(Last of 3 Articles)
By Kumar Balani

NEW YORK, NY – An overabundance of books that give you dubious ‘advice’ on life purpose and developing happiness is the situation existing today on Amazon’s website, the world’s largest bookselling platform. Quickly find out which books are good to read by looking at how many positive customer reviews they have.

Then find out how popular it is with readers. On the search bar at the top of its website, just type in “Life Purpose for Building Happiness’ (exclude ‘toolbox’). .

We found that at the top of the list of 70 books was Designing Your Life: How to Build a Well-Lived, Joyful Life. Its popularity is shown by its very high three-digit sales rank of 336, which means, per my sales-rank-to-daily-copies-sales table, that this book sells between 250 and 500 copies per day! Lower-priced books usually have higher ranks because more people buy them mainly, although not solely, for their price.

In this concluding article we provide you our dear readers, the necessary guidance and tools to build a life of purpose. Helping and serving others is the key to your achieving and maintaining happiness in your life, as the various books, seminars, TED talks, videos, and webinars named below, will show you, including some with data to support that contention.

Find out first, if the authors of books, and speakers at seminars, TED talks, videos, and webinars, lead a happy life. In other words, check if the person – who authored the book, whose seminar you plan to attend, or whose TED talk, video or webinar you plan to watch, actually ‘walks the talk’ in his or her own life.

Toolbox. Below are my suggested tool types needed in a toolbox for building a life of happiness. I caution you from gathering too many irrelevant tools. Stay focused. Be choosy.

Books. Choose those with a lot of positive reviews by customers. In choosing books, ensure that the titles have a narrow and tight focus, otherwise you will simply waste your precious time reading on a whole range of subjects irrelevant to the avowed intent of the author or speaker. I suggest these books on the life-purpose-of-serving-others-leading-to-happiness-connection:

  • Designing Your Life: How to Build a Well-Lived, Joyful Life (336 in sales rank)
  • Immediate Happiness: Be Happy Now Using Practical Steps with Immediate Proven Results (60 customer reviews, with 55 or 92 percent giving maximum five stars)!
  • The Happiness Toolbox: 56 Practices to Find Happiness, Purpose & Productivity in Love, Work and Life (the 56 practices in this book are science-based)       

Seminars. Attend seminars presented by people who are genuine givers to others, interested in your success and happiness, not just out their own enrichment. Find out by going on Google, what has been written – good or bad – about them. If the initial seminar is free, take a list of questions to ask the presenter to verify that he or she is the ‘genuine article.’ I suggest this one:

Tony Robbins, an author of bestsellers and a motivational speaker, says in essence, in his Key to A Happy Life video: “whenever you give, it is always going to come back!.”

TED Talks. Look for the number of views on the bottom right of the video. Check out if they have written books or done seminars on the life purpose-happiness connection. Due to limited space I suggest only two speakers:

Robert Waldinger, whose TED talk had an unbelievable 25 million-plus views as of January 25, is a psychologist. His TED talk gist: “What keeps us happy and healthy as we go through life is not fame and money. It’s something else that is based on a 75-year-old study on adult development with data on true happiness and satisfaction.” He shares important lessons from this study based on extensive scientific evidence. But to me, money is important.

Emily Esfahani Smith, had an amazing 6.6 million-plus views on her TED talk as of January 25. She authored The Power of Meaning: Finding Fulfillment in a World Obsessed with Happiness.  

Videos. View those by authors of books, motivational speakers, or other successful, happy people in different endeavors – on life purpose as it relates to developing and increasing happiness, or better still, on this cause-effect relationship that they can prove, using studies done by qualified psychologists.

Arthur Brooks, president of the American Enterprise Institute, in a video with 699,000+ views, distills 40 years of social science research into a surprising set of answers on what makes you happy. What is important is that his conclusions are not his opinion. They are based on scientific research.

Webinars. Go online to view them presented by people whose clients have written sincere comments on the value they received from topics the webinar presenter discussed. I suggest:

T.Harv Eker, who reveals in his Zero to Multimillionaire web class what were the six major principles that made the difference in either leaving him being broke, or earning millions …

As a special free gift to Daily Tribune readers, we avail to you a free copy of Anil Gupta’s Immediate Happiness. Simply click on blue letters below, then on orange bar, simply click on the letters CLICK HERE TO DOWNLOAD THE IMMEDIATE HAPPINESS BOOK  

http://immediatehappiness.com/

 

Kumar (Kem) Balani has an AB Journalism degree from the University of the Philippines and an MA in Politics from New York University. He is founder and publisher of Biz India Online News since 2002. Go to www.BizIndia.net to read book reviews, features, news, opinion columns, and videos on business, entertainment, investing, law, sports, technology, and more.

 

This column first appeared in the Daily Tribune in the Philippines on Sunday, Feb. 17, 2019. Read Kumar Balani’s columns in that newspaper: http://tribune.net.ph/index.php/author/kumar-balani/