Book recommendation

I recommend you this book, it is very insightful and provides lots of exercises that you can also find on the website Happy Smarts. The author also offers a free course on Coursera about happiness and he himself teaches this course to students. I was impressed that he started teaching marketing and I asked myself how is there possible to connect the two of them.

If you have other books you want to recommend, don't be shy :)

Joy on Demand - a relaxed review

I received this book on December 27. It was a gift from Project Happiness, because I completed the Happy Scavenger Hunt during November. 

For those who do not know, I am a teacher at University of Craiova, Romania and I coordinate a Marketing Circle for my students. In the above pic, I am with my students, at the end of the meeting. It is mostly nonformal education, extending beyond marketing and economics topics to volunteering, No Hate Speech Movement, CSR and so on. 

So, I have to say that I follow Project Happiness for a long time and I really love what they do: May calendar, AWEgust challenge, the Happy Scavenger Hunt, the EQ calendar in January and many others. I love their newsletters that motivate me and give me a boost of energy every day. 

So, when I saw I am one of those who won the book Joy on Demand by Chade-Meng Tan, I was really very happy or joyful in order to be in equilibrium with the book :)

I finished reading the book while I was using my stationary bicycle so I realized I can listen to some music, cycling more and reading faster. I was so amazed by the book and I finished it in two days, before New Year's Eve. I also realized that I am so lucky I know English (not as a native, but still, I understand it very well and I sometimes think in English). I read it as if it were in Romanian :) 

Really love it :) It made me smile and joyful

Even if I finished it so fast, I learned lots of things and exercises meant to increase your joy and your travel here on Earth. For example, you can do some minor exercises/reflections that will improve your life:

1. Breathe and be aware of that breath. This is simple, start with just one breath. 

2. If you use to complain a lot, reflect on this: the Universe is so big and your worries compared to that are nothing. So, let them go: your worries, your envy, your hate or other negative feelings you have

3. Belive in the virtuous cycle and spread this among your friends and people you know

4. Think of mortality. You will not leave forever but now, in this moment, you are ALIVE, so live.

5. The best moment is NOW and the best place is HERE. So, enjoy it!

6. Every hour when you are at school or at work, choose two persons and think that: I want you to be happy. You do not have to say it loud, only in your mind. It does not matter if you know them or not. Just think in a loving way about those people. 

There are lots of formal and informal exercises for meditation because the book is about how to integrate meditation in our lives. It is easy, challenging and life changing. You can bring joy into your life even in suffer. 

I really recommend this book because it is easy to understand and apply, it has lots of cartoons, funny ones and Meng is Meng: He was working at Google between 2000 and 2015. His job title was Jolly Good Fellow and he even had some courses at Google helping the other employees in reducing stress and increasing their inner peace and clarity of their minds. Other books written by Meng are: Search Inside Yourself (I really want to find this book), How to Master Your Mind in 100 minutes. 

I am really grateful for this book and I want to congratulate the team behind Project Happiness for the wonderful things they are doing and also to thank Meng for singning the book for me. 

I wish you all a Happy New Year with joy on demand and this can be brought into your lives through many ways: one of them is being kind and grateful. 

Dane Cobain - Former.ly, a different social network

I received this book from Dane Cobain himself. So, Dane, I hope you will become a notorious writer in a few years :) It was a challenge for me because I am not an English native, but the book was very appealing from the first pages and the reading was stimulated by the intense story revealing in front of me. 

The story was interesting and quite original in its main subject, because Former.ly is a social network for the dead. I will not unfold other details, because you will have to do that alone. 

I do not know why Former.ly and not other name, but ly is similar with lie, so maybe there is a connection, at least for me :) Even if there is not related, LY is used by me as an equivalent for Love You. 

The characters are interesting, but there could be an improvement in the meaning of developing all characters more. Dan Roberts is the main character, but the others are staying in his shadow. I liked Dan and the way Dane Cobain described some feelings and emotions of his or his bohemian relationship with Sarah. 

The style could be improved. I had the feeling that the first half of the book was very narrative and with many details and the last one was hurried, rushed and the ending was kind of predictable and showed some foolish characters. 

But Dane Cobain is at the beginning in his career and I feel he has a great potential for practicing his style. 

I would recommend an equilibrium between the first and the second part of the book, more consistency in the story and characters, introduce the element of surprise (for example, at some point, I was making some suppositions in my mind and I thought that maybe even Flick is involved in that ugly story at Former.ly).

About the author: Dane Cobain is a British author who had his debut in 2015 with the novel No Rest for the Wicked (seems interesting from the title and I understand that some supernatural stuff is going on there, so it must be good). He is also a poet and a musician. You cand find him on Twitter or on Facebook. 

You can buy the book from Amazon,  for 11 dollars or even free with Kindle Unlimited. 

I recommend the book to my friends living in the United Kingdom or for those who love to read contemporary authors and books with an original plot. You will come to the end with a lot of questions related to the morality of social networks, especially for one created for the dead. Ethics, marketing, social network, these are just a few of the subjects approached. It grasped my interest as a professor of marketing and ethics.

My message for the author: Dane, I have to congratulate you for the wonderful book and thank you for sending it to me by mail (it was easier to read and to feel). I am a classic reader, I like the smell of the books and the way they touch my hands. 

I wish you all the best, I am confident that you will become a successful writer and I hope your books will be brought to the cinema one day :)