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It is widely believed that money cannot buy happiness, but lack of money can definitely purchase misery.
.misery
So it’s important to ignore the so-called SMART rules, which dictate that effective immediate goals should be: Specific. You know how you will accomplish the task. “Take the number 19 bus to the Aquatic Center.” Measurable. You will know whether or not you have succeeded. “Get in pool and swim one lap.” Action-oriented. Your goal is to do something, not to think or feel a particular way. “Swim the lap—even if I hate it and think my bathing cap looks stupid.” Realistic. You already know you can do it, even if you don’t feel particularly well. “I could swim twenty laps not long ago; I’m
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If you allow yourself to focus on the immediate goals, you will frequently find that you have succeeded.
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Our emotions and our behavior depend not on the events of our lives, but on our perception and evaluation of those events.
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The Three Things exercise pushes the filter the other way, forcing one to pay attention, however briefly, to the more welcome elements of life. Once people are accustomed to the nighttime exercise, they can, without prompting, begin doing the same thing throughout the day, in effect noticing and storing up material for their bedtime ritual. I should remember getting this check in the mail; I can use it as one of my three things tonight.
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Self-esteem, in other words, does not exist. Self-loathing, however, is very real.
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The things that we feel tempted to do are often those that make us feel worse in the long run: turn on the television, drink more, sit at home, spend impulsively, head to the casino, surf the Internet aimlessly, play computer solitaire, get into relationships or sexual encounters that you and everyone else can see are bad ideas. All you need to do is give in to temptation, and misery will knock at the door like a thirty-minute pizza delivery.
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confidence does not precede action; it follows.
.q
Most people view the words fashion and style as near-synonyms. Crisp insisted that they were opposites. He felt that one of the driving motivations of most humans is the desire to eliminate their own uniqueness—a kind of psychological suicide that Freud might have likened to Thanatos, the death instinct. Fashion, in Crisp’s view, is the art of denying one’s individuality in order to adopt the uniforms and dictates of culture, as determined by people who have never met you, and do not care whether you exist.
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“Fashion is what you adopt when you don’t know who you are.” Style, on the other hand, is the art of bringing your defining individual features to the fore, regardless of what others might expect or find acceptable:
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Bono once said, “Unhappiness is best defined as the difference between our talents and our expectations.”
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To increase happiness, you must arrange your mind or your life so happiness appears as a natural consequence.
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