It’s the happiest time of the year, and Hugh Hewitt, host of "The Hugh Hewitt Show" and a New York Times bestselling author, has a new book to help that happiness stay with you year-round.
"Courage undergirds every good thing," begins Hewitt in The Happiest Life: Seven Gifts, Seven Givers, & the Secret to Genuine Success.
"Courage is, as has long been said, the first virtue because it allows all other virtues to flourish. It takes courage to look clearly forward and backward, and to make a change in direction that increases happiness and human flourishing. This is a book about the courage to give and receive the best gifts that this wonderful life can offer to both giver and receiver."
Happiness has a tendency to be attributed, in large part, to seemingly menial external circumstances. List after list tells us what city is the happiest or what profession produces the most gleeful individuals—as if that alone is a route to contentment.
Hewitt maintains that happiness is not a byproduct of where you live or what you do, and that it can be achieved in spite of them.
"The work by AEI's Arthur Brooks summarizes the academic research on the drivers of happiness into four categories: faith, family, friends and earned success. Those are available no matter the city in which people live or the jobs they work," Hewitt explained.
These categories help to foster the seven gifts, which Hewitt lists as encouragement, energy, enthusiasm, empathy, good humor, graciousness, and gratitude.
Each chapter is a laid out as the title suggests—one chapter per gift, one chapter per giver—but Hewitt is not just compartmentalizing. He is walking his readers through a process that, guided by the anecdotes picked up over the course of his career, leads to a deeper level of fulfillment.
"If persuaded, and I hope to persuade people in the book, they will make quite a few changes that should almost immediately improve their happiness," Hewitt told the Free Beacon.
If you read the Happiest Life the first thing you’ll notice is that it was written for Hewitt’s family. Specifically his three children, who he wants to "prod … to remember that these are the things that motivated their parents and which we hope will continue to motivate them."
When asked what was the most important lesson he hoped his children would take from the book, Hewitt responded matter of factly: "To be exceedingly slow to take offense and very quick to thank and encourage people."
When asked about his father and the ideas in this book, one of his sons, James told the Free Beacon, "My dad has always been an extraordinarily encouraging father. Not just because he is a loving parent, but because he knows instilling confidence in his kids does wonders for pursuing their individual goals [and] that has inevitably led us to having successful (and very happy) adult lives."
James seems to have learned exactly what Hewitt told the Free Beacon he hoped young readers would see.
"So many choices are open in these wonderful years that perhaps the best thing the book will do is persuade [young people] that planning for happiness as opposed to fame or wealth is a much better master plan for their hopefully long professional lives ahead," Hewitt said.
The Happiest Life goes on sale December 31.