Monday, November 15, 2010

Happier: Learn the Secrets to Daily Joy and Lasting Fulfillment

Happier: Learn the Secrets to Daily Joy and Lasting Fulfillment
By Tal Ben-Shahar
McGraw-Hill, 2007. 192 pages. Nonfiction

Tal Ben-Shahar is a professor at Harvard University where he teaches a course on “Positive Psychology” which is basically a class about how to be happy. After its first year, word spread and the class has since been one of the most popular courses at Harvard with over 1/4 of the student population having taken it. After all, who wouldn’t want to be happier?

Ben-Shahar uses scientific research, personal insights, and reader exercises to carry you through the major book topics of what is happiness, why aren’t we more happy, and what we can do to change that.

There are of course no easy answers or “magic pill” in this book, but I found the discussion fascinating. I was expecting this book to merely be a reminder of things I already knew, but there were several things I found very intriguing especially some of the research into what makes us happy and how that doesn’t necessarily match up with popular opinion.

AJ

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