There is a myth, sometimes widespread, that a person need do only inner work . . . that a man is entirely responsible for his own problems; and that to cure himself, he need only change himself. . . ....
The pleasure of doing the same thing, in the same way, every day, shouldn't be overlooked. The things I do every day take on a certain beauty and provide a kind of invisible architecture to my life.
The most important step is the first step. All those old sayings are really true. Well begun is half done. Don’t get it perfect, get it going. A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step....
The Habits Manifesto What we do every day matters more than what we do once in a while. Make it easy to do right and hard to go wrong. Focus on actions, not outcomes. By giving something up, we may ga...
Studies show that in a phenomenon called emotional contagion, we unconsciously catch emotions from other people—whether good moods or bad ones. Taking the time to be silly means that we’re infecting o...
Studies show that if you reward people for doing an activity, they often stop doing it for fun; being paid turns it into work. Parents, for example, are warned not to reward children for reading—they’...
She eagerly meets society’s rules and laws until they conflict with her own inner sense of justice—at which point she rejects them.
Researchers were surprised to find, write Roy Baumeister and John Tierney in their fascinating book Willpower, that people with strong self-control spent less time resisting desires than other people...
Recently I’d been intrigued to read about a self-publishing site, Lulu.com. According to the Web site, I could print a proper hardback book, complete with dust jacket, for less than thirty dollars.
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...
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...
One study estimated that people spend about one-fourth of their waking time resisting some aspect of desire—most commonly, the urge to eat, to sleep, to grab some leisure, and to pursue some kind of s...
Once I’ve cleared away the things I don’t need, use, or love, my surroundings reveal to me, and to others, the things that matter most to me. Careful curation means that my space and my possessions re...
Often, when we try repeatedly to form a habit that we desire, we fail because we want to reap its benefits without paying the price it demands. I think constantly of that stark line from John Gardner,...
Of course it's not enough to sit around wanting to be happy; you must make the effort to take steps toward happiness by acting with more love, finding work you enjoy, and all the rest. But for me, ask...
My happiness project was both. I wanted to perfect my character, but given my nature, that would probably involve charts, deliverables, to-do lists, new vocabulary terms, and compulsive note taking.
Lewis’s brilliant essay On Three Ways of Writing for Children:
Keeping a good habit costs us: it may cost time, energy, and money, and it may mean forgoing pleasures and opportunities—but not keeping a good habit also has its cost. So which cost do we want to pay...
It is easy to be heavy: hard to be light. —G. K. Chesterton What’s
In the chaos of everyday life, it’s easy to lose sight of what really matters, and I can use my habits to make sure that my life reflects my values.