Your Life Is a Startup—Here’s How to Make It Thrive

Arthur Brooks explains why managing yourself like a business may be the secret to happiness.

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Happiness might not sound like a business strategy, but Arthur C. Brooks—Harvard professor, Atlantic columnist, and all-around happiness guru—says it’s the most important metric of all. In his new book The Happiness Files: Insights on Work and Life, Arthur argues that your life is a startup, and you’re the founder, CEO, and maybe even the unpaid intern. Which means you’ve got to manage your most important asset: yourself. From burnout to big career shifts, awkward meetings to meaningful success, this book covers it all with warmth, wisdom, and just the right amount of data. Pick up a a copy on Amazon or read on to check out 5 of Arthur’s big ideas.

1. Manage yourself.

In the startup of your life, you’re the most important employee—so you better manage yourself. Self-management is a skill that successful people have. More importantly, it’s a skill that happy people have. Some people are very successful in managing their professional lives, but managing their personal lives is a different kettle of fish. Some people find self-management more difficult than professional management.

Philosophy and religious faith, friendships, family, romantic relationships—these don’t have to feel different than getting ahead at work. You can treat them in much the same way with a few basic ideas that are taken from neuroscience and behavioral science.

Are you spending time at work on boring or inconsequential things? Do you feel unappreciated? What do you do about that? You need to understand yourself and why you’re stuck in unproductive patterns. This will help you put on your own oxygen mask first so that you’ll be more successful in your job and in your life.

2. How to build your career.

A lot of people think of their twenties as the building phase of their career, but the truth of the matter is that in the business of your life, building is an ongoing operation. A career is always a process of exploration and discovery. Do you have the kind of linear career where you go from one thing to the next, where everything that you do is bigger and better and grander than the last? Maybe you’re more of a spiral, where your career is a set of mini-careers of seven to 12 years, and sometimes you make more money and sometimes less, but you’re setting it up as an adventure of your own making.

“A career is always a process of exploration and discovery.”

When the right time is to switch jobs? A lot of people struggle with this. They’re afraid of these kinds of changes. “I don’t like my job, but will I be happier if I change?” The data says you probably will be.

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3. How to communicate and connect with others.

One of the most important skills to develop is the ability to deal with other people. Communication and connection, at both work and home, are about managing the enterprise of your life and having an enterprise that gets better and better as the years go by. To do this, you need to learn how to give and receive criticism, based on the best communication literature and social psychology. What does good criticism look like? Also, how do you give a great compliment? How do you talk to people that you don’t know? If you’re an introvert, how can you sometimes act as if you’re an extrovert?

Where you should not connect and communicate with other people, if possible? The answer is meetings. Want to be happier? Stay away from meetings and avoid making calls whenever possible.

4. How to balance work, life, and relationships.

I hate the expression “work-life balance” because it sounds like you have to balance two separate things. The truth is, if you want to be happy in the enterprise of your life, your work and your life are part of the same phenomenon. Work should be part of your life. That being said, it shouldn’t be all of it—you should have other things in life that are not involved with your job, such as family and friendship. Instead of work-life balance, I talk about work-life integration.

“If you want to be happy in the enterprise of your life, your work and your life are part of the same phenomenon.”

We want work and life to work together. As it says in The Good Book, iron sharpens iron. Your work and the rest of your life should be the irons that sharpens each other. Where does work stop and life start in a way that actually makes both work and life better? What’s the best way to work with people that don’t understand this? What do you do about colleagues that might make life a bit worse?

5. How to define success.

Success is what you want. At the end of the day, with any kind of startup, you’d better know what the end goal is and you’d better keep it in mind. If you’re starting a little company, you might say success is getting bought by some bigger company or getting to the initial public offering. Well, how do you define success for the startup of your life? What does success mean to you? Hint: don’t denominate it in dollars if you want to be a happy person. This is not to say that money is unimportant. Quite the contrary. It’s very important for doing all kinds of things, but it is not a great metric for understanding our own personal success.

Success can lead to misery if you’re only focused on money, power, pleasure, fame, prestige, titles, or positions. Those things are intermediate goods to what we really want, which are things like love, satisfaction, or faith. How do we define that kind of success? How do we measure that kind of success? Picking a meaningful metric will not make you lose your edge. On the contrary, when you know the success that you’re shooting for and how to measure it, boy does that make you want to show up for work and do your very best every day. Then, it makes you want to go home and do your very best at home as well.