Clear Thinking: Turning Ordinary Moments into Extraordinary Results

Good judgment is expensive, but poor judgment will cost you a fortune.

Wisdom is turning your future hindsight into your current foresight.

Jobs had a daily ritual. Every morning he would look in the mirror and ask himself, “If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?”[3]

“Let us prepare our minds as if we had come to the very end of life,” Seneca said.

Pillemer asked one of his interviewees for help understanding the source of her happiness. She thought about it and answered, “In my 89 years, I’ve learned that happiness is a choice—not a condition.”

Time is the ultimate currency of life.

I once interviewed the gerontologist Karl Pillemer, author of 30 Lessons for Living: Tried and True Advice from the Wisest Americans.

Happiness, however, isn’t conditional.

I’ve known many successful people whose lives I wouldn’t want to have. They had intelligence, they had drive, they had opportunity, and the wherewithal to use them all. But they were missing something else. They knew how to get what they wanted, but the things they wanted weren’t worth wanting.