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14. The Language of Flowers

Rating:  ☆☆☆

Recommended by:  Deidre Farrell

Author:  Vanessa Diffenbaugh

Genre:  Fiction, Romance

Info:  323 pages, published August 23, 2011

Format:  Book

Summary 

The Language of Flowers follows the fraught life of a Victoria Jones, who by the age of 18, had lived in 32 foster homes, and becomes a flower arranger.  Victoria learns the human lessons of love and trust with the aid of a flower dictionary, a type of Victorian-era book which defines what different types of flowers mean.

 

Quotes

“If it was true that moss did not have roots, and maternal love could grow spontaneously as if from nothing, perhaps I had been wrong to believe myself unfit to raise my daughter. Perhaps the unattached, the unwanted, the unloved, could grow to give love as lushly as anyone else.”

“Common thistle is everywhere,” she said. “Which is perhaps why human beings are so relentlessly unkind to one another.”

“She was perfect. I knew this the moment she emerged from my body, white and wet and wailing. Beyond the requisite ten fingers and ten toes, the beating heart, the lungs inhaling and exhaling oxygen, my daughter knew how to scream. She knew how to make herself heard. She knew how to reach out and latch on. She knew what she needed to do to survive. I didn’t know how it was possible that such perfection could have developed within a body as flawed as my own, but when I looked into her face, I saw that it clearly was.”

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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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10. The Life We Bury

Rating:  ☆☆☆1/2

Recommended by:  Heather Ringoen 

Author:  Allen Eskens

Genre:  Fiction, Mystery, Suspense, Crime

Info:  303 pages, published October 14, 2014

Format:  Book

 

Summary 

As part of a college English class assignment, Joe Talbert must interview a stranger and write a brief biography of the person. At a nearby nursing home, Joe meets Carl Iverson, a dying Vietnam veteran who has been medically paroled after spending thirty years in prison for the crimes of rape and murder.  As Joe writes about Carl’s life, especially Carl’s service in Vietnam, he cannot reconcile the heroism of the soldier with the contemptible acts of the convict.  Joe, along with his female neighbor and love interest Lila, throws himself into uncovering the truth, but he is constrained in his efforts by having to deal with his extremely dysfunctional mother, the guilt of leaving his autistic brother vulnerable, and a haunting childhood memory.

 

Quotes

“What if I was wrong? What if there was no other side. What if, in all the eons of eternity, this was the one and only time that I would be alive. How would I live my life if that were the case?”

“Add to that cauldron an ever increasing measure of cheap vodka–a form of self-medication that quelled the inner scream but amplified the outer crazy–and you get a picture of the mother I left behind.”

“But deep down, I knew the truth: I needed her—not as a son needs a mother, but as a sinner needs the devil. I needed a scapegoat, someone I could point at and say, “You’re responsible for this, not me.” I needed to feed my delusion that I was not my brother’s keeper, that such a duty fell to our mother. I needed a place where I could store Jeremy’s life, his care, a box that I could shut tight and tell myself it was where Jeremy belonged—even if I knew, deep down, that it was all a lie. I needed that thin plausibility to ease my conscience.”

“We are surrounded every day by the wonders of life, wonders beyond comprehension that we simply take for granted. I decided that day that I would live my life—not simply exist. If I died and discovered heaven on the other side, well, that’d be just fine and dandy. But if I didn’t live my life as if I was already in heaven, and I died and found only nothingness, well…I would have wasted my life. I would have wasted my one chance in all of history to be alive.”

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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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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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