A few weeks ago, I had the great pleasure of spending an afternoon with Dr. Arthur Brooks, the Harvard Business School professor and best-selling author who is considered a leading authority on happiness.

His How to Build a Life column at The Atlantic is one of the most popular at the magazine and his Leadership & Happiness course at Harvard Business School is oversubscribed by 5x most semesters.

The most interesting idea I learned during our time together was the Four Idols: a framework and exercise for developing an awareness of your underlying motivations and escaping the hollow, Sisyphean chase that so many people find themselves on.

In today’s piece, I’ll walk through that framework and exercise (and share my own results)…

The Four Idols

The concept of the Four Idols is drawn from St. Thomas Aquinas, who spoke of the four false idols—Money, Power, Pleasure, and Fame—in his Summa Theologica, which was written during his life in the 13th century but published in the late 15th century.

In the mind of Aquinas, a Catholic theologian, the pursuit of these idols was distancing people from God.

The adapted, non-religious version of the idea is that everyone is driven by the pursuit of one (or more) of these idols:

• Money: Financial wealth and the accumulation of resources.
• Power: Control over others; commanding position.
• Pleasure: Feeling good.
• Fame: Admiration of others; approval and respect from peers.

The theory states that we make most of our daily decisions based on our worship of our leading idol.

The downside: As we strive to get “closer” to our idol, we find ourselves on an endless chase for more, incorrectly assuming that this chase will lead us to the promised land of happiness.

The harsh reality, as David Foster Wallace pointed out in his This is Water speech in 2005, is that the things you worship may “eat you alive.”

We live our own Sisyphean existence, pushing a heavy boulder up a steep hill, only to have it roll back to the bottom, forcing us to begin our effort anew.

Furthermore, most of us go through our lives completely unaware of the idol we worship:

“The insidious thing about these forms of worship is not that they’re evil or sinful, it’s that they’re unconscious. They are default settings. They’re the kind of worship you just gradually slip into, day after day, getting more and more selective about what you see and how you measure value without ever being fully aware that that’s what you’re doing.” - David Foster Wallace, This is Water

To be clear, you do not need to reject your idol or characterize it as wrong or bad.

The goal is to develop a conscious awareness of your idol—to become aware of what is motivating and driving you, and to understand the separation between this chase and your lifelong pursuit of fulfillment and happiness.

Identifying Your Idol

The Four Idols exercise is a method to identify your idol and bring it to the forefront of your awareness.

Use a process of elimination to identify your primary idol. The three-steps of the elimination process:

1. Of the starting four (Money, Power, Pleasure, Fame), which one is definitely not your idol? Which of the four could you get rid of and not feel a thing? Eliminate one. This is usually an easy step.
2. Of the remaining three, which one could you live without? Eliminate one. This is usually a bit harder.
3. Of the remaining two, does one stand out as being more important as an underlying motivation for why you act and live the way you do? Are you more driven by one than the other on a daily basis? When you've made important decisions in the past, were they more driven by one than the other? Eliminate one. This is the hardest step.

At the end of this process, you’re left with your idol. Reminder, there is nothing wrong with any of these idols—they are perfectly natural. We all have one.

The key is to become aware of your idol—to understand the role and influence it has in your decision-making and life, and to realize that chasing this idol will not lead to happiness on its own.

So What’s Your Idol?

When I first went through the steps of this exercise, it was rather easy for me to identify my idol:

• Step 1—Eliminate Power: I’m not motivated by control or feelings of power. I never have been, and I don’t see that changing anytime soon. I don’t have any desire to be a CEO or have and build a big team to feel the accumulation of power.
• Step 2—Eliminate Pleasure: I’m not motivated by feeling good moment to moment. I have plenty of days when I don’t feel good, and I continue to do what I know I should do. I’m a big believer in discipline, so this was an easy elimination.
• Step 3—Eliminate Money: Don’t get me wrong, I like money, but I’m significantly less motivated by it than others. I don’t use it as a scoreboard of success to measure myself against others, so while I’d like to make great money and provide for my kids and grandkids, it’s not the central idol in my life.
• My Idol—Fame: I am motivated and driven by the approval and appreciation of others. I don’t necessarily want to be “famous” in the traditional sense of the word, but I love the idea of positively impacting millions of lives through my work. The respect of my peers, subscribers, and followers is important to me.

My awareness of my idol marked an important step for me.

I had previously experienced the big swings in emotion that come from the public nature of my pursuits—the high highs of a piece of content resonating with the masses, the low lows of a piece of content driving ad hominem attacks and criticism. I realized I had been chasing my idol and assuming that I would be happier when I achieved X level in that game. The awareness has made me understand that I need to separate my fulfillment and happiness from that motivation and chase—a healthy separation if you ask me!

So, what’s your idol?

I’d love for you to go through this quick exercise and reflect on it with family and friends. Doing the exercise with a partner or friend is a great way to connect and build a deeper understanding of the underlying motivations that will impact your relationship.

Awareness of your underlying motivations is essential. The Four Idols exercise will help you get there. Take five minutes and try it—you won't regret it!

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