Leisure must be entered on the schedule as its own activity; it’s not something I get only when I have nothing else to do. Because I always have something else to do.
Many people decide to improve their habits, they don’t begin by looking where their keys are; they begin by looking in an easy spot.
Mere acquisition isn't enough to establish a good habit
One Secret of Adulthood is Never start a sentence with the words ‘No offense’? And
Six obvious ways to make an activity less convenient: • Increase the amount of physical or mental energy required (leave the cell phone in another room, ban smoking inside or near a building). • Hid...
The Strategy of Pairing, I couple two activities, one that I need or want to do, and one that I don’t particularly want to do, to get myself to accomplish them both. It’s not a reward, it’s not a trea...
The marriage expert John Gottman calls the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse for their destructive role in relationships: stonewalling, defensiveness, criticism, and contempt. Well,
The real key to habits is decision making—or, more accurately, the lack of decision making
The Hawthorne effect, in which people being studied improve their performance, simply because of the extra attention they’re getting. In
A happy home wasn’t a place that I could furnish, but an attitude of mind I must develop.
A sense of growth is so important to happiness that it’s often preferable to be progressing to the summit rather than to be at the summit.
A willingness to be pleased requires modesty and even innocence--easy to deride as mawkish and sentimental.
According to current research, in the determination of a person's level of happiness, genetics accounts for about 50 percent; life circumstances, such as age, gender, ethnicity, marital status, income...
Actually spending ten minutes clearing off one shelf is better than fantasizing about spending a weekend cleaning out the basement.
Although I’d initially underrated its value, the true significance of the fourth element—the atmosphere of growth—had become clearer to me over time. As William Butler Yeats wrote, Happiness is neithe...
And of course, arriving at one goal usually reveals another, yet more challenging goal. Publishing the first book means it’s time to start the second. There’s another hill to climb. The challenge, the...
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
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...
Because money permits a constant stream of luxuries and indulgences, it can take away their savor, and by permitting instant gratification, money shortcuts the happiness of anticipation. Scrimping, sa...
Each day gave me a new opportunity to push the task off until tomorrow. Tomorrow, I’d feel like dealing with it. Start now, I finally thought. Just take the first step. I started with the smallest pos...
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