Supritha S

That’s the elegant secret to discipline: valuing your future self as highly as you value your current self, at least long enough to get your Right Now Self to do the right thing. That moment of choice is where the ants go one way and grasshoppers the other.

When you believe your mood necessarily means something is wrong, that something can only be you, or the world around you. You feel like have to fix one or both, and of course you don’t know how, so you feel worse.

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.”

In other words, bad habits address certain needs in your life. And for that reason, it's better to replace your bad habits with a healthier behavior that addresses that same need. If you expect yourself to simply cut out bad habits without replacing them, then you'll have certain needs that will be unmet and it's going to be hard to stick to a... See more

Waste no more time arguing about what a good man should be. Be one.

Using these three drivers, you can look at the spread of helmets in the NHL, or electric cars in California or Nike sneakers everywhere. We can see it in the decline in smoking in some communities, or the rise of a popular style of music as well.

Sometimes there are discernible reasons for low moods, of course, and it makes sense to act on them. (I don’t have a plan for my consumer debt, and I need one. My relationship is stagnating and I need to address that.) There are also serious, diagnosable mood disorders that need treatment.

Notice that these more specific expressions of classic life advice all refer to concrete objects and things. They identify a real-life moment where the wisdom would make a difference, and they tell you how to create that difference.