Arthur Brooks

Arthur C. Brooks was born in Spokane, Washington, in 1964 — and spent the first chapter of his life not as an academic but as a professional classical French horn player. He left college at 19 to tour and record, performing in more than a thousand concerts, including years with the City Orchestra of Barcelona.

In his late twenties he changed course completely, earning a bachelor's degree by distance learning, then an MA, and finally an M.Phil. and Ph.D. in public policy analysis from the RAND Graduate School. He taught at Georgia State and Syracuse before becoming, in 2009, the 11th president of the American Enterprise Institute, which he led for a decade.

In 2019 he made his final pivot — to Harvard, where he is the Parker Gilbert Montgomery Professor of the Practice of Public and Nonprofit Leadership at the Harvard Kennedy School and a Professor of Management Practice at Harvard Business School. He leads the Leadership and Happiness Laboratory and teaches a "Leadership and Happiness" course that is roughly a third neuroscience. For years he wrote the popular "How to Build a Life" column on happiness at The Atlantic, reaching a weekly audience in the hundreds of thousands; he now writes a regular column at The Free Press and hosts the "Office Hours with Arthur Brooks" podcast.

He is the author of more than a dozen books, including the #1 New York Times bestsellers From Strength to Strength (2022) and Build the Life You Want (2023, co-authored with Oprah Winfrey), and his 2026 #1 bestseller The Meaning of Your Life. Fortune named him one of the "50 World's Greatest Leaders," and he holds multiple honorary doctorates. His life's work is a single, rigorous promise: that happiness is not a feeling that happens to you — it's a skill you can build.