This is an excellent book and full of wonderful advice on how to achieve happiness in our modern world. A few of my favorite points are listed below.
- Happiness can be achieved through training the mind.
- Success may result in a temporary feeling of elation, or tragedy may send us into a period of depression, but sooner or later our overall level of happiness tends to migrate back to a certain baseline.
- Whether we are feeling happy or unhappy at any given moment often has very little to do with our absolute conditions, but rather it is a function of how we perceive our situation, how satisfied we are with what we have.
- Our feelings of contentment are strongly influenced by our tendency to compare.
- Greed is an exaggerated form of desire, based on over expectation.
- The true antidote of greed is contentment.
- Inner contentment is not to have what we want, but rather to want and appreciate what we have.
- It is more sensible to spend energy focusing on the solution than worrying about the problem.