The greatest adventure in our lives is to learn the art of being happy. Happiness, like worry, is a habit, just as tying a shoelace or brushing our teeth becomes a habit. And, as you’ll learn in this book, it only takes five minute a day to install happiness as a lifelong habit. Once the happiness habit is developed then it becomes a permanent part of your personality–requiring little or no effort on your part. You’ll learn that tensions are at a minimum when we are happy. We cannot eliminate tensions altogether, yet wherever possible we must stand up to these tensions and stresses to develop our mental and spiritual muscles, just as in a game an athlete shows his abilities best under stress. In this book, you’ll learn that we have a ‘built-in’ success mechanism, also a ‘built-in’ failure mechanism, and it is up to us to utilize the success mechanism in order to maximize happiness. And you’ll learn that to be happy we must learn that we have another image besides the external one we see in the mirror. We have an inner self image that is the result of what we are and what we think we are…and this image we ourselves create depending on what aspects of the success or failure mechanisms we use. This in turn gives clothing to our personality. Getting the happiness habit means that we can use our imagination properly. Getting the happiness habit means that we become our own plastic surgeon and without the use of a magic scalpel perform magic on our self image, constructing a self image we can live with by removing the scar on it through understanding-an inner scar we put there with our own mental and spiritual bands, because we didn’t understand. In
Five Minutes to Happiness, you’ll spend five minutes each day to reinforce these key ideas, and to pave the way to a joyous life adventure.
About the author
Dr. Maxwell Maltz received his doctorate in medicine from the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Columbia University in 1923. After postgraduate work in plastic surgery in Europe, Maltz was appointed to head several departments of reparative surgery in New York hospitals over his long and distinguished career. He was a prominent international lecturer and on the psychological aspects of plastic surgery. He published two books on the subject, New Faces, New Futures and Dr. Pygmalion.
In the 1950s, Maltz became increasingly fascinated by the number of patients who came to him requesting surgery, who had greatly exaggerated “mental pictures” of their physical deformities, and whose unhappiness and insecurities remained unchanged even after he gave them the new faces they desired. In 1960, after nearly a decade of counseling hundreds of such patients, extensive research, and testing his evolving theory of “success conditioning” on athletes, salespeople, and others, he published his findings—then radical ideas—in the first edition of Psycho-Cybernetics, which went on to sell millions of copies and to be translated in dozens of languages.