The Happiness Hypothesis

And thus we move, logically, to The Happiness Hypothesis. Ben Tanaka, main character of Shortcomings, could use The Happiness Hypothesis. Ginger Pye and the rest of the Pye family apparently intuitively knew The Happiness Hypothesis.
Haidt looks at ancient wisdom and compares it to the result of the new science of positive psychology. Some of the things I learned from this book:

Reciprocity is the best guide to life. This is the classic “Do unto others” thought. There are three effective ways to happiness: meditation, cognitive therapy, and Prozac.

People have good insight about other people, but are terrible in judging themselves. They cannot see their own flaws.Instead of trying to improve weaknesses, we should work on our strengths. Often we can use a strength to get around a weakness.

The personality is now thought to have three components: (1) our basic and classic traits of neuroticism and extroversion, (2) the ways we characteristically adapt including openness to new experiences, agreeableness, and conscientiousness, and (3) our life story, the way we have made sense of our lives.It takes adversity to reach our highest levels. Posttraumatic growth is rising to the challenges of problems, which reveals hidden abilities and changes our self-concept.