Based on some comments I made in a coaching call, a Thinking Labber wrote to me as follows:   I’m fascinated by the idea that self-sacrifice is an easily activated context and not a habit. I’d love to learn more about that, but I’m not sure of the right questions to ask. I’m not even sure I get what you mean. It’s so different from how I have it in my mind. It’s different from how most people think about it. Here’s a quick rundown of my view. “Habit” needs to be precisely defined Thanks to the influence of behaviorism, the term “habit” is commonly used to subsume a wide ra ..read more

In preparation for a new series of classes on “The Work of Happiness” in the Thinking Lab, I have been doing some high-level thinking about how you raise your baseline happiness. As I wrote in How Do You Measure Happiness?, your “baseline happiness” is the overall percentage of your waking time in which you are in a good emotional state. By a “good emotional state,” I include both serenity and any state of happiness, as opposed to any state of suffering. So, peacefulness, even if you are sad, contributes to your baseline happiness. But conflict and indecision, even if it concerns deciding betw ..read more

There are three kinds of actions that mark a person as having an active mind. 1. You look beyond the obvious options and the obvious explanations to make sure you’ve got the full picture. 2. You do the introspective work to make your own values explicit, especially when you experience internal conflict. 3. You find another way to gain and keep your values when the first attempt or the nth attempt doesn’t work out. Why not settle for the obvious? Going with the obvious options or obvious explanations is the simplest, easiest thing to do. The obvious choices are often the best choices. So why no ..read more

When you read self-help books, you can expect that you will need to analyze them carefully to separate the wheat from the chaff. Many such books can be very helpful if you look at the practical advice and rethink the validation of it for yourself. Too often, the explanation for why something works is mistaken. I sometimes help members of the Thinking Lab do this rethinking. Here is a selection of my answers to questions from Thinking Labbers. Is patience a virtue? People often say patience is a virtue I disagree with this. It is sometimes necessary, but it is not a principle to follow. If yo ..read more

      I derive my ideas on happiness from Ayn Rand, who wrote, among other things, “Morality…is a code of values to guide man’s choices and actions—the choices and actions that determine the purpose and the course of his life.” (AR, The Objectivist Ethics) “The purpose of morality is to teach you, not to suffer and die, but to enjoy yourself and live.” (AR, Galt’s Speech) “Happiness is the successful state of life, pain is an agent of death. Happiness is that state of consciousness which proceeds from the achievement of one’s values. A morality that dares to tell you to fin ..read more

Curiosity is not just a penchant for asking a lot of questions. It is a specific kind of interest in a topic, which is critical to thinking and problem-solving. What is curiosity? Curiosity is the emotion you get when you have a sense that there is a phenomenon to understand of which you are aware of only some of the parts. When you are curious, you are eager to understand the interrelationships between the parts, and how they come together to form a whole. The curiosity motivates you to explore those parts and understand the interrelationships before trying to reach a conclusion or make a dec ..read more

Asking yourself questions is a critical part of thinking. But it’s possible to become mentally paralyzed if you ask yourself unhelpful questions. You can easily figure out that a question is unhelpful if you do your thinking “on paper” as I recommend in the Thinking Directions Starter Kit. If you find yourself staring at a question you wrote, it’s probably not a helpful question. If you find yourself going back over the same ground, you probably are not asking yourself helpful questions. What makes a question “helpful”? It’s answerable and it’s relevant to your thinking process. Is it answerab ..read more

I was recently asked to explain the difference between “emotional presence” and “self-esteem.” Emotional presence “Emotional presence” is an intense awareness of your values and their importance to you at the moment. You get it, not just from identifying your emotions, but from experiencing your love, grief, desire, and/or fear as you contemplate the deep rational value that underlies the emotion. Let me concretize what I mean with a story. Some years ago, I was very nervous before giving a speech. I had not worked out a full script, so I knew I would need to ad lib. I also knew the nervousnes ..read more

If you lack momentum on some project, it means your goal or the path to your goal is vague in some way. It is not enough to have a generalized idea of the outcome and the steps involved. You need clarity regarding how your steps will get you from here to there. If you aren’t clear on how those steps pay off, your goal will not guide and motivate action. It will be just a daydream in your mind. Clarifying a goal to build momentum is doable, but it often takes turning the project into an initiative — a project that gets special time and attention. Let’s see why that is, depending on where t ..read more

What are your long-range goals? That is, goals that will take a year or more to achieve? If you already have long-range goals, now is a good time to take stock. How will you make significant progress toward them in the weeks and months ahead? The longer-range the goal, the more important it is to figure this out. And if you don’t have long-range goals, you likely have some long-range wishes. Now is a great time to identify some wishes you might turn into goals for the new year. Nothing stops you from turning long-range wishes into achievable long-range goals — except perhaps a few misconceptio ..read more