In this series on happiness, I have distinguished short-term pleasures and temporary joys from true happiness. To be in a state of true happiness, you need to gain your values every day, week, month, and year. This requires not only that you accept facts of reality,...
"Less" sounds undesirable. Who wants to settle for less when you could have more? Well, in communication, less is often much better than more. For example, if you are offering a proposal to a prospective customer, it's much better to offer just the top three options...
Most people know that it's helpful to break down very complex, long-term projects into smaller steps. This is crucial for achieving your goals. But I'd like to explain an important difference between identifying the "next step" as opposed to identifying the "next...
When Thinking Lab members tell me their task is hard, I hear alarm bells in my mind. Invariably, I find they are making a difficult task harder than it has to be. A difficult task is one that requires a special mental effort to complete. It may require all your...
Self-understanding is critical to achieving enduring happiness. This assertion may seem simple and obvious. Happiness requires that you consistently achieve your values. To have such consistent success, you need to factor your own capabilities into your plans. But to...
If you've been reading my blog, or my website, you've read about a lot of processes and procedures you can use to help get your mental wheels turning when you're feeling overloaded, or conflicted, or doubtful, or otherwise not sure what to do. They're great ideas....
Exercise: Three Ways to Scale Down Background Scaling down helps you focus on the essentials and get the most important work done first. In the last exercise, I suggested you use a thought experiment to help you come up with a scaled-down version that you could get...
Way back in 1998, when I wrote my first article on what to do when you get stuck on a difficult thinking problem, I offered one general piece of advice: Identify the problem. As Louis Sullivan said, "the problem contains and suggests its own solution." Although I now...
The WSJ had an article once on "How to Keep a Resolution." One of the suggestions was to strengthen your self-control. Here's the relevant section: "It may be possible to strengthen your self-control before starting your resolution by exercising it on small tasks.......
In Launch, some people come with money goals. In a few cases that makes sense, but not usually. A well-set goal needs to guide and motivate the action necessary to achieve it — and provide a lasting satisfaction with every step along the way. Money goals often don't...
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