Happiness by Design

The production process for happiness is therefore how you allocate your attention

much of what we do simply comes about, rather than being thought about.

The main point of salient feedback is to help you make decisions about the inputs into your production process of happiness.

The key to being happier is to pay more attention to what makes you happy and less attention to what does not.

You are more likely to run a marathon if you first commit to going out for a run a couple of times a week and building up from there, as opposed to saying “I’m going to run a marathon.”

To be truly happy, then, you need to feel both pleasure and purpose. You can be just as happy or sad as I am but with very different combinations of pleasure and purpose. And you may require each to different degrees at different times. But you do need to feel both. I call this the pleasure-purpose principle—the PPP.

It can be helpful to state what the overall goal is, break it down into more manageable chunks, and then ask yourself what you can do right now to work toward

Yes, there is another important category of feelings that matter to you, and these are the feelings of purpose and pointlessness you feel.

Our attention is attracted to what’s new, remember, so using varied skills focuses our attention on them, thus making purpose more salient.