The Man Who Wanted to be Happy is a self-help book built around a story. The story is that of Julian who is a school teacher on holiday in Bali. He hears of a healer and goes for a check-up. Whilst there the healer, Samtyang, diagnoses Julian's problem - he is unhappy.
From there Julian is taken on a journey with the healer/wiseman where many things are revealed to him. And Julian laps it up across several visits on several days of his holiday.
Samtyang reiterates ideas that are already widely known, e.g. you are what you believe, and to achieve your goals you need to set out in detail the steps needed to get there. But there is other stuff in there you might not know.
For me the two best bits were one part where Julian is tasked with getting five people to say no to his requests. He struggles to do it though because each person he approaches refuses to give an outright no and instead try to help with his request, no matter how absurd. The other best bit was where Julian talked about how he was bad at something because he had done it once and it had not gone well. Samtyang talked about a baby taking his first steps as he learned to walk, and how he would fail time and time again, but his parents encouraged him and the baby becomes an expert walker.
Lastly to get the most from this book you need to read it slowly to digest it, and do it at the same time, e.g. Julian has to write out some lists along the way, and that was something I couldn't do at the time on the train with all the other commuters giving me the beady eye (although Samtyang would probably have some words of wisdom about that ...).
The book reminded me a bit of The Richest Man in Babylon which was a book with some simple stories with messages to do with money management, except not as good in my eyes (and on a different topic) but it's short and easy to read along with.
This book is listed on Amazon HERE.
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