The Happiness Equation

happiness

Just this morning I sat down on my porch swing and the seat broke. I spilled coffee on my white T-shirt. I moved houseplants outside for some fresh air and dropped one on the kitchen floor. A couple of weeks ago I would have been pissed. Today, I took it in stride. I credit my sense of peace to The Happiness Equation – Want Nothing + Do Anything= Have Everything.

Neil Pasricha’s book reads like a devotional of sorts. Thoughtful quotes and stories by everyone from Lao Tzu to Daniel Goleman, bestselling author of Emotional Intelligence; from Rudyard Kipling to Buddha. It’s the kind of book you could read a portion of each day, and if you applied its principles find yourself like I did, less stressed out and more content despite daily mishaps. The author writes that no matter what we acquire in life we usually find ourselves looking ahead to the next new car, new job or new romance. This in itself is nothing new. However, in The Happiness Equation, Pasricha suggests happiness has a formula we can follow to achieve that state, and to do otherwise will keep us forever chasing our tails, like my cat Jax in one of his crazy fits.

The book is easy to read with well-documented research on the study of happiness. The author, who is a graduate of Harvard and well-repected in the business world, began his personal quest for happiness on his blog 1000 Awesome Things. Today Neil Pasricha is considered to be a successful life coach to many like Walmart, the Audi Executive Team for Audi of America and leaders worldwide. He continues to encourage others not only in this book, but his first, The Book of Awesome and is considered to be a popular speaker on TED talks. In The Happiness Equation Pasricha presents the possibility of simply being happy, in spite of broken swings, coffee stained T-shirts, and dirt on the kitchen floor.

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