You’re not perfect, others aren’t perfect, and sometime people get confused.
One is “cognitive reappraisal,” a fancy term for “telling yourself a different story about what is happening.”
Whiny neutered goats fly. Picture it in your mind. You’ve just learned what all good games have in common: WNGF. They’re Winnable. They have Novel challenges and Goals, and provide Feedback. Any time something feels frustrating, it’s probably lacking at least one of the four.
There was no small irony that an economics Ph.D. got such a profound lesson in what is formally known as “opportunity cost.” As Henry David Thoreau said, “The price of anything is the amount of life you exchange for it.”
The question is what are you going to do less of? What are you going to quit or say no to in order to make time for what matters most?
As the old saying goes, “You can do anything once you stop trying to do everything.”
When you think you and your partner are “made for each other,” it’s easy to assume you don’t have to work at the relationship.
You wouldn’t say “I got my dream job. Whew, now I can stop working,” but people frequently do something akin to this with relationships because it’s “meant to be.” Until it turns out it wasn’t.
It turns out that your brain isn’t very good at telling fantasy from reality. (This is why movies are so thrilling.) When you dream, that grey matter feels you already have what you want and so it doesn’t marshal the resources you need to motivate yourself and achieve. Instead, it relaxes.
WOOP—wish, outcome, obstacle, plan—is applicable to most any of your goals, from career to relationships to exercise and weight loss.
WOOP can tell you what needs grit and help you muster the drive to soldier on. But it also can tell you what to quit and help you handle that transition less painfully. I’m not sure if mathematicians familiar with the optimal stopping problem have happier marriages, but you can WOOP your way to answers regarding grit and quit.
Extroverts are happier than introverts. And this is no small detail: “The relationship between extraversion and happiness or subjective well-being (SWB) is one of the most consistently replicated and robust findings in the SWB literature.” In fact, extroverts are even happier than introverts when alone, and one study showed that when introverts pretend to be extroverts, they were happier too.
ask about what challenges people face.
Clinical psychologist and workplace consultant Al Bernstein says, “You can’t not play politics; you can only play them badly . . . the only place where relationships don’t matter is on a desert island far away from the rest of the world.”
As the old saying goes, “There are no ‘pretty good’ alligator wrestlers.” That’s an arena where overconfidence gets you killed.
Want to know which CEOs will run their company into the ground? Count how many times they use the word “I” in their annual letter to shareholders. This is what financial analyst Laura Rittenhouse discovered when she evaluated leaders and how their companies performed.
As Ralph Waldo Emerson said, “We are always getting ready to live, but never living.”
The study came up with four metrics that matter most: 1. HAPPINESS: having feelings of pleasure or contentment in and about your life 2. ACHIEVEMENT: achieving accomplishments that compare favorably against similar goals others have strived for 3. SIGNIFICANCE: having a positive impact on people you care about 4. LEGACY: establishing your values or accomplishments in ways that help others find future success