Happiness by Design

Change What You Do, Not How You Think

By: Paul Dolan, Daniel Kahneman - introduction

Narrated by: Jonathan Cowley

This is not just another happiness book. In Happiness by Design, happiness and behavior expert Paul Dolan combines the latest insights from economics and psychology to illustrate that in order to be happy we must behave happy Our happiness is experiences of both pleasure and purpose over time and it depends on what we actually pay attention to. Using what Dolan calls deciding, designing, and doing, we can overcome the biases that make us miserable and redesign our environments to make it easier to experience happiness, fulfilment, and even health. With uncanny wit and keen perception, Dolan reveals what we can do to find our unique optimal balance of pleasure and purpose, offering practical advice on how to organize our lives in happiness-promoting ways and fresh insights into how we feel, including why:

• Having kids reduces pleasure but gives us a massive dose of purpose
• Gaining weight won’t necessarily make us unhappier, but being too ambitious might
• A quiet neighborhood is more important than a big house

Vividly rendering intriguing research and lively anecdotal evidence, Happiness by Design offers an absorbing, thought-provoking, new paradigm for readers of Stumbling on Happiness and The How of Happiness.

Critic reviews

“Outstanding, cutting-edge, and profound. If you’re going to read one book on happiness, this is the one.”
—Nassim Nicholas Taleb, bestselling author of The Black Swan and Antifragile

“Happiness by Design is the best kind of psychology book: the ideas are fascinating, understanding them will make your life happier and more meaningful, and Dolan expresses them beautifully. Whether you’re a novice or a voracious consumer of happiness research, Happiness by Design hits all the right notes.”
—Adam Alter, bestselling author of Drunk Tank Pink

“Dolan gives a comprehensive overview of the science of happiness and useful tips to achieve it. In his quest to explain what makes us happy, Dolan touches on a powerful idea: happiness need not be pursued, simply rediscovered. In other words, sources of pleasure and purpose are all around us, if only one knows where to look.”
—Scientific American

Reader is a bit boring but the book is insane good

Great audiobook! Nicely explains the production process of happiness. Would recommend it for anyone into behavioural science.

Somewhat interesting tips

While the book provides some interesting tips on nudging towards happiness, the philosophical part seems very light and poor. "Sentimental hedonism" is what it says: sentimental and hedonistic, just the two things on which our culture is already embedded in. The part about saliency is very interesting, however... The narration is monotonic.

Practical evidence based approach to happiness

Thinking is not enough. It is more about doing and changing in what we do.

A Awful(ly) Good Book

I’m a big fan of Kahneman so his recommendation was important to me. Unfortunately, this was not at the caliber of Thinking Fast & Slow.In fact, it was a struggle to get through. Most of the insights we’re well understood, if not platitudes,at least for an old man who’s read a lot on this topic. There were a lot of studies which may have supported the book’s academic credentials but weren’t especially interesting..
So that raises the question ‘Why didn’t this book totally suck? Two reasons:
1. The discussion around purposeful meaning as a key contributor to happiness, while obvious to most of us, was important to the discourse on this topic in economics.
2. The author’s point about mental focus is a terrific insight. While equally obvious in a way, a lot of people (moi) focus their thoughts on worries and problems and then wonder ‘Why am I not happier?’ The author’s answer is, well, duh? It’s a really good and insightful point. If you want to be happier, be grateful, think about your good fortune, celebrate your life. Not always easy or obvious but a unavoidable conclusion.
That insight has helped me and he does offer some practical ideas on how to get there.

Practical but Really?

No one I know would ever work this hard to be happy. Think I, like his ‘you should’ target audience, will just have to keep rolling with the punches and if that makes us happy, that’d be great.