When I was looking for a book related to our monthly theme of Happiness, I found a book by Dale Carnegie entitled How to Stop Worrying and Start Living. It’s clearly related to happiness. Worrying is an opposite of being happy and learning how to overcome worrying means learning how to be happy. Since I knew Dale Carnegie’s reputation, I decided to pick a copy and read it. Inside How to Stop Worrying and Start Living The book is divided into eight parts with several chapters in each. I can’t cover all those chapters in this review, so I will just write some that particularly resonate with me. Part One: Fundamental Facts You Should Know About Worry 1. Live in “Day-tight Compartments”
Note: This is a guest post by Flora Morris Brown of Color Your Life Happy. Take stock of your feelings right this minute. Do you want to maintain the feeling you have right now? Then you are probably happy. Do you wish things were better or different than they are right now? Then you’re probably unhappy, or at best mildly discontented. Discussions on happiness seem to attribute a small portion of our happiness to genetic predisposition and upbringing, but a large portion of our happiness comes from the choices we make in our lives.
Do you want to get the most out of your time? I’m sure you do. But for it you must do two things: you must focus on a project while exploring new opportunities. I learned something from the way Google’s developers work. At Google, the developers have the so-called “20 percent time” policy. It allows the developers to use 20 percent of their work time to work on informal projects of their own. The developers can use the time to work on whatever crazy ideas they have. While giving away 20 percent of their work time may seem counterproductive for the company, it has produced a lot of innovative new projects. Google News, for instance, came from the 20 percent time. In my opinion, this 20 percent time idea is good to implement personally. While you should have a main project to work on, you should also have a side project.
Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way. Leo Tolstoy There are many ways for people to be unhappy, but happy people have common characteristics. That’s why a good way to be happy is to learn the common characteristics of happy people and apply them. So I studied what the great minds in history say about being happy. I went through hundreds of quotes on being happy and extracted the best lessons out of them. Not only are these lessons useful, they are also timeless in nature. Here I’d like to share what I learned with you. Without further ado, here are 17 timeless secrets of happy people:
Note: This is a guest post by Vern Is it still called happiness when every muscle in your face is pulling to make you smile so hard that you fear your skin may rip? Happiness feels incredible. Our mind is light and on a higher plane. Worries are diffused by happiness, even causing stress to disappear completely in some instances. We need happiness in our lives, preferably on a daily basis. Would you think back over the next minute or two and try to come up with a time when you were so overwhelmed with happiness that your face hurt from smiling and yet you couldn’t stop it because the happiness – the joy was bursting from inside you. In fact, once you reached what you’d term the ultimate happiness, more came. Then more… you kept reaching higher levels of bliss that were nearly overwhelming. Was there ever a time like that in your entire life? I really want you to try this exercise and see if you can remember a time like that because most of us can’t. Even on your wedding day, as happy as you were there were probably parts of your mind that weren’t quite in […]
I recently watched Nathan Myhrvold’s video at TED and it’s amazing. I want to talk about the video and what I learn from it in a moment, but let me introduce Nathan Myhrvold first. He is the man who is featured in The New Yorker’s article In The Air (I wrote a post about the article entitled How to Create Ideas: 11 Proven Lessons from Idea Generators). He is a genius. He began college at age 14 and earned PhD in theoretical and mathematical physics at age 23. He worked as a postdoctoral fellow under Stephen Hawking (a top physicist who wrote A Brief History of Time). He later moved to Microsoft where he founded Microsoft Research and became Chief Technology Officer. In the video he talked about what he did after he left Microsoft in 1999. He talked about what he did in archeology, palaeontology, SETI, nuclear technology, photography, and even cooking! Look at the diversity of the topics. This is not to mention his earlier career in physics and information technology.