Progress, not perfection, is the goal. I’m a gold-star junkie,
Pierre Reverdy: There is no love; there are only proofs of love.
Overbuyers, by contrast, find excuses to buy. They accumulate large quantities of office supplies or kitchen gadgets or travel paraphernalia with the thought This will probably come in handy someday....
Our habits are our destiny.
One thing that continually astonishes me is the degree to which we’re influenced by sheer convenience. The amount of effort, time, or decision making required by an action has a huge influence on habi...
One study estimated that for every hour of interrupted sleep during the previous night, people wasted 8.4 minutes in online puttering
One of the great joys of falling in love is the feeling that the MOST extraordinary person in the entire world has chosen YOU
One of life’s small pleasures is to return something to its proper place;
My research had revealed that challenge and novelty are key elements to happiness. The brain is stimulated by surprise, and successfully dealing with an unexpected situation gives a powerful sense of...
My idea of this is the kind of person I am is so bound up in my habits and actions that it’s hard for me to see. But eventually, I realized that my sense of identity makes it easier or harder to chang...
Many strategies help us change our habits, and four strategies tower above the others: Monitoring, Foundation, Scheduling, and Accountability.
Make it easy to do right and hard to go wrong.
Jamie has a transition habit when he comes home from work. He gives everyone a hello kiss, then disappears for twenty minutes or so. He changes out of his suit, sends one last round of emails, glances...
It’s hard to do even simple things well, and most things aren’t simple. As
It’s fun to fail, I kept repeating. It’s part of being ambitious; it’s part of being creative. If something is worth doing, it’s worth doing badly.
It's so easy to wish that we'd made an effort in the past, so that we'd happily be enjoying the benefit now, but when now is the time when that effort must be made, as it always is, that prospect is m...
It was time to expect more of myself. Yet as I thought about happiness, I kept running up against paradoxes. I wanted to change myself but accept myself. I wanted to take myself less seriously—and als...
It is easy to be heavy: hard to be light.
It is by studying little things, that we attain the great art of having as little misery and as much happiness as possible.
In one study, when subjects made a shopping list for what they’d eat in a week, more chose a healthy snack instead of an unhealthy snack; when asked what they’d choose now, more people chose the unhea...