Author: Munro Stewart

Choose to be happy with your current situation and life, as research has shown happiness may come down to your attitude and perception, not our faulty estimation of what we think we want, even big changes like getting a dream job, goal, partner, or money.

• Dan Gilbert, author of Stumbling on Happiness, challenges the idea that we'll be miserable if we don't get what we want.
• Our "psychological immune system" lets us feel truly happy even when things don't go as planned.

The Surprising Science Of Happiness - Dan Gilbert - YouTube

Take a quick break every hour to evaluate what you have done and refocus on what you should do next.

• STEP 2 (1 minute every hour) Refocus.
• Set your watch, phone, or computer to ring every hour.
• When it rings, take a deep breath, look at your list and ask yourself if you spent your last hour productively.
• Then look at your calendar and deliberately recommit to how you are going to use the next hour.
• Manage your day hour by hour.
• Don’t let the hours manage you.

An 18 minute plan for managing your day - Harvard Business Review

Turn your problems into challenges or goals that you can overcome or accomplish in order to be happier and improve your life.

• Happy people will see problems as challenges, as opportunities to explore new ways of doing things, expressing their gratitude for them, understanding that underneath them all lay many opportunities that will allow them to expand and to grow.

15 Powerful things happy people do differently - Purpose Fairy

Write down a list of your goals and dreams, because writing thoughts and ideas down is the first step to making them come to life.

• A list of your short and long-term goals can be a great motivator, as well as a trigger list to help generate new projects.
• I also like to have a list of areas of focus, the different roles that I play, each of which comes with a different set of tasks and goals.

12 Lists that help you get things done - Lifehack.org

"It's not the daily increase but daily decrease. Hack away at the unessential." - Bruce Lee

• If you want to improve your life then it’s tempting to want to add more.
• One problem with this may be that you don’t really have the time or energy to do more though.
• And so your efforts to improve become short-lived.
• Adding more and more just creates more stress and anxiety.
• Removing clutter and activities, tasks and thoughts that are not so important frees up time and energy for you to do more of what you really want to do.
• And as the clutter in your outer world decreases the clutter in your inner world also has a tendency to decrease.
• This has the added benefit of making it easier to actually enjoy whatever you are doing even more while you are doing it.

Bruce Lee’s top 7 fundamentals for getting your life in shape - Positivity Blog

Live your life by being true to yourself and following your dreams and passions, in order to make your life and the lives of others better and happier, instead of only doing things that other people want or expect you to do.

• I wish I'd had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me. This was the most common regret of all.
• When people realise that their life is almost over and look back clearly on it, it is easy to see how many dreams have gone unfulfilled.
• Most people had not honoured even a half of their dreams and had to die knowing that it was due to choices they had made, or not made.
• It is very important to try and honour at least some of your dreams along the way.
• From the moment that you lose your health, it is too late.
• Health brings a freedom very few realise, until they no longer have it.

Top 5 regrets of the dying - Huffington Post

Have a growth mindset by believing that you can grow, learn new things, improve your skills and knowledge, and realizing that temporary and recurring failure are a necessary part of learning and growing.

• Dweck, like many adults, had learned to hide her frustration and anger, to politely say "I'm not sure I want to play this anymore" instead of knocking over the board.
• She figured the successful kids would be the same - they’d have tactics for coping with failure instead of getting beaten down by it.
• But what she found was radically different.
• The successful kids didn’t just live with failure, they loved it!
• When the going got tough, they didn’t start blaming themselves; they licked their lips and said "I love a challenge."
• They’d say stuff like "The harder it gets the harder I need to try."

Believe you can change - Aaron Swartz

Remember everyone is emotional and people are all going through the ups and downs of life, so try not to take it personally when people get angry, and try to comfort or support others when they are in a bad mood.

• Perhaps this is an exaggeration.
• But the core of the message is that people tend to have stronger feelings about something than they let on.
• People who regularly have outbursts of anger, depression or flamboyant enthusiasm are generally frowned upon in most cultures.
• This especially applies to men (for women trying to figure us out).
• The application of this rule is to not assume everything is fine just because someone isn’t having a nervous breakdown.
• We all have our individual problems, angst and upsets that are normally contained.

The critical 7 rules to understand people - Scott H. Young

Give people sincere praise about something they have done well or that you appreciate about them before giving them negative feedback or an idea for something they could change or do differently.

• "Sandwich every bit of criticism between two heavy layers of praise."
• One well known strategy for feedback is the “criticism sandwich,” popularized by the above quote from cosmetics maven Mary Kay Ash.
• In the sandwich, you begin with praise, address the problem, and follow up with more praise.
• In fact, the more of the conversation you can frame positively, the more likely your recipient is to be in the right frame of mind to make the change you’re looking for.

How to Give and Receive Feedback at Work: The Psychology of Criticism - Buffer