Drawing on intrinsic motivation makes us far more likely to stick to a behavior, and to find it satisfying.
Comedian Jerry Seinfeld advised aspiring comedian Brad Isaac that, because daily writing was the key to writing better jokes, Isaac should buy a calendar with a box for every day of the year, and ever...
Clarity of values also makes it possible to identify red-herring habits. A red-herring habit is a habit that we loudly claim to want to adopt, when we don’t actually intend to do so.
By helping us to feel energetic and happy, healthy treats can play a key role in fostering good habits, but we must guard against the temptations of unhealthy treats. The pleasure lasts a minute, but...
By finding my reward within the habit itself, with a reward that takes me deeper into the habit. If I look outside a habit for a reward, I undermine the habit. If I look within the habit for the rewar...
By doing a little bit each day you can get a lot accomplished
As the weeks wore on, along with keeping a food journal, I added a new monitoring habit: No seconds. When people preplate their food and eat just one helping, they eat about 14 percent less than when...
As I turned the key and pushed open the front door, as I crossed the threshold, I thought how breathtaking, how fleeting, how precious was my ordinary day Now is now. Here is my treasure.
Any beginning is a time of special power for habit creation, and at certain times we experience a clean slate, in which circumstances change in a way that makes a fresh start possible—if we’re alert f...
Another study suggested that getting one extra hour of sleep each night would do more for a person’s daily happiness than getting a $ 60,000 raise.
Another study suggested that getting one extra hour of sleep each night would do more for a person's happiness than getting a $60,000 raise.
Also, there was a Princeton study that found that visual clutter reduces your ability to focus and process information.
Also, as I discovered when I took the Newcastle Personality Assessor, which measures personality according to the Big Five model (openness to experience, conscientiousness, extroversion, agreeableness...
Almost always, if I make a commitment, I can stick to it, even without outside help.
All I did was read a book, and that action unleashed an enormous force: the Strategy of the Lightning Bolt.
Action seems to follow feeling, but really action and feeling go together; and by regulating the action, which is under the more direct control of the will, we can indirectly regulate the feeling, whi...
A study of workers in various industries showed that their job satisfaction was less tied to their salaries than to how their salaries compared to their coworkers’ salaries. People understand the sign...
A promotion-focused person recycles in order to make the environment cleaner; a prevention-focused person recycles in order to avoid getting a fine. Different arguments resonate with different people,...
Perhaps the most acute source of happiness from writing was the happiness of expressing a very complicated idea–the kind of idea that takes hundreds of pages to capture.
Arriving rarely makes you as happy as you anticipate.p 84