I recently read Tony Hsieh’s book, Delivering Happiness, for a good business read and it was a good one for sure. He has a fascinating story spanning from LinkExchange to Zappos so its a book I’d recommend for anyone interested in personal stories of American entrepreneurship success. This post is about another book though, one that Tony mentions near the end of his book as he thought more about happiness in general; he recommended The Happiness Hypothesis, by Jonathan Haidt, so I put that next on my list and it did not disappoint!

My goal here with this post is to help spread the word as with some other posts I’ve done on books like Spark because, well, I’m not big on writing reviews. There are plenty of those out there, so if I can share a few key elements of what I’ve read that get someone just interested enough to dig a bit deeper for themselves and maybe read the book (or a real review) then I’ll feel like I’ve done my job. Here’s a few of the key things I like about this book:

• It’s not a self help book. I like self-help books but when it comes to “happiness” I’m not so sure I buy into the notion that a book can teach someone to be happy. Happiness, in my opinion, is a combination of choice and state of mind. To really get there you need to start by educating yourself in a wide variety of topics, many of which I try to touch on in my posts 🙂 From there, you need to decide what life choices make sense for you.
• Haidt’s approach ties key concepts from ancient religions to contemporary psychology and every day life. I love this because you’ll get an education as well as insight.
• Despite the title, the book isn’t only about “how to be happy” in fact I’m not sure I would say it’s about that at all. It’s really more of a discussion of relevant topics that help provide tools and strategies that can be used to get more satisfaction out of life.

One analogy that he uses in the book is that of the elephant and the rider. In this model, the elephant is our subconscious self and the rider is our conscious self. This passage says it all and I think is a super simple but fantastic way to think about some of our most personal challenges:

“The mind is divided in many ways, but the division that really matters is between conscious/reasoned processes and automatic/implicit processes. These two parts are like a rider on the back of an elephant. The rider’s inability to control the elephant by force explains many puzzles about our mental life, particularly why we have such trouble with weakness of will. Learning how to train the elephant is the secret of self-improvement.”

–Jonathan Haidt