10% Happier

by Dan Harris

He had a set of semi-rational writing rules that every correspondent learned to obey over the course of a particularly rigorous hazing period: don’t start a sentence with “but”; don’t say “like” when you can say “such as”; never, ever use the word “meanwhile.”

In fact, people here were fond of repeating a famous quote from the legendary White House reporter Helen Thomas, one I embraced with gusto: “You’re only as good as your last story.”

“It’s amazing,” I said, “because everything we experience in this world goes through one filter—our minds—and we spend very little time bothering to see how it works.”

our life is the manifestation of our minds.”

We live so much of our lives pushed forward by these “if only” thoughts, and yet the itch remains. The pursuit of happiness becomes the source of our unhappiness.

“Yes, because when you’re moving from this project to this project, your mind flits back to the original project, and it can’t pick it up where it left off. So it has to take a few steps back and then ramp up again, and that’s where the productivity loss is.”