Imagine that you are a teenage musical prodigy and you drop out of college at the age of 19 so that you can go tour the world as a musician as a classical French horn player. You even play at Carnegie

Hall where embarrassingly you trip and fall off the stage. At the age of 31, you retire from your musical career and get a PhD. You then become a professor, first at Syracuse University and then later at Harvard, where you teach both at Harvard Business School and at the Harvard Kennedy School.

You publish 13 books and write a column for the Atlantic, which gets noticed by

Oprah Winfrey.

Oprah then invites you to dinner where she asks you to co-author a book together.

This is the life of today's guest, Harvard Professor Arthur Brooks, and he's going to be discussing how to become

happier. Welcome to the Afford Anything Podcast, the show that understands that you can

afford anything but not everything. Every choice that you make is a

trade-off against something else and that doesn't just apply to your money that applies

to your time, your focus, your energy, your attention. It applies to any limited resource that you need to manage and that

opens up two questions. First, what matters most? And second, how do you make decisions

accordingly? Answering these two questions is a lifetime practice.

That's what this podcast is here to explore.

My name is Paula Pan.

I am the host of the

professor at both the Harvard Business School and the Harvard Kennedy School of

government and public policy joins us to talk about becoming happier.

Arthur Brooks is the author of 13 books.

Most recently, he co-authored with Oprah,

a book called Build the Life You Want,

and this book focuses on the science and research behind happiness.

In our upcoming interview we're going to talk about a range of topics including

...