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January 23 - February 14, 2024
Aristotle says, “We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.”
“It’s not necessarily the reality that shapes us but the lens through which your brain views the world that shapes your reality.” William Shakespeare says, “For there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so.”
Viktor Frankl says, “Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.” Walt Whitman writes, “Keep your face always toward the sunshine—and shadows will fall behind you.”
If I knew everything about your life circumstances—your job, your health, your marital status, your income—I could predict only 10% of your happiness. That’s it! The remaining amount is not determined by your external world but by the way your brain processes it.
Carrying out five random acts of kindness a week dramatically improves your happiness.
Charles Dickens puts this well: “Reflect upon your present blessings, of which every man has many, not your past misfortunes, of which all men have some.”
Happy people don’t have the best of everything. They make the best of everything. Be happy first.
Buddha says, “You can search throughout the entire universe for someone who is more deserving of your love and affection than you are yourself and that person is not to be found anywhere. You yourself, as much as anybody in the entire universe, deserve your love and affection.”
Physicist Richard Feynman said, “You have no responsibility to live up to what other people think you ought to accomplish. I have no responsibility to be like they expect me to be. It’s their mistake, not my failing.”
None of us can control our emotions. We can only control our reactions to our emotions.
GREEK PHILOSOPHER EPICTETUS says, “Wealth consists not in having great possessions, but in having few wants.”
A famous Persian proverb hung on my aunt’s kitchen wall reads, “I cried because I had no shoes, until I met a man who had no feet.”
And the Rolling Stones sing, “You can’t, always get, what you wa-ant. You can’t, always get, what you wa-ant. You can’t, always get, what you wa-ant. But if you try sometimes, you j...
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all have 168 hours in their weeks. No more, no less. The richest man in the world can’t buy more time. It’s just not for sale. So the question isn’t how can we create more time but how can we use our time more effectively? We can’t acquire time. But we can structure our time so we can get more out of our lives. Work provides this structure.
Fewer choices means faster decisions.
It is easier to act yourself into a new way of thinking than to think yourself into a new way of acting.
There is nothing more satisfying than being loved for who you are and nothing more painful than being loved for who you’re not but pretending to be.
“Happiness is when what you think, what you say, and what you do are in harmony.”
“When there are no enemies within, the enemies outside cannot hurt you.”
The Bhagavad Gita, the sacred Hindu text, says it’s better to live your own destiny imperfectly than to live an imitation of somebody else’s life with perfection.
“Ninety-seven percent of lung cancer patients are smokers and ninety-seven percent of smokers never get lung cancer.”
Advice is never objectively true in all situations.
Always remember there are only three goals. To want nothing. That’s contentment. To do anything. That’s freedom. To have everything. That’s happiness. What are the nine secrets to get us there?
