Feldman's Faves: September 29, 2025

GOOD MORNING EVERYONE

I want to wish you an easy fast to those of you who will be doing so for Yom Kippur later this week. Personally, I find it a good opportunity to reflect on the past year and to think about what I want to do better as a husband, father, son, brother, friend and of course, as a lawyer.

OK….OK

Blue Jays…. Blue Jays

Let’s

Play

Ball……

What a weekend of baseball being down to the wire. But the boys pulled it off. So exciting.

Finally, please join me in wishing Randy a very happy birthday coming up on Oct 1st.

Given that this week is one of reflection (at least for me), this week’s theme is Arthur Brooks’ latest book and his mission to teach people how to be happy (and if possible, “successful”).

THE HAPPINESS FILES By: Arthur C. Brooks – Arthur Brooks is one of those guys that has made the rounds on all the PODCASTS, the speaking tour and of course in print. His article in the Atlantic last year about how to succeed in the second half of one’s career (spoiler alert – by becoming a mentor, teacher and facilitator to others) went viral and made this famous guy even more famous. Brooks is now a professor at Harvard after having had a very wide ranging career from French Horn Player to CEO and is now focused on teaching people how to be happy, which is the Herculean task he tries to handle in his collection of works entitled the Happiness Files. As Brooks himself notes, “’ Want to be happier? Ditch pointless meetings, celebrate your progress, and think twice before chasing that corner office, advises Arthur C. Brooks in his book The Happiness Files: Insights on Work and Life. Without going too far out on a limb, I believe almost everyone would like two things from their jobs and careers: success and happiness. They want to do relatively well financially, receive fair recognition for their accomplishments, enjoy their work as much as they can, and become happier people as a result. These are reasonable goals, but they can be a lot to ask. So many people, especially ambitious, hard-working leaders, simplify them in a logical way: They first seek success and then assume that success will lead to happiness. But this reasoning is flawed. Chasing success has costs that can end up lowering happiness, as many a desiccated, lonely workaholic can tell you. This is not to say that you have to choose between success and happiness. You can obtain both. But you have to reverse the order of operations: Instead of trying first to get success and hoping it leads to happiness, start by working on your happiness, which will enhance your success. Best of all, evidence shows that this order of operations works on a larger scale, as well: Happier employees tend to make their companies more successful. As such, whether you are simply looking for more success in your career—or whether you are a leader hoping to boost the success of your company—the goal should be to focus more intently on your happiness and the happiness of your employees. In essence, that is the argument of my new book, The Happiness Files: Insights on Work and Life. This book is a curated collection of essays from my “How to Build a Life” column in The Atlantic, each of which focuses on how leaders and employees can make their professional lives happier. Although I cover lots of science and ancient wisdom, I’ve also included very practical lessons that all working professionals can put into practice today. The lessons below are a small taste of The Happiness Files. I hope you’ll find them useful and a first step toward a better work life.

1. Kill more meetings

The research on meetings shows that if you want to be happier at work (or want your employees to be happier), you should fight against the scourge of time-consuming, unproductive meetings at every opportunity. And when they actually are necessary and unavoidable, there are a few steps you can take to make them less draining and more useful. If you are plagued by unnecessary meetings where little is accomplished, find ways to avoid them if you can. Schedule work trips or important client calls to coincide with them, for example. In many cases, you can skip very large gatherings without anyone noticing. If you are the convener, cancel all meetings that don’t have a clear agenda or purpose. Take this advice with caution if you are an employee, of course. It is not likely to be helpful, if your boss asks you why you are skipping all the staff meetings, to say, “Because I read a provocative book chapter.” If it’s too risky for you to skip meetings, maybe your boss will schedule fewer to begin with if you slip a copy of this chapter under their office door.

Create meeting-free days

If possible, bosses should create a policy of guaranteeing whole days without meetings. According to scholars writing in the MIT Sloan Management Review, productivity and workforce engagement are maximized at four meeting-free days per week; stress is minimized at five meeting-free days. (In other words, stress is minimized when there are no meetings at all.) In an era when many are working in a hybrid format, if people come to the office three days a week, a good policy might be to hold all meetings on just one of those days.

Keep meetings to half an hour or less

In 1955, the British naval historian C. Northcote Parkinson coined what he called—and which has since been known as— Parkinson’s law: We expand a task in order to fill the time available to complete it. Nowhere is this more apparent than in staff meetings. How many times has a meeting started with the words “This shouldn’t take the full hour” only to take the full hour? So, what is the right meeting length? Marissa Mayer, the former CEO of Yahoo, famously held micro-meetings that lasted 10 minutes. One productivity expert says that 25 minutes is ideal, based on what research says is the optimal amount of time for people to focus. But the point is clear: Make meetings more efficient by having a tight focus and getting right to the point, and make a commitment to finishing within a short window.

Don’t invite everybody

According to what is called the Ringelmann effect (named after the French engineer Maximilien Ringelmann), as the size of a group increases, the average individual effort falls. Scholars differ on the ideal number of people in a meeting, which no doubt depends on the meeting’s goals. If the boss has a huge announcement such as “We’re bankrupt,” perhaps all staff is appropriate. (Then again, an email might suffice for that.) For making decisions and discussing strategy, many management scholars recommend seven or fewer people in a meeting. People are less likely to fully participate beyond this number, and accountability can become confusing. Try to invite to your meetings the minimum number of people necessary to accomplish the task at hand. If there is one rule to remember about work meetings, it might be that they are a necessary evil. They are necessary insofar as organizations need them for proper communication, but they are evil in that they are almost never inherently desirable and should thus be used as sparingly as possible for the sake of productivity and happiness.

2. Focus on your progress

To pursue one big goal in the hope of attaining happiness is, ironically, to set yourself up for unhappiness. Buddhists see such goals as just another kind of worldly attachment that creates a cycle of craving and clinging. This principle is at the heart of Buddhism’s first noble truth, that life is suffering. This doesn’t mean that you should abandon all goals, however. You just need to understand and pursue them in a different way. I recommend that you subject your goals to a bit of scrutiny. Ask yourself three questions.

Are you enjoying the journey?

A little voice in your head always tells you that your very special dream, whether it’s Olympic gold or winning the presidency, will bring you bliss, so a lot of misery in pursuit of it is worthwhile. But that isn’t true, and the more emphasis you put on the end state, the more emotional trouble you will face. Instead of single-mindedly chasing a goal, focus more on whether you’re getting anything out of your progress right now. For example, about 20 years ago, I set a goal to get in better shape. At first, working out was hard, especially the weight lifting. But within about two months, I found that I enjoyed it, and it became something I looked forward to each morning. I soon lost track of my initial goal—I think it was to bench-press my weight plus my age—and two decades later I rarely miss a day in the gym, because I love it.

Do you like pie?

Here’s an existential riddle: What’s usually first prize in a pie-eating contest? Answer: More pie. So I hope you like pie. The point of a good goal is to improve your quality of life by changing your day-to-day for the better, not to limp across the finish line and stop after a terrible ordeal. Working toward a goal is a lot like that pie-eating contest. The reward for quitting the misuse of alcohol is stopping drinking and then continuing to live in a healthy way. The reward for getting your M.B.A. is being qualified to hold a job that you really enjoy. Make sure you’re really in it for the long haul.

Can you take one step at a time?

Researchers have found that frequent, small achievements tend to start a cycle of success and happiness much more than infrequent, big ones. Make sure you can break your long-term goals into smaller chunks—even into goals for individual days, if possible. You can have a victory each day and not be dependent on something that might happen years into the future. Point your efforts toward where you want to be in a year, but don’t dwell on that destination. Rather, enjoy the daily and weekly milestones that you know are getting you down your road to success.

3. Decide whether you want to lead

Should you seek the corner office? It depends. Maybe you are the outlier who finds perfect bliss in boss life, but I wouldn’t bet on it. Having your eyes open to the costs and not just the benefits of leadership is the wise course. Here are three guidelines to consider as you plan your future.

Some people should avoid leadership

If you have trouble with alcohol, you probably shouldn’t become a bartender or work in a liquor store, because your life will be harder in the proximity of so much booze. Similarly, if you are troubled by loneliness or your anger is hard to manage, leading others may well make your issue worse. Not only is this very bad for your well-being; it can make life harder for others around you and compromise your likelihood of success in an executive job at which, as we saw, 50 to 70% of new arrivals fail.

If you do take the job, be ready

Even if loneliness and anger aren’t particular problems for you, the data suggest that you might experience them at elevated levels. Just as you wouldn’t go into a high-stakes job unprepared professionally, you shouldn’t go in unprepared emotionally. Perhaps this means seeking help before you need it. This isn’t as strange as it sounds; I routinely recommend to executives that they seek therapy before they retire, to prepare for what can be a brutal transition. The same might be worthwhile before your promotion, but you can find many other techniques for emotional self-management, including meditation or prayer. The key thing is to start before you are struggling.

Even if the average newly minted boss doesn’t have loneliness or anger-management concerns, they can face two years of happiness below their old level. This is baffling if they expected to be happier but completely normal and generally temporary. Still, two years is a long time. Perhaps you are willing to make this sacrifice for the good of others or for your own long-term gain. But you may have plenty of good reasons not to make this sacrifice—maybe you’re ready to wind down your career, for example, or would simply rather opt for the life-is-short school of living. Consider the cons before moving into the corner office.”

Brooks is in his 60’s and has the benefit of hindsight. I’m not sure that everything he advises is practical or makes sense for all of us (depending on one’s stage of life) but there are definitely good nuggets worth considering. Here’s a good review from Sekar Writes - https://sekarwrites.com/review-and-summary-the-happiness-files/

THE NEXT BIG IDEA - Arthur C. Brooks Success Won’t Make You Happy — Here’s What Will – For those of you not interested in reading the book you can get a short synapsis from the discussion in this PODCAST. Here’s an excerpt from the PODCAST itself “Arthur C. Brooks is an unlikely happiness guru. He’s not a psychologist, philosopher, or mystic. He’s an economist and public policy analyst who, for years, ran a prominent think tank. But rubbing shoulders with heads of state and titans of industry made him miserable. Confronted with the sobering realization that for too long he’d privileged work over connection and status over happiness, he left the c-suite and set about renovating the mission of his life. Before long, Arthur was teaching at Harvard Business School. But he wasn’t teaching hostile takeovers and leveraged buyouts. He was teaching happiness. From a scientific perspective. Now, the pursuit of happiness might not seem like your typical business school fare. But Arthur’s got a good line on this. As he writes in his new book, The Happiness Files: “Your life is the most important management task you will ever undertake. It is, in fact, like a startup, where you are the founder, entrepreneur, and chief executive. And if you treat your life the way a great entrepreneur treats an exciting startup enterprise, your life will be happier, more meaningful, and more successful than it otherwise would be.” So that’s what today’s show is all about. What does it mean to live your life like it’s a startup? What you’ll learn: Why smart people are often less happy The simple test that reveals your biggest weakness How exercise and diet affect mood Why we should live in “day-tight compartments”: https://podcasts.apple.com/ca/podcast/the-next-big-idea/id1482067226?i=1000724957082

Thank you for your ongoing engagement and participation.

And remember to stay safe, stay healthy and to docket daily.

Jon