Patricia Mou

I realized that my desires require time and attention much more than money. It was a paradox: What I wanted was to not ever have to worry about money again. Instead, all I worried about was money. As Tim Ferris said, “An obsession with security breeds a feeling of insecurity.”

There are numerous variations on these simple activities but the original intervention (Emmons and McCullough, 2003) consisted of taking time once per week to reflect upon five things in life that one was grateful for and writing these down, and then repeating this for ten consecutive weeks.

A couple of months ago I pursued a new habit. Every night I pulled out a pad of paper and filled a blank page with answers to the question “What do I want in life?” (This is an exercise based on Jim O’Shaughnessy’s excellent six-part Thinker & Prover thread.) Unearthing my desires was painstaking work.

A successful tribe is not one that never fails at coordinating. It’s one that is antifragile—one that has a set of proven-to-be-robust mechanisms to handle failures.

A habit of finding pleasure in thought rather than action is a safeguard against unwisdom and excessive love of power, a means of preserving serenity in misfortune and peace of mind among worries. A life confined to what is personal is likely, sooner or later, to become unbearably painful; it is only by windows into a larger and less fretful cosmos... See more

8. Relentless Consistency.  Many people are able to produce bursts of energy. Few people are able to produce consistent, steady flows of energy.

Various strategies and interventions to enhance and promote savoring have been developed including thinking about positive events, recognizing what is good in the present situation, trying to heighten one’s focus on and awareness of a present positive experience, and sharing or celebrating something good (Smith, Harrison, Kurtz, and Bryan, 2014;... See more

5. Low Time Preference. Those with low time preference play it more effectively - they happily delay gratification to build real value.

Cognitive behavioral therapy interventions have also been developed to treat anxiety and many of these have been found to be effective in randomized trials (Cuijpers et al., 2016). Do-it-yourself self-help, workbook, and computer- or internet-based cognitive behavioral therapy interventions are also available and have been shown in randomized... See more