Wordless Wednesday: The Weekend Breakfast Routine

 “All happiness depends on a leisurely breakfast.” – John Gunther

Throwback Thursday: A Brief Visit with David Cane on Happiness

“If you are really thankful, what do you do? You share.” ~ W. Clement Stone

The idea of happiness is something so basic that most of us desire it without knowing why. As Americans it is even written into our national creed as one of our basic entitlements: “Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”

The pursuit alone does not always result in happiness. That might be why there are so many books about happiness on the market. Many of them deal with our internal barriers and others offer practical tools for removing external barriers. The how of happiness, the steps to happiness, the psychology of happiness, the secrets of happiness… So when I was given a chance to review yet another book on this happy subject, The Short Book on Happiness, I took advantage of the opportunity to instead interview its author, David Cane.

Born in 1964, Mr. Cane is a graduate of The American University in Washington D.C. where he received his MBA. His life experience includes overcoming drug and alcohol addictions, unemployment, bankruptcies and other misfortunes. Like many, he knew why he was unhappy, but did not know how to find the happiness he saw others experiencing.

Today he has been a member of Alcoholics Anonymous for fifteen years and speaks routinely on the topic of addiction and recovery. It is apropos that his blogspot includes this quote from Henry Ford: “Whether you think you can, or that you can’t, you are usually right.” Everything really does start right there.

EN: What was your motivation in writing this book?
David Cane: For me, studying and learning about happiness was never enough. I’ve read many books that I thought would help me become happier. I learned a lot, and many of the books I read were extremely well written and valuable as they related to helping me understand why I was experiencing worry, fear, and low self-esteem. What was missing, however, was a simple, short, but substantive approach that I could apply to eradicate worry, acquire more confidence, and become a happier person. My heart was always in the right place, and I knew I could achieve more in my life, and I was certainly ready to do the work, but I just could not figure out the right actions to practice.

It’s my belief that many people unwittingly procrastinate becoming happy due to spending an inordinate amount of time seeking out the reasons for their unhappiness. Too much time is spent figuring things out, and too little time is spent solving the problem. The problem, in essence, is that we have allowed our minds to become our masters, and must reclaim ownership of our minds in order to become happy.

EN: Many people know most of these truths. Why don't they do them?
DC: That is correct. Things such as positive thought, gratitude, forgiveness, and faith are not new. I believe there are a variety of reasons why people do not practice these things and do not receive the associated benefits in their lives. These include:

~ Difficulty in sorting through the vast amount of information and differing philosophies available on these topics
~ People want a quick fix, and give up if it results don't happen fast enough
~ People know what they need to do, but don’t know how to do it to get results
~ It takes a lot of energy and commitment
~ Thinking in a new way makes you "different"
~ It takes people out of their comfort zone

EN: In a world with so much suffering, is it right to be happy?
DC: Yes it is. I believe we deserve to be happy, and that is God’s intention for us. In fact, much of the suffering in the world is created by people who are unhappy to begin with. The more happiness there is, the less suffering there will be. People that are truly happy (i.e., have high self-esteem, are not consumed by worry and fear, and have a strong faith) are in a much better position to reduce suffering in the world.

EN: Discontent can become a prod for motivating us to do something to make a bad situation better. (e.g. in a situation where social injustice is taking place.) Can we be both happy and discontent at the same time?
DC: Yes. In fact, a person who is truly happy understands that happiness does not mean that things around them have to be going well. That is, one can have financial difficulties, health issues, family issues caused by others, etc. and still be happy. Happiness is an “inside job” and is a reflection of how comfortable one is with who they are, not what they have, and for me starts and ends with faith in God.

* * * * 

The full title of David Cane's book is The Short Book on Happiness: Transform Your Life in 10 Days. For additional information on overcoming secret addictions be sure to check out the late John Prin’s website, appropriately called True You Recovery.

THIS INTERVIEW WAS ORIGINALLY PUBLISHED IN 2008

* * * * 

"Those who do not observe the movements of their own minds must of necessity be unhappy."--Marcus Aurelius

Polarity Management: A Tool for Managing Complex Problems

30 years ago or os my brother Ron (Dr. Ron Newman, a PhD psychologist) introduced me to the concept of polarity management. For Ron, thinking about polarities and finding balance has been a lifelong habit of his, almost an involuntary obsession. Once you become aware of the variety of ways polarities emerge, you can't help but notice them yourselves. 

Examples abound. Security vs. freedom, efficiency vs. creativity, competition vs. cooperation. Polarity management is a tool to help us manage or resolve complex issues. The key idea is to understand that opposites are not necessarily enemies.

The goal is not to find a solution that eliminates one of the opposites, but rather to find a way to manage the tension between them in a manner that is productive and sustainable. 

Here's another example that happened with an acquaintance of mine. After a very busy time in his life he decided to go live on a beach in Florida for a year. After four months he was so bored he found a job that was fulfilling for 18 months but not something he wanted to do for the rest of his life. During this period he recognized his calling and followed that for the rest of his life.

Too much activity left him exhausted and he opted for inactivity. This resulted in a sense of meaninglessness, which propelled him to think more deeply about why he was here on earth. Ultimately he found fulfillment in a career that involved helping others.

My brother publishes a column about seeking balance that we hope will become a book or series of books. Topics he's written about include seeking balance with anger, depression, anxiety, happiness, grief, aspects of parenting and more. As a Christian counsellor he has spent more than two decades training church leaders in South America and elsewhere on this principle of finding balance.

Aristotle's Golden Mean is a similar concept in philosophy. Moral virtue lies between the two extremes of excess and deficiency. For example, finding the balance between recklessness and boldness is the path to virtue.

Giving is an example of this challenge. Stinginess is one end of the spectrum, extravagant giving to the neglect of paying your bills and neglecting your children is at the other end of the scale. How do we find the Golden Mean? For each of us this can be a perplexing problem in a world where there is so much need.

What about fun? Is "fun" the purpose of life? Or is laughter something that we enjoy because it lightens our load as we pursue our responsibilities? You can read my thoughts on that topic here: Eudaemonia vs. Hakuna Matata: Two Views on the Pursuit of Happiness

Much more can be said but I have to catch a plane. You can read a few of my brother's articles here... and encourage him to continue his writings. He's thought deeply on this topic for a very long time and has a bundle of useful insights.

Have a great weekend.

Table Scraps: Primarily for Writers

If you're a writer you are probably like me. You enjoy reading what other writers say about writing. One of the writers in this list once wrote, or said, that he takes more pride in how many books he's read than how many he has written.

If you're not a writer, I'm certain that many of these table scraps will speak to you in some way or another anyway. Take your time. Relax. Chew slowly. Enjoy the flavor of the ideas as well as the words. 

* * * * 

"If it sounds like writing, I rewrite it."
--Elmore Leonard

"A good novel tells us the truth about its hero. A bad novel tells us the truth about its author."
--G.K. Chesterton

"Books are a refuge, a sort of cloistral refuge, from the vulgarities of the actual world. "
--Walter Pater

"Whenever a man's friends begin to compliment him about looking young, he may be sure that they think he is growing old."
--Washington Irving

“Music, feelings of happiness, mythology, faces worn by time, certain twilights and certain places, want to tell us something, or they told us something that we should not have missed, or they are about to tell us something; this imminence of a revelation that is not produced is, perhaps, 'the aesthetic event'.”
--Jorge Luis Borges

"In an age when other fantastically speedy, widespread media are triumphing and running the risk of flattening all communication onto a single, homogeneous surface, the function of literature is communication between things that are different simply because they are different, not blunting but even sharpening the differences between them, following the true bent of the written language."
--Italo Calvino

"More fundamentally, I'm interested in memory because it's a filter through which we see our lives, and because it's foggy and obscure, the opportunities for self-deception are there. In the end, as a writer, I'm more interested in what people tell themselves happened rather than what actually happened."
--Kazuo Ishiguro

"Planning to write is not writing. Outlining ...researching ...talking to people about what you’re doing, none of that is writing. Writing is writing."
--E.L. Doctorow

"I had a teacher I liked who used to say good fiction’s job was to comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable."
--David Foster Wallace

"What the United States does best is to understand itself. What it does worst is understand others."
--Carlos Fuentes

"Don't classify me, read me. I'm a writer, not a genre."
--Carlos Fuentes

"It's possible, in a poem or a short story, to write about commonplace things and objects using commonplace but precise language, and to endow those things—a chair, a window curtain, a fork, a stone, a woman's earring—with immense, even startling power. It is possible to write a line of seemingly innocuous dialogue and have it send a chill along the reader's spine—the source of artistic delight, as Nabokov would have it. That's the kind of writing that most interests me."
--Raymond Carver

"True art is by its nature moral. We recognize true art by its careful, thoroughly honest search for and analysis of values.
--John Gardner

And One Last Quote
"A day of bad writing is always better than a day of no writing."
--Don Roff

The Role of One-Percenters

The role of one-percenters from the point of view of many plebians is: "Wouldn't it be great to live like kings, to have your wishes be fulfilled and to be able to do whatever you want?"

In other words, a lot of us envy them at times. For others, one-percenters are leeches to be hated and despised. 

The roll of Powerball and other Mega-Millions lotteries: To soften the plebians' hatred of one-percenters, because, "If I'm lucky maybe I'll be a one-percenter some day." 

* * * 

A study was done about matters pertaining to the mood of people who experience sudden extreme events in their lives, such as becoming a quadriplegic or winning one hundred million dollars. What the researchers found is that nearly everyone reverted to their general disposition before the accident or the mind-blowing victory. That is, if you were melancholy or a puddleglum beforehand, afterwards you were likely to eventually revert to type. If you were a cheerful optimist beforehand, you would likely eventually be the same even after a serious accident. 

In other words, your disposition is determined more by internal mechanisms rather than external circumstances.

* * * 

How many times have
You heard someone say
If I had his money
I could do things my way

But little they know
That it's so hard to find
One rich man in ten
With a satisfied mind

"Satisfied Mind" by Jack Rhodes and Red Hays is a classic that's been recorded by many greats including Johny Cash and Bob Dylan, who makes it the opening track on his album Saved.

"Money can't buy happiness" is a familiar palliative when you ain't got none, but what does it really mean? For many, and this happens a lot to athletes, the responsibilities that accompany having money are a weight that distracts them from what they really love, which is playing baseball or basketball or whatever. When it comes to who can they trust to watch the nest egg, well... there have been plenty of sports stars who ended up bankrupt. 

Psalm 73 is how I comfort myself when I think on these things. How do you view money?

Oh Brave New World: Happiness vs. Purpose

Aldous Huxley (Public domain)

"Once you begin admitting explanations in terms of purpose, well, you wouldn't know what the result might be. It was the sort of idea that might decondition the more unsettled minds among the higher casts. They can lose their faith in happiness and take to believing instead that the goal was somewhere beyond, somewhere outside the present human sphere, that the purpose of life was not the maintenance of well-being, but some intensification and refining of consciousness, some enlargement of knowledge, which was, the controller reflected, quite possibly true but not in the present circumstances admissible." 

* * * 

The passage above is taken from Brave New World by Aldous Huxley. The novel takes place in a future World State, 600 A.F. (After Ford) In this story, the preeminent value is happiness. From the start, the people in this future world are genetically designed to do the work that they will be engaged in for their lifetimes. To ensure their permanent blissful existence is indeed blissful, everyone has a sufficient supply of Soma, a mood-altering drug that makes you happy. 

Another feature of this brave new world is the denunciation of alone-time. "Everyone belongs to everyone else." Pleasure is the priority. Who wouldn't want to be perpetually happy?

The passage in blue at the opening leapt from the page for me as the controller realizes that an alternate set of values could undo the whole structure of their brave new world. 

The book was published in 1931, and it certainly seems that people are clamoring more for Pleasure (Happiness) than for Purpose. 

In 2019 I wrote a blog post about how the meaning of the word "Happiness" has changed. It begins: 

I am proposing that what the Founding Fathers meant when they wrote “Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness” is totally at odds with what it has come to mean today. 

Read more here: Eudaemonia vs. Hakuna Matata 

Grown-ups, Have Your Dreams Come True?

Guest blog post by John Prin

“The greatest despair is to not become the person you were meant to be.”

--Soren Kierkegaard

Ramona had a dream. A big dream. During one of my seminars, she declared, “My dream is to prevent any animal on the planet from ever being harmed.” Her certainty and clarity got everybody’s attention, as it did mine. But she was too busy with life, taking care of three growing children, running a busy household, and working part time at a supermarket as well as volunteering on weekends. How could she possibly realize such a huge dream?

We all dream about the best life we want to live. Many of us imagine great deeds and larger-than-life goals. Almost any functioning adult, it turns out, faces a primal, deep-rooted quandary that will define their identity:

“Why am I alive?”

“What is my purpose in life?”

“What am I going to do about it?”

In our minds, we may aspire to lofty achievements and significant acts of service that will inspire our fellow human beings. We may envision striving for a grand purpose, a destiny we are meant to fulfill. Yet . . .

A vast number of us learn that life gets in the way. Quite simply, we confront obstacles and life’s demands, so we eventually settle for less and move on. Where do those dreams of making a difference go? When we postpone our destiny, is a happy ending impossible?

Some people avoid the responsibility of answering these three questions by working hard at unsatisfying jobs to provide a living for their family, while others escape into the abuse of drugs and alcohol or depression and apathy, to cite a few responses. My seminar titled My Life Dream and Destiny occurred during a national conference for health care professionals. 1 I asked the thirty-five audience members: “Have any of you defined your dream in life and are you working to make it come true? Or, is your destiny on hold waiting for you to act?”

That’s when Ramona, a woman in her 40s, raised her hand and declared her big dream. Fellow participants affirmed its idealism, its simplicity and universal scope, but wondered how a goal so lofty could ever be achieved. We discussed how significant progress toward a goal that huge for one person would itself be a worthy lifetime project. One participant suggested narrowing “animals” to more manageable limits: from dogs, to cats and other pets, to horses, and so on.

“So, Ramona,” I asked, “what steps are you taking to make your dream come true?”

“None right now,” she responded. “But that’s why I’m here: to come up with a plan and do something about it.”

Ramona reminisced about being raised on a farm and her childhood love of animals. The passion in her voice aroused us. I asked, “In what ways could you rekindle that same passion as a mature adult?” She drew a blank. 

One group member suggested, “Sounds like you know why you are alive and what your purpose is.” Another proposed that she could volunteer at a local humane society where injured or abused animals need care. Ramona liked that idea, however, “My goal is to prevent animals from being abused and mistreated in the first place.” Still another member offered to help create a website to promote her cause. She scribbled notes.

Group members raised the issue of priorities: What activities would Ramona have to put aside to make available more time in her schedule to invest the energy her big dream required. People suggested new choices of activities such as encouraging neighbors and friends to join her, using social media to spread the word, different ways to raise money, etc. Ramona acknowledged that her husband and kids no longer needed the level of attention she’d once devoted to them years earlier. “A lot of years have piled up behind me, and the ones ahead are getting fewer and fewer. I’m going crazy every day thinking about it.”

“The purpose of life is to live a life of purpose.”

--Poet Robert Byrne

Whenever people focus on positive and authentic goals that matter deeply to them their energy elevates and new priorities become clearer. I offered a three-phase model intended to help a person “unleash the most complete version of their authentic self—to embrace “the True You self” that strives to make one’s dream come true for the benefit of others.” 2

Dream: An ideal that nourishes and challenges me.

Purpose: My motivation to do, and be, my best for others.

Meaning: Why my dream, and my life, matter.

The distinctions between “dream,” “purpose,” and “meaning” set off some animated comments. As individuals, we can choose and develop our dream based on our strongest interests and highest values. Purpose stimulates us to arrange the roles and responsibilities of our job/finances, family/spouse/children, and citizenship functions in society that will facilitate our dream.

Meaning is the set of emotions that result; it’s what happens when the benefits and rewards for others and ourselves accrue from acting freely and authentically.

For Ramona, that meant a solid answer to the question, “Does my life matter?” She replied with a resounding, “Yes.” A happier family life could also follow because she would be acting consistently with her authentic dream and celebrating when each of her objectives and goals made headway.

Meaning is the elixir of life that human beings seek and desire, the fulfillment of one’s life lived with passion and purpose. Meaning can be experienced as inner joy even in the midst of outer trials and severe circumstances. Meaning results from accomplishing tasks and goals which achieve a broader purpose; it follows from expressing one’s gifts to the world, and from serving something larger than oneself (a cause, a population, a life mission). 3

“The key to realizing a dream is to focus not on success but significance, and then even small steps and little victories along your path will take on greater meaning.” 

--Oprah Winfrey

John Prin leading a seminar.

When aligned, a person’s dream, purpose, and meaning generate the reality of knowing who we are and why we are alive. We live out the reason for getting up in the morning and moving through the day. When legitimate daily demands of competing priorities arise, like careers or parenting, we find fresh energy to keep going.

Ask yourself: “Is my destiny calling me? Is it time to go deep within myself—beyond being a mom/dad and wife/husband and employee/boss—and nurture the “me” who is an artist, inventor, explorer, entrepreneur, leader, or pioneer?” Expressing that identity will make possible the finest moments of being alive—as one who knows who you are and why you are alive.

“With optimism and a firm belief in a positive future, you can throw yourself into the service of that which is larger than you are.”

--Martin Seligman, Founder of Positive Psychology

1. Florida Inner Circle Networking Conference, Fort Lauderdale February 2008

2. Roadmap to Lifelong Recovery Guidebook, © John Prin, 2008 PESI 2008

3. Authentic Happiness, © Martin E. P. Seligman, Jan 5, 2004 Atria Books

Eudaemonia vs. Hakuna Matata: Two Views on the Pursuit of Happiness

"It is an unscrupulous intellect that does not pay to antiquity its due reverence."--Erasmus

I am proposing that what the Founding Fathers meant when they wrote “Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness” is totally at odds with what it has come to mean today. To elaborate on how this came about is not my aim here. Instead I wish to compare two ideas about happiness and suggest that somehow we’ve now got it all wrong.

What I’m attempting to express here comes from notes I took in response to a lecture on Aristotle that our philosophy club discussed a number of years ago.

Aristotle, one of the most influential of the Greek philosophers, had been a student and teacher in Plato’s school before starting his own school, the Lyceum. One of Aristotle’s central themes had to do with how to live the right kind of life. Assuming that there is such a thing as what might be called a “right kind of life,” what are the various components of this “Right kind of life?”

In my Medium article Eudeamonia vs. Hakuna Matata, I compare Aristotle's teachings on happiness with the current attitudes about happiness. The reason this is important because I believe the Founding Fathers had Aristotle's ideas in mind when they wrote about life, liberty and "the pursuit of happiness."

Over time the meanings behind the words we use have changed. Words like freedom and happiness were very different concepts in the minds of Enlightenment thinkers of two and three centuries ago.

* * * * 

Again, check out the rest of this story Here.

Are We As Happy As We Used To Be? A Glimpse at the World Happiness Report

Because we live in a scientific age, we enjoy defining and measuring and quantifying things. This goes back to Aristotle who, in addition, began by naming things.

At the end of last week a story about World Happiness caught my attention. The two highlights that jumped out for me were that Norway is now the happiest place in the world and that the U.S. isn't as happy as it used to be.

What were their criteria, I wondered. How does one measure happiness?

The organization, loosely affiliated with the U.N., has been studying happiness for only about five years, publishing their first report in 2013. That the research is global in scope intrigued me. Here in the U.S. "the pursuit of happiness" was loudly trumpeted as a one of our inalienable rights in our Declaration of Independence. But what is this elusive entity that we call happiness?

The World Happiness Report evaluates the following main factors when measuring happiness: caring, freedom, generosity, honesty, health, income and good governance.

It's an interesting list. Measuring happiness by ranking countries, though, has certain difficulties because as we all know there are vast differences in every country between those at the top of the heap and those at the bottom. (EdNote: I did not read the report in its entirety, but reviewed the executive summary and sections from the various chapters and appendices.)

That Norway, Denmark, Iceland and Switzerland led the list of happy countries did not surprise me. We've heard a lot over the years about the high levels of satisfaction people enjoy in Scandinavia. (Finland was 5th and Sweden tied for 9th, in case you wish to know.) The other countries in the top ten were Netherlands, Canada, New Zealand and Australia. (EdNote: I've never met an Australian who did not seem happy to me.)

So what happened to the U.S? We used to be 3rd.  Now we rank 19th. The executive summary gave these two reasons for this country's fall: declining social support and increased corruption. By way of contrast, the Nordic countries have increased social support and reduced corruption.

As I skimmed the various sections of the report, one of the biggest factors contributing to personal misery is mental illness, which corrodes happiness in whatever country one finds oneself in. Mental illness is a universal problem without borders, which brought to mind this article from The Guardian regarding assisted suicide. Because of lax euthanasia laws Aurelia Browers, a troubled mentally 29-year-old woman in the Netherlands was by law recently able to legally end her life. The Netherlands law was enacted in 2002, permitting assisted suicide when there is "unbearable suffering" without hope of relief.

As I think about this woman's suffering it makes me sad. But suffering takes many forms. We need more caring and compassion for sure, for we never know what hidden burden another is carrying.*

They say that humans have a remarkable capacity for adaptation, but there sure is a lot of brokenness out there. Things aren't what they are supposed to be. That's why we need to be kind, compassionate, merciful and generous.

Are you happy? Somehow writing about all this happiness today made me sad.

Meantime, life goes on. "Sit, Ubu."

* I used to attribute this to Rumi, but have read here that it was someone else.

What Are the Odds of Being Happy After Winning the Lottery?

I've been doing some end-of-year cleaning and organizing. Last night while moving folders and files I came across an old file titled Lottery "Winners". The folder had a few newspaper clippings in it with titles like, "Lottery winner arrested again" and "Jackpot winner hits a bad stretch."

We hear the stories and maybe even know a few ourselves, about the rancorous quibbling amongst siblings when one wins big. According to this story 65% of all lottery winners are bankrupt in 15 years. Furthermore, their divorce rate is four times the national average. The story also notes that the average lottery gambler spend $700 a year on the game, which isn't too bad if you can afford it. Many cannot.

Here in the U.S. the big kahuna of lotteries is the Powerball. The drawings are held on Wednesdays and Saturdays. Today's purse is in the neighborhood of $300 million. The odds of winning are pretty slim, as in finding a specific grain of sand on South Beach. Nevertheless there will be plenty of players ponying up, even with the odds of being unhappy afterwards being so high.

Here's another reason it may not be fun to be a lottery winner. The paparazzi. Win a few million bucks and the reporters want your story. According to one Forbes article*, winning the lottery could be a curse, not a blessing. "Be careful what you wish for. You just might get it," is a fairly well-worn adage, but totally apropos.

The story cites Jack Whitaker who says, "I wish I'd torn that ticket up." Willie Seeley was quoted as saying, “There are days I wish we were back to just getting paid every two weeks.”

I had a friend who used to say that lotteries were invented by the rich in order to give poor people a dream of being rich. Why? So the rich won't be hated so much because these dreamers may become one some day.

I dunno. What I do know is that the more you own the more you have to worry about. I also know that there's a really big pot for the winner tonight. Is it O.K. to just go after the $100,000 prize?


*Why Lottery Winners Crash After Winning Big

More Dave Barry Quotes

OK today's blog post: Dave Barry quotes. I'd like to begin with an apology to Mr. Barry because I actually have some friends who don't know who he is. I feel very bad about this because I think everybody should know who he is. If you do not know who Dave Barry is, I encourage you to ask Siri, Alexa or your favorite A.I.

Yesterday I was feeling a little depressed and while listening to a book on philosophy the writer was discussing existential author John Paul Sartre. Well… let's just say I switched my audiobook to Live Right and Find Happiness (Although Beer Is Much Faster) and almost immediately I was considerably happier. In fact, I was smiling within minutes. Because I want other people to be happy I thought it may be helpful to post a few Dave Barry quotes here by way of introduction.

EdNote: I was not paid to write this.

“The one thing that unites all human beings, regardless of age, gender, religion, economic status, or ethnic background, is that, deep down inside, we all believe that we are above-average drivers.”
― Dave Barry

“If you had to identify, in one word, the reason why the human race has not achieved, and never will achieve, its full potential, that word would be 'meetings.”
― Dave Barry

“It is a well-documented fact that guys will not ask for directions. This is a biological thing. This is why it takes several million sperm cells... to locate a female egg, despite the fact that the egg is, relative to them, the size of Wisconsin.”
― Dave Barry

“Your hand and your mouth agreed many years ago that, as far as chocolate is concerned, there is no need to involve your brain.”
 ― Dave Barry

“Gravity is a contributing factor in nearly 73 percent of all accidents involving falling objects.”
― Dave Barry

“Don't you wish you had a job like mine? All you have to do is think up a certain number of words! Plus, you can repeat words! And they don't even have to be true!”
 ― Dave Barry

“Scientists tell us that the fastest animal in the world, with a speed of 120 mph, is a cow dropped out of a helicopter.”
 ― Dave Barry

“All of us are born with a set of instinctive fears -- of falling, of the dark, of lobsters, of falling on lobsters in the dark, of speaking before a Rotary Club, and of the words "Some Assembly Required".”
 ― Dave Barry

* * * *

Click here for a list of Barry books available at Amazon.

Five Minutes With David Cane, On Happiness

“If you are really thankful, what do you do? You share.” ~ W. Clement Stone

The idea of happiness is something so basic that most of us desire it without knowing why. As Americans it is even written into our national creed as one of our basic entitlements: “Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”

The pursuit alone does not always result in happiness. That might be why there are so many books about happiness on the market. Many of them deal with our internal barriers and others offer practical tools for removing external barriers. The how of happiness, the steps to happiness, the psychology of happiness, the secrets of happiness… So when I was given a chance to review yet another book on this happy subject, The Short Book on Happiness, I took advantage of the opportunity to instead interview its author, David Cane.

Born in 1964, Mr. Cane is a graduate of The American University in Washington D.C. where he received his MBA. His life experience includes overcoming drug and alcohol addictions, unemployment, bankruptcies and other misfortunes. Like many, he knew why he was unhappy, but did not know how to find the happiness he saw others experiencing.

Today he has been a member of Alcoholics Anonymous for fifteen years and speaks routinely on the topic of addiction and recovery. It is apropos that his blogspot includes this quote from Henry Ford: “Whether you think you can, or that you can’t, you are usually right.” Everything really does start right there.

Ennyman: What was your motivation in writing this book?
DC: For me, studying and learning about happiness was never enough. I’ve read many books that I thought would help me become happier. I learned a lot, and many of the books I read were extremely well written and valuable as they related to helping me understand why I was experiencing worry, fear, and low self-esteem. What was missing, however, was a simple, short, but substantive approach that I could apply to eradicate worry, acquire more confidence, and become a happier person. My heart was always in the right place, and I knew I could achieve more in my life, and I was certainly ready to do the work, but I just could not figure out the right actions to practice.

It’s my belief that many people unwittingly procrastinate becoming happy due to spending an inordinate amount of time seeking out the reasons for their unhappiness. Too much time is spent figuring things out, and too little time is spent solving the problem. The problem, in essence, is that we have allowed our minds to become our masters, and must reclaim ownership of our minds in order to become happy.

Enny: Many people know most of these truths. Why don't they do them?
DC: That is correct. Things such as positive thought, gratitude, forgiveness, and faith are not new. I believe there are a variety of reasons why people do not practice these things and do not receive the associated benefits in their lives. These include:

~ Difficulty in sorting through the vast amount of information and differing philosophies available on these topics
~ People want a quick fix, and give up if it results don't happen fast enough
~ People know what they need to do, but don’t know how to do it to get results
~ It takes a lot of energy and commitment
~ Thinking in a new way makes you "different"
~ It takes people out of their comfort zone

Enny: In a world with so much suffering, is it right to be happy?
DC: Yes it is. I believe we deserve to be happy, and that is God’s intention for us. In fact, much of the suffering in the world is created by people who are unhappy to begin with. The more happiness there is, the less suffering there will be. People that are truly happy (i.e., have high self-esteem, are not consumed by worry and fear, and have a strong faith) are in a much better position to reduce suffering in the world.

Enny: Discontent can become a prod for motivating us to do something to make a bad situation better. (e.g. in a situation where social injustice is taking place.) Can we be both happy and discontent at the same time?
DC: Yes. In fact, a person who is truly happy understands that happiness does not mean that things around them have to be going well. That is, one can have financial difficulties, health issues, family issues caused by others, etc. and still be happy. Happiness is an “inside job” and is a reflection of how comfortable one is with who they are, not what they have, and for me starts and ends with faith in God.

Enny: Do you have a website or blog? Where can people find your book?
DC: Yes. My website is http://davidcanebooks.com/

My blog is http://thoughtharmony.blogspot.com/
My book is available through my website, as well as on amazon.com and barnes&noble.com.

Enny: The full title of the book is The Short Book on Happiness: Transform Your Life in 10 Days. Thanks, David, for the good and important work you are doing. I believe you are right regarding your observation that much suffering is created by people who are unhappy to begin with.

Be sure to check out David’s website and David's website and blogspot. For additional information on overcoming secret addictions be sure to visit my friend John Prin’s website, appropriately called True You Recovery.