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Sales rank 85,336
Customers rating (based on 265 reviews)
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Why are lovers quicker to forgive their partners for infidelity than for leaving dirty dishes in the sink? Why will sighted people pay more to avoid going blind than blind people will pay to regain their sight? Why do dining companions insist on ordering different meals instead of getting what they really want? Why do patients remember long medical procedures as being less painful than short ones? Why do home sellers demand prices they wouldn’t dream of paying if they were home buyers? Why are shoppers happier when they can’t get refunds? Why do pigeons seem to have such excellent aim; why can’t we remember one song while listening to another; and why does the line at the grocery store always slow down the moment we join it?In this brilliant, witty, and accessible book, renowned Harvard psychologist Daniel Gilbert describes the foibles of imagination and illusions of foresight that cause each of us to misconceive our tomorrows and misestimate our satisfactions. Vividly bringing to life the latest scientific research in psychology, cognitive neuroscience, philosophy, and behavioral economics, Gilbert reveals what scientists have discovered about the uniquely human ability to imagine the future, and about our capacity to predict how much we will like it when we get there. With penetrating insight and sparkling prose, Gilbert explains why we seem to know so little about the hearts and minds of the people we are about to become.
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| Publisher | Knopf | | Release date | 05/2006 | | Availability | | | Edition | Hardcover |
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 Could be condensed to 10 pages
All the points the author tries to make could be condensed to a 10- or 15-page leaflet and would be a great leaflet CLEAR enough. But to make it a book of a few hundred pages, imagine how much useless irrelevant stuff you have to read! Well, perhaps to make money, you got to make it into a book.
I have attended the author's seminars... they are good. But this book? too much rambling to fill the pages.
 informative but ultimately disappointing
I remember reading the first chapter of Stumbling, thinking that I would be more pleased with the book than I was with Brain Rules by John Medina. I wasn't.
Gilbert's writing style is very digestible; he definitely writes in a less technical manner than did Medina. However, the book only seemed to confirm what I already knew: our brains are imperfect. We all think of ourselves as above average.
Perhaps it's not fair to be too critical. Maybe I'm just unlikely to find books like this terribly interesting. I just didn't feel compelled to read on and it took me much longer than anticipated to finish the book.
 Simply awesome
You know those incredible insights you can get after smoking a good splif? and i know u do. Well every paragraph in this book creates those same epiphanies and ah ha moments with the difference being thaf these will stay on the page to reread later while most of your stoned profundities are long gone. Daniel must have some good stuff to entertain his brain which is nothing short of genius you may get the mumchies just from reading.
Happiness too is inevitable
First of all, I really enjoyed reading Daniel Gilbert's bestseller, Stumbling on Happiness. The Harvard professor's writing style is so accessible and entertaining that I found myself wishing that I could have taken his classes. Along with the academic research and empirical studies are descriptions that are absolutely laugh-out-loud funny. For example, he asserts that the ability to imagine ourselves in a future shaped by our actions is the main the difference between people and animals. That's interesting. But when he goes on to say that he will hold that opinion at least until he "sees a chimpanzee refuse a fudgesicle because he thinks he already looks too fat in shorts." That's hilarious. That line was the one that sold me on the book and I headed for the checkout chuckling all the while. Ironically, for someone as gifted in humor as Gilbert is, he makes no mention of the experience of laughter or humor and it's connection to the experience of happiness.
As an explanation of happiness--it's evolutionary roots and value to our survival--Stumbling on Happiness is insightful if a little depressing to take something so wonderful and unique as the emotion of joy and gut it of its poetry with reductionist materialistic explanations that you may find, as I did, to be at times almost as tenuous and dogmatic as a purely spiritual explanation might be to a scientist like Gilbert. Ultimately it is an exploration of the concept and experience of human happiness rather than a guide to its acquisition, but for what it is, it's a fascinating and witty book by an intelligent and talented author.
Dave Caperton
Author
Happiness Is a Funny Thing
Dan's solution can work
Happiness in your workplace is almost a holy grail particularly as happy people are more productive and this goes triple for the founder of a business and when I Saw Dan's TED talk I felt he was on to something and reading stumbling on happiness proved so useful to me that I referenced it in my own book Stone Soup: The Secret Recipe for Making Something from Nothing as you see when founding a business (or even a non-profit) if you as the founder are not going to end up happy working in what you have started then you are simply not going to mak it.
So I thoroughly recommend you read Stumbling on Happiness if you are going to start a business just so you really understand how bad you will be at predicting how happy your own business will make you and then actually do take Dan's advice before you go and start any business go and find someone else who has succeeded in starting something similar and ask them if they are happy and why because that will be a better guide for you than your own imagination.
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