More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
“Eat frugally for a year and dress frugally for another, and you’ll find happiness forever.”
when the challenge is to move ahead by a factor of ten, you start with a blank slate. When you commit to a moonshot, you fall in love with the problem, not the product. You commit to the mission before you even know that you have the ability to reach
happiness is right where it’s always been: inside us, a basic design feature of our species.
All you needed was no reason to be unhappy. Which is another way of saying: Happiness is the absence of unhappiness.
Success is not an essential prerequisite to happiness.
While success doesn’t lead to happiness, happiness does contribute to success.
You feel happy when life behaves the way you want it to.
Unhappiness happens when your reality does not match your hopes and expectations.
When a rude person offends you, he can’t really make you unhappy, unless you turn the event into a thought, then allow it to linger in your brain, and then allow it to distress you.
It’s the thought, not the actual event, that’s making you unhappy.
If events remain as they are, but changing the way we think about them changes our experience of them, could we become happy simply by changing our thoughts?
Once the pain is no longer needed, it naturally fades away. But that’s not the case with suffering.
We let our suffering linger as a form of self-generated pain.
It all begins when you accept the thought passing through your head as absolute truth. The longer you hold on to this thought, the more you prolong the pain.
Keeping our negative thoughts alive, it seems, is just part of the original design of our human brain.
When we assess an event, our brains tend to err on the side of caution. We tend to consider the worst-case scenario so that we prepare for it, and we tend to morph the truth so that our limited brainpower can process it swiftly and efficiently. That’s all well and good until you realize how often this leads to unhappiness.
we often give excessive attention to some that don’t deserve it.
We swap out true happiness for weapons of mass distraction: partying, drinking, eating, excessive shopping, or compulsive sex.
our brains flood our bodies with serotonin, oxytocin, and other feel-good chemicals during acts they want to encourage us to do more often.
That’s when we try to inject more extreme pleasures into our life: extreme sports, wilder parties, and all forms of excessive indulgences.
wise use for fun is as an emergency off switch to allow for momentary intervals of peace so that you can get the voice in your head to chill, meanwhile interjecting some reason into the endless stream of chatter.
Whenever you feel the thoughts in your head getting negative, enjoy a healthy pleasure—say a workout, music, or a massage—and that will always flick off the switch.
Fun and pleasure in any form are only ever a temporary state of escape—a state of unawareness. So never stay there for too long. Zoom through as fast as you can on your path to genuine, enduring happiness.
Those who reach joy are not only accepting of life as it actually is but are utterly immersed in it.
If fun suspends your thoughts, and happiness arises when your brain agrees with the events of your life, then joy is when thoughts are no longer even needed because the analysis has ended, and the equation has permanently been solved.
The gravity of the battle means nothing to those at peace.
True joy is to be in harmony with life exactly as it is.
All you need to do is remember three numbers: 6-7-5.
The little voice in your head is not you!
What Descartes should have said is: I am, therefore I think.
didn’t come with an operator’s manual, and so very few of us truly learn how to optimize using it.
Imagine what a waste it would be if you were given the fastest sports car in the world and the only part of it you used was its audio system.
The more something matters, the more incessant thought will be left out of it.
As per the Happiness Equation, the repetitive loop of thinking of an event, comparing it unfavorably to our expectations, leads to suffering.
We believe we need a solution for our unhappiness to go away, but often the reason we’re unhappy isn’t justified, and therefore there is no real solution for it, just as there wouldn’t be for a false premise.
Happiness is always found in the positive side of every concept.
Train your brain to find the good and make it the focus of your thought.
The next time you notice a negative thought in your brain, simply respond with Go get me a happier thought.
For the brain, multitasking is a myth!
Learn to shut the duck up.
So much of your happiness depends not on the conditions of the world around you but on the thoughts you create about them. When you learn to calmly observe the dialogue and the drama, you begin to see the ones and zeros. You can watch your thoughts, knowing that the only power they can gain over you is the power you grant them.
You are not the voice in your head.
Enjoy the coffee.
Be yourself no matter what they say.
You are all you’ll ever need—and all you will ever have.
Well, it sure does feel that way to all of us!
That muscle pain after your latest jog might help prevent your heart attack twenty-five years in the future. On the other hand, perhaps the pleasure of driving your car very fast might, a few seconds later, make it the last car you’ll ever drive.
“Cosmologists are often wrong but never in doubt.”
Sometimes when you stray off your track, life nudges you hard . . . and that’s not bad!
You truly never know for sure.
