psychology

Fourth, use the new belief often and make it part of your identity. Your beliefs are the stories about yourself that you have accepted to be true … so you can decide to change the stories.

Are you dreaming about how svelte you’ll look in that swimsuit after the diet you’re planning? Women who did that lost twenty-four fewer pounds than those who didn’t. Fantasizing about getting that perfect job? Those who dwelled on it sent out fewer applications and ended up getting fewer offers. Students who imagined a big A for the semester spent

You didn’t choose the robbery, but it’s still your responsibility to manage the emotional and psychological (and legal) fallout of the experience.

Fault is past tense. Responsibility is present tense. Fault results from choices that have already been made. Responsibility results from

If this isn’t possible in your life today, start with the 3M plan: devote 15 percent of your time to a project that aligns with your core passion and purpose. Fifteen percent is about an afternoon a week, though you can easily split this into a pair of two-and-a-half-hour blocks and get similar results.

Intervention design is really just the translation of pressures into something we can actually create; if pressures are the levers, interventions are how we pull them, hopefully in the right order and with the right strength.

Banning something makes it very desirable.

Second, dopamine tunes signal-to-noise ratios in the brain, which means the neurochemical increases signal, decreases noise, and, as a result, helps us detect more patterns. There’s a feedback loop here. We get dopamine when we first detect a link between two ideas (a pattern), and the dopamine that we get helps us detect even more links (pattern

Stories and limits—that’s what grit and quit come down to. Focus on those two and you can be as unstoppable as a Toronto raccoon—but so successful that you’ll never have to eat out of a trash can.