In other words, habits eliminate the need for self-control.
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,...
Progress, not perfection, is the goal. I’m a gold-star junkie,
If something is worth doing, it’s worth doing badly.
Severity that does not tend to increase good, or prevent evil, is idle.
But it doesn’t matter what we think a person (or ourselves) should be able to do—what matters is only what works for each individual. To help people change their habits or behavior, we should help get...
In many ways, the happiness of having children falls into the kind of happiness that could be called fog happiness. Fog is elusive. Fog surrounds you and transforms the atmosphere, but when you try to...
Discouraging as he’d been, hadn’t actually hit on my real worry about my project: Was it supremely self-centered to spend so much effort on my own happiness?
I used to think I was pretty typical, but now I see that I’m extreme. I can’t judge people according to what works for me.
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...
It was time to expect more of myself. Yet as I thought about happiness, I kept running up against paradoxes. I wanted to change myself but accept myself. I wanted to take myself less seriously—and als...
Eliminating clutter would cut down the amount of housework in the average home by 40 percent.
The Strategy of Scheduling, of setting a specific, regular time for an activity to recur, is one of the most familiar and powerful strategies of habit formation
It’s a Secret of Adulthood: I give myself limits to give myself freedom.
It’s a Secret of Adulthood: I can’t make people change, but when I change, others may change; and when others change, I may change.
It’s a Secret of Adulthood: Make sure the things we do to make ourselves feel better don’t make us feel worse.
It’s a Secret of Adulthood: What we assume will be temporary often becomes permanent; what we assume is permanent often proves temporary.
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...
I’ve been haunted for years by a public service poster I saw just one time, in the subway. It was a photo of a Chinese food take-out container sitting on top of two videos. The caption read, If this i...
How we schedule our days is how we spend our lives.
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