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17. The Happiness of Pursuit: Finding the Quest That Will Bring Purpose to Your Life

Rating:  ☆☆☆☆

Recommended by:  

Author:  Chris Guillebeau

Genre:  Non-Fiction, Self-Improvement, Happiness

Info:  304 pages, published September 9, 2014

Format:  Book

Summary 

The Happiness of Pursuit is all about quests and the people who set them.  Chris Guillebeau, the author, became interested in quests when he set out to visit all of the countries in the world by age thirty-five.  The people and quests he profiles are fascinating and diverse:  exploration, athletics, artistic pursuits to name a few.  The “questers” profiled included a suburban mom pursuing a wildly ambitious culinary project, a DJ producing the world’s largest symphony, a young widower completing the tasks his wife would never accomplish, and a teenager crossing an entire ocean alone – as well as a do-it-yourselfer tackling M.I.T.’s computer-science course, a nerd turning himself into real-life James Bond, and scores of others writing themselves into the record books.  The Happiness of Pursuit also explores the connection between questing and long-term happiness, i.e. how going after something in a methodical way enhances our lives.

 

Quotes

“The very basic core of a man’s living spirit is his passion for adventure.”

“Not everyone needs to believe in your dream, but you do.”

“a quest can bring purpose and meaning to your life,”

“Your comfort zone may be more like a cage you can’t escape from than a safe place you can retreat to.”

“Don’t just do something “fun.” Find a way to create structure around a project and build in a timeline.”

“What’s the difference between a hobby and a quest? You can stop thinking about a hobby, but a quest becomes a total fascination.”

“If you want to make every day an adventure, all you have to do is prioritize adventure. It has to become more important than routine.”

“The most important thing about art is to work. Nothing else matters except sitting down every day and trying.” So, too, for a quest. The most important thing is continuing to make progress.”

“A good plan allows for plenty of spontaneity and room for change – but without a plan at all, it’s difficult to work toward something significant over time.”

“Discontent is the first necessity of progress. —THOMAS A. EDISON”

“So many people live within unhappy circumstances and yet will not take the initiative to change their situation because they are conditioned to a life of security, conformity, and conservatism, all of which may appear to give one peace of mind, but in reality nothing is more damaging to the adventurous spirit within a man than a secure future.”

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13. Lean In: Women, Work and the Will to Lead

Rating:  ☆☆☆☆

Recommended by:  Adrienne Bulinkski

Author:  Sheryl Sandberg

Genre:  Non-Fiction, Self-Improvement, Memoir

Info:  387 pages, published March 11, 2013

Format:  Audio Book

Summary 

When published in 2013, Lean In, Sheryl Sandberg’s provocative call to action about women and power quickly became part of the zeitgeist and the subject of much discussion among professional women.  The book grew out of an electrifying TED talk Sandberg gave in 2010, which has been viewed nearly 2,000,000 times, in which she expressed her concern that progress for women in achieving major leadership positions had stalled.  In Lean In, Sandberg relates humorous personal anecdotes, personal lessons on confidence and leadership, and practical advice for women based on research, data, her own experiences, and the experiences of other women of all ages.  Lean In wrestles with the great questions of modern life and Sandberg’s message to women is don’t sell yourself short and give up before you even try.  

 

Quotes

“Done is better than perfect.”

“Careers are a jungle gym, not a ladder.”

“When looking for a life partner, my advice to women is date all of them: the bad boys, the cool boys, the commitment-phobic boys, the crazy boys. But do not marry them. The things that make the bad boys sexy do not make them good husbands. When it comes time to settle down, find someone who wants an equal partner. Someone who thinks women should be smart, opinionated and ambitious. Someone who values fairness and expects or, even better, wants to do his share in the home. These men exist and, trust me, over time, nothing is sexier.”

“I have never met a woman, or man, who stated emphatically, “Yes, I have it all.'” Because no matter what any of us has—and how grateful we are for what we have—no one has it all.” 

“Fortune does favor the bold and you’ll never know what you’re capable of if you don’t try.” 

“Women need to shift from thinking “I’m not ready to do that” to thinking “I want to do that- and I’ll learn by doing it.” 

“we compromise our career goals to make room for partners and children who may not even exist yet” 

“Leadership is about making others better as a result of your presence and making sure that impact lasts in your absence.” (Harvard Business School definition of leadership)” 

“There is no perfect fit when you’re looking for the next big thing to do. You have to take opportunities and make an opportunity fit for you, rather than the other way around. The ability to learn is the most important quality a leader can have.”

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12. The Happiness Advantage: The Seven Principles of Positive Psychology That Fuel Success and Performance at Work

Rating:  ☆☆☆1/2

Recommended by:   

Author:  Shawn Achor

Genre:  Non-Fiction, Self-Improvement, Happiness

Info:   256 pages, published 2010

Format:  Book

Summary 

Most people believe that if they work hard, they will be successful and that once they are successful, they will be happy.  In The Happiness Advantage, human potential consultant and former Harvard professor Shawn Achor argues that the conventional wisdom is backwards, i.e. people who start off happy are more likely to succeed while people who start off unhappy are more likely to fail.  This conclusion comes from Achor’s own research which included an empirical survey of 1,600 high achieving undergraduates at Harvard as well as more than 200 scientific studies on nearly 275,000 people. Achor is a proponent of positive psychology, which draws lessons from successful people rather than the failures.  College freshmen who were shown to be happy had a higher income 19 years later than their unhappy classmates.  Other experiments showed that happiness led to more creativity and greater vision.

 

Quotes

“Happiness is not the belief that we don’t need to change; it’s the realization that we can.”

“When our brains constantly scan for and focus on the positive, we profit from three of the most important tools available to us: happiness, gratitude, and optimism. The role happiness plays should be obvious—the more you pick up on the positive around you, the better you’ll feel—and we’ve already seen the advantages to performance that brings. The second mechanism at work here is gratitude, because the more opportunities for positivity we see, the more grateful we become. Psychologist Robert Emmons, who has spent nearly his entire career studying gratitude, has found that few things in life are as integral to our well-being.  Countless other studies have shown that consistently grateful people are more energetic, emotionally intelligent, forgiving, and less likely to be depressed, anxious, or lonely. And it’s not that people are only grateful because they are happier, either; gratitude has proven to be a significant cause of positive outcomes. When researchers pick random volunteers and train them to be more grateful over a period of a few weeks, they become happier and more optimistic, feel more socially connected, enjoy better quality sleep, and even experience fewer headaches than control groups.”

“..the more you believe in your own ability to success the more likely it is that you will.”

“The fastest way to disengage an employee is to tell him his work is meaningful only because of the paycheck.”

“Constantly scanning the world for the negative comes with a great cost. It undercuts our creativity, raises our stress levels, and lowers our motivation and ability to accomplish goals.”

“Each one of us is like that butterfly the Butterfly Effect . And each tiny move toward a more positive mindset can send ripples of positivity through our organizations our families and our communities.”

“the key to daily practice is to put your desired actions as close to the path of least resistance as humanly possible. Identify the activation energy—the time, the choices, the mental and physical effort they require—and then reduce it. If you can cut the activation energy for those habits that lead to success, even by as little as 20 seconds at a time, it won’t be long before you start reaping their benefits.”

“For me, happiness is the joy we feel striving after our potential.”

“Focusing on the good isn’t just about overcoming our inner grump to see the glass half full. It’s about opening our minds to the ideas and opportunities that will help us be more productive, effective, and successful at work and in life.”

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11. Find Your Balance Point

Rating:  ☆☆

Recommended by:   

Author:  Brian Tracy

Genre:  Non-Fiction, Self-Improvement

Info:  128 pages, published August 25, 2015

Format:  E-Book (Zinio)

Summary 

Author Brian Tracy argues that each of us has a balance point where we feel in perfect harmony, grounded, happy, connected to others, and where our mind, body and spirit are in alignment, i.e, when “you feel at one with the universe.” He then posits that imbalance in our lives results not so much from doing too much but from doing too much of the wrong things. He then provides a process that enables you to sort out what is most important to you from among the many activities you could focus on. When you can efficiently identify and accomplish what really matters to you, you’ve found your balance point.

Quotes

“The two most important days in your life are the day you are born and the day you find out why.”

“Fully 85 percent of your happiness will be determined by having the right people in your life.”

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8. Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity

Rating:  ☆☆

Recommended by:   

Author:  David Allen

Genre:  Non-Fiction, Self-Improvement

Info:  288 pages, published January 1, 2001

Format:  Book

Summary 

Getting Things Done (“GTD “) is a time-management method which rests on the idea of moving planned tasks and projects out of the mind by recording them externally and then breaking them into actionable work items.  This allows one to focus attention on taking action on tasks, instead of on recalling them.

Allen instructs the reader to pick an “incomplete,” i.e.  what most annoys, distracts, or interests you?  Write down a description of the successful outcome in one sentence.  What is your definition of “done”?  Write down the next action to move toward the desired outcome.  Notice how you feel after the exercise compared to before it.

He claims stress can be reduced and productivity increased by putting reminders about everything you are not working on into a trusted system external to your mind.  In this way, you can work on the task at hand without distraction from the “incompletes.”  The system in GTD requires you have within easy reach an inbox, a trash can, a filing system for reference material, several lists (detailed below), and a calendar.

These tools can be physical or electronic.  As “stuff” enters your life, it is captured in these tools and processed with the following workflow.

 

Quotes

“If you don’t pay appropriate attention to what has your attention, it will take more of your attention than it deserves.”

“Most people feel best about their work the week before their vacation, but it’s not because of the vacation itself. What do you do the last week before you leave on a big trip? You clean up, close up, clarify, and renegotiate all your agreements with yourself and others. I just suggest that you do this weekly instead of yearly.”

“Everything you’ve told yourself you ought to do, your mind thinks you should do right now. Frankly, as soon add you have two things to do stored in your RAM, you’ve generated personal failure, because you can’t do two things at the same time. This produces an all-pervasive stress factor whose source can’t be pin-pointed.”

“Use your mind to think about things, rather than think of them. You want to be adding value as you think about projects and people, not simply reminding yourself they exist.”

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7. The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People

Rating:  ☆☆☆☆

Recommended by:   Angela Toppel

Author:  Stephen Covey

Genre:  Non-Fiction, Self-Improvement

Info:  380 pages, published August 15, 1989

Reading Format:  Audio Book

Summary

Steven Covey has devised a list of seven habits that will transform your life:

Habit 1 

Be Proactive.  This means taking responsibility for your life. You can’t keep blaming everything on your parents or grandparents. They don’t blame genetics, circumstances, conditions, or conditioning for their behavior. They know they choose their behavior. One of the most important things you choose is what you say.

Your language is a good indicator of how you see yourself. A proactive person uses proactive language–I can, I will, I prefer, etc. Instead of reacting to or worrying about conditions over which they have little or no control, proactive people focus their time and energy on things they can control. The problems, challenges, and opportunities we face fall into two areas–Circle of Concern and Circle of Influence.  Proactive people focus their efforts on their Circle of Influence.

They work on the things they can do something about: health, children, problems at work. Reactive people focus their efforts in the Circle of Concern–things over which they have little or no control: the national debt, terrorism, the weather. Gaining an awareness of the areas in which we expend our energies in is a giant step in becoming proactive.

Habit 2

Begin with the End in Mind.  Habit 2 is based on imagination–the ability to envision in your mind what you cannot at present see with your eyes. It is based on the principle that all things are created twice. There is a mental (first) creation, and a physical (second) creation. The physical creation follows the mental, just as a building follows a blueprint.

If you don’t make a conscious effort to visualize who you are and what you want in life, then you empower other people and circumstances to shape you and your life by default.  Begin with the End in Mind means to begin each day, task, or project with a clear vision of your desired direction and destination, and then continue by flexing your proactive muscles to make things happen.

One of the best ways to incorporate Habit 2 into your life is to develop a Personal Mission Statement. It focuses on what you want to be and do. It is your plan for success. It reaffirms who you are, puts your goals in focus, and moves your ideas into the real world.

Habit 3

Put First Things First.  To live a more balanced existence, you have to recognize that not doing everything that comes along is okay. There’s no need to overextend yourself.  All it takes is realizing that it’s all right to say no when necessary and then focus on your highest priorities.  Habit 3 is where Habits 1 and 2 come together.  

It deals with many of the questions addressed in the field of time management. But that’s not all it’s about. Habit 3 is about life management as well–your purpose, values, roles, and priorities.  First things are those things you, personally, find of most worth.  If you put first things first, you are organizing and managing time and events according to the personal priorities you established in Habit 2.

Habit 4

Think Win/Win.  Win-win sees life as a cooperative arena, not a competitive one. Win-win is a frame of mind and heart that constantly seeks mutual benefit in all human interactions. Win-win means agreements or solutions are mutually beneficial and satisfying.

A person or organization that approaches conflicts with a win-win attitude possesses three vital character traits:  Integrity: sticking with your true feelings, values, and commitments, Maturity: expressing your ideas and feelings with courage and consideration for the ideas and feelings of others and an Abundance Mentality: believing there is plenty for everyone.

Habit 5

Seek First to Understand, Then to Be Understood.  If you’re like most people, you probably seek first to be understood; you want to get your point across. And in doing so, you may ignore the other person completely, pretend that you’re listening, selectively hear only certain parts of the conversation or attentively focus on only the words being said, but miss the meaning entirely.

Habit 6

 Synergize.  Synergize is the habit of creative cooperation. It is teamwork, open-mindedness, and the adventure of finding new solutions to old problems. But it doesn’t just happen on its own. It’s a process, and through that process, people bring all their personal experience and expertise to the table.

Together, they can produce far better results that they could individually.

Habit 7  

Sharpen the Saw.  Sharpen the Saw means preserving and enhancing the greatest asset you have–you. It means having a balanced program for self-renewal in the four areas of your life: physical, social/emotional, mental, and spiritual. Here are some examples of activities:

Beneficial eating, exercising, and resting, Social/Emotional:  Making social and meaningful connections with others, Mental:  Learning, reading, writing, and teaching, Spiritual:  Spending time in nature, expanding spiritual self through meditation, music, art, prayer, or service.  As you renew yourself in each of the four areas, you create growth and change in your life. Sharpen the Saw keeps you fresh so you can continue to practice the other six habits. You increase your capacity to produce and handle the challenges around you. Without this renewal, the body becomes weak, the mind mechanical, the emotions raw, the spirit insensitive, and the person selfish.

 

Quotes 

 “Start with the end in mind.”

“But how do you love when you don’t love?”

“If I really want to improve my situation, I can work on the one thing over which I have control – myself.”

“There’s no better way to inform and expand you mind on a regular basis than to get into the habit of reading good literature.”

“Happiness, like unhappiness, is a proactive choice.”

“Habit is the intersection of knowledge (what to do), skill (how to do), and desire (want to do).”

“The ability to subordinate an impulse to a value is the essence of the proactive person.”

“My friend , love is a verb. Love – the feeling – is a fruit of love, the verb. So love her. Serve her. Sacrifice. Listen to her. Empathize. Appreciate. Affirm her. Are you willing to do that?”

“When the trust account is high, communication is easy, instant, and effective.”

“But until a person can say deeply and honestly, “I am what I am today because of the choices I made yesterday,” that person cannot say, “I choose otherwise.”

“Sow a thought, reap an action; sow an action, reap a habit; sow a habit, reap a character; sow a character, reap a destiny.”

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6. Stumbling on Happiness

Rating:  ☆☆☆

Recommended by:  

Author:  Daniel Gilbert

Genre:  Non-Fiction, Self-Improvement, Happiness

Info: 336 pages, published January 1, 2006

Format:  Book

 

Summary 

Gilbert’s central thesis is that, through perception and cognitive biases, people imagine the future poorly, in particular what will make them happy.  He argues that imagination fails in three ways:

(1)  Imagination tends to add and remove details, but people do not realize that key details may be fabricated or missing from the imagined scenario.

(2) Imagined futures (and pasts) are more like the present than they actually will be (or were).

(3) Imagination fails to realize that things will feel different once they actually happen—most notably, the psychological immune system will make bad things feel not so bad as they are imagined to feel.

Gilbert then recommends using other people’s experiences to predict the future, instead of imagining it, since people are very similar in many of their experiences.

 

Quotes

“Our brain accepts what the eyes see and our eye looks for whatever our brain wants.” 

“The fact that we often judge the pleasure of an experience by its ending can cause us to make some curious choices.”

“Impact is rewarding. Mattering makes us happy.”

“In short, we derive support for our preferred conclusions by listening to the words that we put in the mouths of people who have already been preselected for their willingness to say what we want to hear.”

“Economies thrive when individuals strive, but because individuals will only strive for their own happiness, it is essential that they mistakenly believe that producing and consuming are routes to personal well-being.”

“Why isn’t it fun to watch a videotape of last night’s football game even when we don’t know who won? Because the fact that the game has already been played precludes the possibility that our cheering will somehow penetrate the television, travel through the cable system, find its way to the stadium, and influence the trajectory of the ball as it hurtles toward the goalposts!”

“Psychologists call this habituation, economists call it declining marginal utility, and the rest of us call it marriage.”

“Indeed, in the long run, people of every age and in every walk of life seem to regret “not” having done things much more than they regret things they “did”, which is why the most popular regrets include not going to college, not grasping profitable business opportunities, and not spending enough time with family and friends.”

“The belief-transmission network of which we are a part cannot operate without a continuously replenished supply of people to do the transmitting, thus the belief that children are a source of happiness becomes a part of our cultural wisdom simply because the opposite belief unravels the fabric of any society that holds it.”

“We treat our future selves as though they were our children, spending most of the hours of most of our days constructing tomorrows that we hope will make them happy… But our temporal progeny are often thankless. We toil and sweat to give them just what we think they will like, and they quit their jobs, grow their hair, move to or from San Francisco, and wonder how we could ever have been stupid enough to think they’d like that. We fail to achieve the accolades and rewards that we consider crucial to their well-being, and they end up thanking God that things didn’t work out according to our shortsighted, misguided plan.”

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5. The Revenant

Rating:  ☆☆☆1/2

Recommended by:  Lisa Goldberg

Author:  Michael Punke

Genre:  Non-Fiction, History, Western

Info:  272 pages, published June 10, 2002

Format:   Audio Book on Hoopla

 

Summary 

Based on a true incident of heroism in the history of the American West, The Revenant tells the story of Hugh Glass, a Philadelphia-born adventurer and frontiersman.  Glass goes to sea at age 16 and enjoys a charmed life, including several years under the flag of the pirate Jean Lafitte and almost a year as a prisoner of the Loup Pawnee Indians on the plains between the Platte and the Arkansas rivers.

In 1822, at age 36, Glass escapes, finds his way to St. Louis and enters the employ of Capt. Andrew Henry, trapping along tributaries of the Missouri River. After surviving months of hardship and Indian attack, he falls victim to a grizzly bear.  His throat nearly ripped out, scalp hanging loose and deep slashing wounds to his back, shoulder and thigh, Glass appears to be mortally wounded.

Initially, Captain Henry refuses to abandon him and has him carried along the Grand River.  Unfortunately, the terrain soon makes transporting Glass impossible. Even though his death seems certain, Henry details two men, a fugitive mercenary, John Fitzgerald, and young Jim Bridger (who lived to become a frontier hero) to stand watch and bury him.

After several days, Fitzgerald sights hostile Indians. Taking Glass’s rifle and tossing Bridger his knife, Fitzgerald flees with Bridget, leaving Glass. Enraged at being left alone and defenseless, Glass survives against all odds and embarks on a 3,000-mile-long vengeful pursuit of his betrayers.

 

Quotes

“Of course it’s not simple. Who said it was simple? But you know what? Lots of loose ends don’t ever get tied up. Play the hand you’re dealt. Move on.”

“He would crawl until his body could support a crutch.  If he only made three miles a day, so be it. Better to have those three miles behind him than ahead.”

“Though no law was written, there was a crude rule of law, adherence to a covenant that transcended their selfish interests. It was biblical in its depth, and its importance grew with each step into wilderness. When the need arose, a man extended a helping hand to his friends, to his partners, to strangers. In so doing, each knew that his own survival might one day depend upon the reaching grasp of another.”

“Glass shot an irritated glance at Red, who had an uncanny knack for spotting problems and an utter inability for crafting solutions.”

“No mystery surrounded his nickname: he was enormous and he was filthy. Pig smelled so bad it confused people. When they encountered his reek, they looked around him for the source, so implausible did it seem that the odor could emanate from a human.”

“His awe of the mountains grew in the days that followed, as the Yellowstone River led him nearer and nearer. Their great mass was a marker, a benchmark fixed against time itself. Others might feel disquiet at the notion of something so much larger than themselves. But for Glass, there was a sense of sacrament that flowed from the mountains like a font, an immortality that made his quotidian pains seem inconsequential.”

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2. Better than Before: Mastering the Habits of Our Everyday Lives

Rating:  ☆☆☆☆1/2

Recommended by:  Lisa Goldberg

Author:   Gretchen Rubin

Genre:   Non-Fiction, Self-Improvement, Happiness

Info:  320 pages, published March 17, 2015

Format:  Book

 

Summary 

Creating positive habits is a key to leading a happy life.   Habits “are the invisible architecture of daily life,” and “if we change our habits, we change our lives.”  In Better than Before, Gretchen Rubin help you identify your habits personality type (I’m an Upholder) and then shows you how you to create positive habits that will work for your type.

 

Quotes

“The desire to start something at the “right” time is usually just a justification for delay. In almost every case, the best time to start is now.”

“The biggest waste of time is to do well something that we need not do at all.”

“In the chaos of everyday life, it’s easy to lose sight of what really matters, and I can use my habits to make sure that my life reflects my values.”

“I should make one healthy choice, and then stop choosing.”

“With habits, we don’t make decisions, we don’t use self-control, we just do the thing we want ourselves to do—or that we don’t want to do.”

“Habits make change possible by freeing us from decision making and from using self-control.”

“The most important step is the first step. All those old sayings are really true. Well begun is half done. Don’t get it perfect, get it going. A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step. Nothing is more exhausting than the task that’s never started, and strangely, starting is often far harder than continuing.”

“What I do most days matters more than what I do once in a while.” That kind of self-encouragement is a greater safeguard than self-blame.”

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