You know how people say never to judge a book by its cover? I totally judged this book by this cover.

I borrowed The Art of Making Memories because I thought it looked pretty and expected a short, light read on how to capture memories. And while the tone of the book was as light as I expected, I did not expect that the book had so much information nor to read so many studies about happiness and memories.

Memories are precious to us, but they are also fallible (the book spends time talking about false memories). But as studies show, we treasure our happy memories, and so we’d want to make more of them. According to Wiking, these are the eight things that you can do to make more memories:

1. Do something new and novel – we’re more liking to remember our first experience of something
2. Don’t just look, use your other senses to make a memory – think of how certain scents or foods can evoke memories (Proust’s madeleine, anyone?)
3. Pay attention – you obviously won’t remember anything if you were distracted at that time
4. Create meaningful moments – odds are that you’ll remember things that are meaningful to you, like a loved one’s graduation, your birthday, etc. Make and celebrate more milestones to make more memories.
5. Use the emotional highlighter – We tend to remember emotional experiences. One way to make more memories would be to step out of your comfort zone – you will probably remember doing that scared you.
6. Use stories – share stories of what happened with your friends
7. Don’t just focus on the achievement, the struggle to make it is just as memorable
8. Outsource your memory – make sure you have photos, videos, etc. But don’t forget to make sure to curate those photos to make sure you’ll see them!

I was pleasantly surprised by how much information there was in this book. Sure, there are a lot of pretty pictures and Wiking likes to make jokes, but this is not a fluff piece – this book has both style and substance. Wiking shares a lot of personal memories alongside his accounts of various studies, making it easy to understand what we’ve understood about the science of happiness and memories so far.

Overall, I really enjoyed The Art of Making Memories, and I’m glad that my decision to back all photos to the cloud has been validated as one of the eight points. I’m definitely going to try incorporating all eight tips in the future.