Nonfiction: Happiness by Design, Paul Dolan

Happiness by Design: change what you do, not how you think
Paul Dolan, PhD
ISBN: 9781594632433
Read Sept 5, 2014

First off, it is an excellent premise, and I totally agree.  We think about "being" happy, but what makes us happy (or contented, or purposeful) is what we're doing, and how we think about what we're doing.  We need to figure out what we think about the most, and DO things that correlate with those thought-patterns (and also provide pleasure or purpose) to work with the architecture of our minds to become happy as a habit, or as a life-pattern, rather than trying to find interesting special occasions or special activities which take effort and often don't work as well as anticipated to impact our happiness.

Secondly (and on a much less happy note) I feel like this book wasn't as powerful as it might have been.  My two main concerns are the content value, and the advice value.

For the content, it very strongly feels that this was a series of lectures or inspirational speeches that was heavily padded out into a book.  There just wasn't enough substance here for me to really feel like it deserved a full book, and I was shocked at how little was actually in there.  The book starts with explaining the study of happiness, the ideas of public policy, and the science behind what we do and how we think.  At the halfway mark, we finally get into the "change what you do, not how you think" bit, and I was very ready for the author to get on with it.  I would have liked a broader and quicker brush over the current state of affairs and why it isn't working, and a much more robust section on the neuroscience and behavior studies supporting specific ideas for maximizing happiness.

For the advice, to my surprise, even though the title practically promised concrete advice, there was actually very little there as well.  In fairness, there was a lot of general advice, which perhaps was what the author preferred, but I've found that people like specifics, especially in what are essentially self-help books.  If we were as savvy about our happiness as to already know what we needed to do to be happy, perhaps we would not be reading a book about it for advice, no?  Despite having a very intriguing and promising premise, it gets bogged down into digressions on public policy or on attention limits and attention deficits.  I think that a breakdown of his advice into more concrete, action-oriented sections, with specific suggestions for activities in each (perhaps geared towards different "personality types" to fine-tune the approach) would have made the second half of the book a lot stronger.  An irony is that the author specifically and repeatedly brings up the point that we remember the last bits of something and judge the entirety by the feelings sparked by the ending.    

Those are my two main quibbles, and I do think there is a lot of potential here - it just seems to me like potential that would be better met with a TED Talk or a lecture series, or perhaps a Q&A with the author to brainstorm specific ideas for happiness creation, or perhaps a judicious hard edit and restructuring.