This is the story of how success happens. It is told through the lives of one composite American couple, Harold and Erica—how they grow, push forward, are pulled back, fail, and succeed. This is the happiest story you will ever read. It's about two people who led wonderfully fulfilling, successful lives. The odd thing was, they weren't born geniuses. They had no extraordinary physical or mental gifts. Nobody would have picked them out at a young age and said they were destined for greatness. How did they do it?

Distilling a vast array of information into these two vividly realized characters, Brooks illustrates a fundamental new understanding of human nature. A scientific revolution has occurred—we have learned more about the human brain in the last thirty years than we had in the previous three thousand. The unconscious mind, it turns out, is most of the mind—not a dark, vestigial place but a creative and enchanted one, where most of the brain’s work gets done. This is the realm of emotions, intuitions, biases, longings, genetic predispositions, personality traits, and social norms: the realm where character is formed and where our most important life decisions are made and where the seeds of accomplishment grow. The natural habitat of The Social Animal. Drawing on a wealth of current research from numerous disciplines, Brooks takes Harold and Erica from infancy to school; from the “odyssey years” that have come to define young adulthood to the high walls of poverty; from the nature of attachment, love, and commitment, to the nature of effective leadership. He reveals the deeply social aspect of our very minds and exposes the bias in modern culture that overemphasizes rationalism, individualism, and IQ. Along the way, he demolishes conventional definitions of success while looking toward a culture based on trust and humility.

After reading this book, one comes to the conclusion that the subconscious mind is a raging monster, and the rational mind is the midget hanging on for dear life who thinks that since his hands are on the reigns, that everything is under control. The following is an example of how some of the most important parts of our lives depend on guidance from our subconscious minds with very little training or formal preparation: "Children are coached on how to jump through a thousand scholastic hoops. Yet by far the most important decisions they will make are about whom to marry and whom to befriend, what to love and what to despise, and how to control impulses. On these matters, they are almost entirely on their own. We are good at talking about material incentives, but bad at talking about emotions and intuitions. We are good at teaching technical skills, but when it comes to the most important things, like character, we have almost nothing to say."

Teaching character, being intentional about teaching character, is a foreign matter in our society today. We are very good at allowing culture to instruct and inform us (we should think largely of the grip consumerism has on our behavior as a society) on matters that have deep consequences for how we think and live. We do not do the difficult work of critiquing our culture and learning to behave in ways that counter the more harmful effects of our cultural norms. This is one of the main objectives of Brooks' work, to demonstrate through fictional narrative that we are indeed largely creatures of habit, living lives of ritual and routine that are often unquestioned and unexamined. We seldom give serious thought to how social context serves to shape our thoughts, feelings, and beliefs through our daily behavioral patterns.

Brooks asserts that people's subconscious minds largely determine who they are and how they behave. He argues that deep internal emotions, the "mental sensations that happen to us", establish the outward mindset that makes decisions, such as career choices. Brooks describes the human brain as dependent on what he calls "scouts" running through a deeply complex neuronal network.

Ultimately, Brooks depicts human beings as driven by universal feelings of loneliness and the need to belong—what he labels "the urge to merge." He describes people going through "the loneliness loop" of internal isolation, engagement, and then isolation again. He states that people feel the continual need to be understood by others.

The objective of this book as stated by the author: 1. Synthesize the findings of research of the subconscious mind into one narrative. 2. Describe how this research influences the way we understand human nature. 3. Draw out the social, political, and moral implications of these findings. 4. Help counteract a bias in our culture to ignore the importance of the human subconscious mind. 5. Explore why experiments in improving the educational system almost always result in disappointing results. 6. Explore ways that integration of our true makeup could improve education. David Brooks uses his journalistic skills to organize this material into an interesting and easy-to-read format. He follows every step of his characters’ development (from pre-conception through to death) to illustrate the findings of research from the fields of psychology, sociology, physiology, economics, politics, and neuroscience.

Biography

David Brooks, (born Aug. 11, 1961, Toronto, Can.), Canadian-born American journalist and cultural and political commentator. Widely regarded as a moderate conservative, he was best known as an op-ed columnist (since 2003) for The New York Times and as a political analyst (since 2004) for The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer, a television news program on the U.S. Public Broadcasting Service (PBS).

Brooks grew up in New York City and Pennsylvania and graduated from the University of Chicago in 1983 with a B.A. in history. He began his media career as a police reporter for the City News Bureau in Chicago before he joined the Washington Times in 1984, where he contributed editorials and film reviews. In 1986 he joined The Wall Street Journal, initially editing the paper’s book reviews and briefly serving as a film critic. He then worked from the paper’s Brussels office as an editor and foreign correspondent. By the end of his tenure at the Journal in 1994, he had become an editor of the paper’s opinion page. He became a senior editor at The Weekly Standard magazine at its inception in 1995. He was also a contributing editor of Newsweek magazine.

Brooks was widely regarded as a moderate conservative. Although he agreed with neoconservatives that the United States should use its military might to advance its interests abroad, he supported limited government regulation of the economy and even championed some liberal causes, such as same-sex marriage.

In addition to his news reporting and commentary, Brooks wrote articles for several major magazines, including the The Atlantic Monthly. He was the editor of the anthology Backward and Upward: The New Conservative Writing (1996) and the author of Bobos in Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There (2000) and On Paradise Drive: How We Live Now (and Always Have) in the Future Tense (2004), The Social Animal: The Hidden Sources of Love, Character, and Achievement (2011), and The Road to Character (2015).

“Much of life is about failure, whether we acknowledge it or not, and your destiny is profoundly shaped by how effectively you learn from, and adapt to failure.”

“People generally overestimate how distinct their lives are, so the commonalities seemed to them like a series of miracles.”

Human culture exists in large measure to restrain the natural desires of the species.

"People rarely revise their first impression, they just become more confident that they are right."

“Simon Baron-Cohen of Cambridge surveyed the research literature on male communication and feelings and concludedthat men are more curious about systems and less curious about emotions. They are, on average, more drawn to rules-based analyses of how inanimate objects fit together. Women are, on average, better empathizers. They do better in experiments in which they are given partial clues and have to guess a person’s emotional state. They are generally better at verbal memory and verbal fluency. They don’t necessarily talk more than men, but they seem to take turns more while talking, and they are more likely to talk about others while men are much morelikely to talk about themselves. Women are much more likely to seek somebody else’s help when they’re in a stressful situation.”

Social Animal, extract

“One meeting she (Erica) tried to explain theVarieties of Capitalismapproach pioneered by Peter Hall and David Soskice. Different national cultures, she said, have differentmotivational systems, different relationships to authority and to capitalism. Germany, for example, has tight interlocking institutions like work councils. It also has labor markets that make it hard to hire and fire people. These arrangements mean that Germany excels atincrementalinnovation—the sort of steady improvements that are commonin metallurgy and manufacturing. The United States, on the other hand, has looser economic networks. It is relatively easy to hire and fire and start new businesses. The United States thus excels at radical innovation, at the sort of rapid paradigm shifts prevalent in software and technology.”

Social Animal, extract