The Happiness Experiment by Carl Barney
If you’re someone who dreams of success, wealth, and happiness, then The Happiness Experiment is sure to inspire and motivate you.
Austin, TX: Greenleaf, 2025
300pp., $24.95 (hardcover)
If one of your close friends offered you a large sum of money specifically for the purpose of maximizing your happiness and asked only for a detailed plan of how you’d spend it, what would you come up with?
This is the offer education entrepreneur Carl Barney extended to the people who have added significant value to his life. Rather than wait for them to receive portions of his wealth through bequests in his will, he decided to turn those bequests into “pre-quests,” giving the money while he was still alive on the condition that the recipients take part in “happiness coaching” and write a “happiness plan.” Barney’s goal was to put his money to work to maximize the happiness of the most deserving people around him while he was still around to see it. His forthcoming book The Happiness Experiment is the story of that mission, complete with Barney’s observations and lessons learned about the true nature of happiness, how to achieve it, and how to help our loved ones achieve it.
In a culture where happiness is so often equated with short-term pleasure, the deeply thoughtful approach to the subject that Barney takes—and expects of his recipients—is refreshing. Key to his approach is the recognition that we cannot know what will make us happy by merely following our desires. Rather, we need to identify our values—the things in life, both material and spiritual, that matter most to us. “Values give the meaning to our life,” Barney observes, referring not only to concrete values such as our loved ones, possessions, and goals, but also the ideals and principles we seek to live by (90).
Indeed, values lie at the core of Barney’s approach. His pre-quests are not random acts of charity but part of his effort to achieve his own values. “I believe in win-win trades,” he writes. “When I get something I value from someone, I want to give them something they value. The virtue of trading value for value, benefit for benefit, positive things for positive things, is the essence of naturally enriching relationships” (41).
Although the book will help wealthy people determined to best put their money to use, that is not its primary purpose. Rather, it is a guide to thinking about what you value and what happiness looks like for you. For those of us who don’t yet have wealth to share, it can inspire us to plan for being wealthy in the future and help us identify our values so that we can pursue productive, meaningful work and more effectively use the wealth we earn by doing so.
Another of the book’s key lessons is that happiness is an ongoing conscious choice we must make for ourselves. “Happiness . . . is a way of living—a practice,” Barney notes as he describes how forming “happiness habits” (or “haphabs”) is essential to achieving long-term happiness (150). He also observes that “Happiness depends upon certain beliefs,” including beliefs about the value of our own lives, the capability of our minds to identify the right values to pursue, and the nature of the world as a place in which we can thrive (136).
Large parts of the book take the form of conversations between Barney and his friends, coaches, and business associates during which he discusses, explores, and discovers the principles of achieving happiness. This casual, conversational format makes for easy reading, simplifying sometimes complex ideas as the “characters” carefully present them to each other in layman’s terms using everyday examples. Although the conversations sometimes sound a little unnatural, being written more clearly and precisely than a real conversation typically would be, they’re nonetheless entertaining and, most important, rich with useful, applicable ideas.
Alongside these conversational segments and Barney’s storytelling about his own happiness journey, the book includes a substantial workbook of exercises designed to help you identify and organize your values, cultivate habits to improve your life, and create your own happiness plan. Barney also includes a series of stories describing how his recipients crafted their happiness plans and put his money to work, and the much-improved lives they enjoyed thereafter.
If you’re someone who dreams of success, wealth, and happiness, then The Happiness Experiment is sure to inspire and motivate you. It’s already inspired me to create my own happiness plan and thereby identify several important goals and values in my life that I was not properly focused on before. I hope that reading it will bring you the same clarity and motivate you to take the steps necessary to achieve true happiness.
This article appears in the Summer 2025 issue of The Objective Standard.