Life's first class: What's happiness? Let's learn with this book!

     Hi! It’s James, I am going to share a book I read from HyRead, called “Life’s First Class.

     This book centered on the term, happiness, which most people are dreamed of. We spend a great amount of time pursuing so-called “happiness” but what is the happiness? The author wrote his own point of view in this book, telling his experience about what he has encountered in his life. There are also many questions in our lives, those questions bother us every day, we have been continuously searching for solution; however, the key is always in our mind, and that is happiness. To have a deeper understanding to happiness, the first chapter of the life’s first class is to find your passion, know what you passionate about.

" The happiness is what you are passionate about." 

     In the first chapter, author mentioned lots of his student’s experience about passion. Among these, there are some points which have me touched and think more about myself. For instance, the author quoted a sentence by Steve Jobs- “your time is limited, don’t waste it living someone’s else life”, when the moment I entered the school, starting to study like all the other students, I always followed other’s suggestion, some told me that which high school should I go, some told me which department should I major, in my studying career, it seems that I was always take the path determined by others, in this way, I missed those opportunity of pursuing what I truly like, or more specifically, what I’m passionate about. In addition, when we talk about passion, we always misunderstand it with what we are good at; for example, you might consider math is where your passion at because your math grade was higher than other subjects but in fact it wasn’t. In my true experience, at the third year of my high school, it was time for me to decide whether study the same department or transfer to another field. I ended up choosing my comfort zone, which is the original field, which my grade can lead me to top university. Afterward, I achieved what I expected then; however, I kind of regret the decision I made, having few interests in what I choose, and just as the book said “Grades are definitely not an indicator to success”, grades are just an index to examine how effective your learning was. It’s somewhat confusing that many people (including me) would take grades for reference to suggest students should get in what fields, the author claimed that the genuine yardstick is what you’re passionate about, doing things you like and gain achievements from them, that is why passion can form happiness in our life.

     Furthermore, author also brought up a convincing idea, finding where passion at isn’t as tricky as we thought, just ask yourself what you want and question yourself what is joyful to you. I asked myself the same questions and really ponder them, passion indeed isn’t hard to find out, I spend lots of time thinking what will my future be liked and thus felt puzzled about what I was doing; yet what I didn’t realize is my passion in these things, paying no attention to them and always think I was walking down the wrong path. “Life is only boring in the eye of those who are also boring” said by Lev N. Tolstoy and quoted by the author in this book, the power of passion is like positive thinking, when we have passions doing everything, then things would be much easier. doing what we like to do, even if you would gain nothing from it. Perhaps ‘like’ is the greatest force of passion as well as happiness, the definition of happiness may differ one from one but it’s the simplest explanation, which is attributed to passion.

     I’m strongly recommend this book for you to read from different chapter, each has unique interpretation or description of happiness in life. Nevertheless, it’s not only talks about happiness but many lessons which are beneficial in our life. In any stage of life, we must confront lots of difficulties, especially at this stage, which 20 is around the corner, future is no longer far from us, this book is more like a chicken soup for the soul, which can give some useful suggestion (at least for me); despite the fact you are not confronted with questions now, it’s also essential for us to comprehend the importance between passion and life, ask ourselves what our passion is and whether we like what we doing now. 

Because the happiness is what you are passionate about.