A while back I came across a blog post in which a woman explained that she had just turned 38 years old, and that she had spent her birthday doing 38 random acts of kindness. I immediately thought, “What a fantastic idea!”

Inspired by that blog post, I decided to do 42 random acts of kindness for my 42nd birthday (I know, I don’t look a day over 30. 🙂 ). However, I changed it up a bit: instead of doing 42 random acts of kindness on one day, I decided to do one act of kindness a day, for 42 days, as a countdown to my birthday.

My birthday is on May 2nd, so I started the countdown on March 21st. Here’s what I did for my 42 days of random acts of kindness:

Day 1 – March 21st: I left 2 quarters in the change slot of a public phone located next to a park which I walk by on a daily basis.

Day 2 – March 22nd: I helped out two tourists looking for the Trump building here in Panama (yes, as in Donald Trump).

Day 3 – March 23rd: I donated the $16.61 I had in my Kiva account to Kiva for operating expenses (Kiva gives loans to people in developing countries to help them with their small businesses).

Day 4 – March 24th: A woman standing behind me in the line at the fruit grocery store asked me if she could pay before me, and I let her.

Day 5 – March 25th: I donated $10 to “Save the Children” (an organization that helps children in need in the United States and around the world).

Day 6 – March 26th: I sent out a tweet recommending my awesome graphic designer to others.

Day 7 – March 27th: Donated 1000 grains of rice through the World Food Programme.

Day 8 – March 28th: Held the door to my building’s lobby open for a neighbor who was coming up the stairs.

Day 9 – March 29th: There’s a fast-food Chinese restaurant here in Panama called “Don Lee”. For every $2.50 cents that you pay, you get a sticker called a “paisanito” which is basically worth 25 cents. You can either exchange the paisanitos for food at Don Lee, or you can donate them to help feed the hungry. Today I ate at Don Lee and donated the paisanito that they gave me.

Day 10 – March 30th: Contributed to the Wikipedia community by reporting an error in one of their articles.

Day 11 – March 31st: Went to Don Lee again and donated two paisanitos (see Day 9).

Day 12 – April 1st: I sent my brother an email telling him that I miss him and planning a get-together.

Day 13 – April 2nd: Helped out three people asking for critiques of their lenses in the Squidoo forum.

Day 14 – April 3rd: I saw a woman driving at night with her car lights off, and I let her know.

Day 15 – April 4th: I reviewed, “Decisive: How to Make Better Choices in Life and Work” on Amazon. As an author, I know how grateful I am every time someone takes the time to let me know what they thought of one of my eBooks.

Day 16 – April 5th: I left $1 in the donation box at the Arrocha pharmacy for the “Casita de Mausi” (a shelter that provides a place to stay for low income people from the interior of the country who come to the capital to get cancer treatment at the hospitals here).

Day 17 – April 6th: I was standing in the express line at the supermarket and I had eight items. The girl standing behind me only had a carton of eggs, so I let her go in front of me.

Day 18 – April 7th: I told a man walking along with his two little twins that his daughters are beautiful. I got a big smile for that.

Day 19 – April 8th: I left 2 quarters in the coin slot of a public phone near my apartment.

Day 20 – April 9th: I went to visit my two little nephews and played everything they wanted for 2.5 hours. This meant watching Angry Birds videos with the five year-old until he left for his karate lessons, and playing Battleship on the iPad and then Legos with the eight year-old.

Day 21 – April 10th: I sent my sister an email offering to take care of her two little boys so that she and her husband could have dinner out for her birthday.

Day 22 – April 11th: I helped out three people asking for critiques of their lenses in the Squidoo forum.

Day 23 – April 12th: An elderly lady asked me for money as I walked down the street, and I gave her a $1 bill.

Day 24 – April 13th: I called my brother to catch up on how he’s doing.

Day 25 – April 14th: I left $1 on the edge of a flower pot next to a sidewalk that gets a lot of foot traffic.

Day 26 – April 15th: I found a small blog that doesn’t get a lot of traffic and I left an encouraging comment.

Day 27 – April 16th: I called my 91 year-old grandmother just to say “hello” and see how she’s doing. My grandfather passed away about 30 years ago.

Day 28 – April 17th:  I was friendly to a pharmacy employee whom I reported for rudeness a couple of weeks ago. She apologized for her rudeness, and I wanted her to know that it’s now water under the bridge.

Day 29 – April 18th: Made a $10 donation to “The One Fund Boston, Inc.”.  This fund was set up by Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick and Boston Mayor Tom Menino to help the people most affected by the tragic events that occurred in Boston on April 15th of this year.

Day 30 – April 19th: I helped out a man at the supermarket who was looking for balsamic vinegar.

Day 31 – April 2oth: I stopped to pet a dog (because dogs need kindness, too).

Day 32 – April 21st: I went to a buffet brunch with my family. I served a plate for my grandmother so she didn’t have to get up.

Day 33 – April 22nd: I chatted for a while with an elderly waiter who works at a club I go to often. He’s always looking for someone to listen to his latest ailments.

Day 34 – April 23rd: I helped a man pick out fruit at the fruit store.

Day 35 – April 24th: I overheard a lady who works at a pharmacy that I frequent saying that it was her birthday, so I went over to wish her a happy birthday. Incidentally, I know her name because I make it a point to learn the names of the employees who work at places I go to often.

Day 36 – April 25th: I picked up litter as I went for a walk (a Styrofoam cup, an ATM receipt, and a candy wrapper)

Day 37 – April 26th: I smiled at and greeted three strangers as I walked home today (and yes, they smiled back).

Day 38 – April 27th: I gave a box of raisins to a security guard I came across as I walked home from the grocery store.

Day 39 – April 28th:  There’s a shopping cart in my building’s garage so that people can take their groceries up to their apartment. Whoever uses the shopping cart is supposed to take it back to its proper place when they’re done. However, today when I walked into the elevator, I saw that someone had left the shopping cart in there. As my act of kindness, I returned the cart to where it belongs.

Incidentally, there was a dollar bill in the shopping cart. I guess it was left there as a tip for whoever returned the shopping cart (I had never been tipped before). I took the dollar bill and deposited it in the donations box at a pharmacy I frequent.

Day 40 – April 29th: I went to Popeye’s and got some Chicken Bites. The meal comes with an iced tea, and I ordered it to go. As I left Popeye’s I noticed an elderly lady who looked like she could use the iced tea, and I gave it to her. She was very grateful.

Day 41 – April 30th: Made a $25 donation to Kiva.

Day 42 – May 1st: This random act of kindness is for you. I’m going to give you 50% off on all of my eBooks, for 48 hours, starting the moment this blog post is published and ending at midnight on May 2nd. Use the discount code: “birthday” (without the quotations).

Here are my eBooks:

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Having self-esteem means accepting and appreciating yourself for who you are.

People with high self-esteem feel good about themselves and appreciate their own worth. At the same time, they acknowledge their weaknesses but they don’t allow those weaknesses to play an irrationally large role in their lives.

People with high self-esteem are happier than those with low self-worth. They’re also more likely to take on difficult tasks and persevere in the face of failure. Therefore, they’re more likely to succeed.

Below you’ll discover 50 self-esteem quotes to give your confidence a boost, so that you can be happier and experience more success in your life.

1. “You yourself, as much as anybody in the entire universe, deserve your love and affection.”  ~ Buddha

2.  “Your chances of success in any undertaking can always be measured by your belief in yourself.”  ~ Robert Collier

3.  “The strongest single factor in prosperity consciousness is self-esteem: believing you can do it, believing you deserve it, believing you will get it.” ~ Jerry Gillies

4.  “There is overwhelming evidence that the higher the level of self-esteem, the more likely one will be to treat others with respect, kindness, and generosity.” ~ Nathaniel Branden

5.  “The golden opportunity you are seeking is in yourself. It is not in your environment, it is not in luck or chance, or the help of others; it is in yourself alone.” ~ Orison Swett Marden

6. “Listen to your heart above all other voices.” ~ Marta Kagan

7.  “Always be a first-rate version of yourself, instead of a second-rate version of somebody else.” ~ Judy Garland

8.  “You were not born a winner, and you were not born a loser. You are what you make yourself be.” ~ Lou Holtz

9.  “Self-trust is the first secret of success.” ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

10. “The most important opinion you have is the one you have of yourself, and the most significant things you say all day are those things you say to yourself.” ~ Unknown Author

11. “No one can make you feel inferior without your consent.” ~ Eleanor Roosevelt

12.  “Trust yourself. Create the kind of self that you will be happy to live with all your life. Make the most of yourself by fanning the tiny, inner sparks of possibility into flames of achievement.” ~ Golda Meir

13.  “Someone else’s opinion of you does not have to become your reality.” ~ Les Brown

14.  “I was always looking outside myself for strength and confidence but it comes from within. It is there all the time.” ~ Anna Freud

15.  “If I am not for myself, who will be?” ~  Pirke Avoth

16. “The tragedy is that so many people look for self-confidence and self-respect everywhere except within themselves, and so they fail in their search.” ~ Dr. Nathaniel Branden

17.  “It took me a long time not to judge myself through someone else’s eyes.” ~ Sally Field

18.  “The way you treat yourself sets the standard for others.” ~ Dr. Sonya Friedman

19.  “There is only one corner of the universe you can be certain of improving, and that’s your own self.” ~ Aldous Leonard Huxley

20.  “You have within you right now, everything you need to deal with whatever the world can throw at you.” ~ Brian Tracy

21.  “Aerodynamically the bumblebee shouldn’t be able to fly, but the bumblebee doesn’t know that so it goes on flying anyway.” ~ Mary Kay Ash

22. “If you doubt you can accomplish something, then you can’t accomplish it. You have to have confidence in your ability, and then be tough enough to follow through.” ~ Rosalyn Smith Carter

23.  “Confidence comes not from always being right but from not fearing to be wrong.” ~ Peter Mcintyre

24.  “We have to learn to be our own best friends because we fall too easily into the trap of being our own worst enemies.” ~ Roderick Thorp

25.  “It ain’t what they call you, it’s what you answer to.” ~ W.C. Fields

26. “Whether you think you can or think you can’t – you are right.” ~ Henry Ford

27. “I am convinced all of humanity is born with more gifts than we know. Most are born geniuses and just get de-geniused rapidly.” ~ Buckminster Fuller

28.  “If you really put a small value upon yourself, rest assured that the world will not raise your price.” ~Author Unknown

29. “Thousands of geniuses live and die undiscovered – either by themselves or by others.” ~ Mark Twain

30. “Nothing splendid has ever been achieved except by those who dared believe that something inside of them was superior to circumstance.” ~ Bruce Barton

31.  “Always act like you’re wearing an invisible crown.” ~ Author Unknown

32.  “What a man thinks of himself, that it is which determines, or rather indicates his fate.” ~Henry David Thoreau

33.  “The best way to gain self-confidence is to do what you are afraid to do.” ~ Author Unknown

34. “Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous? Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small does not serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won’t feel insecure around you. We are all meant to shine, as children do. We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It is not just in some of us; it is in everyone. And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.” ~ Marianne Williamson

35.  “Well, we all know that self-esteem comes from what you think of you, not what other people think of you.”  ~ Gloria Gaynor

36.  “To trust one’s mind and to know that one is worthy of happiness is the essence of self-esteem.” ~ Nathaniel Branden

37.  “Too many people overvalue what they are not, and undervalue what they are.” ~ Malcolm Forbes

38. “Of all the judgments we pass in life, none is more important than the judgment we pass on ourselves”. ~ Nathaniel Branden.

39.  “One of the most significant characteristics of healthy esteem is that it is the state of one who is not at war either with himself or with others”. ~ Nathaniel Branden.

40. “The most important key to the permanent enhancement of esteem is the practice of positive inner-talk”. ~ Dennis Waitley.

41.  “The greatest success is successful self-acceptance.” ~ Ben Sweet

42.  “Love is the great miracle cure. Loving ourselves works miracles in our lives.” ~ Louise L. Hay.

43.  “To have an incredible increase in self esteem, all you have to do is start doing some little something. You don’t have to do spectacularly dramatic things for self esteem to start going off the scale. Just make a commitment to any easy discipline. Then another one and another one.” ~ Jim Rohn

44.  “Self worth cannot be verified by others. You are worthy because you say it is so. If you depend on others for your value it is other-worth.” ~ Wayne Dyer

45. “Persons of high self esteem are not driven to make themselves superior to others; they do not seek to prove their value by measuring themselves against a comparative standard. Their joy is being who they are, not in being better than someone else.” ~ Nathaniel Branden

46. “Having a low opinion of yourself is not ‘modesty’. It’s self-destruction. Holding your uniqueness in high regard is not ‘egotism’. It’s a necessary precondition to happiness and success.” ~ Bobbe Sommer

47.  “Tell me how a person judges his or her self esteem and I will tell you how that person operates at work, in love, in sex, in parenting, in every important aspect of existence – and how high he or she is likely to rise. The reputation you have with yourself – your self-esteem – is the single most important factor for a fulfilling life.” ~ Nathaniel Branden

48. “Never bend your head. Hold it high. Look the world straight in the eye.” ~ Helen Keller

49. “Today you are you, that is truer than true. There is no one alive who is youer than you.” ~ Dr. Seuss

50. “People are like stained-glass windows. They sparkle and shine when the sun is out, but when the darkness sets in their true beauty is revealed only if there is light from within.” ~ Elisabeth Kübler-Ross

Giving your self-esteem a boost is one of the most important steps you can take in order to live your best life. Begin applying the wisdom contained in the quotes above, today.

 

Related Posts:

• 7 Ways to Supercharge Your Motivation
• Three Ways to Silence That Pesky Inner Critic
• Three Superb Exercises For Boosting Your Self-Esteem
• The Three-Step Formula For Success

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Motivation is the key to both achievement and creativity.

There are two types of motivation: intrinsic and extrinsic motivation. That is, you can be intrinsically motivated to perform a certain task, or you can be extrinsically motivated to perform it. Here’s the difference between the two:

• Intrinsic motivation is motivation that comes from the enjoyment you get from the task itself, or from the sense of satisfaction that you get from working on the task.
• Extrinsic motivation, on the other hand, is about external rewards, such as grades, a prize, money, prestige, and so on.

Although extrinsic motivation works for certain types of activities, one of the keys to creativity, happiness, and the realization of your full potential is the ability to be intrinsically motivated. There is much more on this in below.

The Candle Problem

I’m going to begin by explaining “the candle problem”, and you’ll be able to see how it relates to the subject of “intrinsic v. extrinsic motivation” when you read about Daniel Pink’s Ted.com talk in the next section of this blog post.

Psychologist Karl Duncker coined the term “functional fixedness”, which is a mental block that prevents people from using an object that has a particular function in a new and different way.

That is, people tend to have a bias as to what an object is used for, and this bias interferes with their ability to be able to notice or come up with other, novel uses for that object.

In Duncker’s famous 1945 candle problem, participants were given the following objects:

• A candle
• A box filled with thumb-tacks
• A box of matches

The task was to attach the candle to the wall so that it didn’t drip on the table below, without using any additional elements. At first, participants tried to thumb tack the candle directly to the wall, or to adhere the candle to the wall by taking a match and melting the side of the candle.  However, neither of these approaches work.

The solution to the problem is to stop thinking of the box of thumb tacks as a “container”, and to instead think of it as a “shelf” or “platform”. That is, the answer is to take the thumb tacks out of the box, use a couple of thumb tacks to nail the box to the wall, and then use the inside of the box as a candle-holder. (See the image at the top of this blog post for an illustration.)

Dan Pink – The Surprising Science of Motivation

Dan Pink– author of the bestseller “A Whole New Mind: Why Right-Brainers Will Rule the Future” and of Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us–makes the case in a Ted.com talk titled “The Surprising Side of Motivation” for rethinking our reliance on external rewards as our motivation.

Pink begins his talk by referring to “the candle problem” explained above. He adds that a scientist named Sam Glucksberg, who is now at Princeton University, conducted an experiment which relied on the candle problem to demonstrate the power of incentives.

Glucksberg gathered his participants and told them that he was going to time them to see how quickly they could solve the candle problem. In addition, he added the following:

• He told one group that he was going to time them to determine how long it typically took people to solve this type of problem.
• When it came to the second group, he offered them a reward: he told them that if they were in the 25% that solved the problem the fastest, they would get $5.00.  In addition, the person who was the fastest of all would get $20.00.

It took the second group–that is, the group that was offered the reward–three and a half minutes longer, on average, to solve the problem than it took the first group.  This goes against the widely held notion that if you want people to perform, you offer them prizes, bonuses, commissions, and so on as incentives.

An incentive that was supposed to sharpen focus and enhance creativity did just the opposite: it dulled thinking and blocked creativity. And this isn’t an aberration; this experiment has been replicated over, and over, and over again for nearly forty years.

Another Variation on the Candle Problem

Glucksberg later redid the same experiment, except this time, when he presented participants with the box, the box was empty and the thumb tacks were on the table beside it.  In other words, he made the problem easier because once the box wasn’t being used as a container  it took less mental flexibility to be able to assign a different function to it.

This time, the group that was being rewarded finished the task a lot faster than the other group.

The conclusion we can reach from these findings is that rewards–that is, extrinsic motivation–work well for tasks with a simple set of rules and a clear destination to move toward.  Rewards, by their very nature, narrow our focus and concentrate the mind.

But for the real candle problem–the one with the thumb tacks in the box–you don’t want tunnel vision: you want to be able to see what’s on the periphery; you want to be looking around; you want to expand your possibilities.

Main Conclusions Presented by Dan Pink

Pink concludes that routine, rule-based, left-brained work has become fairly easy to outsource and fairly easy to automate. This includes work such as the following.

• Certain kinds of accounting;
• Certain kinds of financial analysis;
• Certain kinds of computer programming, and so on.

Therefore, what really matters are the more right brained, creative, conceptual kinds of abilities, for which “if-then” rewards don’t work.

Here are some more conclusions reached by other researchers studying the effects of extrinsic motivation:

• “As long as the task involved only mechanical skill, bonuses worked as they would be expected: the higher the pay, the better the performance.”
• But once the task called for “even rudimentary cognitive skill”, a larger reward “led to poorer performance”.
• “In eight of the nine tasks we examined across the three experiments, higher incentives led to worse performance.“
• “We find that financial incentives . . . can result in a negative impact on overall performance.” (This is the conclusion reached by the London School of Economics after studying 51 studies of pay-for-performance plans in different companies. )

Obviously we need a whole new approach: an approach built around intrinsic motivation; around the desire to do something because it matters, because we enjoy it, because it’s interesting, and because it’s part of something important. It’s about the drive to do things for their own sake.

According to Pink, the new operating system revolves around three elements:

• Autonomy: the urge to direct our own lives.
• Mastery: the desire to get better and better at something that matters.
• Purpose: the yearning to do what we do in service to something larger than ourselves.

Aiming For The Flow State

The drive to do things for their own sake–instead of relying on extrinsic rewards–which Pink refers to in his Ted.com talk discussed above, is closely related to what Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi calls “flow”. Csikszentmihalyi describes flow as, “the holistic sensation that people feel when they act with total involvement”.

In the course of his doctoral research, Csikszentmihalyi noticed that the artists he was studying would spend hour after hour each day painting or sculpting with great concentration. They were obviously enjoying their work immensely.

And yet it was typical for them to lose interest in the painting or sculpture once it was done. Few of them expected their art to make them rich or famous. So why did they work as hard on their craft as an executive hoping for a promotion?

It was obvious that the activity of painting produced its own autonomous rewards; that is, the rewards of painting came from painting itself.

Here’s a quote from Csikszentmihalyi:

“To know oneself is the first step toward making flow a part of one’s entire life. But just as there is no free lunch in the material economy, nothing comes free in the psychic one. If one is not willing to invest psychic energy in the internal reality of consciousness, and instead squanders it in chasing external rewards, one loses mastery of one’s life, and ends up becoming a puppet of circumstances.”

If you’d like to learn how to reach the flow state, read my blog post “How to Enter the Flow State”.

Stephen King – I Write Because It Fulfills Me

In the quote below, taken from his book “On Writing”, Stephen King explains that for him, writing is not about the money. He writes because it fulfills him.  This is a perfect example of doing as its own reward:

“Do you do it for the money, honey? The answer is no. Don’t now and never did. Yes, I’ve made a great deal of dough from my fiction, but I never set a single word down on paper with the thought of being paid for it… I have written because it fulfilled me. Maybe it paid off the mortgage on the house and got the kids through college, but those things were on the side–I did it for the buzz. I did it for the pure joy of the thing. And if you can do it for joy, you can do it forever.”

Conclusion

In order to enhance your creativity, prevent being “a puppet of circumstances”, beat procrastination, and live your best life, you need to take your focus away from extrinsic rewards–such as money, prestige, and so on–and, instead, place your focus on intrinsic rewards.

That is, your main reason for performing your work should be your enjoyment of the task itself, the feeling of satisfaction you get from being involved in a given project, and the sense of meaning you derive from carrying out your work.

Related Posts:

1. 7 Ways to Supercharge Your Motivation
2. Three Ways to Silence That Pesky Inner Critic
3. Three Superb Exercises For Boosting Your Self-Esteem
4. The Three-Step Formula For Success

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A while back I published a blog post containing six bucket list videos to help inspire you to create your bucket list, and get to work on it.

I’ve since discovered three more “bucket list” videos which I think are very motivating, and I’ve decided to share them with you in this post.

You’ll find the three videos below.

Ric Elias: 3 Things I Learned While My Plane Crashed

On January 15, 2009, US Airways Flight 1549 was flying from LaGuardia Airport in New York City to Charlotte, North Carolina. During its initial climb the plane struck a flock of Canadian geese. As a result, the plane lost engine power. For a horrifying moment it looked as if the plane with 155 passengers on board would crash into the Hudson River.

Thankfully, due to the pilot’s skill, everyone aboard the plane survived. One of the survivors—Ric Elias—gave a TED.com talk in March 2011 setting forth the three lessons that he learned from that near-miss. He starts his talk as follows:

“Imagine a big explosion as you climb 3,000 feet. Imagine a plane full of smoke. Imagine an engine going clac, clac, clac, clac, clac . . .”

Three minutes after the explosion, the pilot did three things: he lined up the plane with the Hudson River; he turned off the engines; and he said the following: “Brace for impact”. Ric explains that at that moment he felt certain that he was going to die.

Ric shares that on that day he learned three lessons:

1. He learned that it all changes in an instant. Most of us have a bucket list, or a list of things that we want to do before we die. However, we keep postponing taking action and crossing items off our list. Ric learned on that day—as his plane fell toward the Hudson—that you can’t postpone life.

Ric calls this “collecting bad wine”. This is because he no longer saves good wine for special occasions: if the wine is ready and there’s a friend or family member there to drink it with him, he drinks it. Another way of saying this is, “use the good china”.

2. The second thing he learned that day was that his biggest regret on the way in which he had lived his life up to that point was that he had allowed his ego to get in the way of his happiness. He regretted “the time he wasted on things that did not matter, with people that do matter”.

Later on as he thought about his experience on that plane, he decided to eliminate negative energy from his life. Now it’s more important to him to be happy, instead of insisting that he always be right.

3. As the water got closer and closer, Ric realized that he really wished for only one thing: to be able to see his kids grow up.

On that day Ric was given the gift “to be able to see into the future and come back, and live differently”. To sum up, the three lessons that Ric learned on that day were: to stop postponing life, to stop allowing his ego to get in the way of his happiness, and to make the most important people in his life his number one priority.

Imagine for just a moment having an experience similar to what Ric went through. What three lessons do you think you would take away from the experience?

You can watch Ric’s TED.com talk below:

Nelly Furtado – Bucket List

“Bucket List” is a song recorded by Canadian singer Nelly Furtado. The song and the accompanying video are a wake-up call to anyone who’s been putting off for tomorrow something they could be doing today—whether it’s climbing a mountain, swimming the seven seas, flying in a hot air balloon, or simply telling a certain guy or girl how you feel about them.

Here’s part of the lyrics:

“Get on your boots and visit the North Pole
Try every sport until you score a goal
Follow the path of a butterfly
Go to Ground Zero and do nothing but cry

In this lifetime
I want you to be mine
Cuz I took a long look at my bucket list
And I saw that at the bottom it said our first kiss.”

Here’s the YouTube video so that you can listen to the song:

Guy Lombardo – Enjoy Yourself (It’s Later Than You Think)

The most popular version of the song “Enjoy Yourself” was recorded by Guy Lombardo and His Royal Canadians in 1949. The record first reached the Billboard charts on January 13, 1950 and lasted 19 weeks on the chart, peaking at number ten.

Here’s part of the lyrics:

“You work and work for years and years, you’re always on the go
You never take a minute off, too busy makin’ dough
Someday you say, you’ll have your fun, when you’re a millionaire
Imagine all the fun you’ll have in your old rockin’ chair

Enjoy yourself, it’s later than you think
Enjoy yourself, while you’re still in the pink
The years go by, as quickly as a wink
Enjoy yourself, enjoy yourself, it’s later than you think.”

Here’s the YouTube video so you can listen to the song:

Conclusion

I hope that the three videos above have inspired you to get to work on your bucket list. Here are three bucket list ideas:

• Love like you’ve never been hurt.
• Find work that feels like play.
• Go on that cruise.

And here are 7,500 of them.

Related Posts:

1. 67 Ideas for Your “Just Because” Bucket List
2. Six Videos to Inspire Your Bucket List
3. 525+ Ideas for Your Bucket List
4. Adventure Quotes: 50 Quotes on Living a Life of Adventure

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In this post you’ll discover 23 wise ways to increase your happiness. They are the following:

• Nine Requisites for Contented Living
• The Six Most Drastic Mistakes
• Eight Ways to Stop Complicating Your Life

Nine Requisites For Contented Living

According to Johann Wolfgang von Goethe–the great German poet and polymath–, these are the nine requisites for contented living:

1. Health enough to make work a pleasure.

2. Wealth enough to support your needs.

3. Strength to battle with difficulties and overcome them.

4. Grace enough to confess your sins and forsake them.

5. Patience enough to toil until some good is accomplished.

6. Charity enough to see some good in your neighbor.

7. Love enough to move you to be useful to others.

8. Faith enough to make real the things of God.

9. Hope enough to remove all anxious fears concerning the future.

The Six Most Drastic Mistakes

About 100 years before the birth of Christ, Marcus Tullius Cicero listed the following as the six most drastic mistakes made by man:

1. The delusion that individual advancement is made by crushing others.

2. The tendency to worry about things that cannot be changed or corrected.

3. Insisting that a thing is impossible because we cannot do it ourselves.

4. Refusing to set aside trivial preferences.

5. Neglecting development and refinement of the mind, and not acquiring the habit of reading and study.

6. Attempting to compel others to believe and live as we do.

Two thousand years later, we’re still making these mistakes (you’d think we would have learned by now). If you want to increase your happiness, stop making these mistakes.

Eight Ways to Stop Complicating Your Life

The image below shares eight simple ways to stop complicating your life, so that you can increase your happiness.

There you have it: words of wisdom for living your best life and increasing your happiness.

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The Seven Stories Exercise was created by Kate Wendleton, a career counselor and president of The Five O’Clock Club. It has its roots in the work of Bernard Haldane who helped military personnel transition their skills to civilian life in the 1940s.

Although the exercise is usually applied in the context of career counseling, it’s a great way to identify what has brought you joy in the past, so that you can identify what you need more of in your life in the present and the future.

In this post you’ll find the steps that you need to follow in order to complete the Seven Stories Exercise, as well as an example of someone who used the exercise in order to discover what he needed to do in order to bring more zest and joy–or joie de vivre–to his life.

In order to complete the Seven Stories Exercise, follow the steps below:

Step One – Write Down 25 Accomplishments

Think of 25 accomplishments or experiences from your past that have brought you great satisfaction. These experiences can be from your childhood, your college years, a previous job, the recent past, and so on. The idea is to write down things that you enjoyed doing and that you did well.

You’re asked to come up with 25 things, which is a large number, so that you won’t be too judgmental. Just list anything that comes to mind. Don’t try to do this in one sitting. Think about it, and give yourself four or five days to complete this step of the exercise. If you’d like, you can carry a small notebook around with you so that you can jot down ideas as they occur to you.

Don’t limit yourself to work-related experiences. Include volunteer work, your hobbies, and accomplishments from your personal life. In addition, you don’t have to have received praise from others for these accomplishments. The key is that you felt that you did well.

When you write down the 25 experiences, make sure that you’re specific. For example, don’t just write down “playing sports in high school”. Instead, write something like the following: “Playing defense in the final of the soccer tournament when I was in the 10th grade”. Here’s another example:

• Wrong: Coordinating Events
• Right: Coordinated a bake sale and other fund-raising events and raised $5000 for charity in a week during my sophomore year in college.

Step Two – Narrow It Down to Seven Accomplishments

Once you’ve come up with 25 experiences, look at them carefully and choose the seven that are most important to you. Look for the ones that you enjoyed the most and that gave you the greatest sense of accomplishment.

Next, rank these seven accomplishments in order of importance, where number one is the most important, number two is the second most important, and so on.

Step Three – Write Your Seven Stories

The third step is to write a “story” about each of your top seven accomplishments. You’re going to describe each of these experiences in detail, and see what skills and abilities were manifested when you were carrying them out. Try to look for patterns and what the seven experiences have in common.

When you think through the common threads that run through experiences that you’ve done well and enjoyed in the past, you’ll be better able to identify the elements that an experience must have for it to satisfy you. That is, by identifying the commonalities in your accomplishments, you’ll know what aspects an activity–whether it’s a job, a hobby, and so on–, needs to have in order to make you happy.

Here are some questions you can ask yourself in order to flesh out your seven stories:

• Why did you do it? What was your motivation? Why was it meaningful to you?
• What did you do? How exactly did you do it? What role did you play (did you function as a teacher, healer, organizer, leader, and so on)?
• Where did it occur (this may not be important, but add it anyway)?
• With whom did you do it? Who else was involved? You can write down specific names, or just the categories of people like friends, co-workers, clients, and so on.
• What skills and abilities did you use (negotiation, created and stuck to a budget, designed a costume, and so on)?
• What about the project or activity did you enjoy the most?
• What was the outcome?
• How did you feel afterwards?

Write at least one page for each of your stories.

Step Four – Analyze Your Seven Stories

Once you’ve completed your seven stories, you have to analyze them in order to determine what the stories can teach you. For example, one man who was completing the Seven Stories Exercise remembered that when he was young he lived with his family near a tile factory.

One day he decided that he would pick up the scraps of tile that were littered all around the factory and build an oriental city complete with temples, pagodas, and modern buildings. He built his city over a course of several months, and it was a great success with his family and friends. It was also a process that he had greatly enjoyed.

In addition, he remembered that in the past he and a group of friends would gather every so often and work on old cars. He also remembered repairing bicycles when he was in high school. This man realized that in order to bring more joy into his life he needed to look for activities that allowed him to be creative, and to build and repair things.

Step Five – 200 Possibilities

Once you’ve completed the Seven Stories Exercise, you should have a good idea of what you love to do and are good at. Then, come up with a list of 200 possible ways to carry out these activities. Coming up with a list of 200 possibilities allows for all of the following:

• It gets you excited because it allows you to see all sorts of possibilities.
• It increases your confidence that if one thing doesn’t work out, you have lots of other options.
• It reduces your attachment to any one situation.

Conclusion

Live your best life by identifying the things that you’ve done well and that you’ve enjoyed doing in the past. Then, apply what you learn about yourself from this exercise to help you decide which activities to pursue in the future. In addition, click here to discover 15 more exercises to help you decide what you want from life.

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Mindfulness is noticing the present without comment.

Most of us have a tendency to allow our minds to constantly wander into the past, or to worry about the future. However, as spiritual teachers have said throughout the ages, all we really have is the present.

One of the best ways to train our minds to stay in the present moment is through mindfulness exercises. In this post you’ll discover 13 mindfulness exercises, or ways to bring more mindfulness into your life.

1. Bring Your Awareness to Your Breath. The simplest way to bring your mind back into the present moment is by focusing on your breath. Each time that you’re about to start a new activity, bring yourself fully into the present moment by doing the following:

• Bring your attention to the breath sensation.
• Allow yourself to feel the breath as it goes in.
• Then, allow yourself to feel the breath as it goes out.

For one, two, or three breaths, focus as much attention as you can on the sensation of breathing.

2. Mindfulness Cues. Choose something in your environment that you will use as a trigger to remind you to bring your mind back to the present. For example, each time that the phone rings, stop the mental chatter that keeps you stuck in the past or that fills you with apprehension about the future, and allow yourself to come back to the present moment.

3. The Room In Your Head. This is a technique that’s recommended by Karla McLaren for bringing all of your attention to the same place. Karla indicates that you should mentally create a room in your head. Decorate the room however you like. Your eyes are the windows. Make sure that there’s a comfortable chair in the room.

Whenever you feel your mind leaving the present moment and wandering off, visualize yourself coming back into the room in your head and sitting in the chair. At the moment in which your consciousness is “sitting in the chair”, your mind and body become one, and you’re fully in the present.

4. Do One Action Mindfully. Alice Boyes, Ph.D., indicates that you should pick one short action which you do every day and perform that action mindfully. For example, if every day you walk to the door, open it, and bend down to pick up the newspaper, start doing that action mindfully.

5. Mindful Listening. Every now and then stop for a minute and just listen. You can pick a piece of music that you like, and put it on. Don’t think about the music, just listen. In the alternative, you can simply listen to the noise in your environment. Once again, don’t think about the noises that you hear. Just allow yourself to effortlessly absorb the experience.

6. Notice Three Things. I love “The Lord of the Rings” trilogy. I have all the DVDs and I like re-watching them. Every time that I watch one of these films, I give myself the task of noticing three things that I had never noticed before. This forces me to really pay attention.

You can use this same strategy in order to bring more mindfulness to your everyday routines. For example, if you walk from the subway stop to your office every weekday, tell yourself that each day you have to notice three things about the scenery that you had never noticed before.

This will keep you focused on the walk, instead of thinking about something that happened the day before, or worrying about the day that’s just beginning.

7. Rest Your Awareness On What Is Going On Inwardly. Every now and then, ask yourself: “How am I doing?” Notice any emotions that you may be feeling, and simply give them a name. For example:

• I’m a bit sad.
• I feel some stress.
• I feel peeved.

Don’t hold on to the emotion. Simply allow it to float across your field of awareness.

8. Break Your Patterns or Routines. There are lots of things that we do the same way over and over again, day after day. These activities present a great opportunity for the mind to wander. After all, you don’t have to think about these things: you can do them on automatic pilot.

You can bring more mindfulness to your day by breaking your patterns and routines. Here are some examples:

• If you normally brush your teeth with your right hand, try brushing with your left hand.
• If you jog along the same route every day, try a different route.
• If you add sugar to your coffee, try drinking coffee without sugar.
• Reverse the order in which you do things. For example, reverse the order in which you towel yourself off.

When you break your patterns or routines, the novelty of the situation will force your mind to pay attention. That is, it will bring your mind into the present moment.

9. Play the A to Z Game. Another way to bring your focus into the present moment is to give yourself the task of looking around and picking out items that start with each letter of the alphabet. For example, during your morning jog you might identify the following:

• A – Apartment Building
• B – Baby in stroller
• C- Cat running by

10. Do a Body Scan. Your mind may travel through time continuously, but your body is always firmly rooted in the present moment. Use that to your advantage. When you need to bring your mind back to the present, conduct a mental scan of your body. Start at the top of your head and work your way down.

• Are your eyes tired? Close them for a couple of minutes.
• Is your neck tight? Try rubbing it.
• Does your back ache a little? Breath into the ache.
• Are your feet sore? Move your toes around, and rub the sore spot.

Stay with each body part for a few moments and notice what you’re feeling.

11. Inhale a Scent. All of your senses can help bring your attention back to the present moment. Keep a smell that you enjoy nearby as you work, and once every hour stop and take a moment to enjoy the scent.

For example, I love the smell of Crabtree & Evelyn Rosewater, and I have their hand lotion. Every so often I stop what I’m doing and I rub some of the lotion on my hands. When I do so, I take a moment to inhale the scent deeply and to savor this simple pleasure.

12. Candy Meditation. Get a mint, a chocolate, a jelly bean, or some other candy that you like. Take a piece, and put it in your mouth. Don’t bite it. Just let it sit on your tongue for a minute or so, allowing the taste to form. Focus all of your attention on the taste.

13. Complete a Puzzle. When your mind is fully engaged, it can’t go anywhere. It has to stay in the moment in order to be able to work on the task before it. A great way to engage your mind is with puzzles. This can be Sudokus, crossword puzzles, and so on.

Coloring complicated mandalas is another great way to force the mind to focus on the task at hand.

Conclusion

In order to live your best life, you have to be present for it. To be present, you have to bring your awareness to each moment. That is, you have to be mindful. Try the 13 mindfulness exercises above and begin a love affair with the present moment.

 

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5. Srikumar Rao On Happiness – Four Exercises That Will Make You Happier

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You can either wait for ideas to come to you, or you can get out there and actively seek them out. The second option will almost certainly prove to be more fruitful than the first. After all, the most creative people are very productive.  They come up with lots and lots of ideas, most of which aren’t very good. But it’s precisely by coming up with a large quantity of ideas that, every so often, they find a great idea.

In order to help you with your idea-finding quest, below you’ll find three unconventional ways to find ideas.

Hold Meetings with Interesting People

Have you seen the movie “Liar Liar”, starring Jim Carrey? Carrey plays a divorced lawyer who puts his career above all else. He’s constantly breaking promises to his young son, Max, and then covering up by lying to him and to his ex-wife. On his birthday, Max is blowing out his birthday candles, and he wishes that his father would go for an entire day without being able to tell a lie. His wish comes true.

How about the movie, “A Beautiful Mind”? This film is based on the life of John Forbes Nash, Jr.–a schizophrenic prodigy who won a Nobel Laureate in Economics. Both “Liar Liar” and “A Beautiful Mind” were produced by Imagine Entertainment, which was founded over twenty years ago by Brian Grazer and director Ron Howard.

Imagine Entertainment also produced the films “Eight Mile” and “The Da Vinci Code”, among several others. Grazer is largely responsible for the diversity that exists among these films.

So, how does Grazer get inspiration for his films? For the past twenty years he has set up a meeting each week with experts in many diverse fields, including the law, science, medicine, politics, fashion, religion, and so on. Part of the duties of a couple of his staff members is to find interesting people for him to meet with.

These meetings have been responsible for some of Grazer’s best ideas:

• Grazer came up with the idea for “Liar Liar” after meeting with five top lawyers.
• “Eight Mile” came about after meeting Chuck D–the lead singer for Public Enemy–, and Slick Rick, a rapper from the 1980s.

Take a cue from Grazer: if you want to have more great ideas, get out there and start meeting interesting people, preferably in a line of work that is very different from your own. Be your own cultural attaché: purposefully meet people from all walks of life and engage them in conversation.  You might meet the next protagonist for your novel, find an interesting plot twist for your play, or discover an unexpected solution to a problem you’ve been grappling with.   (Source).

Take Advantage of the Hypnologic State Between Wakefulness and Sleep

For the second unconventional way to find ideas, you’re going to need the following:

• A comfortable reclining chair.
• A metal spoon.
• A metal bowl.
• A notepad and a pen or pencil (or a voice recording device).

Are you wondering what you’re going to do with these props?  The same thing Dalí used to do.

Salvador Dalí–the great Spanish surrealist painter–knew that the hypnologic state between wakefulness and sleep is extremely creative.  Therefore, he devised a method so that he could take advantage of this highly creative state.  Here’s what he’d do:

“Sitting in the warm sun after a full lunch and feeling somewhat somnolent, Dalí would place a metal mixing bowl in his lap and hold a large spoon loosely in his hands which he folded over his chest. As he fell asleep and relaxed, the spoon would fall from his grasp into the bowl and wake him up. He would reset the arrangement continuously and thus float along-not quite asleep and not quite awake—while his imagination would churn out the images that we find so fascinating, evocative, and inexplicable when they appear in his work…” (Source.)

In order to use the hypnologic state to come up with creative ideas, think of a problem that you’re trying to solve or set an intention, such as coming up with a product you could sell or an idea for a book you could write. Then, relax as much as you can and create a method similar to the one Dalí used so that you’ll wake up just as you begin to enter the sleep stage. Quickly write down any images or ideas that come to mind.

Let the Internet Be Your Coffee House

There’s a book by Steven Johnson titled, Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation.  Johnson has a great video up on YouTube in which he argues that most ground-breaking ideas start out as “slow hunches”.

• Good ideas spend a long time–even years–incubating.
• They spend a long time dormant in the background.

In order for a hunch to turn into a great idea, it has to collide with other hunches.  These “other hunches” can be yours–by mulling over your idea you come up with new hunches–, or they can be other people’s hunches.

Johnson argues that many of the great ideas of the past came about as a result of the best minds of the time meeting at coffee houses to discuss and debate their ideas. This allowed for the collision of hunches which led to breakthrough ideas. For example:

• The English coffee houses in the Age of the Enlightment
• The Parisian salons of Modernism

These coffee houses and salons created a space in which ideas could mingle and be swapped, be borrowed and combined, and come together to create new forms.

Johnson goes on to say that today, with the internet, there’s an even greater opportunity to stumble upon that piece of information that you need in order to be able to solve your problem, or that idea in a blog post which pushes your idea further along.  In addition, it’s even easier to connect with others–via social networks such as Twitter and Facebook–, so that their hunches can collide with yours and result in that ultimate idea or innovation.

Conclusion

Stop waiting for ideas to come to you. There are many methods and techniques you can use to generate ideas. Be more creative by going out of your way to have conversations with people from many different fields, by taking advantage of the creative state between wakefulness and sleep, and by using the Internet as your coffee house.

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We’re all familiar with the concept of net worth. The process for calculating your net worth is simple:

• First, you make a list of all of your assets (basically, everything you own). You add them up, and the number that you’re left with is your total assets.
• Then, you do the same thing for your liabilities. Make a list of all of your liabilities (everything you owe), add them up, and that gives you your total liabilities.
• Now take your total assets and subtract from that your total liabilities. The resulting number is your net worth.

People have a tendency to put a lot of emphasis on their net worth. However, your net worth represents only a fraction of your well-being. You can get a more accurate picture of the quality of your life by calculating your net happiness.

I got the idea for calculating your net happiness when I came across the term “Gross National Happiness”. This term was first expressed by the former king of Bhutan, His Majesty Jigme Singye Wangchuck. The term is rooted in the Buddhist notion that the ultimate purpose of life is inner happiness.

King Wangchuck argued that economic growth does not necessarily lead to contentment. Therefore, instead of merely focusing on Gross Domestic Product (GDP), he focused on the four pillars of Gross National Happiness: economic self-reliance, a pristine environment, the preservation and promotion of Bhutan’s culture, and good governance in the form of a democracy.

Follow Bhutan’s lead: instead of simply calculating your net worth, start calculating your net happiness. In this post you’ll discover three ways or methods to do this:

• Create a Happiness Index
• Create a Happiness Time Log
• Create a Happiness Balance Sheet

There’s more on these three methods for calculating your net happiness, below.

Create A Happiness Index

In 2006, Med Jones, the President of International Institute of Management, proposed an index that treats happiness as a socioeconomic metric. The metric measures socioeconomic development by tracking seven development areas, including a nation’s mental and emotional health.

Gross National Happiness is proposed to be an index function of the total average per capita of the following measures (taken from Wikipedia):

• Economic Wellness: Indicated via measurement of economic metrics such as consumer debt, average income to consumer price index ratio, and income distribution.

• Environmental Wellness: Indicated via measurement of environmental metrics such as pollution, noise and traffic.

• Physical Wellness: Indicated via measurement of physical health metrics such as severe illnesses.

• Mental Wellness: Indicated via measurement of mental health metrics such as usage of antidepressants.

• Workplace Wellness: Indicated via measurement of labor metrics such as jobless claims, job change, workplace complaints and lawsuits.

• Social Wellness: Indicated via measurement of social metrics such as discrimination, safety, divorce rates, complaints of domestic conflicts and family lawsuits, public lawsuits, and crime rates.

• Political Wellness: Indicated via measurement of political metrics such as the quality of local democracy, individual freedom, and foreign conflicts.

Your personal happiness index could be something like the following:

• Your Economic Well-Being: Your net-worth would come into play as one of the factors to consider in order to calculate your net happiness.

• Your Living Conditions: Are you happy with the city you’re living in? Are you happy in your neighborhood? How do you feel about your current home?

• Your Physical Wellness: Are you healthy? Are you overweight? Do you have high or low levels of energy?

• Your Mental Wellness: Are you depressed? Do you feel angry or fearful? Do you feel joy? Do you feel inner happiness?

• Your Job Satisfaction: Do you enjoy your work? Do you find your work to be meaningful? Are you happy with your boss and your co-workers?

• Your Social Wellness: Do you have a good relationship with your significant other? Do you get along with your family? Do you have friends you can count on?

• Your Community Wellness: Do you contribute to charities? Do you participate in volunteer work? Do you belong to any organizations that aim to improve the lives of others?

• Your Spiritual Wellness: Do you feel a connection to something larger than yourself? Are you at peace?

Your happiness index can include any measurements which you consider to be important.

Create a Happiness Time Log

Another method you can use to measure your net happiness is to keep track of how you’re using your time, and how you feel while performing each of your daily activities.  Create a table with the following three columns:

• Activity;
• Amount of time spent on the activity; and
• How you feel while performing the activity.

Then, add up how much time you spend doing things you enjoy, and add up how much time you spend doing things that you dislike doing. Just like when calculating your net worth, subtract one total from the other, and that gives you your net happiness.

Create A Happiness Balance Sheet

The third method that you can use in order to calculate your net happiness is to create a happiness balance sheet. Get a piece of paper and create two columns by folding the paper in half. Label the columns as follows:

• Things I’m Happy About
• Things I’m Unhappy About

Under the first column, list all of the things in your life that you’re currently happy about. Then, under the second column, list all of the things that you’re currently unhappy about. In addition, you’re going to assign a weight to each item on the list. That is, from 1 to 5, how important is the item that you wrote down, or how much of an impact does it have on your life.

For example, in the “Things I’m Happy About” column, you might  write down something like the following:

• “I have a clean, organized, comfortable home”. If this is very important to you, you would give it a weight of “5”.
• “I received a bonus at work”. You might give this a weight of “3”.
• “My relationship with my sister has improved.” You might give this a weight of “4”.

Therefore, the total for the “Things I’m Happy About” column is “12”. In the “Things I’m Unhappy About” column, you might write down things such as the following:

• “I keep getting calls from my child’s school saying that he’s misbehaving.” If the problem has gotten to the point where your kid might get expelled, you would probably give this item a weight of “5”.
• “My car keeps stalling in the mornings.” You might give this item a weight of “2”.
• “I keep getting passed over for a promotion.” You might want to give this a weight of “4”.

The total for the “Things I’m Unhappy About” column would therefore be “11”. Your net happiness would then be “1” (12 – 11 = 1).

Conclusion

Of course, once you’ve calculated your net happiness you can start planning how to raise it. For example, ask yourself how you can spend less time doing things that you don’t enjoy doing. In addition, ask yourself how can you fix or lessen the impact of the things that you’re unhappy about. Live your best life by calculating your net happiness, and then doing everything that you can in order to increase it.

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