Summary of John Leland's Happiness Is a Choice You Make


Book Description

Please note: This is a companion version & not the original book. Sample Book Insights: #1 I began visiting six strangers who had lost something in 2015. I was fifty-five years old, and I had lost my marriage after nearly three decades. I was now living alone for the first time. I was the main caregiver for my eighty-six-year-old mother. #2 I interviewed a variety of people, from the very old to the very young, to find out what life was like for them now. I was surprised to find that every visit raised my spirits. #3 I had to give up the idea that I knew about life. It was a humbling experience, but also an energizing one. I didn’t have to be the expert or critic, challenging the things they told me. Instead, I let them guide me through the world as they saw it. #4 I chose six people for my experiment. Frederick Jones, who was eighty-seven when I met him, was a World War II veteran and retired civil servant with a weak heart. He had started every day by giving thanks for another sunrise. Helen Moses, ninety, had found love in a Bronx nursing home. John Sorensen, eighty-nine, had lucked into the sweet spot in the social safety net.




Happiness Is a Choice You Make


Book Description

A New York Times Bestseller! An extraordinary look at what it means to grow old and a heartening guide to well-being, Happiness Is a Choice You Make weaves together the stories and wisdom of six New Yorkers who number among the “oldest old”— those eighty-five and up. In 2015, when the award-winning journalist John Leland set out on behalf of The New York Times to meet members of America’s fastest-growing age group, he anticipated learning of challenges, of loneliness, and of the deterioration of body, mind, and quality of life. But the elders he met took him in an entirely different direction. Despite disparate backgrounds and circumstances, they each lived with a surprising lightness and contentment. The reality Leland encountered upended contemporary notions of aging, revealing the late stages of life as unexpectedly rich and the elderly as incomparably wise. Happiness Is a Choice You Make is an enduring collection of lessons that emphasizes, above all, the extraordinary influence we wield over the quality of our lives. With humility, heart, and wit, Leland has crafted a sophisticated and necessary reflection on how to “live better”—informed by those who have mastered the art.




Light of Setting Suns


Book Description

At age 60 Dr. Richard Morgan wrote No Wrinkles on the Soul as he faced the unknowns of aging and felt the need for a book to help himself and others navigate its challenges, especially the spiritual ones. Now 91, Morgan still faces many unknowns, and once again has written a book that describes how it feels to be old and encourages others in the same stage of life. "The years have taken a toll on my body," he writes, "but my mind and spirit are still young!" Light of Setting Suns contains stories of people age 90 and beyond who have remained vital and spiritually alive, including the author's own experiences. Morgan shows how to discover wellness, even in years of decline, and how these years may be unexpectedly rich and meaningful. This book shows readers that, even at an advanced age, they still have the opportunity to shine with the Spirit.




How to Live Forever


Book Description

Using this helpful book, learn how the secret to happiness and longevity can be found through mentoring the next generation. In How to Live Forever, Encore.org founder and CEO Marc Freedman tells the story of his thirty-year quest to answer some of contemporary life's most urgent questions: With so many living so much longer, what is the meaning of the increasing years beyond 50? How can a society with more older people than younger ones thrive? How do we find happiness when we know life is long and time is short? In a poignant book that defies categorization, Freedman finds insights by exploring purpose and generativity, digging into the drive for longevity and the perils of age segregation, and talking to social innovators across the globe bringing the generations together for mutual benefit. He finds wisdom in stories from young and old, featuring ordinary people and icons like jazz great Clark Terry and basketball legend Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. But the answers also come from stories of Freedman's own mentors—a sawmill worker turned surrogate grandparent, a university administrator who served as Einstein's driver, a cabinet secretary who won the Presidential Medal of Freedom, and the gym teacher who was Freedman's father. How to Live Forever is a deeply personal call to find fulfillment and happiness in our longer lives by connecting with the next generation and forging a legacy of love that lives beyond us.




Why Kerouac Matters


Book Description

Legions of youthful Americans have taken On the Road as a manifesto for rebellion and an inspiration to hit the road. But there is much more to the book than that. In Why Kerouac Matters, John Leland embarks on a wry, insightful, and playful discussion of the novel, arguing that it still matters because it lays out an alternative road map to growing up. Along the way, Leland overturns many misconceptions about On the Road as he examines the lessons that Kerouac's alter ego, Sal Paradise, absorbs and dispenses on his novelistic journey to manhood, and how those lessons-about work and money, love and sex, art and holiness - still reverberate today.




Success in 50 Steps


Book Description

Success in 50 Steps has been 10 years in the making, with the author researching and compiling over 500 book summaries into video, audio and written format on his website Bestbookbits.com. The book takes the reader through the steps of taking their dreams out of their head and making them a reality. Walking the reader through the steps to success such as dreams, passions, desire, purpose, goals, planning, time, knowledge, ideas, thinking, beliefs, attitude, action, work, habits, happiness, growth, failure, fear, courage, motivation, persistence, discipline, results and success. With the pathway to success outlined in 50 easy steps, anyone can put into practice the wisdom to take their personal dreams and goals out of their head into reality. Featuring a treasure trove of quotations from the legends of personal development such as Tony Robbins, Jim Rohn, Napoleon Hill, Les Brown, Zig Ziglar, Wayne Dyer, Brian Tracy, Earl Nightingale, Dale Carnegie, Norman Vincent Peale, Og Mandino and Bob Proctor to name a few, let this book inspire you to become the best version of yourself.




Merlin and the Making of the King


Book Description

A retelling of three Arthurian legends, "The Sword in the Stone," "Excalibur," and "The Lady of the Lake," which feature Merlin, King Arthur, and other familiar figures.




The Brand Mapping Strategy


Book Description

If You Don’t Define Your Brand, Someone Else Will Define It for You Your small business is a brand. You as a business person are a brand! Imagine using a time-tested,strategic method to build your brandwith best practices for online marketing and more! Brand and marketing strategist Karen Tiber Leland helps entrepreneurs, business owners, CEOs, and executives create a brand by design instead of default, gain greater influence in their industries and companies, and become thought leaders in their fields. The Brand Mapping Strategy uses proven strategies, best practices and anecdotes from real life brand-building successes to give readers the tools they need to design, build, and accelerate a successful brand. Readers will be able to: Develop an overall blueprint for their brand using the Brand Mapping Process® Determine which online tactics (and in what combination) will work for their brand Expand the current brand outreach and contribution to a bigger audience in their industry, community, or the world at large Become a thought or industry leader, using clear positioning, a specific strategy for brand building, and a method for implementation Leverage content effectively and efficiently to build their brand Develop a marketing and social media strategy using the right platform




The Graduate


Book Description

The basis for Mike Nichols' acclaimed 1967 film starring Dustin Hoffman -- and for successful stage productions in London and on Broadway -- this classic novel about a naive college graduate adrift in the shifting social and sexual mores of the 1960s captures with hilarity and insight the alienation of youth and the disillusionment of an era. The Graduate When Benjamin Braddock graduates from a small Eastern college and moves home to his parents' house, everyone wants to know what he's going to do with his life. Embittered by the emptiness of his college education and indifferent to his grim prospects -- grad school? a career in plastics? -- Benjamin falls haplessly into an affair with Mrs. Robinson, the relentlessly seductive wife of his father's business partner. It's only when beautiful coed Elaine Robinson comes home to visit her parents that Benjamin, now smitten, thinks he might have found some kind of direction in his life. Unfortuately for Benjamin, Mrs. Robinson plays the role of protective mother as well as she does the one of mistress. A wondrously fierce and absurd battle of wills ensues, with love and idealism triumphing over the forces of corruption and conformity.




Leisureville


Book Description

Blechman delves into life in a gated retirement community and offers a hilarious, first-hand report on all its peculiarities. He also takes a serious look at the consequences of such instant cities and examines the implications of millions of Americans dropping out of society.