Happiness
A Guide to Developing Life’s Most Important Skill
About the book
Buddhist monk Matthieu Ricard treats happiness as more than an emotion, calling it a skill that can be developed through training. He argues that lasting well-being deserves at least as much effort as wealth, fitness or career success. To make the case he draws on fiction and poetry, Western philosophy, Buddhist teaching, scientific research and his own experience. Written without jargon, the book includes simple exercises meant to train the mind to recognize happiness and to pursue it by focusing on what is fundamental in life. Its stated goal is a shift in how readers see the world.
Richard Branson named it among his top 65 lifetime reads, a list he posted for World Book Day. Buffer co-founder Joel Gascoigne took from it the idea that happiness is within our control and works more like a skill than something that simply happens.
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This book has 2 recommendations
Joel Gascoigne (Co-founder/Buffer)
The author of this book has sometimes been called the "happiest man in the world". He is a French Biochemist turned Buddhist monk and has been in a unique position to merge science with mindfulness and meditation.
The underlying theme of the book is that happiness is indeed within our control, and is much more a skill than something that simply happens to us.
One of the biggest revelations for me in this book was the way that it linked happiness with altruism, asserting that there is an undeniable correlation and that helping others can provide a much more lasting satisfaction and happiness than pleasure activities such as watching a movie or enjoying a banana split. This was something I had intuitively when I got into helping early stage founders, and reading it in this book made me recommit to helping others as a way of life, which in turn makes me very happy.
Recommended by Richard Branson (Founder/Virgin Group)
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Joel Gascoigne, Richard Branson