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...
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...
About 30 to 50 percent of happiness is genetically determined; about 10 to 20 percent reflects life circumstances (such as age, gender, health, marital status, income, occupation); and the rest is ver...
A routine is a string of habits, and a ritual is a habit charged with transcendent meaning.
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,...
A happy home wasn’t a place that I could furnish, but an attitude of mind I must develop.
A University of Exeter study showed that people who have control over their workspace design are happier at work, more motivated, healthier, and up to 32 percent more productive.
The habit of bed making is correlated with a sense of greater well-being and higher productivity. Other common broken windows include having a messy car; accumulating piles of laundry or trash; not be...
Nothing was insurmountable if I did what I knew ought to be done, little by little. My
Is surprising how soon a desire will die of inanition if it be never fed.
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...
With habits, we don’t make decisions, we don’t use self-control, we just do the thing we want ourselves to do—or that we don’t want to do.
Whenever I start a new book, I think, This is the most interesting subject of all time. It’s sad, I’ll never enjoy writing another book as much as I enjoy this one. Every time, I’m convinced. And then...
When it comes to fake food, I’m like Samuel Johnson, who remarked, Abstinence is as easy to me as temperance would be difficult. In other words, I can give something up altogether, but I can’t indulge...
When Obligers have the external accountability they need to meet their inner expectations, they don’t experience any sense of limitation or self-frustration—and of course many environments, such as th...
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?...
What I do most days matters more than what I do once in a while. That kind of self-encouragement is a greater safeguard than self-blame.
We should make sure the things we do to feel better don’t make us feel worse.