Nietzsche wrote, All truly great thoughts are conceived while walking, and his observation is backed up by science; exercise-induced brain chemicals help people think clearly. In fact, just stepping o...
In other words, even though one coin certainly isn’t sufficient to make a man rich, a man only becomes rich by adding one coin after another.
The very words we choose to characterize our habits can make them seem more or less appealing. Engagement time sounds more interesting than than email time; playing the piano sounds more fun than prac...
Colorful tin trays from my grandmother? A friend confided
The Levity Effect,
Happiness, wrote Yeats, is neither virtue nor pleasure nor this thing nor that, but simply growth. We are happy when we are growing. Contemporary researchers make the same argument: that it isn’t goal...
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...
An unmade bed is a common broken window, which is why Make the bed is one of the most popular happiness-project resolutions, and in fact, as Charles Duhigg points out in his fascinating book The Power...
He gave his assistant a stamped, addressed envelope with a check he’d written to an anti-charity, an organization whose policies he passionately opposes, with the instruction to mail the check if he h...
Scheduling makes us far more likely to convert an activity into a habit (well, except for Rebels), so for that reason, I schedule even some slightly ridiculous habits, such as Kiss Jamie every morning...
One of the best ways to make myself happy is to make other people happy. One of the best ways to make other people happy is to be happy myself.
My idea of this is the kind of person I am is so bound up in my habits and actions that it’s hard for me to see. But eventually, I realized that my sense of identity makes it easier or harder to chang...
Each week, I post a video about some 'Pigeon of Discontent' raised by a reader. Because, as much as we try to find the 'Bluebird of Happiness,' we're also plagued by those small but pesky 'Pigeons of...
Happiness, wrote Yeats, is neither virtue nor pleasure nor this thing nor that, but simply growth. We are happy when we are growing.
At the heart of this home is my family; where my family is, is home. If I lived by myself, home would be the place peopled with reminders of everyone I loved. My home is a place of unconditional belon...
The fact is, changing a habit is much more challenging if that new habit means altering or losing an aspect of ourselves.
For Rebels, the ability to choose is so important that sometimes they make a choice—even when it’s against their own self-interest or it’s not what they prefer—just to reassure themselves that they ca...
To achieve greater clarity in my actions, I often invoke a bright-line rule, a useful concept from law. A bright-line rule is a clearly defined rule or standard that eliminates any need for interpreta...
What you do every day matters more than what you do once in a while. You
Aaron Beck, founder of cognitive behavioral therapy, maintains that people find it easy to notice what their partners do wrong, but not what they do right, so he suggests keeping marriage diaries to t...
Showing 41 to 60 of 547 results