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Symposium examines science, outlines opportunities to tackle mental health crisis
Arthur Brooks likes to give students in his popular Harvard Business School class on happiness a quiz: Why are you alive? For what would you be willing to die?
“I tell students that the way to pass the following quiz is to have answers; the way to fail the following quiz is to not have answers. I’m not going to tell you what the right answers are. They’re your answers,” said Brooks, professor of management practice at HBS, as he opened a recent symposium on happiness and leadership.
Brooks’ query on core values reflects widely accepted happiness research, which finds that meaning and purpose are hallmarks of a happy life, one filled with a sense of well-being. The principle dates back to Aristotle’s reference to eudaimonia, or having a “good spirit,” and was one of the theories discussed at the event hosted by Brooks’ Leadership and Happiness Laboratory.
The June 20-21 symposium drew 200 in-person attendees, with another 1,000 online, and included administrators, business leaders, military personnel, elected officials, and students. The purpose was as direct as the mission of the lab, which “believes that all great leaders should be happiness teachers.”
Brooks, who is also the Parker Gilbert Montgomery Professor of the Practice of Public and Nonprofit Leadership at Harvard Kennedy School, said many of the speakers had inspired and mentored him in his own work, notably psychologist Martin Seligman, a pioneer in the field of positive psychology.
Another influential figure was Tal Ben-Shahar ’96, Ph.D. ’04, a co-founder of the Happiness Studies Academy, who taught two of the largest classes in Harvard’s history, Positive Psychology and The Psychology of Leadership. Ben-Shahar discussed the genesis of developing a curriculum on happiness and his work designing the first master’s degree in happiness science for Centenary University in 2022.