If enough electricity pours into a neuron, that neuron fires, sending that electricity onward to the next neuron. If enough electricity pours into that next neuron, it fires, too. It’s like water in a bucket on a waterwheel. Pour enough water into a bucket, and sooner or later it spills into the next bucket, and the next. It’s that mechanical.

Purpose shifts our attention off ourselves (internal focus) and puts it onto other people and the task at hand (external focus). In doing this, purpose guards against obsessive self-rumination, which is one of the root causes of anxiety and depression.18 By forcing you to look outside yourself, purpose acts as a force field. It protects you from yo

Flow follows focus, and we pay the most attention to the task at hand, when the challenge of that task slightly exceeds our skill set. We want to stretch, but not snap. When we are pushing on our talents and advancing our abilities, we are walking the path to mastery—and the brain notices. It rewards this effort with dopamine. And because dopamine

Making your own schedule works well for two reasons. The first is sleep. The freedom to control your schedule gives you the best chance of getting a good night’s rest. The research shows that we all need seven to eight hours of shut-eye a night.9 We’ll explore this in further detail later, but here, know that without proper sleep we experience a sm

Finally, dopamine, like all neurochemicals, amplifies memory.5 This, too, is automatic. A quick shorthand for how learning works in the brain: the more neurochemicals that show up during an experience, the more likely that experience will move from short-term holding into long-term storage. Memory enhancement is another key role played by neurochem

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

Flow may be the biggest neurochemical cocktail of all. The state appears to blend all six of the brain’s major pleasure chemicals and may be one of the few times you get all six at once. This potent mix explains why people describe flow as their “favorite experience,” while psychologists refer to it as “the source code of intrinsic motivation.”

If willpower degenerates over time, don’t argue. Just start your day with your hardest task and work backward—in descending order of importance and difficulty—to the easiest. The business catchphrase for this approach is “eat your ugly frog first,”

As Richard Ryan later wrote: “Human needs [such as autonomy, mastery, and purpose] provide the energy for behavior; people value goals because the goals are expected to provide satisfaction of their needs.”5 In other words, the need for autonomy is what drives people to start their own business; goals, meanwhile, are all the individual steps requir