There’s no magic formula – not for ourselves, and not for the people around us. We won’t make ourselves more creative and productive by copying other people’s habits, even the habits of geniuses; we must know our own nature, and what habits serve us best.
By mindfully deciding how to act in line with my values instead of mindlessly applying my rules, I was better able to make the decisions that supported my happiness.
Instead of always worrying about being efficient, I wanted to spend time on exploration, experimentation, digression, and failed attempts that didn’t always look productive.
One of life’s small pleasures is to return something to its proper place;.
A sense of growth is so important to happiness that it’s often preferable to be progressing to the summit rather than to be at the summit. Neither a scientist nor a philosopher but a novelist, Lisa Grunwald, came up with the most brilliant summation of this happiness principle: “Best is good, better is best.
By mindfully choosing our habits, we harness the power of mindlessness as a sweeping force for serenity, energy, and growth.
I don’t want to reject my life. I want to change my life without changing my life.
What I do most days matters more than what I do once in a while.” That kind of self-encouragement is a greater safeguard than self-blame.
As Samuel Johnson said, “To hear complaints is wearisome alike to the wretched and the happy.
Habits are the invisible architecture of daily life. We repeat about 40 percent of our behavior almost daily, so our habits shape our existence, and our future. If we change our habits, we change our lives.
Boredom can be important. That’s when you have to figure out what you want to do.
Outer order isn’t a matter of having less or having more; it’s a matter of wanting what we have.
In many ways, the happiness of having children falls into the kind of happiness that could be called fog happiness. Fog is elusive. Fog surrounds you and transforms the atmosphere, but when you try to examine it, it vanishes. Fog happiness is the kind of happiness you get from activities that, closely examined, don’t really seem to bring much happiness at all – yet somehow they do.
According to Aristotle, “Happiness is the meaning and the purpose of life, the whole aim and end of human existence.
The words of the writer Colette had haunted me for years: “What a wonderful life I’ve had! I only wish I’d realized it sooner.
If something is worth doing, it’s worth doing badly.
We all must pay, but we can choose that for which we pay.
To a truly remarkable extent, we’re more likely to do something if it’s convenient, and less likely if it’s not. For this reason, we should pay close attention to the convenience of any activity we want to make into a habit.
The imperfect book that gets published is better than the perfect book that never leaves my computer.
It is easy to be heavy: hard to be light.” – G. K. Chesterton What’s.