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Actual happiness is sometimes confused with the pursuit of it; and the most mindless and crass how-tos can get jumbled in with the modestly useful, the appealingly personal, and the genuinely interesting.

I find happiness comes from numerous sources in my life. Most often, the happy moments I cherish most are quiet moments with my wife and family back home in Nova Scotia.

Through a long and painful process, I've learned that happiness is an inside job - not based on anything or anyone in the outer material world. I've become a different and better person - not perfect, but still a work in progress.

One major challenge within happiness is loneliness. The more I've learned about happiness, the more I've come to believe that loneliness is a terrible, common, and important obstacle to consider.

Friends have suggested that I am the least qualified person to talk about happiness, because I am often down, and sometimes profoundly depressed. But I think that's where my qualification comes from. Because to know happiness, it helps to know unhappiness.

So even though I consider myself a fairly upbeat person, energetic and things like that, I never do very well on happiness tests.

The search for happiness is one of the chief sources of unhappiness.

When you analyze happiness, it turns out that the way you spend your time is extremely important.

Once I found professional happiness, it gave me time to think about other areas in my life in which I wasn't happy. The next obvious candidate for introspection was my marriage.

We've all met those who seem to radiate happiness. They seem to smile more than others; they laugh more than others - just being around them makes us happier as well.