Happiness is particularly elusive when you look for it in the future. Success, on the other hand, is often best manifested by looking and focusing on the future.
Author: Jeff Blum | Subjects: Happiness, Life & Society, Personal Improvement, Psychology | Behavior, Success / Failure
A powerful shaping factor about our social and political worlds is how they are structured by group belonging and identities.
Authors: Jay Van Bavel, Philip Pärnamets | Source: Scientific American | Subjects: Education | Scholarship, Life & Society, Politics & Public Policy, Psychology | Behavior
There is only one success—to be able to spend your life in your own way.
Author: Christopher Morley | Subjects: Life & Society, Personal Improvement, Success / Failure
Courage is knowing it might hurt, and doing it anyway. Stupidity is the same. And that’s why life is hard.
Author: Jeremy Goldberg | Subjects: Life & Society, Psychology | Behavior
A scholar’s positive contribution is measured by the sum of the original data that he contributes. Hypotheses come and go but data remain. Theories desert us, while data defend us. They are our true resources, our real estate, and our best pedigree. In the eternal shifting of things, only they will save us from the ravages of time and from the forgetfulness or injustice of … [ Read more ]
Author: Santiago Ramón y Cajal | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subject: Education | Scholarship
He who knows and acts is the one who counts, not he who knows and falls asleep. We render a tribute of respect to those who add original work to a library, and withhold it from those who carry a library around in their head. If one is to become a mere phonograph, it is hardly worth the effort of complicating cerebral organization with study … [ Read more ]
Author: Santiago Ramón y Cajal | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Education | Scholarship, Life & Society, Personal Improvement
Writing is nature’s way of telling us how lousy our thinking is.
Author: Leslie Lamport | Subjects: Education | Scholarship, Reading | Writing, Thought | Inquiry
Emotions create habits. Not repetition. Not frequency. Not fairy dust. Emotions.
Author: BJ Fogg | Source: strategy+business | Subject: Personal Improvement
[BJ Fogg has created] a model with three variables: B = MAP. A behavior happens when the three elements of MAP — Motivation, Ability, and Prompt — come together at the same moment. Motivation is the desire to exhibit the behavior. Ability is the capacity to exhibit it. Prompt is the cue to exhibit it. According to the equation, if you want to craft a … [ Read more ]
Authors: BJ Fogg, Theodore Kinni | Source: strategy+business | Subjects: Personal Improvement, Psychology | Behavior
Think of these levels as reading to entertain, reading to inform, reading to understand, and reading to master. When you learned to read in elementary school, you were taught to read for entertainment. If you made it to high school and college, you learned to read to inform. This is where most people stop. But most of the value comes at the last two levels. … [ Read more ]
Authors: Mortimer Adler, Shane Parrish | Source: Farnam Street | Subjects: Education | Scholarship, Reading | Writing
Confidence is simply a way of moving through the world with a correct view of your strengths and vulnerabilities, a correct measure of your depths and your limits, in order to face the possible with unstoried willingness.
Author: Maria Popova | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subject: Personal Improvement
All expectation is a story of the possible. Every person lives inside a story of who they are, what they are worth, and what is possible for their life, and suffers in proportion to how conscious they are of the story, how much credence they give those inner voices over the raw input of reality. It is often when life blindsides us with a bright … [ Read more ]
Author: Maria Popova | Source: The Marginalian (Brain Pickings) | Subjects: Concepts, Life & Society, Pain & Suffering, Personal Improvement, Possibility
How you talk about your experiences will dictate how you feel about them. Reframing our goals and rewriting our stories are powerful tools. Nobody can tell us how to feel about something. We can make our shortcomings into something beautiful if we want to. How we label an experience can completely change how we perceive it.
Author: Alexi Pappas | Subjects: Experience, Life & Society, Personal Improvement
The price of success is paid in private. Visible triumphs are built on invisible work.
Author: Shane Parrish | Subjects: Personal Improvement, Success / Failure
[According to economist James Heckman,] innate intelligence plays, at best, a 1 to 2 percent role in a child’s future success. Instead, financial success is correlated with personality traits that make up conscientiousness: self-discipline, perseverance, and diligence. Everyone defines success differently, as well they should. […] But if you happen to define success by traditional measures, like professional achievement or fortune or fame, hard work … [ Read more ]
Author: Jeff Haden | Source: Inc. | Subjects: Life & Society, Personal Improvement, Success / Failure
More is missed by not looking than not knowing.
Author: Thomas McCrae | Subjects: Life & Society, Personal Improvement
Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested.
Author: Francis Bacon | Subjects: Education | Scholarship, Reading | Writing
Assumptions can be malleable. Change the assumptions and the outcomes will change as well. Generally speaking, assumptions come into play when we are dealing with unknown or incomplete information situations, so it’s good to change the underlying assumptions and see how things would play out. Of course, if you are making assumptions, especially incorrect ones, in known situations, you need to correct that.
Author: Jeff Blum | Subjects: Education | Scholarship, Intelligence | Knowledge, Personal Improvement, Prejudice and Stereotype, Psychology | Behavior, Thought | Inquiry
Progress in improvement or achievement is a function of the things we do and the things we don’t do (or stop doing). Measuring or monitoring the former is easier than the latter, but both are necessary.
Author: Jeff Blum | Subjects: Personal Improvement, Success / Failure
Sometimes we fall in love with ideas not people.
Author: Bridgett Devoue | Subjects: Personal Improvement, Psychology | Behavior, Relationships