Fight the Light at Night Keep artificial light before bedtime from ruining your sleep. Exposure to light in the hours before you go to sleep suppresses melatonin levels. Lower melatonin levels make it hard to fall asleep, decrease sleep quality, and could even increase the risk of high blood pressure and diabetes.
There is no greater predictor of human well-being than the amount of social time we spend with one another.
Essentially, giving another person your undivided attention is a measure of how much you care.
When you focus on other people’s shortcomings, they lose confidence in their abilities. But if you focus on their hard work and successes, you produce a sustainable increase in their self-confidence. What’s more, researchers have discovered that the earlier in life you focus on a person’s daily successes, the greater the gains over time.
Your overall satisfaction with life certainly matters. But you create meaningful change in moments and days, not years and decades.
One challenge is that our ability to progress in our career is often determined by our effectiveness in responding to near-term needs. When high value is placed on solving these kinds of problems, it creates a culture in which leaders spend little or no time thinking about what could be done because they receive more accolades for simply doing what needs to be done.
If I care about the people I work with, why tempt them to make a lousy choice? So I dumped the entire bucket of sweets into a garbage can in my office. Many foods are better off in the trash than in your stomach. The next time you receive unhealthy food as a gift, subtly dispose of it later. When you get a free dessert or candy with a meal, leave it behind. If the item is clearly bad for your health, don’t feel guilty. You are not wasting food. You may be saving lives.
An Australian study of more than 12,000 adults estimated that every single hour spent watching television after the age of 25 decreased the viewer’s life expectancy by 22 minutes.
Researchers have estimated that 90 percent of us could live to age 90 with some simple lifestyle choices.
Life is not about you. It’s about what you do for others. The faster you are able to get over yourself, the more you can do for the people who matter most.
And all of the self-awareness in the world can quickly go to waste if you fail to keep learning about what the world needs from you and how you can best serve others.
When you move past self, life is simpler and less stressful.
I am increasingly convinced that even fifteen minutes of time spent listening to another person is one of the most valuable things you can do today. In this era of hyperdistraction, asking great questions and listening are two of the qualities we look for most in friends, partners, and colleagues. Yet most people are sending the exact opposite message to friends and loved ones today.
As legendary investor Warren Buffett put it, by definition, “A leader is someone who can get things done through other people:.
I have started forcing myself to substitute thinking “I’m busy” with “I need to do a better job managing my time.
When you see a rare opportunity, take it. Life is too brief for living with regrets.
If you focus on people’s weaknesses, they lose confidence.” At a very basic level, it is hard for us to build self-confidence when we are focused on our weaknesses instead of our strengths.
Fortunately, going from the low end of this continuum to the recommended 10,000 steps can lead to significant health benefits in the short term as well as the long run.
Across the board, having the opportunity to develop our strengths is more important to our success than our role, our title, or even our pay. In this increasingly talent-driven society, we need to know and develop our strengths to figure out where we fit in.
Work is a purpose, not a place. Work is about productively applying your talent.