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1-Page Summary of Happiness By Design

Overview

Many people want to be happy, so they spend money on books and courses that teach them how to live a happier life. However, even though they buy these materials, many of us are still unhappy for most of our lives.

A number of key points in this book will help you understand how our brain and environment affect our happiness levels, which is different from what we previously thought. We can manage these factors to ensure we remain happy in our lives. For example: going to the gym may lead us to eat unhealthy foods; hearing French music makes us buy French wine; switching off your phone helps you be happier.

Big Idea #1: You are happiest when you experience your daily activities as pleasant and purposeful.

Imagine being forced to watch the same comedy show for the rest of your life. Would you be happy? After a while, it would feel pointless and you’d probably wish that you had spent your time doing something else instead.

However, it’s not just about being happy. It’s also about feeling like you have a purpose in your life and that what you’re doing has meaning.

Every day, you do both pleasurable and purposeful things. For example, watching your favorite TV show is pleasurable; creating a presentation for work is purposeful.

To have a productive day, you should alternate pleasurable activities with purposeful ones. For example, at work, you can take “pleasure” breaks by having lunch and chatting with a colleague or taking short walks in the afternoon.

It turns out that how much pleasure you get from your life depends on your personality. You might like to have more fun, or you could be in it for the work.

Happiness is important, but it’s not about a general sense of satisfaction. Instead, happiness is more about feeling good in the moment and experiencing pleasure and purpose. To be happier every day, you should focus on actively doing things that bring you joy and feel like they matter to you.

Big Idea #2: Happiness isn’t caused directly by what you do, but rather by what you pay attention to.

A meaningful job, exciting hobbies and good health are the best ingredients for happiness. However, people often ignore them because they’re too busy with other things.

It’s important to be able to focus on what makes you happy. However, it can be difficult to do that because we only have a limited amount of attention. Therefore, we often think about negative things rather than positive ones. For example, when you’re sitting at dinner with your friends and thinking about work the next day, you’re not focused on being present with them in that moment.

We tend to focus more on the unfamiliar and novel things in our lives rather than on the routines. We forget about how good we are at doing routine things, which makes us feel bad when something goes wrong. For example, we might get a new car that’s exciting at first, but soon it becomes routine to drive it. Now we’re focused on a stain on the driver seat of our new car because it is so different from other cars that are not stained.

Feeling happy is not just about what you do, but also about your attention. It can be achieved by focusing on the right things and ignoring other things.

In the first key point, we’ll identify some mistakes that most people make when it comes to attention. We’ll figure out some strategies on how to stop making them. Let’s take a look at what these mistakes are in the next key point.

Big Idea #3: Your behavior and attention are largely driven by unconscious mechanisms that are prone to mistakes.

In the previous key point, we saw that many of our actions are unconscious. We often feel unhappy because we’re drifting towards things in life that make us feel unhappy.