Happiness by Design Quotes

“Change what you do, not how you think. You are what you do, your happiness is what you attend to, and you should attend to what makes you and those whom you care about happy.”
― Paul Dolan, Happiness by Design: Finding Pleasure and Purpose in Everyday Life

“Decisions about relationships, like all other decisions in life, should be based on their consequences for experiences of pleasure and purpose over time, and not by narratives surrounding them.”
― Paul Dolan, Happiness by Design: Finding Pleasure and Purpose in Everyday Life

“future happiness cannot compensate for current misery; lost happiness is lost forever. Powered”
― Paul Dolan, Happiness by Design: Finding Pleasure and Purpose in Everyday Life

“Producing happiness involves deciding, designing, and doing, and”
― Paul Dolan, Happiness by Design: Finding Pleasure and Purpose in Everyday Life

“Optimism research teaches us that we should expect the best and have a contingency plan for the worst.”
― Paul Dolan, Happiness by Design: Finding Pleasure and Purpose in Everyday Life

“It is well established that you will feel uncomfortable when there is a discrepancy between what you think and what you do. This is known as cognitive dissonance.”
― Paul Dolan, Happiness by Design: Change What You Do, Not How You Think

“To be truly happy, then, you need to feel both pleasure and purpose. You can be just as happy or sad as I am but with very different combinations of pleasure and purpose. And you may require each to different degrees at different times. But you do need to feel both. I call this the pleasure-purpose principle—the PPP.”
― Paul Dolan, Happiness by Design: Change What You Do, Not How You Think

“Being too hard on ourselves, and not accepting the fact that we procrastinate, just leads to more procrastination and makes it harder to change. Students”
― Paul Dolan, Happiness by Design: Finding Pleasure and Purpose in Everyday Life

“By using priming, defaults, commitments, and norms in your own life, you can become a whole lot happier without actually having to think very hard at all about becoming happier. You will be happier by design.”
― Paul Dolan, Happiness by Design: Finding Pleasure and Purpose in Everyday Life

“trying to force yourself to be different never really works.”
― Paul Dolan, Happiness by Design: Finding Pleasure and Purpose in Everyday Life

“Self-improvement is important, but it needs to be conducive to your happiness. If an ambition will not make you or those you care about any happier, then there really is no point in striving to be someone else. You should carefully consider your reasons for the ideal self you construct and then select goals and ambitions that are sensible and conducive to your happiness.”
― Paul Dolan, Happiness by Design: Finding Pleasure and Purpose in Everyday Life

“The main point of salient feedback is to help you make decisions about the inputs into your production process of happiness.”
― Paul Dolan, Happiness by Design: Change What You Do, Not How You Think

“You can trust your own experiences more than your desires.”
― Paul Dolan, Happiness by Design: Change What You Do, Not How You Think

“We often think about small decisions more than we need to and about big decisions much less than is optimal for our happiness, such as spending days looking at what colors to paint the walls but only a couple of hours visiting the house we buy.”
― Paul Dolan, Happiness by Design: Change What You Do, Not How You Think

“Our tendency to attribute our behavior to our context or to blame others for it is directly in contrast to how we tend to judge others’ actions. When it comes to other people, we are far more likely to attribute the bad meal to their inability to cook rather than to other causes. This is called the fundamental attribution error.”
― Paul Dolan, Happiness by Design: Change What You Do, Not How You Think

“So experiences of pleasure and purpose are all that matter in the end. Hedonism is the school of thought that holds that pleasure is the only thing that matters in the end. By adding sentiments of purpose to pleasure, I define my position as sentimental hedonism. I am a sentimental hedonist and I think that, deep down, we all are.”
― Paul Dolan, Happiness by Design: Change What You Do, Not How You Think

“Ultimately, we should all be seeking to use our time in ways that bring us the greatest overall pleasure and purpose for as long as possible. Just as you cannot recover time that is lost, you cannot recover happiness that is lost. Staying in a boring job or an annoying relationship simply prolongs the misery and any future happiness is unlikely to fully compensate for this loss. Lost happiness is lost forever.”
― Paul Dolan, Happiness by Design: Change What You Do, Not How You Think

“There are so many stimuli vying for your attention—sounds, places, people, smells, and your own thoughts rattling around in your head. You only have so much attentional energy and it will make you happier, more efficient, and healthier if you are able to focus it properly.”
― Paul Dolan, Happiness by Design: Finding Pleasure and Purpose in Everyday Life

“Overall, how satisfied are you with your life nowadays? 2. Overall, to what extent do you feel the things you do in your life are worthwhile? 3. Overall, how happy did you feel yesterday? 4. Overall, how anxious did you feel yesterday?”
― Paul Dolan, Happiness by Design: Change What You Do, Not How You Think

“Distraction will, of course, interrupt attending to experiences; one survey reported”
― Paul Dolan, Happiness by Design: Change What You Do, Not How You Think

“My ability to keep weight training—my “stickability”—is simply sticking with an activity that brings happiness in the current moment, rather than in the future. It’s the pleasure-purpose feedback you get while you are engaged in an activity that matters most.”
― Paul Dolan, Happiness by Design: Change What You Do, Not How You Think

“In general, you should not give up too much happiness for too long (clinging to the mistaken belief that you will be able to recoup the loss at some point later on in life). Don’t put off until tomorrow happiness that can be experienced today.”
― Paul Dolan, Happiness by Design: Change What You Do, Not How You Think

“Our attention is attracted to what’s new, remember, so using varied skills focuses our attention on them, thus making purpose more salient.”
― Paul Dolan, Happiness by Design: Change What You Do, Not How You Think

“If mindless eating is the problem, then paying attention to what you eat through salient feedback will be a big part of the solution.”
― Paul Dolan, Happiness by Design: Change What You Do, Not How You Think

“People eating at McDonald’s in Paris take about twenty minutes longer to eat their food than diners at McDonald’s in Philadelphia.7 This study did not look at overall calorie consumption, but other data confirm that the French typically eat less than do Americans.”
― Paul Dolan, Happiness by Design: Change What You Do, Not How You Think

“You can also trust your own experiences more than your projections.”
― Paul Dolan, Happiness by Design: Change What You Do, Not How You Think

“And you can trust your own experiences more than your beliefs.”
― Paul Dolan, Happiness by Design: Change What You Do, Not How You Think

“The ways in which you can reallocate your attention to be happier are best understood from three separate but related perspectives: deciding, designing, and doing.”
― Paul Dolan, Happiness by Design: Change What You Do, Not How You Think

“Modest expectations will also mean that you can avoid false-hope syndrome, whereby we stick with crazy expectations way past the point at which we should have reined them in.”
― Paul Dolan, Happiness by Design: Change What You Do, Not How You Think

“Take a second to recall your last holiday. How much did you enjoy it? Would you go back again? If you are anything like other people, two factors will explain your answers: the peak moment of pleasure or pain and the final moment of pleasure or pain. This is known as the peak-end effect.50 Further, your overall assessment of an experience doesn’t even pay that much attention to how long it lasted. This is known as duration neglect.”
― Paul Dolan, Happiness by Design: Change What You Do, Not How You Think