"Know this: cool is overrated. Freeing yourself from the relentless pursuit of cool can be the single biggest thing you can do to create personal happiness in your life, besides installing a zip line in your backyard or deleting Twitter from your phone."

By this account, my husband and three teens are the happiest people on the entire planet. True story. Well, OK - none of them ever installed the Twitter app in the first place. But still.

This is a sampling of Jason Gay awaiting you in Little Victories: Perfect Rules for Imperfect Living. Highly anecdotal, highly amusing. Then again, I'm part of a family that checks each morning's Wall Street Journal for Gay's column and looks forward to his Rules for Thanksgiving Touch Football almost as much - maybe more during some years - Thanksgiving Day football itself.

Gay relates to and opines on issues as varied as coolness, health, marriage, sports, gyms, manners, work, and kids. In each chapter, expect a story. Or a quiz. Maybe it's serious. Maybe it's humorous. But it's totally Gay. And it's followed by advice in bullet-point form - again, some serious, some tongue-in-cheek.

If you have any sense of decency, you will smile. You will read a sentence or two to the person sitting nearest you. You will tweet newly-acquired advice. (Because face it, most of us are still hanging on to Twitter, trying to be cool.) You might even laugh out loud. And if you're not careful, you just might pick up something worthwhile along the way.