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Summary:
Do you know what makes you happy? Daniel Gilbert would bet that you think you do, but you are most likely wrong. In his witty and engaging new book, Harvard professor Gilbert reveals his take on how our minds work, and how the limitations of our imaginations may be getting in the way of our ability to know what happiness is. Sound quirky and interesting? It is! But just to be sure, we asked bestselling author (and master of the quirky and interesting) Malcolm Gladwell to read Stumbling on Happiness, and give us his take. Check out his review below. --Daphne Durham
Guest Reviewer: Malcolm Gladwell
Malcolm Gladwell is the author of bestselling books Blink and The Tipping Point, and is a staff writer for The New Yorker.
Several years ago, on a flight from New York to California, I had the good fortune to sit next to a psychologist named Dan Gilbert. He had a shiny bald head, an irrepressible good humor, and we talked (or, more accurately, he talked) from at least the Hudson to the Rockies--and I was completely charmed. He had the wonderful quality many academics have--which is that he was interested in the kinds of questions that all of us care about but never have the time or opportunity to explore. He had also had a quality that is rare among academics. He had the ability to translate his work for people who were outside his world.
Now Gilbert has written a book about his psychological research. It is called Stumbling on Happiness, and reading it reminded me of that plane ride long ago. It is a delight to read. Gilbert is charming and funny and has a rare gift for making very complicated ideas come alive.
Stumbling on Happiness is a book about a very simple but powerful idea. What distinguishes us as human beings from other animals is our ability to predict the future--or rather, our interest in predicting the future. We spend a great deal of our waking life imagining what it would be like to be this way or that way, or to do this or that, or taste or buy or experience some state or feeling or thing. We do that for good reasons: it is what allows us to shape our life. And it is by trying to exert some control over our futures that we attempt to be happy. But by any objective measure, we are really bad at that predictive function. We're terrible at knowing how we will feel a day or a month or year from now, and even worse at knowing what will and will not bring us that cherished happiness. Gilbert sets out to figure what that's so: why we are so terrible at something that would seem to be so extraordinarily important?
In making his case, Gilbert walks us through a series of fascinating--and in some ways troubling--facts about the way our minds work. In particular, Gilbert is interested in delineating the shortcomings of imagination. We're far too accepting of the conclusions of our imaginations. Our imaginations aren't particularly imaginative. Our imaginations are really bad at telling us how we will think when the future finally comes. And our personal experiences aren't nearly as good at correcting these errors as we might think.
I suppose that I really should go on at this point, and talk in more detail about what Gilbert means by that--and how his argument unfolds. But I feel like that might ruin the experience of reading Stumbling on Happiness. This is a psychological detective story about one of the great mysteries of our lives. If you have even the slightest curiosity about the human condition, you ought to read it. Trust me. --Malcolm Gladwell
Customer Reviews:
Average Customer Rating:
Get to the point already
Customer Rating:
I get what the book is about. However, I found that if I were back at college and he were a professor, that he would be one whom I'd classify as "Likes to hear himself talk". I found that he digressed from his points way to many times in the book, or would list off examples that took up almost an entire paragraph, vice one or two followed by a succint "etc.". This caused me frustration, and often i would scan through this to get ahead just to see what the point was he was driving at. Overall, the book is just okay. Not very in depth, and doesn't really resolve anything.
The exploration of happiness
Customer Rating:
If you are looking for an in-depth exploration of humanities involvement with happiness, this is a surprisingly broad resource. Mr. Gilbert's narrative style slips you through the normally dry research of the human physiological and psychological experience with entertaining ease. Let go of expectations to find happiness and enjoy the story of man's pursuit of that end.
Is it possible to have a single favorite book?
Customer Rating:
Per the author's forward: "Despite the third world of the title, this is not an instruction manual that will tell you anything useful about how to be happy. Those books are located in the self-help section two aisles over, and once you've bought one, done everything it says to do, and found yourself miserable anyway, you can always come back here to understand why. Instead, this is a book that describes what science has to tell us about how and how well the human brain can imagine its own future, and about how and how well it can predict which of those futures it will most enjoy." Got it? Can he possibly be any more clear?
Mixed review
Customer Rating:
Amazon showed the vendor as having my book but turns out they did not have it. They also sent me the wrong book in the mail by mistake. I did get my money back but would have preferred the actual book i ordered, Stumbling on Happiness.
Better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all
Customer Rating:
Written in a casual narrative style but packed with detailed research, Stumbling on Happiness helps us understand that we have a blind spot in how we image the future. One example is that in looking back at our lives, we regret inaction rather than incorrect action, but when our current selves image the future, in order to avoid regret we tend to sit pat with the hand we have rather than take a new one.
There is more to the book of course, and I have to warn you that as you read the first quarter of the book you may wonder where Gilbert is going, but once he gets there, the book turns into a series of revelations about what we leave out when estimating our future happiness and why our imagined happiness is not really around the corner.
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