Arthur C. Brooks teaches a happiness class at Harvard Business School. Students line up to take the class. Probably because the place is filled with people looking for happiness in all the wrong places (to paraphrase a song).
Oprah Winfrey read his bestseller, From Strength to Strength: Finding Success, Happiness, and Deep Purpose in the Second Half of Life, contacted him and invited to her home in California. They hit it off and agreed to collaborate on this book just out this month, Build the Life You Want: The Art and Science of Getting Happier.
This book is readable and practical. Much of this I know and practice. Many will not have heard of this research and story. This will help you and/or someone you love.
Let’s begin with “Happiness is not the goal, and unhappiness is not the enemy.”
Philosophers from ancient times have known that happiness is a byproduct of living, not the goal of living. Yet, each generation must learn the lesson anew.
The first chapters discuss managing our emotions.
The four pillars are discussed in detail in the remainder of the book:
- Family
- Friends
- Work
- Faith (Find Your Amazing Grace)
I leave you with two takeaways.
Augustine of Hippo (St. Augustine) gave a student three pieces of advice.
The first part is humility; the second, humility; the third, humility; and this I would continue to repeat as often as you might ask direction.
Another takeaway.
We need to detach ourselves and become free of sticky cravings. We honestly examine our attachments. What are yours? Money, power, pleasure, prestige—the distractions we sought to be free of with greater emotional self-management? Dig deeper. Just maybe they are your opinions. The Buddha himself named this attachment and its terrible effects more than twenty-four hundred years ago when he is believed to have said, “This who grasp at perceptions and views go about butting their heads in the world.” More recently the Vietnamese Buddhist sage Thich Naht Hanh wrote in his book Being Peace, “Humankind suffers very much from attachment to views.”
Faith Venture 
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