You can't choose to be happy, except the sole reason you're not is that you've chosen so. Only if you've chosen to feel miserable can you change your decision and be happy instead. But how often do you choose to feel miserable? That's right. And that's why you usually can't choose to feel happy. In an important sense, happiness is a chemical state based on certain ranges of neurotransmitter levels in your central nervous system. You can't directly control this system by choice. Yet, there are … [Read more...]
Scientific Guidelines for Effective Motivation
How can you motivate your employees, clients, teammates, coworkers, and friends? You need to inspire, exude passion, infect them with your own motivational force, and lead by example, right? This article is not about passive or indirect approaches. Rather, it's about taking direct action and concrete principles to guide these actions. Since behavioral anthropology was the focal point of my academic studies, I will ground my guidelines in the current state of the art of research on human … [Read more...]
Willpower: Lessons in Self-Discipline #6
The sixth principle in my willpower series states: Procrastination must end now! Don't even finish reading this post. No information on this planet is worth your procrastination. Passive consumption comes from weakness, and whatever springs from weakness is bad. As soon as you have one reason to not follow your True Will at this very instant, you might as well tear your entire plan apart; for this one reason alone has rendered it worthless. You want to start on Monday? This means not … [Read more...]
No, You Can’t Achieve Anything You Want
The entire Internet seems to uniformly endorse an optimistic, feel-good-about-yourself philosophy of life: If you put in the effort, you can achieve anything you want and be the best. Although that's a great philosophy to adopt, I feel like spitting all of you in the face today with a little bit of truth: You can't achieve anything you want in life Don't worry, I won't criticize your life philosophy by pointing out the platitude that even an infinite amount of focused training won't be enough … [Read more...]
To Achieve Your Goals, Monitor Your Progress!
"What gets measured gets managed." Is it true? In their meta-study (2016), Harkin and his colleagues analyzed 138 scientific studies to find out whether people who monitored their goal progress were in fact more likely to attain their goal than those who didn't. The results were positive: Monitoring goal progress promoted goal attainment. The more often the progress was monitored, the more likely the goal was attained. Why? Because monitoring your progress helps you identify where … [Read more...]
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