Lessons from the book ‘Happiness in Your Life – Book One: Karma’

I am reading an interesting book called ‘Happiness in Your Life – Book One: Karma’ written by Doe Zantamata. The book is filled with wonderful insights about happiness and good values. Even virtues which we are all familiar with, such as being kind to others, are examined in a new light. Reading and reflecting on these insights has helped me a lot.

Here are my top three favorite takeaways from the book – the lines in Italics and double quotes are excerpts from the book and the lines that follow are my interpretations.

1. “The grand piano will never drive as fast as a sportscar. Well of course it won’t, it wasn’t designed for driving. It was designed to play beautiful music.”

This is a creative reminder not to compare ourselves with others. Further, the author has cleverly used a piano and a car as examples to highlight that we may even have vastly different purposes in life. We may feel inferior to others because we lack one specific quality that they possess. But our purpose may be to shine in a completely different field.

2. “When you love doing something and share it with people around you, the joy is contagious. You can inspire other people to get more active in what they love doing.”

Say, you love dancing. You dance and share your videos with your friends and family. Seeing your video, one of your friends is inspired to develop their hobby of painting. This leads to a virtuous cycle where the friend who paints, in turn, influences someone else in their respective circle to pursue their hobbies too.

Eventually, it brings out the hidden potential in people. Society becomes happier.

3. “Whatever you do may seem unimportant, but it’s very important that you do it. The more you immerse yourself in any one thing, the more people suddenly appear who are on similar paths, or who can help you towards yours.”

I was passionate about teaching when I was in engineering college. But I didn’t have sufficient knowledge on any topic to start with. In my final year, we had job interview preparation sessions taken by a training agency. Based on the learnings in those sessions, I volunteered to help a few friends after college hours.

What started as a small informal session grew into a full-fledged classroom session composed of students from four classes from the Computer Science and IT departments, as more and more people wanted to learn.

Their questions strengthened my understanding of the topics. Also, I was able to learn from them about areas they were strong in.

The story didn’t end there. This teaching experience gave a tremendous boost to my self-confidence. I volunteered to be a mentor to my juniors in the institute where I finished my MBA, to guide them on interview preparation and career decisions. A student was assigned to me by the institute each year, and I got an opportunity to add value to their careers.

What seemed relatively less important when I started teaching a small group became immensely beneficial, both for me and hopefully for others. This incident and the author’s point of view both resonate with a quote by Samuel Goldwyn – “The harder one works, the luckier they get”.

There are many more wise insights in the book. I highly recommend the book if you are interested in spiritual growth and being kind to others. I hope you have a great day ahead!

About the author: Anirudh Murali loves reading about various topics and meeting new people. He is based out of India.