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The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett

Most Replayed Moment: Why You’re Never Satisfied! The 4 Pillars of Lasting Happiness

The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett

FlightStory

Society & Culture, Business, Education

4.613.2K Ratings

🗓️ 14 November 2025

⏱️ 21 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Arthur C. Brooks is a Harvard professor, social scientist, and bestselling author who studies the science of happiness, meaning, and human fulfilment. He advises leaders and high achievers on how to build lives rooted in purpose, satisfaction, and emotional wellbeing. In today's Moment, Arthur breaks down the four scalable areas of life to work on for lasting happiness. Learn the science behind long-term satisfaction, emotional resilience, and building meaning and purpose in a pleasure-driven world. Listen to the full episode here: Spotify: https://g2ul0.app.link/CEreSpaggYb Apple: https://g2ul0.app.link/PrjwL6cggYb Watch the Episodes On YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/%20TheDiaryOfACEO/videos Arthur C. Brooks: https://www.arthurbrooks.com/

Transcript

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0:00.0

So people in memory turn pleasure into enjoyment.

0:07.0

To enjoy that's right. So alcohol, add people in memory. You know, the Anheuser-Bush Corporation

0:12.0

doesn't put out advertisements of, you know, a dude alone in his apartment pounding a 12-pack.

0:19.8

That's how a lot of people use the product.

0:22.1

But everybody knows that's an irresponsible, dangerous thing to do that can lead to alcoholism.

0:26.6

What they show is the same guy with his brothers and friends, you know, clink in bottles together,

0:32.0

having a great time.

0:32.9

That is pleasure, alcohol, plus people, plus memory equals enjoyment and that leads to happiness,

0:38.3

because they want to join their brand to happiness, not just to pure pleasure and certainly not

0:43.1

to addiction. Same with like Coca-Cola. All the Coca-Cola ads are like the World Cup with your friends

0:47.2

and in summer with your friends. Yeah. And that's actually less addictive. I mean, there's certain,

0:52.2

you know, the sugar and caffeine are certainly addictive. But they don't have the same properties of brain capture in the same way for sure, because they don't stimulate as much dopamine as, you know, something like alcohol does. And so they're less likely to make you really addicted. But the whole point is that they're, it does give you a little bit of pleasure but it makes you way happier

1:11.5

if you get to enjoyment and you only get that when you're doing it with people satisfaction

1:15.8

satisfaction is the joy you get after struggle you're an entrepreneur you understand this one

1:22.3

really well you're good at deferring your gratification all entrepreneurs are good successful entrepreneurs

1:26.7

are good at deferring gratification,

1:29.0

which means I'm going to do this hard thing and it's going to get big payoff and that payoff is going to be

1:33.6

sweet. That's satisfaction. A really funny thing about humans is that we need struggle and suffering

1:41.2

for us to actually get the joy that we seek. And that's a really

1:44.2

important part of our happiness. So you find the people who are better at deferring their

1:48.5

gratification, get more satisfaction and they're happier. There's a lot of that. Remember,

1:52.5

you've heard about the marshmallow experiment. Yeah. And people have debunked it, but they actually

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