The Courage to be Happy is a follow-up after the Courage to be Disliked where Kishima and Koga revisited the philosophical ideas of Alfred Adler in the contemporary context. The authors have done a great job in discussing the root causes of our everyday emotional dramas through a conversation between a philosopher and a teacher. While the philosopher tries to elaborate some of the key concepts of Adler in a broad manner, the student (teacher by profession) brings him to daily life and confronts its applicability in real-life scenarios. This constant dialog process makes the book interesting to read and a healthy argument leads to the core of these concepts. Some of the key takeaways are:
- The purpose of education is to teach human beings to be self-reliant
- Teachers should not praise or rebuke the students. The practice of rebuking belittles the respect you pay to other human beings while the habit of praise creates a culture of competition disturbing the community feeling.
- People do not like to change as change is uncomfortable. Rather, they choose to reason their positions to affirm their current position.
- History is often written by the victors. That’s why you get the distorted view of the past. We are not creatures who are shaped by past events. Rather, we explain our current position based on the meaning we give to the past events. We hate change, so we affirm our current positions based on the interpretations of past events. From this perspective, history is irrelevant.
- There’s a difference between sympathy and empathy. Sympathy is after the fact. Empathy is the courage to walk in the same shoes (“same heart and life”).
- Two things cannot be forced: love and respect.
- Three primary ways we can approach truth: through the lens of philosophy, through the perspective of science (objective truth), and through the interpretations of philosophers. Society advances through the conflicts and contrasts imposed by different viewpoints. The dogmas set by each viewpoint hinder human progress in justifying the superiority of one approach over another.
- Respect is the first step in dealing with the subjective world. Respect is seeing people as they are; to be aware of their unique individuality. Most often it is difficult to know a person completely as they behave differently in different circumstances. That’s why the bucketing methods of personality identification only work with extremeness.
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