For this to really work, you’ll need a lot more positive self-talk than you might assume. University of North Carolina’s Barbara Fredrickson discovered “the positivity ratio,” or the fact that it takes three positive thoughts to counter a single negative thought. “Three-to-one,” she wrote in a recent journal article, “is the ratio we’ve found to be

If you’re asking questions and learning, it’s hard to tell yourself that learning itself is not possible.

Less gritty people hunt happiness through pleasure, while grittier folks choose engagement. By consistently choosing engagement and triggering flow, the grittier folks are actually getting more happiness, not less.

Two to six hours, one or two times a week: highest-flow activity (skiing, dancing, singing, whatever). These are the activities that often get edited out of our lives as responsibilities pile up and schedules get crowded. But the more flow you get, the more flow you get. It’s a focusing skill. So spending extra time in an activity that is all but

Five minutes for making a clear-goals list—also usually at the end of a workday to prepare for the next day’s uninterrupted concentration period. Remember, order tasks from the most difficult (and most rewarding) to the least. Also, don’t just put “work tasks” on your clear goals list. Write down everything you want to do in a day, including things

During struggle, the prefrontal cortex is hyperactive. It’s working feverishly to solve a problem. In release, we want to relax and let go. The goal is to take your mind off the problem. This allows us to pass information processing responsibilities from the conscious to the unconscious. Executive attention disengages and the default mode network

Complexity shows up when we force the brain to expand its perceptual capacity, for example, when we stand on the edge of the Grand Canyon and contemplate the question of geological time, or when we gaze up at the night sky and realize that a great many of those singular points of light are actually galaxies. This is the experience of awe, where we

Our next flow trigger is a rich environment. This a combination platter of three separate triggers: novelty, unpredictability, and complexity. All three drive dopamine into our systems and, as a result, catch and hold our attention much like risk.14 We’ll go one at a time.

These facts also tell us something about those Silicon Valley companies with “fail forward” as their de facto motto. This motto creates a consequence-friendly environment, which makes it a high-flow environment. If employees don’t have the space to fail, then they don’t have the ability to take risks. At Facebook, there is a sign hanging in the