Extroversion: response to reward Neuroticism: response to threat Conscientiousness: response to inhibition (self-control, planning) Agreeableness: regard for others Openness to experience: breadth of...
Eventually, I decided to count my daily walk or cross-country ski as a treat—my time for myself in a day otherwise filled with responsibilities. Somehow, that made it much easier to make it a priority...
Concern for Others Loophole: We tell ourselves that we’re acting out of consideration for others and making generous, unselfish decisions. Or we decide we must do something in order to fit into a soci...
Clarity is one reason that the Strategy of Scheduling is so helpful. It’s important to have time to write; to have time with my family; to read. Instead of spending my day in a chaos of warring priori...
Challenge: we find personal meaning in pursuing a goal that’s difficult but not impossible. Curiosity: we’re intrigued and find pleasure in learning more. Control: we like the feeling of mastery. Fant...
By doing a little bit each day you can get a lot accomplished
But perhaps the most acute sense of happiness from writing was the happiness of expressing a very complicated idea - the kind of idea that takes hundreds of pages to capture.
Besides clarity of values, another kind of clarity supports habit formation: clarity of action. The more specific I am about what action to take, the more likely I am to form a habit. A habit to be mo...
Being asleep is a great way to avoid being critical.
Because we’re quite susceptible to goal contagion, we may rapidly pick up someone else’s habits, so it’s helpful to be around people who are good role models.
Audiences = expectations. If he thinks you're not watching, he won't need to rebel against your expectations.
At certain points in our lives, it may not be possible to be happy, but it is possible to try to be happier—as happy as we can be, under the circumstances—and by doing so, fortify ourselves against ad...
Associate with people who are likely to improve you. —SENECA, Letters from a Stoic
As Michel de Montaigne observed, The least strained and most natural ways of the soul are the most beautiful; the best occupations are the least forced.p 233
Are you a morning person or a night person (Lark or Owl)? Do you enjoy spending time outdoors, or do you prefer not to deal with weather? Are you motivated by competition? Do you enjoy exercising to s...
Apply the one minute rule. Don't postpone anything that could be done in less than a minute
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 reason to avoid stopping a good habit is that, sadly, starting again is often far harder than starting the first time. It’s natural to think, Oh, I did this before, it will be easy to do it ag...
Although many people believe that habits form in twenty-one days, when researchers at University College London examined how long people took to adopt a daily habit, such as drinking water or doing si...