Just as our view of work affects our real experience of it, so too does our view of leisure. If our mindset conceives of free time, hobby time, or family time as non-productive, then we will, in fact, make it a waste of time.
Happiness inspires productivity.
It’s hard to find happiness after success if the goalposts of success keep changing.
Most people keep waiting on happiness, putting off happiness until they’re successful or until they achieve some goal, which means we limit both happiness and success. That formula doesn’t work.
The greatest competitive advantage in our modern economy is a positive and engaged brain.
Life inflicts the same setbacks and tragedies on the optimist as on the pessimist, but the optimist weathers them better.
The good life is using your signature strengths every day to produce authentic happiness and abundant gratification.
Changing the destructive things you say to yourself when you experience the setbacks that life deals all of us is the central skill of optimism.
You go into flow when your highest strengths are deployed to meet the highest challenges that come your way.
Just as the good life is something beyond the pleasant life, the meaningful life is beyond the good life.
Optimism is a tool with a certain clear set of benefits: it fights depression, it promotes achievement and produces better health.
Not only do happy people endure pain better and take more health and safety precautions when threatened, but positive emotions undo negative emotions.
If we just wanted positive emotions, our species would have died out a long time ago.
There is one aspect of happiness that’s been well studied, and it’s the notion of flow. Ask yourselves, when for you does time stop? When are you truly at home, wanting to be no place else?
In every life we have some trouble, but when you worry you make it double. Don’t worry. Be happy.
It is a great mitzvah to be happy always.
We don’t “have” a great day, we “make it” a great day!
The mind is the source of happiness and unhappiness.
Happiness is the overall experience of pleasure and meaning.
Happiness equals reality minus expectations.