Amazing Lessons about Happiness from The Happy Mind by Kevin Horsley and Louis Fourie

Last Updated on August 19, 2024 by The Unbounded Thinker

‘A happy life is a prolonged experience of meaning and fulfillment, a longlasting enduring enjoyment of life, not the arrival of a mystical moment or a string of joyful events.’ – Kevin Horsley and Louis Fourie

Kevin Horsley and Louis Fourie’s book, ‘The Happy Mind: A Simple Guide to Living a Happier Life Starting Today,’ is one of the best books to read about happiness. The book provides the best definition of happiness and discusses the misconceptions about happiness. I learned several remarkable facts about happiness – from the book – that changed my approach towards it.

Horsely and Fourie write that most people believe they will find happiness when certain things happen in their lives. This approach towards happiness encourages them to think that happiness comes from ‘the world,’ ‘in another time,’ or ‘happens because of other people.’

When people believe happiness comes from the world, they focus on accumulating wealth and attaining high social status. This focus fails to guarantee their happiness as it encourages them to engage in criminal acts and damage other people’s well-being.

Horsely and Fourie also write that people who believe happiness is in another time ‘spend a lot of their present in an imaginary future.’ These people, as Horsely and Fourie write, ‘are forever longing for a futuristic knight of happiness to gallop into their lives and liberate them from the present.’ Besides focusing on the future, these individuals also believe happiness existed in the past. Thus, they rarely experience the present moment fully.

People who believe happiness happens because of other people think their happiness is in other people’s hands. Thus, they seek happiness in relationships or children and blame other people for their unhappiness.

All the aforementioned people fail to find happiness because true happiness is a ‘now and here’ skill. True happiness, as the authors observe, ‘is an overall rhythm in the way you live your life –  a rhythm that applies in any content you find yourself, pleasurable or not.

Anyway, the authors also discuss the primary traits of happy people. According to them, happy people empower themselves, assume full responsibility for their circumstances, embrace gratitude, take charge of their future, and are clear about their path of value creation. They invest in their overall wellness, enjoy solitude, establish constructive relationships, are positive, and know that happiness is a daily effort.

Horsely and Fourie also describe the characteristics of unhappy people. They write that these people have a destructive thinking pattern and are usually in a state of desiring something. They don’t believe in their ability to overcome challenges, they can’t enjoy simple things, they find it difficult to love unconditionally, and they are pessimists. Mainly, the authors claim that most people are unhappy because they fear rejection and not having enough.

Besides these facts about happiness, the authors explain more amazing pearls of wisdom about happiness in their book. For instance, they write that you can find happiness by embracing simplicity, reducing your expectations, and creating time to practice peace. You’ll have to read the book to acquire such nuggets of wisdom. I promise you that you’ll love it.

Here’s is the link to the book; The Happy Mind: A Simple Guide to Living a Happier Life Starting Today
The link to the publisher’s website https://www.tckpublishing.com/