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A thoughtful reader emailed me a link to a recent Time article, Getting Serious About Happiness. It’s about Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, an expert on happiness and “flow.” His book Flow: The Pyschology of Optimal Experience is fascinating. What interested me most was the following advice by Csikszentmihalyi: Be attuned to what gives you genuine satisfaction. Although many people assume that popular …
My friend Marci is a brilliant networker. She’s constantly meeting people and, what’s more, taking the time to make useful introductions for other people. Her new book One Person/Multiple Careers just came out, so she’s been working especially hard lately. I’m not a natural networker, just the opposite, so I study Marci to see if I can figure out how …
Every Wednesday is Tip Day. This Wednesday: Seven tips for making yourself happier in the next hour. You can make yourself happier – and this doesn’t have to be a long-term ambition. You can start right now. In the next hour, check off as many of the following items as possible. Each of these accomplishments will lift your mood, as …
Last Wednesday’s post, Tips for how NOT to be happy, provoked a lot of controversy. I think one major reason was the question: what does it mean for a person “not to be happy”? Many people understood this to mean a person who is “depressed.” Which is not what I intended. I spend most of my time thinking about happiness, …
One of the trickiest questions in the happiness project is: “What is ‘happiness’?” Scientific texts use various terms, such as utility, hedonic tone, subjective well-being, positive emotionality, and positive affect. One study identified 15 different academic definitions of “happiness.” Several kinds of tests measure various concepts of “happiness.” Some studies focus on “life satisfaction,” by asking people how satisfied they …
