Well, yes and no – it depends on the book.

It may surprise you that research shows people panache is more polished in readers of Pride and Prejudice or Harry Potter than readers of How to Win Friends and Influence People.

According to a 2005 University of Toronto  study, reading fiction is linked to social skills like empathy and awareness. But non-fiction? Not so much.

The study was correlational, not causal, so we can’t say for sure that our reading matter makes us more or less socially adept.

I can see how reading fiction could boost people skills. After all, reading a novel gets you right into a character’s head – you experience ‘first hand’ another person’s feelings and cogitations, tuning you in to the depth of their internal life. It makes sense that your social insight would be cultivated. 

On the other hand, it could go in the other direction, with socially skilled people simply choosing to read more fiction. That would still be interesting. Perhaps reading fiction is a way to hone the skill, or perhaps it’s pleasurable to flex a strong empathy muscle.

Regardless of direction, there’s a link between reading stories and getting on with others. So it can’t hurt every now and then to put down your Q Is for Quantum Particle Physics and pick up A is for Alibi.

Technorati Tags: happiness,relationships,research,reading,fiction

Image: iofoto

It’s not easy to shake off a mantle you’ve worn for a long time – even if it no longer suits you. And that makes it hard to re-connect with any passion lurking below.

For me, the answer to the question What work would bring me happiness? came with time, and from reading books. Books always seem to have the answers I’m looking for.

But you might prefer a different approach – perhaps using exercises, writing and active self-exploration. If that sounds like you, I’ve found a resource you might like.

Cheryl Richardson has suggestions for locating your latent love in her Passion Path of Development. This is a four-stop journey to finding where your ‘deepest delights’ lie:

Stop 1: Make space

Stop 2: Be an explorer

Stop 3: Find the gold

Stop 4: Take action

Along the way she suggests specific exercises, activities and journal-writing tasks as tools for helping you move toward your passion.

I remember being in that post-corporate limbo, trying to recall what my likes and dislikes had been before I’d sacrificed them to the God of suck-cess. Along with clarity about work came other realizations: that the music I liked was classified as alternative; that I wasn’t, and never had been, a people person; that I much preferred fun costume pieces to real jewelry, and that I was inordinately fond of anything pink and sparkly.

So if you’re committed to uncovering rather than imposing, be warned that your natural inclinations may be less polished or sophisticated than you’ve been telling yourself all these years.

But whatever you do – please don’t discover you like talkback radio.

Related posts:
Happiness Life Strategy: How to find your passion
Happiness Life Strategy: How to find your passion #2

Image by by Lost in Scotland under Creative Commons Attribution 2.0.

Determined to make my way in the world, I took my commerce degree and spent the next 13 years in financial-services marketing. The early years were fun and exciting, but the higher up the ladder I went, the more urgently flashed Stephen Covey’s warning that my ladder might be up against the wrong wall. I dismissed it as an after-image indelibly burned on my retinas from all those eighties nightclub strobes. (Steps, anyone? Rogues?)

That was until I got married and things became more skewed – I discovered that my husband (the betrayal still smarts) enjoyed his work. Clearly, something was very wrong with one of us. Probably him, I rationalized.

Then one day I was chatting to a friend. I said, ‘You know when you’re heading back from lunch and you see a truck and you think: How cool would it be to get run over – not seriously hurt, just enough to spend a couple of weeks in hospital…’

Well, I never got to finish the thought – my friend was so alarmed I had to pretend it was a joke and change the subject. That’s when I knew it was time for financial-services marketing and I to part ways.

It took several months to work out what I wanted to do, and when I did it was so blindingly obvious that you’d think I had been hit by that truck and suffered several unsuccessful rounds of remedial frontal lobe work.

Three books were immeasurably helpful – both to me and to the many friends and family members who’ve since sought guidance in navigating their own career crossroads. Each book fills a different role, and together they make a fantastic set of resources for finding your passion – even if it turns out to be blindingly obvious.

Do What You Love, The Money Will Follow
by Marsha Sinetar

Do What you Love is like a long conversation with a wonderfully wise friend. It goes the deepest of the three books, encouraging you to think about who you are and to explore the importance of finding a way to express yourself. Don’t be scared though – I’m not a touchy-feely person and I wasn’t freaked out at all. The insights are well worth the journey.

The Money or Your Life
by John Clark

The Money or Your Life is more of a practical workbook.

It’s filled with fun cartoons, motivating quotes, thought-provoking diagrams and good common sense.

Follow Your Heart by Andrew Matthews

Andrew Matthews writes delightful books that he illustrates with great warmth, wisdom and humor. Follow your Heart  is encouraging, motivating and charming. This book is the most ‘lightweight’ of the three, but is still loaded with helpful insights for the career-challenged soul.

Note: The first two are a little hard to find, so I’ve included the best links I could ferret out. The last one is easily available on Amazon or through my Happy Store.

Happier is based on Tal Ben-Shahar’s positive psychology primer – the most popular class at Harvard and attended by about 20% of all Harvard graduates.

Ben-Shahar wisely suggests that a better question than Am I happy? is How can I be happier?, since this recognizes happiness to be an ongoing and lifelong process.

He positions his book in contrast to self-help guides which, because they aren’t subject to the scientific method, tend to ‘over-promise and under-deliver’ (page xi). Findings published in academic journals, he says, have greater substance.

Part 1 seeks to define happiness and identify the components of a happy life. Here purpose plays a large role in reconciling immediate and delayed gratification, as well as meaning and pleasure.

Part 2 applies these ideas to:

• Education – suggesting a ‘lovemaking model’ for more enjoyable learning
• Work – happier work gives meaning and pleasure and also uses a person’s strengths
• Relationships – we may need to cultivate rather than find the relationships we want.

Part 3 contains Ben-Shahar’s reflections on the nature of happiness and its place in our lives.

Rather than simply surveying the research, Happier seeks to help the reader become happier by incorporating interactive elements:

• Time-ins (as opposed to time-outs), which ask the reader to apply the ideas to their own life – for example, What are the things that you really, really want to do? (page 77).
• Exercises, which include journal-writing, meditations and tasks such as reading a particular book or joining a class.

In short:
Happier argues for a balanced approach to life – balancing present with future wants, pleasure-seeking with meaning-seeking, and self-interest with altruism. The combination of research, anecdotes and exercises give the reader a sense that being happier is an achievable and worthwhile goal.

Although Ben-Shahar’s writing style is certainly not hard work, for some readers the book may be. There are so many concepts and tasks that the whole project may come to feel onerous after a while.

For readers really ready to get happier and looking for the information and exercises to follow, this is a good guide.

Title: Happier: Learn the Secrets to Daily Joy and Lasting Fulfillment
Author: by Tal Ben-Shahar
Publisher information: McGraw Hill, New York, 2007

How then is the skill of durable happiness achieved? Ricard – a Buddhist monk and both monk and son in the popular book The Monk and the Philosopher: A Father and Son Discuss the Meaning of Life – advocates ongoing mind training and the development of qualities including inner peace, altruistic love and mindfulness.

But this is not a Buddhist book so much as ‘Buddhist in spirit’ (page 14). It’s written for ‘anyone who aspires to a little more joie de vivre and to let wisdom and compassion reign in his or her life’ (page 15).

As such, the book synthesizes ancient Buddhist wisdom with current research findings to offer a happiness program built on spiritual awareness, scientific knowledge and simple exercises. It explores conditions that support happiness – like a deep sense of wellbeing, wisdom, and love for fellow beings – and those that undermine it – including ignorance, mental toxins and disturbing emotions like desire, hatred and envy. In this way, it leads readers away from a life built on grasping for pleasure and self-absorption toward one of contentment and altruism.

In short:
Ricard’s approach to cultivating happiness is deep but wonderfully wide-ranging. It takes findings from neuroscience, psychology, positive psychology, sociology and economics and ideas from philosophy and ethics, and presents them through a prism of ancient Buddhist wisdom. The result is a gentle, wise and motivating guide to happiness that spans suffering, death, emotions, time and ego.

Please note that all of Ricard’s share in the book’s proceeds go to humanitarian and educational projects in Tibet, Nepal, India and Bhutan.

Title: Happiness: A guide to developing life’s most important skill
Author: Matthieu Ricard
Publisher information: Atlantic Books, London, 2007

It seems American voters are upbeat about their own lives, with the majority satisfied about their jobs, income, and future outlook.

But they’re decidedly downbeat concerning the state of their nation – including the president, Congress, the government’s problem-solving ability and its efficiency.

This ‘happiness gap’ means people are personally satisfied, but feeling threatened by the government’s inability to protect against global problems and macro threats. As a result, what the voters want is for ‘the government to change so their own lives can stay the same’.

My 2 cents

Are people really happy at a personal level? Much has been written (eg in Richard Layard’s book Happiness: Lessons from a new science) about ‘the happiness problem’ – the now-well-known statistic that although (US) incomes have doubled over the past 15 years, people are no happier. It may be that people are generally pleased with their material situation, but whether this translates into contentment is not so clear.

In a recent Sydney Morning Herald article Peter Hartcher cited diverse but compelling evidence of an emerging ‘happiness agenda’ – a push toward making happiness a greater responsibility of the state (which I summarized in The politics of happiness). Part of the reason for the shift was a growing dissatisfaction with the spoils of economic growth.

So perhaps it’s not so much that Americans are sitting pretty personally. Perhaps they are simply less excited by the promise of further economic growth to fund more material goodies. Perhaps that’s why they’re looking for a greater sense of peace.

In home-decorating lingo, I’m what they call anal. My wardrobe is color-ordered. My library is Dewey-decimalized.  My linen is fold-perfect – corner to corner, edge to edge, smooth lines facing out. Neatness and order bring me calm, as well as something I can best describe as happiness.

Until recently, my books were pristine. I’d buy only perfect-condition volumes and read them with care to avoid breaking the spine or curling the corners.

If I thought I might want to return to a beautiful passage of fiction, I’d try to remember the page number. Effectiveness rating: 0%.

To look up an index, I’d perform minor acrobatics to hold open the index page while contorting myself to plaster the relevant sections with post-it notes (to be removed later). It produced neck twinges and paper cuts, and looking up the topic again, as I sometimes do, meant repeating the gymnastics. Annoyingness rating: 100%.

One day, feeling particularly put out by these contortions, I dog-eared an index page and highlighted the entry. I looked around. Nothing happened. I did the same with each reference. Armageddon remained at bay. I kept going, defacing the book but also, strangely, engaging with it. When I’d finished and closed the book it seemed heavier, like the little folds had trapped something extra in them.

I tried it with fiction, dog-earing a page of wonderful prose. I closed the book, then re-opened it at the dog-ear. There was the passage: lovely and accessible.

I now routinely highlight, annotate, spine-crack and dog-ear my books. Before, we had an acquaintance – one-sided and aloof. Now, we have a relationship.

And as with any relationship, we each make our mark on the other.

Postscript: Don’t try dog-earing extraordinary novels like Atonement by Ian McEwan or you’ll end up with a pentagon-shaped book.