Research suggests that about 40 percent of our behavior is repeated almost daily, and mostly in the same context.
Procrastinators may resemble Sprinters, because they too tend to finish only when they’re against a deadline, but the two types are quite different. Sprinters choose to work at the last minute because...
Research shows that the more elements make up your identity, the less threatening it is when any one element is threatened.
When Churchill was running for office for the first time, he went door to door to ask for votes. He knocked on the door of an irritable man who, when Churchill introduced himself, said, Vote for you?...
The second reason rewards pose a danger for habits is that they require a decision. A habit, by my definition, is something we do without decision making.
Our lives are in the space between Isaiah Berlin’s We are doomed to choose and every choice may entail an irreparable loss and Borges’s Garden of Forking Paths, where every choice produces a quantum e...
Now that I know I’m an Upholder, an Abstainer, a Marathoner, a Finisher, and a Lark, and have spent a lot of time thinking about what is, and isn’t, important to me, I’m much better able to shape my h...
And the
One of the best ways to make myself happy is to make other people happy. One of the best ways to make other people happy is to be happy myself.
Getting one extra hour of sleep each night would do more for a person’s daily happiness than getting a $60,000 raise.
Pushing myself, I knew, would cause me serious discomfort. It's a Secret of Adulthood: Happiness doesn't always make you feel happy. When I thought about why I was sometimes reluctant to push myself,...
One of the great joys of falling in love is the feeling that the MOST extraordinary person in the entire world has chosen YOU
From Lewis’s brilliant essay On Three Ways of Writing for Children: When I was ten, I read fairy tales in secret and would have been ashamed if I had been found doing so. Now that I am fifty I read th...
I was comforted by the words of my model Benjamin Franklin, who reflected of his own chart: On the whole, though I never arrived at perfection I had been so ambitious of obtaining, but fell far short...
I wasn't as happy as I could be, and my life wasn't going to change unless I made it change.
IF IT’S ON THE CALENDAR, IT HAPPENS
If you’re not failing, you’re not trying hard enough. Over-the-counter
If you’re not failing, you’re not trying hard enough.
In fact, for both men and women—and this finding struck me as highly significant—the most reliable predictor of not being lonely is the amount of contact with women. Time spent with men doesn’t make a...
In other words, even though one coin certainly isn’t sufficient to make a man rich, a man only becomes rich by adding one coin after another.
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