Happiness by Design: Finding Pleasure and Purpose in Everyday Life

Author gives a deep insight to something we all aim for. Clear insightful, full of information presented in a easily digestible form. Makes you reevaluate your thinking and helps a lot in clarifying your mind and feelings.. Best is, there is no preaching, makes you understand who you are and leaves a positive taste. Also well structured , one chapter flows into other. Very good bibliography to explore further. Solid stuff. I thank the author. Heartily recommend it to everyone.

Bought this book after seeing it at a bookstore in London. Loved the simple style and extremely useful and actionable content, so relevant for folks today. A gem from a world expert.

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 the self-styled professor of Happy. The book is full of well-evidenced insights into what makes us happy. He doesn't just give us his opinions - he tells us about scientific surveys into happiness.And while much of it is common sense, there are some light bulb moments (well, there were for me). I had more than one When Harry met Sally moment ... "YES! YES! YES!"But ... all is not happiness in the reading of this book. For one thing, Paul Dolan gives us rather too much information about his own life. His best friend. The fact that he goes to the gym. He doesn't read novels. And while some of it is relevant and interesting, such as how he has dealt with his stammer, most of it is, frankly, a little bit dull. Is Paul Dolan a particularly happy person that I should model myself on? I don't really know.Then there's the writing. It's all very nicely edited and grammatical and all that. But there is something dead and lifeless about it. There is a lot of text here. A wall of prose. I yearned for some lists, some bullet points, a few more conclusions, the occasional joke. It's a bit dry.But the biggest problem is the gap between understanding and doing. He tells us a lot about what makes people happy and then throws out a single sentence or two telling us what we should do about it. If we want a clean house we should invest in lemon-scented air fresheners because people are more likely to keep a house clean if it smells fresh. Then he is bouncing off to the next thing that you should do.It feels as if there is a gap between his understanding about how people behave and knowing what you should do instead. He is great on the understanding bit, but you can't help feeling that he has little experience of the doing bit. It feels like he is a professional analyser who is trying his hand at giving a bit of slightly amateurish advice.And that's the funny thing about this book. I can't help feeling that there are some fabulous insights in there. They just need teasing out by someone with more experience in actually doing this stuff. He knows what makes people happy ... he is not so good at knowing how to make people happier.Perhaps the most telling thing for me is that I intend to read the book again, but this time with a notebook by my side. When he says something relevant to me I am going to write it down and work out for myself what to do about it. Adding in the actions and conclusions that are missing.All in all, it's a good book. It has lots of insights. It just isn't quite the finished article.

Many of the reviews here critique either the writing style or the fact that the book does not offer new insights.I vehemently disagree with both criticisms.If you went to university or are a native speaker (which I am not), you should not struggle with the readability of this book. Dolan refrains from using jargon, and the writing style is much more like a popular science book than publications in an academic journal would be.The second criticism is that this book does not offer new insights. People that claim this clearly struggle with reading comprehension. Dolan offers two very novel insights in this monumental piece. One is on how to design your life in order to maximize for happiness. The second is that offers a novel approach to decision-making that helps you maximize happiness. I read a lot of literature on the topic of happiness - both popular science and academic - and had never read this material before.With this book you will make better choices in apartments, movies, jobs and romantic partners. If you think I am exaggerating, do yourself a favor and order the book. You won't be disappointed, but you will be happier - by design.

The idea behind this book is fairly straightforward but it is repeated over and over again, which I understand is necessary to get to a book length but it did go on. The author is an economist which tells you everything about the approach. A great deal of the research seems to be done on students or based on anecdotes from his life, which as he admits, is a privileged one. Some actual interview data with people less fortunate than the bulk of his respondents would have been interesting. What does he have to say to the woman who does three jobs as a single mother and has her grandchildren to care for as well? I’m sure her work is purposeful in his terminology, but I wonder how much she can focus her attention on her own happiness, another of his insights. So, some interesting points, too many flawed quantitative studies and not enough engagement with those in genuinely miserable life circumstances. This book will not change your life.

I think this book is a really good read, and I have recommended it to a lot of friends and family. I do love a good popular science book anyway, so I really liked that this book is not framed as a 'self-help' manual, but is an accessible drawing together of the research that the author has undertaken on the subject. I found some of the themes within the book to be incredibly useful, from the perspective of changing how one feels about (and perceives) happiness. For me, the two key things that came out of the book were: 1. that you need both pleasure and purpose in your life to be happy (and obviously the correct balance of these for the individual concerned); and 2. that thinking you can only be happy if/when you have achieved the 'big-ticket' item (be it relationship, house, money, job etc etc), is wrong, and results in an unhappy lot, as your perception of how happy you are actually reflects the aggregate of those small moments of happiness you experience each day. So after having read this book (a number of times!) I now make sure that I get a measure of 'pleasure' in my day (to balance out the 'purpose' - which I have too much of, unfortunately!), and I make sure that I recognise and seek out small moments of joy each day (that delicious coffee, speaking with a friend, looking at my children sleeping...) and I am so much happier for it. And those big-ticket items no longer stand in the way... I feel quite liberated! Thank you so much, Paul Dolan - keep up the good work!!

This book is very insightful, providing a simple model and framework when looking further into the complexity of what happiness really is. The author discusses at length (backed up by years of research) the difference between pleasure and purpose, and how both have an effect on our happiness overall. Like all books on happiness, the book itself wont magically change your life, but it can provide new knowledge and understanding of how to do so. I for instance, discovered from reading this book, it is more a sense of purpose I lack in my life. Now I'm aware of it, it is down to myself to take action and make the necessary changes.