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Happiness by Design: Finding Pleasure and Purpose in Everyday Life
THE SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER'Few books change one's life; in 48 hours this has improved mine' Jenni Russell, Sunday TimesHow can we make it easier to be happy? Using the latest cutting-edge research, Professor Paul Dolan reveals that wellbeing isn't about how we think - it's about what we do. By making deliberate choices that bring us both pleasure and meaning, we can redesign our lives for maximum happiness - without thinking too hard about it.'Outstanding, cutting-edge, and profound. If you're going to read one book on happiness, this is the one' Nassim Nicholas Taleb'Bold and original ... what I wish for my a life that is rich in activities both pleasurable and meaningful' Daniel Kahneman, author of Thinking Fast and Slow
- GenresNonfictionAudiobook
ebook
Published August 28, 2014
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Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews
September 1, 2024
A love letter to small sample randomised control trials
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The insight on happiness being a balance of pleasure and purpose was really interesting and has definitely made me evaluate things in my life and future plans with a better lens about what they offer me.
Maybe not interesting enough to sustain 200 pages. There were some smaller insights but these were all very common sense and reeked of what our Strategic Management teacher called ‘Airport Books’, where economists repackage basic insight into alliterative lists or business school poster shapes (e.g. The Three Ls of Vertical Integration, The Rhombus of B2B IT Marketing) which apparently is the best way to make money as an academic.
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Remaking the film ‘Triangle of Sadness’ but its about an academic who is bitter about his colleague’s $20k speaking fee off the back of writing a shitty pop-psychology book. Harris Dickinson and Woody Harrelson are attached at this stage of pre-production.
-
The insight on happiness being a balance of pleasure and purpose was really interesting and has definitely made me evaluate things in my life and future plans with a better lens about what they offer me.
Maybe not interesting enough to sustain 200 pages. There were some smaller insights but these were all very common sense and reeked of what our Strategic Management teacher called ‘Airport Books’, where economists repackage basic insight into alliterative lists or business school poster shapes (e.g. The Three Ls of Vertical Integration, The Rhombus of B2B IT Marketing) which apparently is the best way to make money as an academic.
-
Remaking the film ‘Triangle of Sadness’ but its about an academic who is bitter about his colleague’s $20k speaking fee off the back of writing a shitty pop-psychology book. Harris Dickinson and Woody Harrelson are attached at this stage of pre-production.
August 21, 2024
Duidelijk, wetenschappelijk, en nuttig. Dit boek vertelt veel inzichten uit de positieve psychologie. Dit zijn levenswijsheden die je diep van binnen weet, maar moeilijk te verwoorden zijn.
De auteur gebruikt zijn eigen leven om het narratief van menselijk geluk goed in kaart te brengen. Verder besteedt het boek vooral aandacht aan de cognitieve vooroordelen die onze dagelijkse en langetermijnkeuzes zowel negatief als positief beïnvloeden. Door het gebruik van voorbeelden en (onderzoeks)opdrachten worden deze inzichten meteen tastbaar en toepasbaar. Uiteindelijk, door dit boek te lezen word je een net iets gelukkiger mens. Zeker een aanrader voor iemand die nu bezig is met grote levensveranderingen #breakupseason
Mijn favoriete quote:
"Too often, I think, we treat happiness as if it is fungible—as if, like money, it can be moved around relatively easily. But while saving money for a rainy day that never comes, giving up on happiness now for later happiness is truly tragic'
De auteur gebruikt zijn eigen leven om het narratief van menselijk geluk goed in kaart te brengen. Verder besteedt het boek vooral aandacht aan de cognitieve vooroordelen die onze dagelijkse en langetermijnkeuzes zowel negatief als positief beïnvloeden. Door het gebruik van voorbeelden en (onderzoeks)opdrachten worden deze inzichten meteen tastbaar en toepasbaar. Uiteindelijk, door dit boek te lezen word je een net iets gelukkiger mens. Zeker een aanrader voor iemand die nu bezig is met grote levensveranderingen #breakupseason
Mijn favoriete quote:
"Too often, I think, we treat happiness as if it is fungible—as if, like money, it can be moved around relatively easily. But while saving money for a rainy day that never comes, giving up on happiness now for later happiness is truly tragic'
February 18, 2026
I wrote this review a while ago. When I finished the book. I mentioned the book to a friend yesterday. In doing so I was reminded of what I learnt from this book. And what I wish it could have done better. I've removed a star from my rating.
Since reading this I am doubtful I know what will make me happy, and have come to rely more on my daily experiences as measures of happiness.
The lesson that has helped me most from this book is deciding early when unsure what to choose. Because the pain I feel when undecided in unecessary given it doesn't reduce the pain I'll experience if I make the less optimal choice.
I will apply the rules of paying attention to one thing at a time without multitasking, like music.
I'll keep in mind that I won't acclimate to things that change, like noise levels, the way I will to things that stay the same, like the furniture or size of kitchen, when moving into a new home.
I've started leaving social events or dates soon after feeling like going home.
I've made an LLM skill which applies the Day Reconstruction Method to my own life.
Sadly the explanation of biases which affect our judgement of happiness was messy. It read like a list which made it hard to remember what to keep in mind when deciding what will make us happy in our own lives. And the final part of the book about using priming, defaults, commitments, social norms, and habits didn't register in my memory at all because it lacked clear instructions and examples which would have made it easy to apply these technique to my own life.
I liked:
- The distinguishing between instrumental and end goals.
- The importance given to how our life feels day to day.
- The comparison between experiencing happiness during the day and evaluating whether we are happy overall.
- Defining happiness as pleasure and purpose over time.
- Explaining the day reconstruction method for measuring experienced happiness instead of evaluated happiness.
- The easy to apply tips for ones own happiness sprinkled throughout the book.
I disliked:
- The lack of a why for the claim happiness later in life doesn't make up for misery now.
- The hard to keep track of list of biases that affect our judgements of happiness.
- The hard to apply part 2 of the book on deciding, designing, and doing happiness which was meant to help me design a happy life for myself but resulted in me being unsure what to do. Exercises with clear instructions would have helped.
The review from a while ago which reads more like a summary:
tl;dr
Happiness is a balance of pleasure and purpose over time.
Happiness later in life doesn't make up for misery now.
We aren't good at knowing what will make us happy so we should use the Day Reconstruction Method and other people's opinions to decide what will.
Once we have decided what will make us happy we should design our lives so that our unconscious instincts make us behave in ways which make us happy instead of using consious will power to cause behaviour change because the latter usually fails.
To do this we should use priming, defaults, commitments, social norms, and habits.
extra tips to be happier:
When doing something like being out with friends, go home as soon as you start thinking about going home.
Focus on one thing at a time to make it enjoyable. Multi-tasking makes us sad.
Music makes us happy if we pay attention to it on its own.
If we pay for something and aren't enjoying it we should stop immediately and do something else we feel like doing more. We tend to stick with things we aren't enjoying because we've already paid a cost to do the activity, such as paying for food, a movie ticket, or having already invested so much time in a relationship, a degree, or a career.
Summary of what I remember from the book:
Happiness is the final end goal, all other goals are instrumental to achieving happiness.
Happiness is the single end goal of all other goals, which are instrumental to happiness. We want money, status, sex, knowledge, to have fun, etc. because it will make us happy.
Often we mistakenly pursue an insturmental goal in a way which makes un unhappy without realising that we should stop because the reason we are pursuing the goal is to be happy.
Happiness is pleasure and purpose over time, not just pleasure. A pleasurable activity is one which makes us feel good physically. A purposeful activity is one which find useful to achieving a goal, like learning maths or helping others.
Some of us are pleasure machines, i.e. pleasure maximisers, and others are purpose maximisers. It's best to balance pleasure and purpose to feel happy.
What matters is not just how we evaluate life overall, but how life actually feels while we are living it. We have two selves, our evaluating self and our experiencing self.
Our experience of happiness over time is what matters and it is not the same as our evaluation of happiness. Happiness research that asks people if they are happy and tries to draw inferences based on people's reported overall happiness and their circumstances is flawed. People evaluate their lives as happy even if their experience of life is negative. We can say that we are happy at our job for exmaple even if out day to day experience is lacking in purpose and pleasure. In general humans are unskilled at separating their thinking (evaluative) self from their experiencing self.
We misjudge happiness because we make mistakes of desire/prediction, memory, belief/explanation.
prediction and attention biases (what we think will make us happy)
When asked if we would be happier if some change were to happen in our lives, we overestimate how much of a difference the change will make. For example, if you ask someone if they would happier if they lost a leg, moved to a new city, or made $10,000 more a year they tend to overestimate the impact of that change on their happiness because people focus on the differences between different futures more than similarities, thereby overestimating how much sadder or happier they will be if the change they are contemplating were to happen. This is known as distinction bias, where we are bias to the distinctions between two different scenarios.
We also tend to overweigh the impact of a change on our happiness due to the focussing effect. The reason for this is that when we are asked whether an intervention X, such as losing a leg or making more money, will make us happier we focus all of our attention on that change and the resulting differences in our life compared to now with that change. But our day to day experience if far less focussed on one aspect of our life. Our minds are frequently changing object of focus, daydreaming, thinking about a task, wanting to eat, thinking about the ending to that movie from last night, wondering if your boss doesn't like you, etc. Often we are situationally blind because we over-focus on one variable, as seen in the famous gorilla attention experiment where people miss the bigger picture because their attention is narrowly focussed on counting how many times the ball is being passed.
Projection bias is when we let how we feel now influence how we predict we will feel in the future, e.g. “I love this house now, therefore I’ll love living in it”. In other words we project our current feelings onto our future feelings. If we are happy now we think we will be happy later, and if we are sad we think we will be sad later. But our mood tends to change and with it so do our predictions.
In reality we don't pay attention to things that stay the same as much as things that change: noise levels, light, sharing a room, or your kids fighting when sharing a room have a bigger impact on whether you enjoy a new house more compared to having larger rooms, nicer furniture, or a better kitchen.
Biases make us unskilled at predicting what effect different interventions (behaviours and events) will have on our happiness. Beyond these attention and prediction biases, we also have memory biases.
memory biases (how we remember what made us happy or sad)
We aren't good at knowing how much pleasure and purpose past experiences gave us because of errors in our memory.
We remember the climax and end of an experience more than the rest of the experience. If the end of an experience is positive or negative, or the most intense moment from an experience is positive or negative, we will let our judgement of that moment taint our memory of the entire experience. Even if most of the experience wasn't as positive or negative as that moment. This means an overall negative experience can be remembered as positive or vice-versa an overall negative experience can be remembered as positive.
Peak-end bias leads to duration neglect bias: we can enjoy the first 119 minutes of a movie, but if we hate the last 5 minutes we ignore that the majority of the experience was enjoyable.
Another reason we're bad at remembering what makes us happy is that our memory is inconsistent. We give different happiness ratings to the same event when asked about it at different times of the day. Out judgements of how happy past experiences made us are tainted by how happy or sad we are right now, much like our judgements of future experiences. This is projection bias at play again.
So our predictions about what will make us happy or sad, and our memories of what made us happy or sad, are often wrong. What about our understanding of what makes us happy right now?
belief and explanation biases (how we justify our decisions and judge others)
When what we do conflicts with what we believe, it creates discomfort.
For example, if you believe your job makes you unhappy but you stay in it, there is an inconsistency between your belief (“this job makes me unhappy”) and your behaviour (staying in the job). Leaving may feel costly not only financially, socially, or practically, but also psychologically: you may feel that leaving would mean you wasted time, failed, were not capable enough, or were wrong about yourself. Because those costs and beliefs feel painful, it is often easier to reduce the discomfort by changing the belief rather than the behaviour. So instead of leaving, you may tell yourself things like, “Most jobs are like this,” “I should be grateful,” “maybe I expected too much,” or “it’s better to stick things out,” because those beliefs make staying feel more justified.
This is known as cognitive dissonance. And it explains why it's easy for us to maintain behaviours which hurt us when we perceive them as hard or costly to change.
For example, if we are married to someone who doesn't make us happy or enrolled in a degree we don't enjoy, getting a divorce or dropping out of university is hard to do because we feel like we wasted time, money, and effort, are falling behind our peers, made the wrong decision, are quitters, etc. so we are more likely to change our belief that our spouse or degree isn't suited to us, with justifying beliefs like "all marriages are like this", "we must make sacrifices to be happy", or "all worthwhile jobs require uncomfortable studying" than we are to divorce or drop out of university because we perceive the costs associated with these behavioural changes as large compared to the small cost of changing our beliefs. Even if the beliefs we end up adopting are selective and lead us to maintaing an unhappy marriage or pursuing an unhappy career.
confirmation bias
fundamental attribution error
"stick with it errors" (persisting to long before quitting)
If we pay for something and aren't enjoying it we should stop immediately and do something else we feel like doing more. We tend to stick with things we aren't enjoying because we've already paid a cost to do the activity, such as paying for food, a movie ticket, or having already invested so much time in a relationship, a degree, or a career. This is the sunk cost fallacy. Where we keep doing something unejoyable because we feel like we should having already paid a cost to do the activity.
There were more but I don't remember them all.
In general, we are ridden with biases when judging our happiness and what will make us happy in the future.
So we should rely less on abstract reflection of happiness from our evaluative self and more on actual moment to moment experiences of happiness.
A workaround to judgement biases the author and his colleagues have found in their research on happiness, which is now used across the field of research is the Day Reconstruction Method (DRM) where one fills out a table with the activity they were performing on each row and a rating out of 10 for each column where the columns are pleasure and purpose associated with the activity. The DRM allows us to measure how we felt doing different activities and avoid the trap of evaulating our entire life.
The DRM helps us avoids biases when evaluating whether our behaviour is making us happy.
Another workaround for happiness biases is to ask others if they think we should make a change. Because others are less committed to our present selves. But don't ask "Should I take this new job opportunity?". Instead ask "What do you think my day to day will be like down the line if I take this new job?".
Also, use the DRM from time to time to evaulate if what you are doing day to day is still giving you a pleasureable and purposeful experience day to day.
Since reading this I am doubtful I know what will make me happy, and have come to rely more on my daily experiences as measures of happiness.
The lesson that has helped me most from this book is deciding early when unsure what to choose. Because the pain I feel when undecided in unecessary given it doesn't reduce the pain I'll experience if I make the less optimal choice.
I will apply the rules of paying attention to one thing at a time without multitasking, like music.
I'll keep in mind that I won't acclimate to things that change, like noise levels, the way I will to things that stay the same, like the furniture or size of kitchen, when moving into a new home.
I've started leaving social events or dates soon after feeling like going home.
I've made an LLM skill which applies the Day Reconstruction Method to my own life.
Sadly the explanation of biases which affect our judgement of happiness was messy. It read like a list which made it hard to remember what to keep in mind when deciding what will make us happy in our own lives. And the final part of the book about using priming, defaults, commitments, social norms, and habits didn't register in my memory at all because it lacked clear instructions and examples which would have made it easy to apply these technique to my own life.
I liked:
- The distinguishing between instrumental and end goals.
- The importance given to how our life feels day to day.
- The comparison between experiencing happiness during the day and evaluating whether we are happy overall.
- Defining happiness as pleasure and purpose over time.
- Explaining the day reconstruction method for measuring experienced happiness instead of evaluated happiness.
- The easy to apply tips for ones own happiness sprinkled throughout the book.
I disliked:
- The lack of a why for the claim happiness later in life doesn't make up for misery now.
- The hard to keep track of list of biases that affect our judgements of happiness.
- The hard to apply part 2 of the book on deciding, designing, and doing happiness which was meant to help me design a happy life for myself but resulted in me being unsure what to do. Exercises with clear instructions would have helped.
The review from a while ago which reads more like a summary:
tl;dr
Happiness is a balance of pleasure and purpose over time.
Happiness later in life doesn't make up for misery now.
We aren't good at knowing what will make us happy so we should use the Day Reconstruction Method and other people's opinions to decide what will.
Once we have decided what will make us happy we should design our lives so that our unconscious instincts make us behave in ways which make us happy instead of using consious will power to cause behaviour change because the latter usually fails.
To do this we should use priming, defaults, commitments, social norms, and habits.
extra tips to be happier:
When doing something like being out with friends, go home as soon as you start thinking about going home.
Focus on one thing at a time to make it enjoyable. Multi-tasking makes us sad.
Music makes us happy if we pay attention to it on its own.
If we pay for something and aren't enjoying it we should stop immediately and do something else we feel like doing more. We tend to stick with things we aren't enjoying because we've already paid a cost to do the activity, such as paying for food, a movie ticket, or having already invested so much time in a relationship, a degree, or a career.
Summary of what I remember from the book:
Happiness is the final end goal, all other goals are instrumental to achieving happiness.
Happiness is the single end goal of all other goals, which are instrumental to happiness. We want money, status, sex, knowledge, to have fun, etc. because it will make us happy.
Often we mistakenly pursue an insturmental goal in a way which makes un unhappy without realising that we should stop because the reason we are pursuing the goal is to be happy.
Happiness is pleasure and purpose over time, not just pleasure. A pleasurable activity is one which makes us feel good physically. A purposeful activity is one which find useful to achieving a goal, like learning maths or helping others.
Some of us are pleasure machines, i.e. pleasure maximisers, and others are purpose maximisers. It's best to balance pleasure and purpose to feel happy.
What matters is not just how we evaluate life overall, but how life actually feels while we are living it. We have two selves, our evaluating self and our experiencing self.
Our experience of happiness over time is what matters and it is not the same as our evaluation of happiness. Happiness research that asks people if they are happy and tries to draw inferences based on people's reported overall happiness and their circumstances is flawed. People evaluate their lives as happy even if their experience of life is negative. We can say that we are happy at our job for exmaple even if out day to day experience is lacking in purpose and pleasure. In general humans are unskilled at separating their thinking (evaluative) self from their experiencing self.
We misjudge happiness because we make mistakes of desire/prediction, memory, belief/explanation.
prediction and attention biases (what we think will make us happy)
When asked if we would be happier if some change were to happen in our lives, we overestimate how much of a difference the change will make. For example, if you ask someone if they would happier if they lost a leg, moved to a new city, or made $10,000 more a year they tend to overestimate the impact of that change on their happiness because people focus on the differences between different futures more than similarities, thereby overestimating how much sadder or happier they will be if the change they are contemplating were to happen. This is known as distinction bias, where we are bias to the distinctions between two different scenarios.
We also tend to overweigh the impact of a change on our happiness due to the focussing effect. The reason for this is that when we are asked whether an intervention X, such as losing a leg or making more money, will make us happier we focus all of our attention on that change and the resulting differences in our life compared to now with that change. But our day to day experience if far less focussed on one aspect of our life. Our minds are frequently changing object of focus, daydreaming, thinking about a task, wanting to eat, thinking about the ending to that movie from last night, wondering if your boss doesn't like you, etc. Often we are situationally blind because we over-focus on one variable, as seen in the famous gorilla attention experiment where people miss the bigger picture because their attention is narrowly focussed on counting how many times the ball is being passed.
Projection bias is when we let how we feel now influence how we predict we will feel in the future, e.g. “I love this house now, therefore I’ll love living in it”. In other words we project our current feelings onto our future feelings. If we are happy now we think we will be happy later, and if we are sad we think we will be sad later. But our mood tends to change and with it so do our predictions.
In reality we don't pay attention to things that stay the same as much as things that change: noise levels, light, sharing a room, or your kids fighting when sharing a room have a bigger impact on whether you enjoy a new house more compared to having larger rooms, nicer furniture, or a better kitchen.
Biases make us unskilled at predicting what effect different interventions (behaviours and events) will have on our happiness. Beyond these attention and prediction biases, we also have memory biases.
memory biases (how we remember what made us happy or sad)
We aren't good at knowing how much pleasure and purpose past experiences gave us because of errors in our memory.
We remember the climax and end of an experience more than the rest of the experience. If the end of an experience is positive or negative, or the most intense moment from an experience is positive or negative, we will let our judgement of that moment taint our memory of the entire experience. Even if most of the experience wasn't as positive or negative as that moment. This means an overall negative experience can be remembered as positive or vice-versa an overall negative experience can be remembered as positive.
Peak-end bias leads to duration neglect bias: we can enjoy the first 119 minutes of a movie, but if we hate the last 5 minutes we ignore that the majority of the experience was enjoyable.
Another reason we're bad at remembering what makes us happy is that our memory is inconsistent. We give different happiness ratings to the same event when asked about it at different times of the day. Out judgements of how happy past experiences made us are tainted by how happy or sad we are right now, much like our judgements of future experiences. This is projection bias at play again.
So our predictions about what will make us happy or sad, and our memories of what made us happy or sad, are often wrong. What about our understanding of what makes us happy right now?
belief and explanation biases (how we justify our decisions and judge others)
When what we do conflicts with what we believe, it creates discomfort.
For example, if you believe your job makes you unhappy but you stay in it, there is an inconsistency between your belief (“this job makes me unhappy”) and your behaviour (staying in the job). Leaving may feel costly not only financially, socially, or practically, but also psychologically: you may feel that leaving would mean you wasted time, failed, were not capable enough, or were wrong about yourself. Because those costs and beliefs feel painful, it is often easier to reduce the discomfort by changing the belief rather than the behaviour. So instead of leaving, you may tell yourself things like, “Most jobs are like this,” “I should be grateful,” “maybe I expected too much,” or “it’s better to stick things out,” because those beliefs make staying feel more justified.
This is known as cognitive dissonance. And it explains why it's easy for us to maintain behaviours which hurt us when we perceive them as hard or costly to change.
For example, if we are married to someone who doesn't make us happy or enrolled in a degree we don't enjoy, getting a divorce or dropping out of university is hard to do because we feel like we wasted time, money, and effort, are falling behind our peers, made the wrong decision, are quitters, etc. so we are more likely to change our belief that our spouse or degree isn't suited to us, with justifying beliefs like "all marriages are like this", "we must make sacrifices to be happy", or "all worthwhile jobs require uncomfortable studying" than we are to divorce or drop out of university because we perceive the costs associated with these behavioural changes as large compared to the small cost of changing our beliefs. Even if the beliefs we end up adopting are selective and lead us to maintaing an unhappy marriage or pursuing an unhappy career.
confirmation bias
fundamental attribution error
"stick with it errors" (persisting to long before quitting)
If we pay for something and aren't enjoying it we should stop immediately and do something else we feel like doing more. We tend to stick with things we aren't enjoying because we've already paid a cost to do the activity, such as paying for food, a movie ticket, or having already invested so much time in a relationship, a degree, or a career. This is the sunk cost fallacy. Where we keep doing something unejoyable because we feel like we should having already paid a cost to do the activity.
There were more but I don't remember them all.
In general, we are ridden with biases when judging our happiness and what will make us happy in the future.
So we should rely less on abstract reflection of happiness from our evaluative self and more on actual moment to moment experiences of happiness.
A workaround to judgement biases the author and his colleagues have found in their research on happiness, which is now used across the field of research is the Day Reconstruction Method (DRM) where one fills out a table with the activity they were performing on each row and a rating out of 10 for each column where the columns are pleasure and purpose associated with the activity. The DRM allows us to measure how we felt doing different activities and avoid the trap of evaulating our entire life.
The DRM helps us avoids biases when evaluating whether our behaviour is making us happy.
Another workaround for happiness biases is to ask others if they think we should make a change. Because others are less committed to our present selves. But don't ask "Should I take this new job opportunity?". Instead ask "What do you think my day to day will be like down the line if I take this new job?".
Also, use the DRM from time to time to evaulate if what you are doing day to day is still giving you a pleasureable and purposeful experience day to day.
September 6, 2025
picked this up from the happiness museum in Copenhagen and started buddy-reading it with a dear friend. this had so many cool ways to think about happiness.
key takeaways for me:
- future happiness cannot compensate for current misery; lost happiness is lost forever
- attention is key -- what we pay attention to is what drives our behaviour and it determines your happiness. pay more attention to what brings us happiness and less to what doesn't
- pleasure-purpose principle: a "good" life requires both!
- 3 main reasons why we aren't happier are: mistaken desires, mistaken projections, mistaken beliefs.
- we can organise our lives in ways to make us happier
key takeaways for me:
- future happiness cannot compensate for current misery; lost happiness is lost forever
- attention is key -- what we pay attention to is what drives our behaviour and it determines your happiness. pay more attention to what brings us happiness and less to what doesn't
- pleasure-purpose principle: a "good" life requires both!
- 3 main reasons why we aren't happier are: mistaken desires, mistaken projections, mistaken beliefs.
- we can organise our lives in ways to make us happier
November 6, 2024
I was disappointed once more from the books with this context, alrhough this one specifically got a lot of stars and good reviews. Except for chapter 5, I could not get any actual useful advice on happiness. My theory is that all these books and surveys they write these books based on are originally from wealthy American/European privilaged people whose happiness could be improved by the minor changes in mentality or habbits or friend circles. So many book readers around the world are not as privilaged and their happiness could not be improved by some simple advices.
July 20, 2026
I'm sorry, but this is absolute trash. I tried three separate times to start and finish this, and have decided to completely give up. It is full of unnecessary studies, unrelated anecdotes, and absolutely zero useful information. Maybe the ending chapters were good, but I couldn't get more than 100 pages into this on any occasion to know! Now to decide whether to donate my copy or throw it in the bin to save someone else having the displeasure of reading this attempt at a book...
September 8, 2025
O livro é interessante e construi contigo alguns conceitos sobre o que de fato é felicidade. Depois, ele tenta lhe ajudar a desenhar alguns detalhes na tua rotina e na tua vida para que você tenha mais felicidade. O livro é bastante fundamentado em evidências científicas trazendo bastante credibilidade para os conceitos e argumentos.
May 9, 2026
I have mixed feelings about this book.
Overall, it was not a pleasant reading, but I did learn some things.
What kept me reading was my interest for the subject.
It did help me to put my happiness into perspective and I'm already taking some actions based on the author's recommendations.
Overall, it was not a pleasant reading, but I did learn some things.
What kept me reading was my interest for the subject.
It did help me to put my happiness into perspective and I'm already taking some actions based on the author's recommendations.
November 26, 2025
Practical and simple, providing insight into long lasting feelings of fulfillment
June 20, 2026
Gekocht in Glasgow om te lezen tijdens de WHW, maar daar is weinig van terecht gekomen. Bevat niet heel veel nuttige inzichten.
Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews