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If your view of the world is that people use reason for their important decisions, you are setting yourself up for a life of frustration and confusion. You’ll find yourself continually debating people and never winning except in your own mind. Few things are as destructive and limiting as a worldview that assumes people are mostly rational.
“confusopoly” to describe that strategy.) The
business writing is all about getting to the point and leaving out all of the noise. You think you already do that in your writing, but you probably don’t.
“The boy hit the ball” more easily than “The ball was hit by the boy.” In editors’
over the course of an entire document, passive writing adds up and causes reader fatigue.
Unnecessary words and passive writing kill the timing of humor the same way they kill the persuasiveness of your point.
Accounting is part of the vocabulary of business, and if you don’t understand it on a concept level, the world will be a confusing place.
create your own cash-flow projection on a spreadsheet and feel some confidence that you understand the tax impacts and the so-called time value of money.*
No one with accounting skill would get involved with a business model that can’t work on paper.
A bad conversationalist will focus on the impoverished part of the list, doing a lot of bragging, complaining, and exchanging of information. It’s fair to say that such a person doesn’t understand what conversation is or how to do it. I fell into that category for the first few decades of my life.
What’s your name? Where do you live? Do you have a family? What do you do for a living? Do you have any hobbies/sports? Do you have any travel plans?
99 percent of the general public love talking about themselves.
faking social confidence leads to the real thing over time.
It starts by smiling and keeping your body language open. After that, just ask questions and listen as if you cared, all the while looking for common interests.
which people are thing people and which ones are people people. Thing people enjoy hearing about new technology and other clever tools and possessions. They also enjoy discussions of processes and systems, including politics. People people enjoy only conversations that involve
I also find it helpful to remind myself that every human is a mess on the inside. It’s easy to assume the good-looking and well-spoken person in front of you has it all together and is therefore your superior. The reality is that everyone is a basket case on the inside. Some people just hide it better. Find me a normal person and I’ll show you someone you don’t know that well.
It’s one thing to speak your mind and voice your preferences, but you hope that other people agree with you because of the thundering rightness of your arguments. Sadly,
Humor also transports your mind away from your daily troubles. Humor puts life in perspective and sometimes helps you laugh at even the worst of your problems. Because humor directly influences your energy levels, it touches every part of your life that requires concentration and willpower.
I find it helpful to see the world as a slot machine that doesn’t ask you to put money in. All it asks is your time, focus, and energy to pull the handle
over and over. A normal slot machine that requires money will bankrupt any player in the long run. But the machine that has rare yet certain payoffs, and asks for no money up front, is a guaranteed winner if you have what it takes to keep yanking until you get lucky. In that environment, you can fail 99 percent of the time, while knowing success is guaranteed. All you need to do is stay in the game long enough.
I can, but I see that as 20 percent of the solution. The big part—the 80 percent of happiness—is nothing but a chemistry experiment. And it’s hugely helpful to think of it that way. You can’t always quickly fix whatever is wrong in your environment, and you can’t prevent negative thoughts from drifting into your head. But you can easily control your body chemistry through lifestyle, and that in turn will cause your thoughts to turn positive, while making the bumps in your path feel less important.
A mediocre meal when you’re starving will contribute more to your happiness than an extraordinary meal when you’re not hungry. The timing of things can be more important than the intrinsic value of the things.
That brings me to the next important mechanism for happiness. Happiness has more to do with where you’re heading than where you are.
ahead. We tend to feel happy when things are moving in the right direction and unhappy when things are trending bad. The directional nature of happiness is one reason it’s a good idea to have a sport or hobby that leaves you plenty of room to improve every year.
As a cartoonist, my drawing skills have slowly improved over most of my career, and that is a source of happiness for me. If you are lucky enough to have career options, and only one of them affords a path of continual improvement, choose that one, all else being equal.
but it bears repeating in this chapter. Pessimism is often a failure of imagination. If you can imagine the future being brighter, it lifts your energy
Happiness is the natural state for most people whenever they feel healthy, have flexible schedules, and expect the future to be good.
I’m here to tell you that the primary culprit in your bad moods is a deficit in one of the big five: flexible schedule, imagination, sleep, diet, and exercise.
Prior to reading this book, the way you probably looked at food was in terms of good versus bad, or fattening versus low calorie, or maybe carbs versus protein, or some combination of the above. All of those ways of looking at food have power to help you steer away from bad diet choices. The problem with the common view of food is that it will always make you feel as if you were in a battle with yourself. You crave bad foods because they are so darned tasty. You struggle to resist.
A more practical view is that food is the fuel that makes exercise possible.
the dollar you have today can be invested.
