The Wall Street Journal's popular columnist Jason Gay delivers a hilarious and heartfelt guide to modern living.

“The book you hold in your hand is a rule book. There have been rule books before—stacks upon stacks of them—but this book is unlike any other rule book you have ever read. It will not make you rich in twenty-four hours, or even seventy-two hours. It will not cause you to lose eighty pounds in a week. This book has no abdominal exercises. I have been doing abdominal exercises for most of my adult life, and my abdomen looks like it’s always looked. It looks like flan. Syrupy flan. So we can just limit those expectations. This book does not offer a crash diet or a plan for maximizing your best self. I don’t know a thing about your best self. It may be embarrassing. Your best self might be sprinkling peanut M&M’s onto rest-stop pizza as we speak. I cannot promise that this book is a road map to success. And we should probably set aside the goal of total happiness. There’s no such thing.

I would, however, like for it to make you laugh. Maybe think. I believe it is possible to find, at any age, a new appreciation for what you have—and what you don’t have—as well as for the people closest to you. There’s a way to experience life that does not involve a phone, a tablet, a television screen. There’s also a way to experience life that does not involve eating seafood at the airport, because you should really never eat seafood at the airport.

Like the title says, I want us all to achieve little victories. I believe that happiness is derived less from a significant single accomplishment than it is from a series of successful daily maneuvers. Maybe it’s the way you feel when you walk out the door after drinking six cups of coffee, or surviving a family vacation, or playing the rowdy family Thanksgiving touch football game, or just learning to embrace that music at the gym. Accomplishments do not have to be large to be meaningful. I think little victories are the most important ones in life.”

— From the Introduction 

An Amazon Best Book of November 2015: Jason Gay, a popular and funny columnist for the Wall Street Journal, was driven to write Little Victories after his father’s diagnosis of cancer. But Little Victories isn’t just another treacly exhortation to enjoy this precious existence or else. It’s a curation of snapshots of Gay’s “many life mistakes,” demonstrating that life’s little victories are made up of “small, perfect moments,” even—or perhaps especially—when we ourselves are not perfect. Anxious parents in particular will benefit from Gay’s philosophy, whether it’s his thoughts on youth sports to how to set limits on kids’ usage of digital devices: “If it means a peaceful cross-country flight without dirty stares from every other passenger, I will let a two-year-old watch Scarface.” Some chapters are laugh-out-loud funny (the family Thanksgiving chapter should be required reading at this time of year); some are poignant. All are self-deprecating and wry. There are a lot of books out there on how to stop and smell the roses. This is a crowning addition to that genre, making us laugh at our ridiculous human self-importance and showing us how to savor the everyday little victories. —Adrian Liang

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