Quotes from Arthur C. Brooks

Devote the back half of your life to serving others with your wisdom.

More important, her curated self was a person she would admire—a hugely successful, hardworking executive. And she succeeded! But nothing is permanent, and now she felt like every hour of work was giving her less than the last, and not just less happiness—less power and prestige, too. Her problem was that the "special one" she had created was less than a full person. She had traded herself for a symbol of herself, you might say.

Satisfaction comes not from chasing bigger and bigger things, but paying attention to smaller and smaller things. Buddhist master Thich Nhat Hanh explains this in his book The Miracle of Mindfulness:

My financier friend had objectified herself to be special, with a self-definition that revolved around work, achievement, worldly rewards, and pride. Even though that object was slowly eroding, she was too attached to her worldly success to make the changes that could now bring her happiness.

That's when it struck me: people who choose being special over happy are addicts.

Finally, obsessing over the future squanders the present.

One of the nastiest and most virulent addictions I have seen is workaholism

The rewards of that productivity give way to a fear of falling behind as an impetus to keep running. Soon enough, the work crowds out relationships and outside activities.

Man was made for conflict, not for rest," Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote.[13] "In action is his power; not in his goals but in his transitions man is great.

With little else, work is all that is left to the workaholic, reinforcing the cycle.

And just as sincerely, this is a book for open-minded liberals who understand that our country would benefit from new passion and new ideas in the fight against poverty.

Why? If we are thinking about the past or future, "we are not alive during the time we are washing the dishes.

To contemplate your eulogy, however, is the easy part. Now the harder part: staring right at your death and decline itself. This is what will truly eradicate the fear.

Remembering that life won't last forever makes us enjoy it all the more today.

Mandela had a conviction that only goodness could win in a moral struggle. He believed that even under unjust persecution, people should treat others with kindness and respect, that anything less was a failing of his own character.

When Ronald Reagan made his case to the American people, he didn't spend a lot of time talking about what he was fighting against. He spent most of his speech talking about who he was fighting for. This is what conservatives too often forget.

Death is the most normal, natural thing in life itself, and yet we are amazingly adroit at acting as if it were abnormal and a big surprise.

As we age, we shouldn't accumulate more to represent ourselves but rather strip things away to find our true selves

The true master, when his or her prestige is threatened by age or circumstance, can say, "Don't you see that I am a person who could be utterly forgotten without batting an eye?

What activities will you keep? What activities will you evolve and do differently? What activities will you let go of? What new activities will you learn? And to start . . . What will you commit to doing in the next week to evolve into the new you? What will you commit to doing in the next month? What will you commit to doing within six months? In a year, what will be the first fruits to appear as a result of your commitments?

We speed past the questions that would help us get to know another person's story and instead immediately look to the places of greatest difference and disagreement.

Without desire, one's original nature will be at peace.

the average American considers the beginning of "old age" to be six years after the average person dies. We avoid thinking realistically about the length of our lives and our time left, lulling us into the false belief that we have all the time in the world.

The rest of this book, therefore, is dedicated to helping you make the jump. First, I will show you the three forces holding you back, and how to remove them. They are your addiction to work and success, your attachment to worldly rewards, and your fear of decline.