The How of Happiness by Sonja Lyubomirsky

Research psychologist Sonja Lyubomirsky made a study of the things that contribute to happiness. Even if you haven’t read her book, The How of Happiness, some a particular facts she introduced have been shared by many authors since, and you may have heard them. Name, people have a natural happiness set point, which accounts for half of how happy they feel. One’s life circumstances account for one-tenth of the happiness one experiences. The remaining 40 percent is the result of a person’s actions and ways of thinking.

There are some important lessons to take from this discovery.

*Do not compare your happiness to others. Some people are naturally more or less happy than you. Give yourself a break if you cannot sustain the ecstasy someone else seems to have and be graceful to those who never seem to be as happy or upbeat as you are.

*You probably do not need to change your life circumstances to be much happier. Admittedly, someone facing severe poverty or routine physical danger has a lot of reason to be unhappy; better life circumstances will make a big difference for them. However, if you live in a safe place and have enough to meet your needs, getting more is not likely to make a significant improvement in your happiness.

*A large portion of your happiness is under your control, and you can choose to take actions and think in ways that make you happier.

That is, you can learn to be happier. Any learning requires effort and commitment, but it is within your reach

Much of the book is a discussion of strategies for becoming happier that are backed by research. You do not need to try them all. You can play to your strengths and use strategies that fit your values. The book contains a test to help you identify the strategies that may be most useful to you. You can skip straight to the relevant chapters to find things you can do and get started right away, though reading the other chapters will be useful because you may discover other things in them that are fitting for you.

Lyuobomirsky’s strategies suggest there is more than one kind of happiness and more than one way to be happy. Everyone is unique, so if something that works for someone else isn’t working for you, there is still a route to happiness for you, and you might find it in this book. For myself, I’ve noticed that my perspectives and priorities have changed over the course of my life, and the amount that various things contribute to or detract from my happiness have changed as well.

If you’re interested in this book, you may also be interested in

The Beethoven Factor by Paul Pearsall

Happier by Tal Ben-Shahar

Happiness is a Choice by Barry Neil Kaufman

The 100 Simple Secrets of Happy People by David Niven

100 Ways to Happiness by Timothy Sharp

The Relaxation Response by Herbert Benson with Miriam Z. Klipper

Solve for Happy by Mo Gawdat

Thanks! by Robert A. Emmons

Lyubomirsky, Sonja. The How of Happiness: A Scientific Approach to Getting the Life You Want. New York: Penguin, 2007.

Get Your Sh*t Together by Sarah Knight

The title of Sarah Knight’s book, Get Your Sh*t Together, suggests what is inside. There is cursing on practically every page. There is tongue-in-cheek humor. There is advice on how to set goals and achieve them.

If you’ve read many books on self-help, getting organized, setting goals and success, Knight’s recommendations won’t be new to you. However, many will find her style helpful and appealing. She writes with directness, simplicity and humor.

She has a take on motivation that you don’t see everywhere: focus on what annoys you. A lot of people advise that you conjure up a richly detailed vision of the life you want. That is hard. The vision can seem out of reach. You don’t have to imagine annoying things; they are right there bothering you. If you can do something to reduce the annoyance, you’ll want to, and if some series of steps will eliminate it, they’ll seem worth the effort. The life you want may reveal itself as you shed the annoying things you want to get rid of.

Once you have a goal (stop this annoying thing by taking some action), you need a plan that breaks into manageable steps. You’ll also need to set aside time to give your energy and attention to taking those steps. It also takes commitment to follow through.

Because it takes time to get things done, you may need to make time by spending less of it on other things. Knight discusses priorities. I’ve observed that the people who are the worst at having it together seem to have no priorities. If you can learn to spend more time on what is really important, and focus on it, you’ll be way ahead.

Knight’s book isn’t for everyone. The cursing starts in the title and doesn’t let up. However, I appreciate her brevity, simplicity and directness. The concepts are easy to grasp; the challenge is in implementing them.

If you’re interested in this book, you may also be interested in

The Procrastination Equation by Piers Steel

Secrets You Keep from Yourself by Dan Neuharth

Succeed by Heidi Grant Halvorson

You are a Badass by Jen Sincero

Knight, Sarah. Get Your Sh*t Together: How to Stop Worrying About What You Should Do So You Can Finish What You Need to Do and Start Doing What You Want to Do. New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2016.

Lift by Daniel Kunitz

Trends in fitness in the 2000s have given to new sports, such as the CrossFit games, and new athletic entertainments in the form of American Ninja Warrior. Daniel Kunitz traces the rise of this new fitness culture, which he calls New Frontier Fitness or NFF, in his Lift.

 Kunitz goes back to the ancient Greeks, who revered physical beauty and fitness and considered it the obligation of citizens (only men were citizens) to keep themselves in good shape in order to serve and defend their nation. The Greek word for this training was askesis.

 The English word asceticism has it root in askesis. While we now associate it with self-denial, the Greeks associated it with purposeful self-discipline. Participants in NFF have embraced this old-fashioned asceticism, training purposefully with benefits that spill into all areas of life.

 As an aside, Christian asceticism is often associated with self-denial, sometime extreme, for the purpose of penance. When I read Paul’s writing on denial of self, I see it described in the context of disciplining oneself with the purpose of living a higher life. He even uses athletes as an example. He is not denigrating athletes for training for a worthless prize. He is reminding Christians that they have and even more important calling that deserves at least an equal commitment and effort.

 Of course, few cultures since then have reveled in physical achievement. Exercise at times has been considered dangerous to health. Weightlifting too much resembles labor, a task for lower-class people that wealthy and middle-class people were reluctant to embrace. Even when exercise became more acceptable, starting in the 1960s and taking off in the 1980s, the focus was often on appearance.

 NFF is not concerned with appearance. It is concerned with performance. If one trains to perform well, appearance will take care of itself.

 Because of this focus on function, NFF eschews many of the machines found in gyms. Exercises resemble tasks one might actually perform, though with greater intensity intended to push skill and physical capacity. NFF participants train like an athlete, constantly reaching to do better, not to look better but to live better. As Kunitz says several times, they are “training for life.”

 From a historical point of view, Lift covers a lot of the same ground as Making the American Body by Jonathan Black. However, Kunitz is specifically intending to give context to NFF and its influence on how people think about being fit today.

 Though Kunitz is a professional writer, he is also a fan of NFF. He practices CrossFit, which he discusses in the book, and Olympic lifting. He also talks to people who train in other functional regimes like parkour and sweatier forms of yoga.

 If you’re interested in this book, you may also be interested in

The Age of Edison by Ernest Freeburg

Arthur & George by Julian Barnes

Empires of Light by Jill Jonnes

Mr. America by Mark Adams

The Power Makers by Maury Klein

The Real World of Sherlock Holmes by Peter Costello

The Ten-Cent Plague by David Hajdu

 Kunitz, Daniel. Lift: Fitness Culture, from Naked Greeks and Acrobats to Jazzercise and Ninja Warriors. New York: Harper Wave, 2016.

Feeding the Fire by Mark E. Eberhart

Mankind is hungry for energy. The United States is a huge consumer of energy, and our lifestyle depends on it. This makes us, and other developed countries, vulnerable. The burning of fossil fuels is leading to a changing climate that could have many negative ramifications. Our dependence on foreign sources of fuel, especially oil, have embroiled us in wars oversees and made us uncomfortable allies with nations that do not share our values.

Chemistry professor Mark E. Eberhart suggests that we need a good energy diet. Unfortunately, after spending a couple of chapters of Feeding the Fire setting up the idea, he ends up having only a little to say about an energy diet in the final chapter of the book.

In between, however, he tells an interesting history of energy from the big bang to our age. He also provides a primer in thermodynamics aimed at an audience that hasn’t studied science or engineering. If the book had purported to be about that, I’d probably be speaking about it in glowing terms. If you’re looking for a book that explains energy and how it works that is written for an audience with little scientific background, this is a good option.

Though most of the book concerns itself with the dispersal of energy through the universe and the development of technology, the energy diet is mainly a matter of policy. The central element of Eberhart’s vision is an “energy-industrial complex” modeled on the way the U.S. military works with industry on the long-term development, delivery and reliability of technology. U.S. energy policy is so disjointed that in practice we have no policy, but with imagination and discipline (and arguably the setting aside of partisanship for matters of national security that transcend it) we could develop a comprehensive policy that gets our efforts moving toward a more secure, efficient and cleaner future. It doesn’t even need to be a perfect policy, just a commitment to take specific actions and set specific standards to make things better over time.

Eberhart has some specific recommendations, especially related to the development of electric vehicles and supporting technolgies. In the 12 years since Feeding the Fire was published, we’ve made some headway on many of them. This is in spite of the fact that we still do not have a comprehensive energy policy.

If you’re interested in this book, you may also be interested in

A Professor, a President, and a Meteor by Cathryn J. Prince

The Age of Edison by Ernest Freeburg

The Astounding, the Amazing, and the Unknown by Paul Malmont

Bottled Lightning by Seth Fletcher

The Computers of Star Trek by Lois Gresh & Robert Weinberg

Empires of Light by Jill Jonnes

How We Got to Now by Steven Johnson

I Am Spock by Leonard Nimoy

My Inventions by Nikola Tesla

The Power Makers by Maury Klein

The Powerhouse by Steve Levine

Rust by Jonathan Waldman

Eberhart, Mark E. Feeding the Fire: The Lost History and Uncertain Future of Mankind’s Energy Addiction. New York: Harmony Books, 2007.

Making the American Body by Jonathan Black

In Making the American Body, journalist Jonathan Black explores the history of health and fitness from aerobics to Zumba. Promotion of physical fitness goes back to the founding of the United States; Black notes that Benjamin Franklin praised the use of dumbbells. Franklin was known to be a fan of swimming, too. It began to gain some momentum in the middle 1800s when German immigrants brought the gymnasium (they called it a Turnverein) to the U.S.

I was draw to the book because it has a touch of Missouriana in the person of Bernarr Macfadden, self-proclaimed “Father of Physical Culture.” Macfadden had a classic story of the early bodybuilder. He was a sick, weak kid from the Ozarks who was transformed into a paragon of masculine pulchritude by his commitment to weight training, healthy eating and clean living. Unlike some of his contemporaries, Macfadden believed clean living included an active sex life and he campaigned against prudery. His magazines, headed by Physical Culture, featured photographs of nearly naked men and women in swimsuits.

Fitness promotion is a small world, and many of its leading figures are connected. Macfadden organized a contest (probably fixed) that crowned Charles Atlas the “World’s Most Beautiful Man.” Atlas’ ads in pulp magazines and comic books are probably some of the most well-known ever, especially the bully of the beach ad. The story of this ad, told in comics form, is based on a real event in Atlas’ life when he was shamed by a muscular life guard for his scrawny form and weakness while on a date at the beach.

Macfadden and many others were inspired by Prussian strongman Sandow. They saw him at the Chicago Columbian Exposition, where his show was produced by Florenz Ziegfeld, Jr.

California became a focus of health and fitness trend that would spread across the country. Santa Monica’s Muscle Beach was a place for weight lifters and gymnasts to have fun and show off. Steve Reeves, known for playing Hercules in several films, was a product of Muscle Beach. Jack LaLanne, another wimpy kid transformed, opened gyms, brought workouts to television, and encouraged women to exercise and do strength training.

Other trends gained popularity, especially fitness focused on cardiovascular health. This brought into popular culture Dr. Kenneth Cooper, a physician to astronauts whose 1968 book Aerobics launched an industry. That industry provided a career for Richard Simmons and a second career for Jane Fonda, who was the first to emphasize exercise as a way for women to lose weight (though this was an unspoken appeal long before the 1970s). Bodybuilding made a comeback, though, especially fueled by the popularity of Arnold Schwarzenegger.

I’m not especially interested in the health and fitness industry, but I found this book to be very interesting. It provides a historical context for many of the health and fitness trends that are still part of American culture.

If you’re interested in this book, you may also be interested in

American Nerd by Benjamin Nugent

Empires of Light by Jill Jonnes

The Fifth Heart by Dan Simmons

The Power Makers by Maury Klein

The Relaxation Response by Herbert Benson with Miriam Z. Klipper

The Ten-Cent Plague by David Hajdu

Black, Jonathan. Making the American Body: The Remarkable Saga of the Men and Women Whose Feats, Feuds, and Passions Shaped Fitness History. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2013.

The Last Self-Help Book You'll Ever Need by Paul Pearsall

Self-help books are baloney. Psychologist Paul Pearsall didn’t go that far, but he encouraged readers of his book The Last Self-Help Book You’ll Ever Need to have a healthy skepticism about the advice and claims of self-help books. Much of the standard advice in the genre is unsupported by research and sometimes just wrong.

Pearsall’s chief criticism of self-help is its focus on the personal and individual. He argued that there is more joy and fulfillment, along with better solutions to our problems, to be found in the interpersonal and relational aspects of life.

Good relationships are largely a matter of the value you place in them. If you want to others to like you, find ways to like them first. To get love, give love. To find a partner, become someone who would be a good partner. Look for the best in others and overlook their faults. Lasting, loving relationships are based on commitment, not passing, emotional passion.

Another important aspect of Pearsall’s perspective is that there is much to be said for accepting life as it is, good and bad, instead of buying into self-help’s striving for the perfect life.

Life is never going to be perfect anyway. There is no reason to make yourself crazy trying. Instead, aim for a good life of deep enjoyment and engagement. Life is chaotic. Remain calm and learn to enjoy the messy reality. Practice mindfulness; accept the facts of life as it is, but do not passively accept the interpretation you may receive from others. You find the great pleasures and great challenges of living in thinking for yourself.

The themes of relationships and mindful acceptance run through all the chapters of the book. In addition to those areas already mentioned, Pearsall address health and work.

If you’ve read a lot of self-help, you may feel burdened by the gap between where you are and where self-help authors say you can be. Pearsall’s book may be an antidote for that. At the very least, reading it may put things in perspective and help you give yourself a break.

Paul Pearsall also wrote

The Beethoven Factor

Toxic Success

If you’re interested in this book, you may also be interested in

The Road Less Traveled by M. Scott Peck

Solve for Happy by Mo Gawdat

Pearsall, Paul. The Last Self-Help Book You’ll Ever Need. New York: Basic Books, 2006.

The Road Less Traveled by M. Scott Peck

Spiritual growth is the heart of mental health as described by psychiatrist M. Scott Peck in his book The Road Less Traveled. The path of growth Peck describes is not often taken because it involves pain, discipline and stretching. The rewards of this life are great, but they are obtained through effort.

People forgo growth, and sometime develop mental problems, because they refuse to accept a difficult fact: life is hard. Unfortunately, they often put themselves through a lot of extra pain for a longer period than they might have suffered if they would accept and deal with challenges in the first place.

Later in the book, Peck characterizes this as a kind of laziness. It is refusal to extend oneself and put effort into mastering life. The extension of oneself for the purpose of spiritual growth (your own or another’s) is the essence of love in Peck’s view. Laziness is the opposite of love.

Love is one of the main elements of spiritual growth. This love is not primarily emotion. It is commitment. It is respect for others and the distinction of others as unique individuals. It it is the effort one puts into growing and helping others to grow.

Emotions are important. They are fuel for action. To be effective in supporting growth, emotions must be disciplined.

“Passion is feeling of great depth. The fact that a feeling is uncontrolled is no indication that it is in any way deeper than a feeling that is disciplined.” M. Scott Peck, The Road Less Traveled

Discipline is another major practice for growth. Discipline is not beating up on yourself. It is accepting responsibility for your life and dealing with reality. It is the practice of giving up things for the purpose of taking hold of more valuable things. Proper discipline is not rigid but it helps us to be flexible and enlarge ourselves.

Love and discipline work together. As Peck frames it, successful psychotherapy occurs when a patient is ready to discipline himself and a therapist can create a relationship of love that supports that discipline.

This is just the beginning of growth. In the latter chapter of the book, Peck shifts to other elements, particularly religion. For Peck, religion is your conception is your conception of how the world works. Even a scientific worldview is a religion.

Religion is also where we can grapple with mystery, especially the mystery of grace, which is important to growth. Peck sees grace in many areas, such as serendipity and the strange knowingness of our unconscious minds.

If you’re interested in this book, you may also be interested in

Get Smart! by Brian Tracy

The Way of the Superior Man by David Deida

Peck, M. Scott. The Road Less Traveled: A New Psychology of Love, Traditional Values and Spiritual Growth. New York: Touchstone, 1978.

Small Move, Big Change by Caroline L. Arnold

In Small Move, Big Change, Caroline L. Arnold addresses those who have made big resolutions and failed to keep them. That is a large audience.

Without getting into depth about the first chapter, the reason we fail in our resolutions is habit. When we want to change behavior, we come against the resistance of all our already ingrained behaviors. The larger the change we try to make, the larger is the resistance we experience.

Arnold’s solution is what she calls microresolutions. This is exactly what it sounds like, a commitment to a very small change. It is very important that a microresolution be easy. It should be so small, simple, and easy that you’ll do it in spite of your old habits. Do it consistently, and in a short while it will be a new habit.

There are seven rules to making a good microresolution. The first is already mentioned: make it easy. It should be specific and measurable (you’ve probably seen this before if you’ve read other books about goal-setting). The new behavior should have intrinsic value that provides immediate rewards (for most of us a small reward now is more motivating than the big reward down the road). It should be personalized to the user. It should be liked to a cue. It should resonate with the user (and generally be stated in positive terms). Finally, only take on two microresolutions at a time; you don’t want to exhaust your willpower.

I especially like the suggestion to link the new behavior to a cue. In reviewing my successes in making a change, I’ve often tied the new thing I wanted to do to a trigger. Many of our habitual behaviors are triggered by cues. These cues could be the calendar, the clock, a feeling, a sensory experience, a word, or another behavior. Our cues sometimes aren’t even logically connected to the behaviors they trigger. This is a powerful takeaway for me. In my future goal-setting, I’ll intentionally think of cues that might make a good trigger for the new behavior I want to implement. Using cues allows one to piggyback new habits onto old ones.

All of Arnolds rules are intended to do the same thing: take advantage of the way we form habits. Instead of unconsciously developing habits that may or may not help us, we can intentionally form habits that, bit by bit, move us I the direction we want to go.

If you’re interested in this book, you may also be interested in

One Small Step Can Change Your Life by Robert Maurer

Succeed by Heidi Grant Halvorson

This Year I Will... by M. J. Ryan

Arnold, Caroline L. Small Move, Big Change: Using Microresolutions to Transform Your Life Permanently. New York: Viking, 2014.

The Genius in All of Us by David Shenk

David Shenk has good news. Geniuses aren’t born, and very few of us have genetic limitation on our capacities.  Just to make sure you get it, his book is entitled The Genius in All of Us.

Shenk challenges the notion that genius, talent, and the potential to excel in a field is something a few people are born with, lucky people who hit the jackpot in the genetic lottery.  He is not entirely an advocate of nurture in the nature-versus-nurture debate.  He looks at new science that suggests that that is a false notion to begin with.  Traits, including intelligence, develop form the interaction of genes and the environment.

Genes are not a blueprint that determine out traits.  Genes influence our reaction to the environment.   The environment influences the expression of our genes.  It’s complex.  Shenk devote a chapter to epigenetics.  This is material in our cells that protect and support the function of our genes.  Our epigenes influence the expression of our genes, are influenced by the environment, and most astounding are hereditable.  Environmental and behavioral factors can change the epigenes in ways that are passed on to offspring for generations and affect the expression of genes in those offspring.

Unless we have some unusual genetic disorder, the lesson of this book is that our genes are just one card in the hand we are dealt, and genes are not necessarily the most important card.  Genes are important, but so are a lot of other things.  Our traits are malleable, shaped by genes, environment, and behavior, and to the degree that we can influence those things we can change our traits.  We can become geniuses.

The bad news is the road to genius is not an easy one.  Mozart and Michael Jordon have in common that they put in a lot of time over a many years deliberately practicing and improving their skills.  Beethoven and Yo-Yo Ma may seem like born prodigies, but they were surrounded my music, music teachers, encouragement, challenges, competition, high expectations, and opportunities from birth.  Abundant practice and continuing improvement from early childhood helped them become very competent musicians as children, and many more years of deliberate practice, commitment, and mentoring resulted in the genius they exhibited as adults.

Based on this, Shenk presents a chapter on how to become a genius.  Genius may not be quite the right word, especially if you starting something later in life after years of thinking you had little ability.  However, I think his advice is likely to lead to great improvement, even above normal success and excellence.  The first piece of advice is to find your motivation.  If you have the motivation to devote a lot of time to practice, and the commitment push yourself to always seek improvement, you will get better and with time will be excellent.  Shenk also has a lot to say about how this information can help parents and educators see the potential in children and contribute to the development of their traits and their success in any field.

I was very impressed with this surprisingly short book.  Actually, if you include the extensive notes, which are worth reading, it is not a short book.  It opened my eyes to a new, and I think more fruitful, way of looking at the way people develop.

Shenk, David.  The Genius in All of Us:  Why Everything You’ve Been Told About Genetic, Talent, and IQ Is Wrong.  New York: Doubleday, 2010.

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The Most Effective Organization in the U.S. by Robert A. Watson & Ben Brown

Watson, Robert A., & Ben Brown.  The Most Effective Organization in the U.S.: Leadership Secrets of the Salvation Army.  New York: Crown Business, 2001.

What is The Salvation Army?  Is it a service organization or a church?  Yes.  That is, it is both.  In The Most Effective Organization in the United States, former National Commander Robert A. Watson, with Ben Brown, writes much about the organization’s dual mission of preaching the good news of Jesus Christ and helping needy people.  The Salvation Army would say this is a single mission because they so closely relate saving people with serving them.

The title of the book is taken for Peter Drucker’s praise for the Army.  The authors do not for a moment shy away from the Christian history, motivation and mission of the organization.  Even so, this book is aimed at business and organizational leaders who want their companies to be more effective.

It’s good to start with this focus on mission.  The Army is extremely mission focused.  Everything they do and the way they do it, including how they organize, manage and lead, is done to achieve the mission.  The first lesson in effectiveness is that an organization needs a transcendent mission, something greater than making money that can bring purpose to people’s lives.

Clear mission allows the Army to attract great people.  People need meaning and purpose in life, and finding people with personal missions that align with the organization’s leads to passionate employees.  They’re not just employees, they’re partners.  They also see their clients, often people in very bad situations, as potential partners.  People who have been transformed by Christ and who know the value of the help they received from the Army, when they are on their feet again, are potentially very committed and motivated volunteers, employees and officers.

As one would hope from a Christian organization, the Army places a high value on integrity.  Integrity is closely linked to accountability.  They are very careful to assure that all they do advances their mission.  Likewise, they want their people, especially officers, to live their values.  They also want their constituents to trust that they will deliver on their promises.  The Army careful about accountability.  Their local leaders have extraordinary latitude, but they also have great responsibility and are answerable for themselves and their programs.  They are open and transparent so clients and donors know that the resources entrusted to them are used well.

One of the things that impressed me about the Army is that their commitment to mission and accountability makes it easier for them to say no.  If it doesn’t fit, or if it isn’t sustainable, they let it go.  Even existing programs are not sacred.  If it’s not working, if it begins to distract from the mission, it is dropped even if a lot as already been invested in it.

I enjoyed this book much more that most business books.  I admit it appealed to my own sensibilities.  It’s also a glimpse inside an organization that most people know relatively little about.  The authors explain how the Army accomplishes so much with its resources with so little management structure.  They’re way is adaptable to business, but probably requires a lot more discipline than many top business managers may have.

If you’re interested in this book, you may also be interested in

Revved! by Harry Paul and Ross Reck

Titus

Vital Friends by Tom Rath

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