The Happiness Blog Tour & Giveaway

Bryan Cohen here, guest poster and author, promoting my new book The Post-College Guide to Happiness for The Happiness Blog Tour. I'm giving away free digital review copies of the book and doing a giveaway for paperback copies, audio copies and even a Kindle Fire! Read on and check out the info below the post.




“The reason people find it so hard to be happy is that they always see the past better than it was, the present worse than it is, and the future less resolved than it will be.”
- Marcel Pagnol Reality Check



Have you ever helped a friend try to recover from a break-up? Here are the stages that I used to go through when I had my heart broken by a high school or college love. First, I would talk about all of the amazing things that I used to do with this wonderful love of my life. I would conveniently and sentimentally skip over all of the bad things that probably led to the break-up in the first place. I would talk about how much worse my life was now that this person would have a reduced or completely absent place in my day-to-day living. I would ignore the fact that other than not spending time with this person, that little would change aside from my temporary emotions. Lastly, I would whine and cry about how my future had now been changed forever to a life of doom and gloom.




Yeah, I was a little bit melodramatic. Then again, a ton of people do this every day when they think about their lives and their levels of happiness.


Haven't you ever looked back and pumped up the past to be a bit more amazing than it truly was? Perhaps you've wished you could go back to high school and date that high school sweetheart or that you could hang out with your gang of friends that would never let you down. Of course, you like to conveniently forget that this person was cheating on you and that your friends made fun of you all the time (or something similar).


Have you ever been over dramatic about how rough you have it? Maybe you talk about not getting a pay raise or having to pay a parking ticket as if it's the worst thing in the world. Of course, plenty of other people don't have jobs or had their cars completely towed or totaled. And even those people would not necessarily call their experiences, "the worst."




Have you ever said "never" when it comes to the future? Perhaps you've said, "I'll never find love," or "I'll never get out of debt," or "I'll never do something I love for a job." The word never has a funny way of being proved wrong.



Instead of talking in wild emotional terms and absolutes, give yourself a reality check. The past was pretty good but it's not nearly as good as the present. The present has way more positives than you usually keep in mind. The future contains endless possibility. Keep your head on straight and push forward and you'll find yourself in a much happier reality.



  -- Bryan Cohen is giving away 61 paperback and audio copies of The Post-College Guide to Happiness and a Kindle Fire between now and May 7th, 2012 on The Happiness Blog Tour. All entrants receive a free digital review copy of The Post-College Guide to Happiness. Bryan hopes to give away at least 1,000 copies during the blog tour.




To enter, post a comment with your e-mail address or send an e-mail to postcollegehappiness (at) gmail.com. Bryan will draw the names at the end of the tour. Entries will be counted through Sunday, May 6th.




Bryan Cohen is a writer, actor and comedian from Dresher, Pennsylvania. He graduated from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2005 with degrees in English and Dramatic Art and a minor in Creative Writing. He has written nine books including 1,000 Creative Writing Prompts: Ideas for Blogs, Scripts, Stories and More, 500 Writing Prompts for Kids: First Grade through Fifth Grade, Writer on the Side: How to Write Your Book Around Your 9 to 5 Job and his new book, 1,000 Character Writing Prompts: Villains, Heroes and Hams for Scripts, Stories and More. His website Build Creative Writing Ideas helps over 25,000 visitors a month to push past writer's block and stay motivated. Feel free to follow along with the tour at The Happiness Blog Tour Hub Page or on the book's Facebook Page.