Why?

" Joy is absolutely what we want from life. It's our birthright. It's what the creator intended for us.
" Happy people produce more. Joy is good business. And it doesn't take a lot of time or cost a bunch of money.
" Joy changes the way we see work. When there's joy at work, I'll come early and stay late. Sure, I'd like a raise, but I'm certainly not going down the street to get it if that means risking my joy. When there's joy at work, I bring it home.

So what?

" You can have joy now. We go around doing and buying in order to get joy, when what's really called for is choosing. We don't have to wait for the weekend, for our vacation, or for retirement: we can have joy now!
" Joy is a choice. I don't have to wait for it to happen to me, to be bestowed upon me by others, or to win the lottery. I have the power to make it so.
" Joy is everywhere. It's in the air around us, ready to be plucked like a ripe peach off a tree. We see it, smell it, taste it, touch it, and hear it. Most wonderful of all, we can create it instantly in our mind. And it's contagious to boot!

How?

" Reconnect with joy. We need to re-activate the connections in our brain where memories of joy live. That means reconnecting with joy in your work through the years. The book provides stories about my early experiences with work, some about boring work, and a few about grunt work, and point out the joy I found there. My stories help you think about your own stories and find the joy in them.
" See joy around you. Once you awaken your old joys, you can't help but see joy tomorrow at work. It's just like when we buy a new car, we suddenly see them everywhere.
" Influence joy. Now that we see joy, we naturally want to tinker with it so it comes around more often, lasts longer, and spreads to those around us. That involves little experiments with joy. The book gives you my stories about how I tried to influence joy at work. Some worked" ?some didn't. As you observe my experiments with joy progress, you'll begin developing your own ideas about how to impact joy at your work.

This leads to a desire to know more about how joy works. So I provide thirteen principles of joy to help guide your experiments. To help you when you struggle with your experiments, you get eight blocks to joy. These are the joy killers towards which we need to maintain constant vigil. For those moments when you feel your joy slipping away, I'll give you nine techniques to help you get yourself back on track. Pretty simple, eh?