How to Be Rich and Happy

I’m not a billionaire. I’m not even a millionaire. I don’t own a mansion or a yacht. I don’t employ a housekeeper, butler, chef, gardener or a cleaning lady.

I’m just your average middle-class working mom. I will feel enormously successful if I manage to send my daughter to college and still be able to retire before the age of 65.

In short, I probably know nothing about being rich. And as for happiness? The best I can say is that I struggle with that. Happiness is not a natural state of mind for me. I must work at it. As a result, I occasionally have good moments.

This is all to say that I probably would have never written a post with the title “How to Be Rich and Happy” had Tim Brownson not sent me his book by the same title. I read Tim’s blog and have come to follow him in one of those semi-stalkerish virtual sort of ways. So, when he asked me if I would consider reviewing his book, I said, “Of course.”

But once I started reading the book, I realized some research was in order, especially when Tim’s co-author, John P. Strelecky, suggested imagining my Rich and Happy life in great detail—because seeing it in my mind would make it come true for me in real life.

This, I thought, sounded a lot like this other book called The Secret. It’s been on the New York Times Hardcover Advice bestseller list for 144 weeks and has sold who knows how many millions of copies.

I can confidently say that I may very well have been the last person on Earth to read it. I’ve owned a copy of the book for about two years, ever since I visited the offices of Atria, which published The Secret, and someone there pulled it off a bookshelf and handed it to me. I got home that day and put it on my bookshelf, which is where it stayed until late last week.

Why hadn’t I cracked it til now? I suppose that is one of the great mysteries of my life. Perhaps I didn’t think I needed to know The Secret. Perhaps I thought The Secret was beneath me. Perhaps I thought that I wasn’t a Secret kind of person.

I’ll never know for sure. All I know is that I never planned to read that book until I started reading How to be Rich and Happy. In order to give How to Be Rich and Happy an intelligent review, I felt that I needed to read The Secret, too. And then my mom sent me a link to a review of Bright-Sided, which is Barbara Ehrenreich’s backlash to the positive thinking movement. I couldn’t do a review of How to Be Rich and Happy and a review of The Secret without also doing a review of Bright-Sided, it seemed. So I bought that book and I read it, too.

I’ll review all three books in the posts that follow. Before I do so, there are some things you must know about me. They are as follows:

I waffle between being a woman of faith and a woman of doubt.
I define faith as a belief in things that we cannot prove or ever know for sure. I define doubt as a disbelief in things that cannot be known.
I have strong faith in some things. They include: Most people are good and, when given the choice, most people will choose good over evil; There is inherent good in doing good; Everything always works out in the end; Most unhappiness is self created—any of us have the ability to be as happy or as unhappy as we want to be; We all have a distinct calling or talent; If we continually do good and follow our calling, we will end up living the best lives we have to live.
I have strong doubts about some things. They include: Levitation (the day I can roll back and forth underneath a monk’s levitating body is the day I will believe that levitation is possible), crystals, magnets, mind-reading and mind control (defined as being able to bend a spoon by thinking about bending a spoon)
I’m on the fence about some things. They include: Whether or not wishes can come true, whether or not some coincidences are really God-incidences (or universe-incidences), whether or not one door always opens whenever another one shuts.

I tell you this not to try to get you to believe what I believe, but rather, so you’ll know my inherent biases. It is probably because of my beliefs—or lack thereof—that I’ve reviewed the following books in the way I have.

I’ll start this series by reviewing The Secret. My review is in the post that follows.

Part 2: The Secret