If I have talked to you in the past couple of days, I am sure that I mentioned that I just finished reading the best seller "Stumbling On Happiness" by Harvard psychologist Daniel Gilbert. I am recommending the book to everyone that I know...
You might ask yourself what a psychology book has to do with business and real estate..
Well, the way that I see it is that most people are taking the big step of buying or selling their home to achieve a greater level of "happiness". Gilbert shows that as humans we as are pretty bad at using our past experiences as guidance to accurately direct us to make decisions that will lead us to a higher level of happiness in the future. I will share with you some of the points below:
-The human being is the only animal that thinks about the future
-Happiness is a subjective experience that is difficult to describe and thus hard to evaluate
-Our brains are programmed to react before fully comprehending and evaluating scenarios
-Experiencing something can be done without awareness of that experience
-Our brain creates illusions when recalling our memory of the past by "filling things in"
-We all distort facts based on our individual perspective
-When imagining the future we fail to do a good job predicting
-We give higher observational weight to those things that occur versus those that don't
-When contemplating the future we imagine that scenario in the present and try to place it in the future.
-Declining marginal utility is real, but is affected by time
-We compare with the past to determine our present decisions, rather than fully examine our present possibilities..."presentism"
Stumbling on Happiness goes much deeper into our shortcomings in achieving happiness, and does so in an easy to read format ripe with intriguing every-day examples. I don't want to give away the advice that Gilbert gives in the end to help achieve happiness, but I can tell you that reading this book gave me much happiness...and Gilbert will tell you why you should take my advice!
Paul Vranas
Chicago Real Estate
