#Best books on optimism series#

Become an adverse paranoid (people are saying good things behind my back).

Use the “bullfight” method to side-step negativity.

Use humor in adjusting creatively to ageing.

Make your relationships workable and enjoyable.

Identify your emotions for an authentic life.

Use the 4SW (Some Will, Some Won’t, So What, Someone else is Waiting) formula to achieve all you desire.

Bounce back from adversity/negativity and live a life of laughter.

Funny and authentic.” Chip Conley, Author of New York Times best-selling book “ PEAK” and “ Emotion Equations”Ĭome take Lenny’s hand as he leads you through his hilarious 81 year journey to everlasting optimism and learn how to: “ Funny, accessible, and insightful, this book can help you laugh all the way to everlasting happiness.” ~ Tal Ben-Shahar, PhD, Author of New York Times best-selling book “ Happier”

#Best books on optimism series#

Brilliant and easy to apply practical recipes for happier life, charmingly written by an educator and humorist sage.” ~ Jack Canfield, Originator of “ Chicken Soup for The Soul” series “ Finally a book about optimism that is hilariously funny. You can preview the book and purchase the Kindle version (Only availaible outside Singapore) at or ship directly from Amazon! Lenny wrote this book to support all who are going through rough patches and offers the hope that we will be stronger, and happier.

By drawing on this personal 81 year journey, Lenny keeps us in stitches as he allows us to experience how his responses to life’s “slings and arrows” have helped him reduce stress, anxiety, fear, and anger only to come out on the other end smiling, healthy and gracious. Enlightenment Now by Steven Pinker is published by Allen Lane.In this rare and authentically funny book, Lenny Ravich emphatically underlines his passion for optimism as a way of life that promises better health, success in all areas of our lives, and for relationships that work.The sky is blue, the birds are singing.” After reading Wodehouse, who could disagree? “Don’t talk rot,” advises Fink-Nottle “It is a beautiful world.

In his climactic speech at the Market Snodsbury Grammar School, Gussie Fink-Nottle ticks off “the fellow with a face rather like a walnut” who said the world was in a deplorable state.

Deutsch presents science as a force for betterment, since it impels us to explain the world while forcing us to acknowledge our fallibility.īut the best paean to optimism in the English language is in PG Wodehouse’s Right Ho, Jeeves. And a deep theory of why humanity is destined to make progress may be found in David Deutsch’s dazzling The Beginning of Infinity. Still bigger pictures are presented in Johan Norberg’s Progress and Matt Ridley’s The Rational Optimist. The story is told in James Payne’s The Decline of Force, Kwame Anthony Appiah’s The Honor Code, and Michael Shermer’s The Moral Arc – an allusion to Theodore Parker’s famous line (beloved of Martin Luther King) that the arc of the universe bends towards justice. It is also decimating child labour, capital punishment and the criminalisation of homosexuality.

Progress is not just material but moral: the world has abolished human sacrifice, slavery, heretic-burning, witch hunts, duelling, apartheid and male-only suffrage. Children of the 1970s will appreciate the title, an allusion to Brand’s groundbreaking Whole Earth Catalog, which merged technology with the counterculture and encouraged global consciousness with the breathtaking “Earthrise” photograph on the cover. The equally remarkable decline of armed conflict is recounted in Joshua Goldstein’s Winning the War on War and several irreverent books by John Mueller, including The Remnants of War and the sarcastically titled collection A Dangerous World? The most surprising may be The Internationalists, in which Oona Hathaway and Scott Shapiro argue that the oft-ridiculed 1928 pact outlawing war deserves much of the credit.Īnd no, the environment is not hopelessly despoiled and depauperate, say “ecomodernists” such as Ronald Bailey in The End of Doom, Ruth DeFries in The Big Ratchet Chris Thomas in Inheritors of the Earth, and Stewart Brand in Whole Earth Discipline. As does Factfulness by the late TED star Hans Rosling, who liked to quiz his audiences on trends in wellbeing and show that they did worse than chimpanzees. More modestly, Charles Kenny tells us how the world is Getting Better. Authors who describe the remarkable decline of poverty, hunger and disease in the developing world anticipate such incredulity that they often flaunt the word “great” in their titles, such as Nobel laureate Angus Deaton’s The Great Escape and Steven Radelet’s The Great Surge.