Arthur C. Brooks, who taught happiness at Harvard Business School and led a Washington think tank, argues that anxiety signals you're doing meaningful work. He received hate mail as a CEO and saw the anxiety it caused as the cost of confronting hard truths. Accepting anxiety as part of purposeful work makes it empowering instead of debilitating.
Anxiety is normal. Look, for the past 7 years, I've been teaching at the Harvard Business School, and I tell them usually in the second lecture of my Science of Happiness class, you're studying at Harvard University, at the best business school in the world. If you're not stressed out, you need therapy. This is important and it's hard and you're doing it on purpose. But remember, you're doing it on purpose, which means you need to accept it. And all of us are doing things on purpose. Look, you're putting one foot in front of the other. That's great. You're doing something in your life. The ones who are most likely to are strivers, and strivers are asking for stress and anxiety, even sometimes fear, certainly lots of worry. You know, it was really helpful for me earlier in my life. I took a job as a CEO, a big Washington institution, policy think tank, and it was at the center of a lot of controversies actually. And I started getting not just hate mail, sometimes even threats for the very first time. It bummed me out. It stressed me out, made me really anxious. And so one day I realized that if I'm going to dish it out as CEO of this organization, saying hard hard truths as I see them, I gotta take it too. This is a cost of doing business and it's well worth it. And that's really what I'm talking about. Accept that anxiety is normal and this is a life that you've chosen. And that's pretty empowering.
