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Dec 17, 2009

Lena rated it:

This is pretty much the opposite of a self-help book. Instead of telling you how you can be happier, Harvard Psychology professor Gilbert talks about why we are so bad at predicting what will make us happy in the first place. Gilbert is a smooth and entertaining writer, and he does a good job of explaining in detail the cognitive errors we make in trying to predict our future happiness. For those who hope to gain some practical value from the book, Gilbert also outlines one technique that has More...

6 comments like (21 people liked it)

Feb 22, 2009

Trevor rated it:

Years ago there was a poster that appeared around Melbourne of a young man with one of those far away looks in his eyes. The photo in the poster was extreme close up and the expression on the young man’s face was that which I believe only comes from religious ecstasy or a particularly transporting bowel movement. In bold type under this young man’s face was the single word Happiness. Below this in smaller type was Transcendental Meditation. I figured we were talking religion rather than laxa More...

9 comments like (22 people liked it)

May 01, 2008

kareem rated it:

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0 comments like (9 people liked it)

Oct 12, 2007

Foster rated it:

I just finished Daniel Gilbert’s new book, and it’s highly recommended. Next time in Cambridge, I’ll be asking him to join me at Grafton Street for a Guinness (you’ll get this if you read the book).

He uses one of the most humorous and accessible non-fiction, science-related writing styles to explain a whole genre of psychological, psychiatric, and philosophical research. His basic message is that we are crap at remembering our past happiness, and also terrible at making decisions tha More...

0 comments like (7 people liked it)

May 05, 2007

Caitlin rated it:

April 2007, first impression: So far, this book is witty, eye-opening and really fun. Also really well researched. He references Daniel C. Dennett in the first five pages, so how could I not love it?

May 2007, upon completion: Update...

Ultimately, I decided to give this book three stars because I believe that it is a ballsy and well-executed attempt to take on an impossibly difficult problem (happiness - that's a biggie). For the most part, I admire Gilbert's methods, tho More...

2 comments like (6 people liked it)

May 13, 2008

Guy rated it:

First thing you need to know about this book: it's cognitive psychology, not self-help. To Gilbert's credit, he states this clearly early on... but by then, for many purchasers, it will be too late, since the cover fairly shouts "Self-Help!!".

So, to be clear: "Stumbling on Happiness" won't do much to help you be happy, but it will help you understand some of the many reasons as to why, despite our best efforts, we so often fail to be so.

But only some More...

0 comments like (3 people liked it)

Dec 17, 2009

Inder rated it:

Is it just me, or is the author of this book unusually cocky in his writing style? Gilbert reiterates a bunch of basic ideas that any normal, reasonably intelligent person should already have arrived at (like, you shouldn't judge another person's life without all of the facts, and, wow, things never turn out quite how you plan them) and then acts like he's discovered a new planet. His tone is one of an utterly brilliant professor talking down to his idiotic, simple students.

I was ac More...

4 comments like (5 people liked it)

Mar 15, 2009

Laura rated it:

If you are technical or scientific then "Stumbling on Happiness" may be a good read for you. For me, Daniel Gilbert's conclusions were fascinating but most may be garnered by reading his articles or the last chapter of his book. As Gilbert admits in his foreword, his book is not about happiness so much as it is about the way that our minds work in an attempt to find happiness.

Particulary interesting to me were his findings on children and happiness. "Every human c More...

0 comments like (3 people liked it)

May 03, 2011

Bettie rated it:

mp3 workaday

Zoikes! I should have realised by the title what this would be about but I am always droopy and zonked in the early mornings. So what did I get here? Self Improvement WITH crazy Xylophone Music.

Too much man!

4 comments like (1 person liked it)

Aug 20, 2008

Maggie rated it:

"No one likes to be criticized, of course, but if the things we successfully strive for do not make our future selves happy, or if the things we unsuccessfully avoid do, then it seems reasonable (if somewhat ungracious) for them to cast a disparaging glance backward and wonder what the hell we were thinking."

"This is when I learned that mistakes are interesting and began planning a life that contained several of them."

"Surprise tells us that we we More...

0 comments like (2 people liked it)

May 29, 2008

Alana rated it:

I was given this book by a friend who likened the style to Alain de Botton. While I don't agree with the comparison, I can understand that the genre bears certain similarities -- a nonfiction book with meandering tone, musing on a single topic -- but because this is primarily about psychology and the way we make decisions, I wouldn't really put these on the same shelf.
That being said, this was an interesting read... although I've been "currently-reading" this in bits for about More...

0 comments like (2 people liked it)

Mar 25, 2008

Cjasper rated it:

I think this book should have been called Stumbling on Humility, cause what I took from it is that I'm not even as happy as I thought I was, and really, I didn't think I was that happy to begin with. So, I get it, our perception is flawed. Our ability to remember, perceive and predict is not well developed. I have thought of this book and brought it up in conversation quite a bit because either a)it has a lot of real life applications or b) I'm kind of obsessed with the subject of happiness. More...

2 comments like (2 people liked it)

Dec 03, 2007

Eric rated it:

The author Dan Gilbert, is a gifted teacher and professor of social psychology at Harvard. This book is an overview of his research on affective forecasting, which examines what and how people think about their own emotions. This line of research began with the question of how accurate are people at predicting how they will respond emotionally to a variety of experiences. Not very well, it turns out. This led to an examination of the factors that lead to these fascinating mistakes that we all More...

0 comments like (2 people liked it)

Oct 27, 2007

Sarah Beth rated it:

The first important thing to note about this book is that it is not a self-help book. Rather, it's a beginner's look at how we perceive the world and how that translates into our perception of our own happiness, or lack thereof. In that light, it does its job well.

Gilbert is clearly a man who is in love with words, which every reader knows can be charming or tiresome, depending on the skill of the author. Gilbert skates that line pretty closely in my opinion - while I mostly enjoyed More...

0 comments like (2 people liked it)

Apr 14, 2008

B. rated it:

Two of the abilities that separate us from the beasties; the ability to remember the past and the ability to imagine the future; receive a thorough analysis from author Daniel Gilbert that inform us just how unreliable these faculties can be. We create illusions on a daily basis that enable us to find happiness no matter what life tosses our way. This is fascinating stuff. Much of what our senses tell us is real, much of what we remember of our past, and much of what we anticipate will be true i More...

1 comment like (2 people liked it)

Dec 17, 2009

Alicia rated it:

Stumbling On Happiness and is my current rebellion book. (It isn't on my assigned reading list.) and it is a fascinating book. The author explores our perception of happiness and why we consistantly guess wrong about what will make us happy. How, once a moment has passed, it is impossible for the individual who experienced the moment to accurately rate how happy that moment made us because, our subsequent experiences change how we view that experience. How convinced we as Americans are that are More...

0 comments like (2 people liked it)

Apr 27, 2008

Scott rated it:

Combining the rigor of scientific inquiry with the affability of a humorist, this remarkable book examines the brain's systematic inability to reliably predict what will make us happy. Gilbert shows how neurological structures that allow us to store and re-imagine information may serve us all too well, creating a persuasive yet fundamentally distorted picture of what we want and why we want it. A life-changing book, or at least ought to be. This, more than any other recent read, is the one I' More...

0 comments like (3 people liked it)

Apr 02, 2009

Victory rated it:

Interesting book. No it's not a self-help, although there's nothing wrong with self-help books... Anyway, this is the science of why we can't find happiness as our present self for our future selves b/c we are unable to predict what our future selves will like. Say we pack a lunch and we think it's fabulous and then we open it and look at it (and it's not squashed or whatever) and we just aren't as excited... Or say we imagine what our future world's will look like-- funny they look a lot li More...

0 comments like

Oct 21, 2011

Richard rated it:

Because I basically now only read books for research material for my writing projects, and doing reviews on them would be BORING… I decided to post some thoughts on books that influenced my life. When I say “influenced” it could be profound… or even a book that I enjoyed so much that it became a marker for a particular type of genre of entertainment that I have since enjoyed all my life.

Today I write about “Stumbling on Happiness.”
I bought this book because it has Steven D. Levit More...

0 comments like

Jul 17, 2011

Ranga rated it:

Entertaining, informative and scientific. Three words rarely used to describe a book on happiness. But yes, it's true; Daniel Gilbert's acclaimed book lives up to it's hype and even exceeds it.

The book goes on to describe what it means to be human, how difficult it is for us to fathom anything except the present, how our memories deceive us, how our forecasts of the future is utterly flawed, and how our bodies experience while the mind simulates. Although the book's narrative tie ev More...

0 comments like

Jun 15, 2011

Kenn rated it:

As a book, I didn't expect this to have cutting-edge research. As a popular book, I didn't expect it to be dry and technical.

It met both of these criteria, and I can't honestly say that I was disappointed with it. It's written in an entertaining if slightly condescending style. Most of the material was not new to me—I'd done a lot of reading online about these topics already.

It did stimulate a lot of interesting thoughts during a week when I felt more like reading books th More...

0 comments like

Jun 11, 2011

Mehrsa rated it:

This book is written by a Harvard Psychologist and is a compilation of research on happiness. It is not a self-help--it's a very realist portrayal of happiness. The thesis is basically that we don't know what makes us happy because of a variety of tricks our brain and memory play on us. We make great plans about the future based on how we think we will feel about certain things, but we are usually wrong about how we would actually feel about those things. The book includes some fascinating studi More...

0 comments like

May 03, 2011

Joy H. added it

_Stumbling on Happiness_ (2006) by Daniel Gilbert
Added 5/3/11. May finish sometime. Read partially on computer at:
http://books.google.com/ebooks/reader?id...
and
http://books.google.com/books?id=6h8jkUB...

Originally came across this book at the website of Keith Martin:
http://96db.com/books/notes/0554_0/
Keith Martin's review said: "This is a well-written popular science book about the psychology of happiness, and Gilbert does a good job explaining More...

0 comments like

Mar 23, 2011

Sergey rated it:

People imagine their future in wrong way:
1) Imagination adds and removes details, yet we don't realize that key details may be fabricated or missing from the imagined scenario.
2) Imagined future (or even past) is very much like the present.
3) Imagination fails to realize that things will feel differently once they actually happen -- most notably, the psychological immune system will make bad things feel not so bad as they are imagined to feel.
==> use other people's exp More...

0 comments like

Mar 05, 2011

Em rated it:

This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here

2 comments like

Jan 29, 2011

Micah rated it:

Attitude - If something terrible happens to us, after some time our brain will rationalize why it was a good thing and what we learned from it. "Divorce, Cancer, etc... was the best thing that happened to me because I learned X." Our happiness does not originate from what happens to us, but it stems from the world we create given our circumstances.

Options - more options makes us less happy because we are constantly 2nd guessing what could have been.

Habituaiton - t More...

0 comments like

Sep 13, 2010

Men D. rated it:

A pleasure to read and remember. Ostensibly its an exploration of the psychology of happiness, but it doesn't feel very coherent because the structure of the book is: 1) hypothesis statement (e.g. people have an easier time processing highly traumatic events than mildly traumatic events), 2) summary of a psych experiment upholding that hypothesis (subjects return to a good mood faster when rude researchers tell them they are mediocre them rather than when they witness rude researchers telling ot More...

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Aug 19, 2010

Jaclyn rated it:

I randomly selected this audio book off the shelf at the library because the title was intriguing to me. It wasn't quite what I expected because I was expecting more of a self-help book, and this is more of a psychological analysis/science and study related book. There are no real answers on how to find happiness or what you can do to help your perceptions and improve your odds of finding happiness. However, once I got used to the study-related, scientific nature of the book, I found myself r More...

0 comments like (1 person liked it)

Apr 15, 2010

sleeps9hours rated it:

Read by the author, good audiobook. Very interesting think about what a poor job we do predicting what will make us happy in the future. Seems wise make sure the process of attaining our future goals is rewarding in the present as well. Tal Ben-Shahar discusses this in his book “Happier”. He posits that to be happy we must focus on activities that are enjoyable in the present AND contribute to future well-being.

Publisher’s Weekly review:
Not offering a self-help book, but in More...

0 comments like

Feb 15, 2010

Bob rated it:

From the title you might expect this book to be another self-help screed showing you how to be happier. It's actually a general introduction to the topic of perception -- how we perceive the past, present and future, and judge how we did / do / will feel about them. When you think about it, everything comes down to perceptions, especially our subjective happiness.

This book is a real eye opener if you've not done much thinking about the mind's propensity to perceive and weigh bits a More...

0 comments like (1 person liked it)