Hacker News Books

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/56627.Stumbling_on_Happi...

It might be good to make a downvote = -.5 and an upvote = +1 to even out the effect?

Just a thought...

In fact, there are a quick Ted talk about that, you can search for his name.

Yeah. They should read Daniel Gilbert's book _Stumbling on Happiness_.

The why is because it's extremely enlightening.

Two excellent books that delve into this area are "Stumbling on Happiness" and "Sapiens".

Contrast that to my wife, who, despite having a degree from a top ivy league school, seems to have hated every job she's ever had and would drop it all to retire in an instant if she could afford it.

I will note that I also have had the luxury of exploring the "do what you love" career theory. Out of high school, I wanted to be an orchestral musician, and spent like 12 years pursuing that path before realizing that it wasn't going to work out. So I sort of had to reset my brain to understand that I didn't have to do this one thing to be happy. So I'm not sitting here in a cubicle thinking "if only...." because I've done the "if only." (Not having other options is actually a surprisingly effective route to happiness. (See: Stumbling on Happiness)).

Another great book related to this topic is "How to Want What You Have."

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/933037.How_to_Want_What_...

Another HN participant recommended the book Stumbling on Happiness

http://www.randomhouse.com/kvpa/gilbert/

in a previous thread. I have just started reading the book, and I agree with reviewers that the author has a lot of research-based insight into what makes people happy.

1. Flow by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (http://tinyurl.com/33kv6te) - fascinating look at the author's theory of Flow, the state of total absorption that accompanies total concentration - so called "optimal experience". Anyone who programs knows this feeling. Really excellent book.

2. Stumbling on Happiness by Daniel Gilbert (http://tinyurl.com/38lvdzc) - not the self-help book it sounds like, but an interesting look at why we're so bad at working out what will make us happy.

3. The Tiger that isn't by Andrew Dilnot (http://tinyurl.com/38hntqx) - interesting guide to our instinctive interpretation of statistics and how the media manipulates it.

4. Bad Science by Ben Goldacre (http://tinyurl.com/3yk8woz) - at once amusing and horrifying look at various aspects of pseudoscience, especially as applied to healthcare.

Fiction:

1. Anything by Iain Banks, especially the sci-fi.

2. If Nobody Speaks of Remarkable Things by Jon McGregor (http://tinyurl.com/3496d34) - worth reading just for the language he uses.

3. American Gods by Neil Gaiman (http://tinyurl.com/3xyr65w) - great fantasy with a darkly humorous side.

The researchers have uncovered a tremendous amount about this topic (see Paul Bloom's "How Pleasure Works: The New Science of Why We Like What We Like", "Stumbling on Happiness" by Daniel Gilbert and the multi-author paper "If Money Doesn't Make You Happy Then You Probably Aren't Spending It Right"), and philosophers have thought about this topic for centuries.

The best reconciliation of philosophy and (recent studies in) psychology of it all is by Michael Bishop and his book: The Good Life: Unifying the Philosophy and Psychology of Well-Being

https://www.amazon.com/Good-Life-Philosophy-Psychology-Well-...

http://jseliger.com/2009/04/23/stumbling-on-happiness-—-dani...

Divorce is only one possible indicator of unhappiness, there are lots of people who are unhappy and do not or cannot divorce.

You also assume that divorce leads to decreased happiness overall and I'm not convinced that's true either.

Moreover, I think it's pretty remarkable that almost 50% of people make a "successful" choice of a life partner. (Exclusively in the sense that they do not divorce.)

Considering how horrible people are at decisionmaking in general, and how vague and slippery the idea of "happiness" is, (see Stumbling on Happiness, and/or Mistakes Were Made for a great layman's overview), it's pretty remarkable... or merely a great indicator of how much people are willing to withstand/fool themselves/constrain their nature.

I've recently finished Dan Gilbert's: Stumbling on Happiness and I highly recommend it. It's witty and gives you a very different way of looking at what you think makes you happy.

I know these aren't start-up books, but unfortunately I haven't read any to recommend.

Actually, Daniel Gilbert's book Stumbling on Happiness and Jonathan Haidt's book The Happiness Hypothesis both point to the idea that social connections and finding meaning one's relationships are the key to being happy—much more so than material possessions.

That being said, it does appear that many if not most Americans spend too much on things they think will make them happy but don't—see Spend by Geoffrey Miller for more on this idea. It's as if we're hanging ourselves through our own failures to understand ourselves.

A great "how to" book is: The How of Happiness: A New Approach to Getting the Life You Want by Sonja Lyubomirsky (a Ph.D. researcher in the field of study) http://thehowofhappiness.com -- this book shares the specific advice you share in your comment.

A lot of great books I can recommend as well, e.g. Stumbling on Happiness by Daniel Gilbert and The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom by Jonathan Haidt.

1. Man's search for meaning, by Viktor Frankl.
He was an Austrian psychiatrist who founded Logotherapy as a form of analysing one's life with the idea of finding meaning or living a purposeful life.
According to Frankl, such a life would mean doing important/meaningful work, enjoying nature in all it's beauty, loving and taking care of another person and being courageous when going through hard times. These are things that I personally consider part of the common sense package I had built-in when I was born, so this book kind of talks to my soul. I would recommend it to anyone who is highly self-reflective.

2. Stumbling on happiness, by Daniel Gilbert. This was an interesting read and the different studies described in the book made me think how would I react in a similar situation and I realised funny things about how memory works and how does our brain imagine future events.

This book covers many of the fallacies people fall for http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1400077427/randohouse... Stumbling on Happiness

"Most of us spend our lives steering ourselves toward the best of all possible futures, only to find that tomorrow rarely turns out as we had presumed. Why? As Harvard psychologist Daniel Gilbert explains, when people try to imagine what the future will hold, they make some basic and consistent mistakes. Just as memory plays tricks on us when we try to look backward in time, so does imagination play tricks when we try to look forward."

* I Drink For a Reason - very funny

* Stumbling on Happiness (sounds self helpy but is actually a great book on our inability to predict how we will feel about situations in the future)

* A Brief History of Everything - one cool story after another

* A Long Way Gone, Memoirs of a Boy Soldier - hard to bear, but eye-opening

* Getting Unstuck - buddhist talk by Pema Chodron

* Born to Run - great, exciting story. Sometimes I would sit in the parking lot or the driveway after arriving in order to keep listening.

Unfortunately, this is a horrible article on a fascinating subject: hedonistic psychology. If you haven't read Dan Gilbert's "Stumbling on Happiness", you're missing out. A better introduction to what he has to say can be found here:
http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/97

Gilbert puts the dollar amount closer to $40K, rather than $60K, and points out the Mencken quote in action: most people think they need to earn about 20% more than they do, almost regardless of how much they earn. But people seem more satisfied by work they find meaningful, a good sex life, and social connections (not necessarily in that order).

I mentioned Stumbling on Happiness in my list of influential / important books to me: http://jseliger.com/2010/03/22/influential-books-on-me-that-... , though perhaps I should've said more about it.

The Willpower Instinct: How Self-Control Works, Why It Matters, and What You Can Do to Get More of It - McGonigal, Kelly. Great book

The Feynman Lectures on Physics - Feynman, Richard - He is a great teacher, you will love physics even if you didn´t like it.

Stumbling on Happiness - Gilbert, Daniel Todd - Great book about how our mind works

I had to survive - Roberto Canessa: He is a survivor from the the Andes tragedy, half of the book is about that and the other half about what happens next, he become one of the best paediatric cardiologists in the world.

Of course, that doesn't cover the pressure of choice detailed above by the "satisficers". To paraphrase Dan Gilbert (Stumbling on Happiness), adding more perfect options makes maximizers more stressed and less happy about what they do choose. Again, I prefer to place implicit trust in the quality of my selection process - its capacity to find me something good enough - rather than always in the quality of what I own. That latter threshold changes with the circumstances.

For this and many other interesting musings on the nature of happiness I strongly recommend "Stumbling on Happiness" by Daniel Gilbert. It's fascinating.

Deep Work - Cal Newport (recommended)

Stumbling on Happiness - Daniel Gilbert (recommended)

Succeed: How We Can Reach Our Goals - Heidi Grant-Halvorson (lots of great stuff in here, highly recommended)

The Autobiography of Malcolm X - Alex Haley (I really like biographies and Malcolm X was a pretty interesting person. recommended)

Making It in Real Estate: Starting Out as a Developer - John McNellis (meh)

Ready Player One - Ernest Cline (I'm not big on sci-fi, so this book surprised me with how good it was. recommended)

Man's Search for Meaning - Viktor Frankl (I'm not sure how much I got out of it, but worth it just for learning about Frankl's unique experiences and perspectives. recommended)

Elon Musk: Tesla, SpaceX, and the Quest for a Fantastic Future (meh)

Masters of Doom: How Two Guys Created an Empire and Transformed Pop Culture - David Kushner (One of those books that makes you want to lock yourself in a room and program for hours. Carmack's dedication and intellect is especially awe-inspiring. recommended)

Making a living in the arts is excruciating. Classical musicians today tend to live in an unstable patchwork of part-time gigs, private teaching, side jobs lacking health insurance, etc... and that's if they're lucky. Only a few manage to obtain full time jobs. As others have noted, the day to day life of a musician isn't as glamorous as it might seem. I loved Beethoven's 5th as a child; but after playing it for the N-teenth time, I began to see how a career in music could grow tedious.

When I decided to go into CS it was because I realized that the people who had successful music careers tended to be a.) either so insanely talented that it was obvious they'd be catapulted into the inner circle (eg, full time gigs) fairly easily or b.) so monomaniacal in their dedication to their craft that they simply had no other choice. Anything other than being a musician would have meant having to curl up and die.

Since I was neither of those, I decided to turn to something that'd I'd been quite good at in high school (math/science) and rather enjoyed, and I would describe myself as much happier now. Vastly happier, and financially secure. Music is still a part of my life as a fulfilling hobby.

Whatever you decide, I'd highly recommend reading Daniel Gilbert's "Stumbling on Happiness," before making any irrevocable decisions. Gilbert is a psychologist whose research suggests that people are generally extremely bad at predicting the future and figuring out what actually will make them happy. It's a cautionary tale for anyone who might think "If only I could do X I'd be happy..." Follow that with "How to Want What You Have," by Timothy Ray Miller, and you have a prescription for happiness.

The question of course, is it a good thing to indulge in experience stretching or should one not try things that we'll miss.

I always had the feeling that of course we should strive for constant refinement, atleast within some boundaries rather than stay ignorant... but it's not always the easiest route when your taste start to outmatch your capabilities and wallet :)

If you were to marry and have kids, you would likely argue the same points about it being the greatest experience of your life. However, you would only feel that way because your memory of your past bachelor life would be distorted by the joy that your new settled life has brought you.

So I think you're both right. :)

None of which really matters, of course. If you want kids you'll probably love having them, and if you don't you'll probably be happier without them.

And once I have enough education, I can read books like Daniel Gilbert's Stumbling on Happiness: http://jseliger.com/2009/04/23/stumbling-on-happiness-daniel... and hopefully (re?)learn about happiness.

In On Photography (I believe), Susan Sontag talks about how it has been a quintessentially American thing to ensure everyone was smiling in family snapshots. I wonder if cultures or families that tend to smile in photos end up taking more vacations because they misremember them as being better than they were.

And you're right that there's more to life than happiness, such as fulfillment and love. Being a Dad is, like the Marines, the hardest job you'll ever love. I wouldn't change it for the world.

So my goal for the last year while I have been doing startups my goal has been to get ramen profitable and we did that just a couple of months ago.

The reason this was so important to me is because now, I feel like I am "living off the land" or "surviving in the wild" and answering to literally no one. The amazing part about start-ups is that they make me feel truly alive and independent, while working for someone else makes me feel trapped and dependent. Right now, I'm really happy.

I'm also looking forward to the next part of our start-ups growth, which staying with the analogy, will be like growing a clan of like minded people who want to build on what we started.

Also, I read once in 'Stumbling on Happiness' that people are happy when they can actually have an impact on things. In less than a year, we have already significantly impacted the YouTube space and will be continually impacting the entertainment industry. The exciting part is in my opinion we have done this for the better and that as promised in the book that does makes me happy.

I guess in some ways, I'm some sort of new aged tech-hippy, but at least I'm not alone: http://www.paulgraham.com/boss.html

Another salient point is that we almost never take into account the fact that we accommodate to the conditions around us. We truly believe that if we win the lottery we will be happy forever, even in the face of mountains of data to the contrary.

The most surprising result, I thought, was that (in the late 1990s U.S. dollars) happiness begins at $40k per year, and increases only slightly for incomes up to $100k per year, and then is essentially flat. One of the drivers for this was that, at $40k per year, you typically get health insurance through work, and this removes the primary worry that brings people's happiness down.

I think the really interesting thing would be to see if you could convince rich people of this so that they voluntarily, without legal compulsion, would give up some of their wealth to make others happy. I'd be interested to see if I would do this, if I ever became a .com/web 2.0 zillionaire.

Hrm, well, yes, to an extent. However, People do do research on the psychology of human happiness and a bunch of other human charistics and we can answer some questions on what will be "best" in the longrun with quite a bit of certainty.

We also know that oftentimes people are just downright wrong about what will make them happy.

Example- we know spending your money on experiences rather than objects will make you happier in the long run.

If you want to read more about the topic I recommend the book "Stumbling on Happiness."

Sometimes we DO know that your choice is wrong for your goals.

Thats just in general, not particularly about this service.

<i>9. Customization is stressful</i>.

I would add that choice can actually make us less likely to make a decision rather than more likely to; I face this in all kinds of fields, including office equipment. In the last two weeks, I've spent vast amounts of time looking at phone and copier systems for <a href="http://blog.seliger.com>Seliger + Associates</a> and found the experience mostly enervating—and that's with a relatively small sample set!

Trying to not just evaluate a large number of products, but to customize them as well, isn't something I'm willing to do for anything save things that are important to me, like books. And the literature on this issue in fairly vast—see, for example, Daniel Gilbert's <i>Stumbling on Happiness</i>, Dan Ariely's <i>Predictably Irrational</i>, and Tim Harford's <i>The Logic of Life</i>.

Together, those might help explain some of the social issues with mass customization.

1. <em>Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience</em> by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

2. <em>The Guide to Getting It On</em> by Paul Johannides [sp?]

3. <em>The Mating Mind: How Sexual Choice Shaped the Evolution of Human Nature</em> by Geoffrey Miller

4. <em>Hackers & Painters</em> by Paul Graham

5. <em>Man's Search for Meaning</em> by Viktor Frankl

6. <em>Stumbling on Happiness</em> by Daniel Gilbert

7. <em>The Time Paradox</em> by Philip Zimbardo.

That last one is particularly important: it points out that, once you've reached a comfortable but, for a highly educated person, relatively low level of income (around ~$40K for an individual), additional income increases do not matter for very for overall happiness.

What does? Friends, family, your sex life, meaningful work.

What doesn't help for happiness? TV. See the journal article "Does watching TV make us happy?" by Bruno S. Frey, Christine Benesch, and Alois Stutzer for more on the answer: "no."

Bingo. Our algorithm focuses on the lingering, subliminal emotions that you aren't necessarily aware you're feeling. Though not related to the emotions we measure, one commonly-referenced study shows that if you're walking down the street and you see a big sign with the word "ELDERLY" written on it, you'll actually walk slower without realizing it [1]. Lots of words have these subconscious impacts and you simply cannot accurately poll your own brain to determine how you feel.

[1] See "Stumbling on Happiness" for a great overview of this study: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1400077427/ref=as_li_ss_tl?...

My strategy has been to read books like "Stumbling on Happiness" - written by Daniel Gilbert, a Harvard Ph.D. -- rather than by journalists who only tangentially explore a subject to pump out yet another book.

There's a theory out there that we evaluate ourselves mostly against people we can reasonably consider our peers (e.g. college classmates or the kid who grew up down the street, not Barack Obama or Steve Jobs) because they are the best proxy for what our lives could have been like had we made different choices with the same starting point (e.g. medical school instead of starting a business). These peers represent our best experimental data given a world of singular outcomes.

The double-edged sword of you achieving success is that those hundred or so people you compare yourself to sit high up on an asymptotic curve of outcomes. That is, if your peer group all has advanced degrees and decades of experience, the outcome-difference between the least and most successful will be extreme. "Low success" peer groups sit at the flatter part of the curve, so peers you compare yourself to will "look more like you", thus avoiding the unhappiness of comparative failure when you judge yourself.

I'm forgetting whether this particular idea comes from Gilbert's book or another source, like perhaps "Status Anxiety" by Alain de Botton.

You are always 100% in control of your emotions: the choice to be happy is up to you regardless of what you're doing or what's happening to you. Money (or value) will come from following fundamental principles of success: diligence, hard work, honesty, etc. You often find the two together, but neither is required for the other.

For more information read Dan Gilbert's "Stumbling on Happiness" and Viktor Frankl's "Man's Search for Meaning."

  A guide to the Good Life by William Irvine

  The Daily Stoic by Ryan Holiday

  The Art of Living by Epictetus

  Meditation by Marcus Aurelius

  Man's Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl

  The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle

  The Fifth Agreement by don Miguel Ruiz

  Stumbling on Happiness by Daniel Gilbert

...or happiness.

I recently read "Stumbling on Happiness" which had an interesting discussion on the fact that there are several studies that show that pay raises up to around $45k per year result in an increase in happiness. But after that, an increases in salary brings only a marginal increase in happiness, if that.

So the question he raised is that if one doesn't receive additional happiness from earning more than $45k, what is the reason for doing so? Most other human actions are geared towards happiness. It really got me thinking about the subject.

Have you read anything like Predictably Irrational, or the less famous Stumbling On Happiness, or maybe The New Brain? Or Mistakes Were Made (But Not By Me)?

They all make psychology and behavioral economics research very digestible, and all underscore the point: we're not rational. Even if we think we are. Our brains are essentially wired to be tangled up and self-deluding.

Moreover, lots of people use "logic and reason" as shield to hide behind when they say and do unfeeling, cutting things to other human beings who happen to react with emotions.

Yes, there are fluff books in there (Gladwell, Godin, etc) but you seem to be dismissing a lot of quality work just because you feel everyone should be reading hard theoretical material.

However, I do agree that it's easy to read only books such as those on Sivers' list and ignore those on your list, which is a mistake. A mix is healthy.

[ Priests vow to remain celibate, physicians vow to do no harm, and letter carriers vow to swiftly complete their appointed rounds despite snow, sleet, and split infinitives. Few people realize that psychologists also take a vow, promising that at some point in their professional lives they will publish a book, a chapter, or at least an article that contains this sentence: "The human being is the only animal that..." We are allowed to finish the sentence any way we like, but it has to start with those eight words. Most of us wait until relatively late in our careers to fulfill this solemn obligation because we know that successive generations of psychologists will ignore all the other words that we managed to pack into a lifetime of well-intentioned scholarship and remember us mainly for how we finished "The Sentence." We also know that the worse we do, the better we will be remembered. For instance, those psychologists who finished The Sentence with "can use language" were particularly well remembered when chimpanzees were taught to communicate with hand signs. And when researchers discovered that chimps in the wild use sticks to extract tasty termites from their mounds (and to bash one another over the head now and then), the world suddenly remembered the full name and mailing address of every psychologist who had ever finished The Sentence with "uses tools." So it is for good reason that most psychologists put off completing The Sentence for as long as they can, hoping that if they wait long enough, they just might die in time to avoid being publicly humiliated by a monkey.

I have never before written The Sentence, but I'd like to do so now, with you as my witness. "The human being is the only animal that thinks about the future." ]

Coincidentally, I'm reading the book because I'm trying to decide whether to leave my small city teaching job at a and move to SV to get a big tech job. And the book and your experience suggest that it is better to leave and fail to thrive than to never leave at all. But may I ask why didn't you like it, or what should I look out for?

1. The Art of Learning - I'll never think about practice the same way.

2. Getting Things Done - Enough has been said about this elsewhere, but the whole concept of "what's the next action" has really worked for me.

3. E-Myth Revisited - This was my MBA in one book. It came at the right time for me and really changed the way I think about creating businesses as assets. I wasn't a fan the cheesy example of the pie shop, but the advice has been invaluable.

Others that I found interesting, and that changed the way I think were:

4-hour Work Week. Yes, there is a ton of hype around this book, but I'd be surprised if anyone read it with an open mind and didn't learn anything or come away motivated to experiment with their lifestyle.

Outliers. This one probably stands out to me since I read it so recently. Gladwell gets a lot of hype as well, but I think he deserves at least some of it.

The Culture Code drastically changed the way I think about marketing.

And, a few random notes on the others I've read:

I found Predictably Irrational, Brain Rules and The 48 Laws of Power to be mostly garbage.

The Wisdom of Crowds, Wikinomics and Made to Stick are decent essays in book form.

Stumbling on Happiness is not nearly as good as Haidt's The Happiness Hypothesis which would be in the first list I made above if it were on Siver's list.

Seth Godin's books are good for motivation and for changing the way you think about marketing, especially if you've been doing it for a long time (I haven't). They're quick and fun, I think they're worth reading.

Fooled By Randomness is worth reading if nothing else because Taleb is such an entertaining writer.

[0] http://www.amazon.com/Stumbling-Happiness-Daniel-Gilbert/dp/...