5 New Secrets To Achieving Your Goals, Backed By Research
al setting is one of the four techniques the military used to increase Navy SEAL passing rates from 25% to 33%. Studies have also shown it makes you happier. So what are five steps to achieving your goals? 1) Shut Up Keep them secret. Talking about big goals rewards yourself ahead of time and makes you less likely to follow through. Via Daniel Coyle’s excellent book The Little Book of Talent: 52 Tips for Improving Your Skills: While it’s natural and oh so tempting…
4 minutes
Here Are 3 Awesome Secrets To Happier Memories, Backed By Research
u can't trust your memory. Memory is fluid. Every time you recall something you're essentially rewriting it in your head. Yet you're prone to stubbornly trusting this copy of a copy of a copy -- even if it no longer resembles the original: Robert Burton describes an experiment in his book On Being Certain: Believing You Are Right Even When You Are Not, which everyone with a strong opinion should read. Immediately after the Challenger explosion in 1986, the psychologist Ulric Neisser asked…
4 minutes
The Secret To Telling If Your Life Is On Track
bsp; Sir Ray Avery, entrepreneur and author of Rebel With A Cause, says it's as easy as counting your days. “When you’re born, you’re born with 30,000 days. That’s it. The best strategic planning I can give to you is to think about that.” He's 65. So he's "got about 5,625 days to live." Then he just works backward to plan. Via Techcrunch (HT: 99U): “For me, I can reverse engineer my life to achieve much more than you guys. Every…
1 min read
Here’s What Scientific Research Says Leads To A Merry Christmas
me people love the holidays, others think they're awful. What's the deal? People are happier during the Christmas season, even if they do feel more stress: …subjects are on the whole reasonably satisfied with their holiday experience, with 74.8% scoring above “neutral” in terms of their satisfaction. Subjects’ stress levels approach the midpoint of the scale, with 57.4% disagreeing that the holiday was stressful and 43.6% agreeing. The holiday experience involved substantially more PA than NA for most individuals, with 75.4% of the…
2 minutes
These 5 Books Can Change Your Life
recently posted about five of my must-read books. Here are a few more that have really made a difference in my life: 1) 59 Seconds: Change Your Life in Under a Minute What is it? If you like this blog, you'll love this book. Richard Wiseman takes psychology research and tells you how to use it to improve your life in a straightforward (but entertaining) way. What did I learn from it? A ton. I learned that: Best…
3 minutes
Why do you read 1000 things about change and never change?
owing isn't doing. I post a lot of stuff about getting better at things. A common response to my posts is "I know that." Knowing is great for watching Jeopardy. It's not nearly as good for life. So why is learning about improvement so easy and actually improving so damn hard? Most any change that requires a lot of consistent mental effort is going to fail because you spend most of the day on autopilot. Via Charles Duhigg’s excellent book The…
5 minutes
The One Word That Sums Up Everything You Need To Do To Be Happier
at word is "PERMA." It's an acronym for: Positive Emotion Engagement Good Relationships Meaning Accomplishment Martin Seligman is a professor at the University of Pennsylvania and one of the foremost experts on the study of happiness. He gave the following talk in 2011 explaining "PERMA", the research behind it, and how we can use it to improve our lives. I'll break it down after the video. For the longest time the model of happiness we've had has followed how we look…
5 minutes
10 Videos Guaranteed To Inspire You
bsp; 1) How to be happier Harvard professor Shawn Achor is the author of the wonderful book The Happiness Advantage. 2) Is it better to come in first... or third? Malcolm Gladwell is the author of the bestsellers Blink, Outliers and The Tipping Point. 3) Why do we lie? And why do we lie to ourselves? Great interview with Dan Ariely, author of Predictably Irrational and The Honest Truth About Dishonesty: How We Lie to Everyone---Especially Ourselves. 4) What’s it take to free…
2 minutes
