the Buddhist trick, gets back to the intention without attachment.
The first noble truth of Buddhism is that life is dissatisfaction, that life has suffering. That's Duḥkha. The reason for that is that there's too much time in the 'me' self. Because we're spending too much time thinking about ourselves, looking inward, because there are too many mirrors in our lives. The secret is to get rid of your mirrors. The secret is to literally take the mirrors out of your house, take the notifications off your phone, stop thinking about yourself, start thinking about other people, transcend, spend more time in prayer, serve others.
The single best set of techniques that you can use for getting happier is to spend more time serving other people and spend more time looking for the divine. Those two things are breaking the mirrors.
My last question, and I know this is oversimplified, but if you could give people three pieces of advice to help them be happier day to day, what would they be?
Let's see if I can do something simple there for you. So Mother Nature gives you a false counterfeit formula for happiness. Here's Mother Nature's formula: love things, use people and worship yourself. That's Mother Nature's formula — that's the 'me' self.
The right formula — this is what to focus on, this is what to put up on the fridge or on your computer screen and to say to yourself as you wake up in the morning or as you go to bed at night: 'Love people, use things and worship the divine.'
That's the formula.