Do you want to have progress in your life? Do you want to be a happier person? Do you want to have a life full of meaning?

What you want is a sequence of expanding goals with no upper limit. And that's exactly what you see in Jacob's Ladder.

There's another weird angle on this, though. I've been trying to think about prayer technically. That's a complicated topic.

Gratitude is a divine thing. It's managing your effective, evolved state, so it doesn't manage you.

Why would you settle for momentary pleasure when you could be walking in the eternal garden?

Thank you. Hello, everybody.

I had the opportunity today to sit down and speak with Arthur Brooks.

Now, I met Mr. Brooks several years ago when he was

CEO of the American Enterprise Institute. And after that, he ended up serving as a professor of practice

at the Kennedy School and at the business school at Harvard. And that's where he is currently.

He has a very active public life as well. And it focuses on psychology, philosophy, neuroscience of happiness.

And so we talked about that. That was the focus of our conversation, and part of that was a matter of definitional clarification,

which is crucially important, because to understand happiness and to pursue it properly

means that it has to be defined correctly.

You have to know what it is and what it isn't.

And it isn't, for example, in Arthur Brooks conceptualization,

reducible to instantaneous hedonistic gratification

in the moment.

And so one of the things we talked about

was the distinction between pleasure and enjoyment.

And understanding that in this introduction gives you a flavor of the conversation.

So pleasure could be reduced to something like immediate hedonistic gratification in the moment.

...