Too busy to read?

A big problem is that your mind keeps reminding you of things when you can't do anything about them. It has no sense of past or future. That means as soon as you tell yourself that you might need to do something, and store it only in your head, there's a part of you that thinks you should be doing that something all the time. Everything you've told yourself you ought to do, it thinks you should be doing right now. Frankly, as soon as you have two things to do stored only in your mind, you've generated personal failure, because you can't do them both at the same time. This produces a pervasive stress factor whose source can't be pinpointed.

One of the most important ideas in positive psychology is what Lyubomirsky, Sheldon, Schkade, and Seligman call the "happiness formula:" H = S + C + V The level of happiness that you actually experience (H) is determined by your biological set point (S) plus the conditions of your life (C) plus the voluntary activities (V) you do.34 The challenge for positive psychology is to use the scientific method to find out exactly what kinds of C and V can push H up to the top of your potential range.

Because of the way the mind developed, it is brilliant at recognition, but terrible at recall. You can glance at today's calendar and in the course of a few seconds get a coherent sense of the day and its contents and contexts. But you'd have a terrible time trying to recall the contents of the next fourteen days on your calendar merely from memory.

"It's not how well you play the game, it's deciding what game you want to play."--Kwame Appiah. This quote separates striving from strategy and reminds me to take a macro view of what I'm doing, like in a video game where you can zoom out and you suddenly see you've been running around in one corner of the maze.

False encouragement is a kind of theft: It steals time, energy, and motivation that a person could put toward some other purpose.

There is one thing we can do, and the happiest people are those who can do it to the limit of their ability. We can be completely present. We can be all here. We can give ... our attention to the opportunity before us. --Mark Van Doren