When life feels like a dance to you – that’s when you’re living Shyly’s delight.

This is the introduction to Shyly’s delight: Work, play and love like a Labrador, which is brand new at Amazon.com today:

Introduction: Why aren’t you dancing?

“A dog reflects the family life. Whoever saw a frisky dog in a gloomy family, or a sad dog in a happy one? Snarling people have snarling dogs, dangerous people have dangerous ones.”
—Arthur Conan Doyle

Do you like self-help books? I don’t, to say the truth. They’re all full of bullshit promises. Here’s the thing, though: This one delivers.

No fake, no fail. Your life, just the way you pictured it – a loving, passionate marriage, a happy, successful family, a fulfilling home and work life – everything you’ve ever dreamed of. And when you die at last, you will die at peace, leaving your world a better place for your having lived.

You can have all that, everything the laws of physics will allow. You can’t change the cards you were dealt, but you can play those cards to their fullest attainable value, reaping everything from life that can be had by commitment, attitude and effort.

How do I know you can do all that?

Because I watched my Labrador mutt, Shyly, do all that and more with her life.

Am I seriously offering you life training as taught to me by a dog? I am. And you’d be wise to heed it, too. Shyly didn’t build a business or perform surgery or even write a poem. But she lived delighted and she died delighted and she never lost one minute of her life to sorrow or guilt or shame or regret. If you want to learn to live a delighted life, you’ll learn it best by studying under a master like Shyly.

Here’s what she’ll teach you: How to love everyone on sight because: “Oh! Hey! Look at you!” How to love your loved ones so cuddlingly playfully that you seem to melt into each other. How to love absolutely everything you do so much that all you’re ever really doing is scampering and jumping and dancing for the simple joy of doing. And she’ll teach you the truth she never once betrayed in her actions, even though only we can understand it conceptually: Why she was right to live that way – why her way of living was right for her, and why something very much like it is right for you and me.

I argue that each one of us is his own philosopher, but each life is the expression of a philosophy. Shyly’s delight is the stuff of a delighted life. You can’t live it the way she did, as the automatic and inescapable interior everythingness that so constantly delighted her, but you can live your delight as she lived hers – from the inside out.

We call them ‘dumb animals.’ They’re so dumb they live happy lives and die contented.

We’re Homo sapiens, the wise ones – so wise we live miserably and make the people around us happiest with our deaths.

Shyly wasn’t smart, not even for a dog. But she wasn’t foolish enough to fall for a ‘wisdom’ that harvests only depression, despondency and despair. For Shylygirl, life was nothing but delight – simply because there was no room within her for anything else.

Your life is best when you live it her way. I know this already, because it’s true for each of us. You have your chosen objective, and only you can know it. But when you love what you do, when life feels like a dance to you – that’s when you’re living Shyly’s delight.

I want for you to live that way all the time. The purpose of this book is to show you how.

How will you know when you’ve got it down? When you’ve finally gotten something helpful out of a self-help book?

When you feel like Shyly always did – delighted from the inside out – and you find yourself dancing at everything you do.