Happiness by Design, Paul Dolan
Happiness by Design, Paul Dolan
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Happiness by Design
Change What You Do, Not How You Think

Author: Paul Dolan, Daniel Kahneman

Narrator: Jonathan Cowley

Unabridged: 7 hr 17 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Penguin Audio

Published: 08/28/2014

Includes: Bonus Material Bonus Material Included

Synopsis

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.

About The Author

Paul Dolan, PhD, is an internationally renowned expert on happiness, behavior, and public policy. He is currently Professor of Behavioral Science at the London School of Economics and Political Science and has been a visiting research scholar at Princeton University with Professor Daniel Kahneman. Among various other roles, he advises the National Academy of Sciences on measurement issues in happiness research. He lives in Brighton, UK with his wife and two children.

Reviews

Goodreads review by Will on January 21, 2015

This is another of those books where I want to rate it five stars and three stars at the same time. So I'll settle for four, as the arithmetic mean. Happiness by Designs is at turns brilliant and infuriating. Let's do the brilliant stuff first. Paul Dolan clearly knows what he is talking about. He is......more

Goodreads review by Lynne on June 13, 2015

Professor Paul Donan’s definition of happiness is: experiences of pleasure and purpose over time. The reader is informed firstly, that to be truly happy, then you need to feel both pleasure and purpose. You can be just as happy or sad as I am but with very different combinations of pleasure and......more

Goodreads review by Bianca on February 08, 2021

Not a bad book, but at the end of it, I couldn't quite say I learnt anything new, which probably it's not the author's fault. It's the kind of book I was enjoying listening to it, agreeing with what Dolan was saying, but after a few hrs of finishing it I couldn't tell you what I learnt. Arguably, thi......more

Goodreads review by Oksana on November 01, 2015

Confessing you are reading a book on happiness is hard. It kind of makes you to confess you are depressed and unhappy looking to be rescued from your misery.I have to admit I was even hiding the cover of the book myself while reading in public places :-) I believe this has to do with the rather nega......more

Quotes

“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

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