Happiness first before success instead of the success first then success, the author advocated. The author’s own perspective on being privileged to attend Harvard makes his Harvard experience all the more productive and enjoyable. This paved the way for the author to look for what makes us successful – by being happy. The author, Shawn Achor, peppered throughout the book his life experience in additional to actual psychology studies with lots of humor, making the book a joy to read. The seven principles are easy to understand and in a way common known wisdom. What stands out for me are the 20-second rule and the Zorro circle. They are practical steps to start. Highly recommended.

A summary of the book:

The author presented his 7 principles:
1. The Happiness advantage – how happiness gives your brain and our organization – the competive advantage: I agreed with the general definition of happiness, which varies among people, the experience of positive emotion – pleasure combined with deeper feeling of meaning and purpose – three measurable components: pleasure, engagement, and meaning. Or according to Achor, happiness is the the joy we feel striving after our potential. How to capitalize the happiness advantage: meditate, find something to look forward to (most enjoyable part is the anticipation), commit conscious acts of kindness, infuse positivity into your surroundings (turn off TV’s), Exercise, Spend money (not on stuff) on positive experiences or learning, 3:1 positive to negative interactions (Losada Line).

2. The Fulcrum and the Lever – change your performance by changing your mindset: Our brains are like single processors capable of devoting only a finite amount of resources to experiencing the world. We can leverage it to see the world through a lens of gratitude, hope, resilience, optimism, and meaning. Our power to maximize our potential depend on two things: 1) the length of the lever – how much potential power and possibility we believe we have, and 2) the position of our fulcrum – the mindset with which we generate the power to change. The turning back the clock experiment on the 75-year-old men, the experiment of singing “row row row your boat” and count time, hotel maids losing weight when reminded of their calorie consumption, learning from the speakers or surroundings when stuck in a boring meeting, etc. were ways to change the fulcrum or perspective how we see the circumstance. Use growth mindset instead of fixed mindset. See your work as a career or calling instead of a job or chores. Derive meaning from each of your tasks. The Pygmalion Effect or self-fulfilled prophesy: when our belief in another person’s potential brings that potential to life.

3. The Tetris Effect – training your brain to capitalize on possibility: Need to be stuck in positive Tetris Effect (a pattern of thinking or behaving as if you’ve played hours of Tetris, after which everything looks like Tetris pieces). Three tools: happiness, gratitude, and optimism. Write daily journal of three good things or say three things to be thankful for before dinner.

4. Falling Up – Capitalizing on the Downs to Build Upward Momentum: Take the 3rd path (other than spiraling down or status quo) that take us to a place where we are even stronger and more capable than before the fall – post-traumatic growth, like Michael Jordan being cut from his high schoool basketball team, and etc. Need to overcome “learned helplessness.” A few strategies: 1. Change your counteract to positive one (“I could have died.”). 2.Change your explanatory style to an optimistic one (“It’s not that bad, and it’ll get better.”). 3. Learn your ABCD (Adversity, Belief, Consequence, and Disputation – telling ourselves that our belief is just a belief then dispute it.) Success if about more than simple resilience but using the downward momentum to propel us in the opposite direction. It’s not falling down, it’s falling up.

5. The Zorro Circle – how limiting your focus to small, manageable goals can expand your sphere of power: Success correlates with “internal locus of control” the belief that their actions have a direct effect on their outcomes. For example, elders tasked with taking care of their plants live longer. The dueling brain of “Jerk” and “Thinker”: Jerk responds with “fight and flight” when we’re under stress and should “think, then react.” How do we regain control from the Jerk – use the Zorro Circle but start with self awareness circle first then tackle one small challenge at a time. Start running laps before training for marathon. “Don’t write a book, write a page…” Japanese Kaisen. Separate out what you can control and what you cannot. Clean out a small circle instead of the entire room. Cleaning out the graffiti and fixing the broken glass are the first step for New Yorkers to reverse the crime rate. Small successes can add up to major achievements. All it takes is drawing that first circle in the sand.

6. The 20-second rule – How to turn bad habits into good ones by minimizing barriers to change. “Common sense is not common action.” We are a bundle of habits. Why will power is not the way. We tend to succumb to paths of least resistance (activation energy ~ 20 seconds). Lower or eliminate the activation energy for the habits we want to adopt (use opt-out instead of opt-in) and raise it for the habits we want to avoid. Set rules of engagement – reduce rules and choices.

7. Social Investment – why social support is your single greatest asset. Author’s fire fighting lesson – hold tight to your social connection when under stress. Correlation between happiness and social support is 0.7 (huge). The importance of defensive linemen to the quarterback (Joe Montana). Even Edison surrounded himself with a 30 assistants. Have a “glue guy” in the work place. Manage by walking around.

The Ripple Effect: Spread the happiness advantage at work, home and beyond. Our actions have a ripple effect due to the mirror neurons. By practicing the 7 principles, we are spreading the happiness around us.

I did some paper learning of the Python programming language. Never got a hands on experience with it. Learning to program games seemed to be a good motivator to learn a new computer language. The nice thing about this book is that all of programs are available on the web for download without having to retype them. In addition the entire book in html format is on the web too.

Python programming language is intriguing to me because of its interpretive environment and object-oriented nature (though the book didn’t explore the “class” object) plus its popularity among fellow engineers.

The most notable program is Reversi and its simple algorithm that borderline artificial intelligence. I was surprised by how easy it is to set up simulation to test out various algorithms against each other. Very nice. There were other text-oriented programs like Tic Tac Toe, Hangman, Sonar Treasure Hunt. Then the author went into more graphic-oriented games like Dodgers to explore the sound, and graphics. Very nice flow from simple games to a full blown interactive graphic game and yet kept the programming relative simple to understand.

This is a book for beginner programmers. As an experienced programmer, I flipped the pages fairly quickly to learn the main syntax and uniqueness of the Python language. If I were a beginner programmer interested in learning Python to start off, I would pick this book because of the instant gratification from playing a game makes learning less stressful.

There is a follow on book called “Making Games with Python and Pygame.” I just might read it too.

The title of the book stems from Chairman Mao’s proclamation that women hold up half the sky. They are empowered with half of the responsibility of world affairs.

This book provides the readers a snapshot and the state of the oppression of women around the world. From starvation, to lack of health care, to trafficked sex trades, to rapes, the readers are fed with plenty of evidences and stories of the how the women and girls are mistreated all over the developing world. I was flabbergasted by the horror and the sufferings many women/girls endured by their fellow human being.

This is a rude awakening to those who live in the developed countries that there are still many girl/women being treated like 3rd class citizens, mostly because of misguided beliefs – both cultural and religious. Ultimately, this is a human right issue – regrettably true. The author stressed that the key to turning this situation around is education. By educating women, even through TV soap opera, the women got to see their worth and how women are being treated outside of their own tribe. In a way, education and mass media are the great equalizer.

Through books like this, hopefully, many the opportunities for women lie ahead – for my daughter’s sake.

This is a story mainly about James Garfield, the 20th President of United States, who was nominated and elected without his own intention. He rose from poverty, received education to become a school president at a young age of 26, then to become a general during the civil war. Eventually, he was nominated in a strange Republican Primary and eventually won the presidential election without campaigning for it. In a sense, he was drafted because of his great personality and charisma. But his run of luck ran out when an insane, religion-zeal person, Charles Guiteau, assassinated him in a train station. Ultimately, he died from his gun shot wound mostly because of the poor handling by his doctor, Willard Bliss, a self-righteous traditionalist who’s more interested in his reputation than doing the right thing for his patient. It wouldn’t hurt for him to listen to competing opinions of other doctors.

For James Garfield, I developed great respect for his courage and talent. Too bad that he died so early into his term that no one would ever know what he was capable of achieving. I’m sure he’s much better at overcoming the corrupt power force of Roscoe Conkling had he been the President through the whole term. Also, his love for his wife, family, and friend was admirable.

I am shocked by how poorly the President was protected and the poor condition of the rat-infested White House in those days. Overall, the central U.S. government was so poorly funded that there was just one secretary (Brown) that the President can count on to return mountain of letters and screen the onslaught of job seekers. I guess that’s before the government got as bloated as today’s.

The medical practice in those days was arcane. X-ray would have shown where the bullet resided just 16 years later within minutes. Instead, the bullet that rested in President Garfield wasn’t discovered until his autopsy. In a way, Garfield died from the over caring by his ambitious doctor than from the bullet.

Another hero character, Alexander Graham Bell did all he could to invent a metal detector to find the bullet but ultimately his effort was sabotaged by Bliss’s constraining his scoping to the wrong side of patient’s body. Bell’s fanatic effort to search for the solution was heroic that met with tragedy of his own. But the more interesting story lies in his telephone invention and his patent fight against the frivolous law suits. Something never changes.

This book offers a decent treatment of all the major characters and gives the readers a glimpse of the government, the politics, the medicine, the technology, and the people of that era. Utterly enjoyable.

This book acts as a counter weight against the history we’re normally taught at school. As I was told in my early age that history is normally written by the victor or people who won the wars – not by the underdogs or victims who got in the way of the progress. This book is written for the underdogs: black, hispaniac, native American Indian, the poor who committed crimes due to disadvantaged circumstances, draft deserters, and etc.

The author did a great deal of research. Somehow, I had this impression that he scouted newspapers for the littlest victim stories to make his case, but I guess that’s where the littlest victim/people tend to show up, not on the newspaper headlines.

The only demerits of the book is that the mood of the book was very depressing and the time line was not sequential from earliest to the latest or vice versa. Rather it jumped around based on the victim “characters” he’s advocating. This doesn’t make a good history book but it makes his case more coherent, I suppose.

From the book, I learned of the plight of under-privileges people who seem to be enslaved under the privileged upper class. Despite the shortcoming of not actively lifting those people above their circumstances, this country still boasts the most egalitarian rules without plunging into a wholly socialistic system or worse into a communist system. It’s in this country that Howard Zinn gets to publish a book like this freely without retribution and still earn money from it. His warning is duly noted and the history has spoken. The book served its purpose.