Tal Ben-Shahar begins by asking not if he was happy but how I can become happier. Shahar's reason for this is because happiness is not binary but instead exists all around us. Shahar says that when he was sixteen he spent all his time training to win the Israeli national squash championship. He "believed that winning the title would make me happy, it would alleviate the emptiness I felt most of the time." Afterwards, by winning the championship, Shahar thought his life was complete because he had filled the “void”. The next morning he realized that the happiness he had had the night before was gone, he couldn't understand why? It was then that “I realized that I had to think about happiness in different ways, depending on or changing my understanding of the nature of happiness.” When Shahar found research conducted by Robert Emmons and Michael McCullough stating that they kept daily gratitude journals to improve their overall happiness, he began writing his own believing that these acts of kindness would help him achieve happiness. From then on Shahar started writing down his achievements throughout the day, which will lead him to become happier. Shahar then introduces his four archetypes into the world, which are a representation of how people live their lives. The four archetypes are hedonistic people who live now and don't think about the future. Rat-rush people, you think about the future but you don't think about now. Nihilism is a group of people who do not think about the present or the future. Happy people who live now and enjoy themselves secure themselves for the future. Shahar points out that, as a society, we have been led to believe that setting a goal and achieving it will make us happier. In society, people value a good job, wealth and fame as the thing... middle of the card... misconception, instead you should see goals as guidelines and surpassing one will help you achieve overall happiness. In a study conducted by psychologist Phillip Brickman he showed that the happiness levels for the person who wins the lottery would be high but within a month their happiness level would return to the same level. At first the lottery winner believed that buying everything he wanted would bring him happiness but in reality it brought him back to the same mental place he was in because those objects had no real meaning so they didn't bring him happiness. The same could be said for people who have had accidents: they are depressed for about months but within the month they return to the same level of happiness. This can be explained by their mental state, which took them back to the time before the accident.