Book Review of Stumbling on Happiness by Daniel Gilbert

 Daniel Gilbert provides data backed insight into the human psychology of happiness.
By understanding and learning from his findings one can lead a much more fulfilling life while helping others do the same. The discoveries have many applications in Leadership and Management.
Gilbert focuses on the errors one makes when trying to predict the happiness (either positive or negative) one will experience from some future event. For example, how happy will a promotion make me? Or how sad will I be after the death of a loved one?
As leaders, understanding exactly how happy or sad a friend or colleague will be as the result of some event, such as a a new product approval, will help us to boost the postive things while at the same time tempering the negative ones. This can lead to improved morale. In this book Gilbert not only explains the problems he also provides solutions.
Because the prediction mechanisms in humans are a recent development in our evolution, the ability to perform these simulations in our heads is pretty awful and results in systemic over estimation of the impact.
One interesting finding of the research cited in the book is that the best way to improve the accuracy of our ability to predict how we will feel about some event is to ask others that have had that same experience about how they were impacted. The conclusion; if you are about to have a big change in your life, ask others about their thoughts. You might even make some friends along the way.