Wednesday, October 21, 2020

The Art of the Good Life

I thought The Art of the Good Life: Shortcuts to Happiness, Wealth, and Success would promote three or four important principles, and spend the book elaborating on how to get the most out of them. Instead, I was disappointed to see it instead contained a list of 52(!) items that one should abide by in order to live a good life.

Unfortunately, it's not possible for me to remember more than a few of them. Surprisingly, however, I still enjoyed the book, for a couple of reasons:

1) It's skimmable. You'll probably recognize a lot of the 52 suggestions. I did, as the author draws extensively on the teachings of Buffett and Munger, among others.

2) It reads pretty fast. The writing style is easy to read, letting you download that wisdom into your brain at breakneck speed. It took me only a couple of hours to cover the whole thing.

3) Although I wouldn't be able to recall many of the recommendations, that doesn't mean the info isn't stored and re-inforced somewhere in my brain, able to help when neccessary. For example, while I may not be able to recall "only focus on what you can control" as part of a list of things I need to do, when something does happen where that subject is relevant, maybe my brain will be able to recall that subroutine in the proper context. That's the hope anyway.

If you can get the book cheap or at the library, I recommend perusing it. You might pick up a couple of recommendations that make your life better, without a huge time investment.

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