Supritha S

Choosing to front-load pain and discomfort isn't just a choice that applies to daily tasks and errands. It can also be used to nudge you toward the goals you have that you tend to procrastinate on.

Like Ahmed, she found that traits like curiosity were essential. But she found that they also needed high emotional resilience to pursue their interests in the face of external expectations. “Because we live in a society that tells us to specialise, and these are people who didn’t do that – they forged their own path.” Many people may lack the... See more

Working on challenges of an optimal level of difficulty has been found to not only be motivating, but also to be a major source of happiness. As psychologist Gilbert Brim put it, “One of the important sources of human happiness is working on tasks at a suitable level of difficulty, neither too hard nor too easy.”

Getting what we want, or think we want—in those brief moments when we actually do—always seems to be more complicated and fraught than what we pictured.

Why is it so difficult to do what we say we’re going to do?The lizard brain.

It may not have been on purpose, but we’ve created a steaming buffet of possibilities for time-spending. Many of them are enriching and more than worthwhile.

The least articulate form of the bad actor explanation might be the one we hear most often: that human beings are terrible and society is terrible. As much as that might explain any problem you can think of, it’s a ridiculous conclusion to make, if you consider that our species is obsessed with right and wrong and discerning one from the other.

Certainly, an abundance of food is preferable to scarcity, and the same is true for ways to spend our time. More options do give us more to work with in our quest to build a satisfying life.

Quotes from Marcus Aurelius