Early in life, we have a lot of what psychologists call “fluid intelligence.” That increases through your 20s and 30s—it increases faster if you work harder on it—but it decreases in your 40s and 50s. Fluid intelligence is your ability to work hard with focus and solve problems, your analytic cap...

Maybe you’re a striver and successful, but you’re kind of lonely in your relationships. Well, successful people usually have a lot of people around them. They have a lot of “deal” friends. How many real friends do you have? Go from deal to real, and watch yourself get happier.

The striver's curse is that the people on the lower branch, the people who tend to get unhappier as they age, tend to be the ones who experienced a lot more success earlier in their lives. And it kind of makes sense—what goes up must come down. If you don’t do anything with your life, you won’t k...

To begin with, it’s not just a feeling. The feeling of happiness is like the smell of the turkey at your Thanksgiving dinner—it’s not the dinner itself. Happiness is a set of elements; it’s made up of enjoyment, satisfaction, and purpose. And we can control all those things—not perfectly, but a l...

Crystallized Intelligence increases through your 40s and 50s. It stays high through your 60s and 70s, and even beyond. Crystallized intelligence is not all about working hard and focusing—it’s about wisdom and passing on knowledge. You get wiser as you get older, which means you know a l...

One of the most interesting things in the neuroscience and social science of happiness is that happiness is based on love. Love is the nuclear fuel of happiness, and if you don’t have a lot of love in your life, you can’t get happier as you get older.

And that means you need to work on the ...