Stumbling On Happiness by Daniel Gilbert

I saw Daniel Gilbert on the Colbert Report talking about his book, Stumbling on Happiness.  If you've not seen a Colbert Report interview, Professor Gilbert's accomplishment will be lost on you.  Suffice it to say, Stephen Colbert interviews have a tendency to place writers in the role of fall guy to Colbert's straight guy.  Oh, to suffer such a fate...  Back to Professor Gilbert. The most impressive part of the interview was his ability to move the interview in a direction that managed to paint Colbert into corner of agreement.  Well done, Dr Gilbert...  If you are wondering about the book, read on.

Stumbling on Happiness is packed with intriguing concepts and ideas applied to convincing explanations regarding our difficulties predicting what will make us happy.  In short, Stumbling on Happiness weaves a tapestry of mental mistakes covering errors in memory, perception and imagination that tells a story of our inability to see the future well enough to predict what will make a happy person of the person we will become at some point in the future.

As Dr. Gilbert says in his introduction...

...[O]ur 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.

Not that knowing any of this is going to help you become happier, but that is not the point while being exactly the point.  Stumbling on Happiness is not about becoming happier.  Rather, it is about understanding why we are so bad at predicting what will make us happy which on a broader scale means it isn't about happiness at all.  Rather, it is about the difficulties of predicting the future and the foibles of depending on predictions.  This attack on conventional wisdom is where Stumbling on Happiness offers the most value.  If we can be taught to believe that orchestrating our own happiness is at best a losing proposition, we just might be able to develop a habit of questioning all of our future-building predictions with enough voracity to avoid many of the pitfalls of daily life that are built on our own poor insight.

Stumbling on Happiness is easily one of the best Leadership books I have ever read.  I cannot give this book a better recommendation that to say that I predict it will make your future self happier if you read it...

If you have any thoughts on Stumbling on Happiness that you would like to share, leave a message in the guest book below.

Take care and enjoy...

JWM