This content was created by Dr. Arthur Brooks. This content was uploaded by Dr. Arthur Brooks. This is a YouTube interview titled "Arthur C. Brooks | Art of Charm with Eric Montgomery" (created 2022-02-21). The excerpt is a spoken segment in English featuring Arthur C. Brooks discussing the Harvard Study of Adult Development — an 80-year longitudinal study — and summarizing its finding (as reported by George Vaillant) that love is the strongest predictor of long-term happiness and wellbeing.
Chapters
There was one that predicted more than anything else whether or not you'd wind up happy. What is the ultimate secret to happiness? There's an 80 year longitudinal study that was run through Harvard University, where I teach, that looked at started with men who were in their 19 years old, they were sophomores at Harvard College in the late 30s and early 40s. And then they mixed it with some people who weren't all Harvard men, so it'd be more demographically similar. Followed them all the way through into their 80s, some of them into their 90s, and they came up with seven practices that predicted whether or not they were going to be happy and well, healthy or in some other quadrant. And so what you want to be is happy and well. And of those seven, there was one that predicted more than anything else whether or not you'd wind up happy in your 70s, 80s and 90s. And that was love. And the guy who read the study, George Valiant, who is a psychiatrist at a Harvard Medical School, professor for know really, really long time, he was asked at the end of his career, how do you sum up the Harvard study of adult development? He said, happiness is love, full stop.
