This is an RSAnimate video of a talk by Ray Pink.
If you can’t see it here, click this link for the original on Youtube.
{ 0 comments }
From the category archives:
Reflections
This was just posted on TED.com. If you can’t see the video here, you can click here for the link to the original.
{ 0 comments }
This is amazing. Bruce Lipton on decades of discovery about cells, leading to wisdom about life, happiness, stress, consciousness, and … well, take the time, watch this.
You can get the source video on YouTube.
{ 0 comments }
This YouTube video is less than four minutes long and I’m grateful to Ron Graham who pointed it out to me in Twitter. Watch it. You won’t have to think about it. But it will probably brighten your outlook.
And just in case you don’t see it here, it’s Youtube address is http://youtu.be/WibmcsEGLKo
{ 0 comments }
I love the TED talks. This is outstanding. And I love the way she talks about stories as higher truth:
If for any reason you don’t see it here, click this link for the original on the TED site.
{ 0 comments }
This is from The 7 Timeless Habits of Happiness by Henrik Edberg, reviewed on lifehack by Eugene Yiga. This is all direct quote:
1. Choose Happiness
‘Most people are about as happy as they make their minds up to be.’ – Abraham Lincoln
Misery and happiness aren’t about external circumstances; they are a conscious choice. ‘You choose each day what you focus on and how you interpret your reality,’ Edberg writes. So instead of seeing the world and yourself ‘through a lens smudged by negativity’, you consciously choose to look outwards and inwards ‘through a lens brightened by positivity’. This could involve being grateful for what you have, spending time in an environment of happiness with people who lift you up, and choosing positive information such as personal development reading over negative information like endless news reports.
2. Get Your Physical Fundamentals in Shape
‘Those who think they have no time for healthy eating will sooner or later have to find time for illness.’ – Edward Stanley
‘How we manage our body has a huge, huge impact on our thoughts, emotions and everything that happens in our personal world,’ Edberg explains. This is why we need to eat healthy, exercise regularly, and get enough sleep.
3. Create an Action Habit
‘Action may not always bring happiness; but there is no happiness without action.’ – Benjamin Disraeli
It’s been said that the only place success comes before work is in the dictionary. We need to stop waiting for other people to solve our problems and take action in order to see results. Use a morning ritual, do things even if you don’t feel like it, and take responsibility for the process, not the potential results.
4. Be Here Now
‘The secret of health for both mind and body is not to mourn for the past, nor to worry about the future, but to live the present moment wisely and earnestly.’ – Buddha
Guess what? The past and future don’t exist. They are simply thoughts arising in the present moment. By focusing on the present, we can improve our social skills (no more thinking of what to say when you should be listening to what’s being said), improve our creativity (no more worrying about what others will think of our work), and release stress. And by focusing on what’s in front of us (through practices like guided meditation and breathing techniques), we also learn to appreciate our world more.
5. Help and Make Other People Happy
‘If you want happiness for an hour, take a nap. If you want happiness for a day, go fishing. If you want happiness for a year, inherit a fortune. If you want happiness for a lifetime, help someone else.’ – Chinese Proverb
‘When you do the right thing and make people happy you feel good about yourself,’ Edberg points out. ‘When you make someone else happy you can sense, see, feel and hear it. And that happy feeling flows back to you.’ Give value by bringing a positive attitude to your interactions, giving useful advice, or offering a listening ear to someone who needs it. And let’s not forget about smiles and hugs! Even though people may not always appreciate what you do or feel compelled to reciprocate, you should still persist and feel good for doing so.
6. Do What You Love to Do
‘Success is not the key to happiness. Happiness is the key to success. If you love what you are doing, you will be successful.’ – Albert Schweitzer
The fact that you’re working at a full-time job doesn’t mean you can’t (or shouldn’t) pursue your passions on the side. ‘There is always time,’ Edberg explains. Things won’t always be great but the work won’t feel as hard nor will you have to force yourself to perform. Spend some time exploring and asking questions to bring clarity. Most importantly, remember to add value to the world and not simply to yourself. ‘By using your talents and skills and at the same time helping people and giving them value in some way you can find the opportunities to both do what you love and to earn money to support yourself from it.’
7. Let Go
‘When I let go of what I am, I become what I might be.’ – Lao Tzu
So much of our suffering is caused by our clinging. We hold on to who we are and what we believe to the point where we must always be right. We hold on to things that are impermanent and things we think will make us happy even though they never really do. Sometimes we simply need to accept things as they are and then let them go. We need to stop trying to control everything and stop fussing over things that don’t even matter. And while it may be hard at first, it gets easier as time passes. Our happiness depends on it.
Again, this is all quoting from the review on lifehack.
{ 0 comments }
Today I want to share a personal story. It ends extremely well, but it was horrible for a while. And I feel like sharing these reminders is a way to express gratitude.
We’ve been married for all of our lives. 41 years. Yesterday morning I wanted to go with her for a follow-up to something they’d found in a routine mammogram; but she said no, I’d just be waiting outside anyhow, and they’d said it was not something we should worry about. So I didn’t. Her appointment at the imaging center was at 11:30.
At about 1 pm yesterday I had just ordered a sandwich at a lunch place when my cell phone rang, the tune to “Still Crazy After All These Years,” which is my personalized ringtone for calls from Vange.
“Tim, come now,” she said. “They want you to hear what the doctor has to say.”
Imagine what was going through my mind as I drove across town. Imagine what was going through her mind as she waited for me to get there.
When I got there, she reached out for my hand. When the nurse left us alone, she started with: “If it’s bad news, I don’t want chemotherapy.” In the background, my mom died of breast cancer at 65, and her mom died of lymphoma at 70. She and I are both 63. We waited alone in one of those examination rooms.
Finally a doctor came in with the news: “You have absolutely nothing to worry about.” Total relief. Total happiness. Not even a faster-than-normal follow-up, he said, they’d done the higher-resolution mammogram and ultra sound, and it was a false alarm. There was nothing there.
So yes, it’s awkwardly personal for a blog post, but like I said, sharing expresses gratitude. And it was a huge reminder for both of us, life is short, make it count, what a blessing to be healthy.
{ 0 comments }
She’s a brain scientist who studied the brain "from inside out" when she had a stroke. We should listen to what she discovered. And what we have to choose from.
If you don’t see the video embedded here, you can click this link to go to the original on TED.com.
{ 0 comments }
Anger isn’t always bad for a relationship. It is bad for your health, debilitating, and dangerous. It does make you dumber. Like substance abuse, it clouds your judgment. But still, sometimes, a burst of anger can have some benefits.
Like a thunderstorm, it can clear the air. 
Like the clutch in a manual transmission, it can pull tightly meshed metal things apart so they can adjust, change, and reengage; so it changes gears.
It can pull things that are too tightly wound apart, so they can adjust, reposition themselves, and come back together in better alignment.
The aftermath of anger can be a readjustment that ends up for the better.
Not that I’m in favor of getting mad at somebody; I’m not. I’m just saying that the anger cloud can sometimes have a silver lining. I’ve seen some situations in which the cleared vision, the changes that came from anger, were good.
Even in those cases, looking back, it’s too bad they didn’t just go straight to the adjusted vision without suffering the anger first.
(image: tizz66/Flickr cc)
(Note: first published on Planning Startups Stories)
{ 0 comments }
He might be the man I most admire. He is certainly that among the men I’ve actually known. And he’s a model for us all. 
My dad, Frank D. Berry, MD, turned 91 last Fall. His four children are in their 60s and 50s. He still plays tennis twice a week, and golf on occasion, and he’s on the web every day, watching the business news, political news, discussions, ideas, and the world. He voted for Goldwater and Reagan as a middle-aged conservative, and for Gore and Obama as an older liberal. He’s always had the ability to change his mind. He put up with me being a hippie in the 60s when he was a conservative. He puts up with my brothers being conservatives, now that he’s a liberal.
He hasn’t lost his razor-sharp wit or his intellect, but he’s lost his quick reflexes, and most of his hearing (except on the phone), so he compromises with his limitations. He plays triples in tennis instead of doubles when he can, because he hits everything that he can reach, but he can’t reach like he used to. He settles for shooting in the high 40s for nine holes now, even though he used to shoot 70-something for 18. He drives a steel blue mini-cooper when he drives, but he doesn’t drive much any more, just back and forth from his home — the same one I grew up in, and I’m 63 — to the club, and to the corner store, and sometimes the video store.
He never smoked. He has always — except on nights before surgery — had a drink or two before dinner. He has never stopped getting regular exercise.
My dad has been a quiet hero for a lot of different people at different times. At the height of his career as an Ophthalmologist, 
people flew from all over the west, up from Los Angeles and down from Seattle, to have him do their eye surgery at El Camino Hospital in Mt. View, California. He was one of the first in his generation to do lens transplants. He was the first chairman of the first committee to create El Camino Hospital.
He was a straight-A student who went from a small mill town named Milford, in Massachusetts, to Holy Cross and then Tufts medical school. 
He was also the starting guard in high-school basketball (he scored 32 points in one game), and second baseman on the AAU team that won the state championship in Fenway Park. That was back in the middle 1930s when baseball was the national sport and the state championship put little Milford on the map. He was an army doctor during World War II.
He quit his medical practice at 65 to care for my mother, then his wife of 43 years, who died of cancer when he was 69. And now he’s caring for Liz, his wife of 22 years, now 87, struggling with the skeletal effects of aging. He was 70 when they married, and she was 66. We thought it was one of those December romances because they met a few months after their respective spouses had died. If so, that December’s been a long one.
My dad is the model of teaching by example. He’s always given his best at whatever he does. He loves competition, but he honors winning with quiet dignity and losing with grace. He’s never booed an opposing team, and he’s never lost a game on purpose, because that would disrespect the opponent. He tells the truth, he listens extremely well, and — only if you ask him to — he tells you exactly what he thinks. He made his own career out of skill and intelligence, and when he could, as he gained stature, he focused on the parts of Ophthalmology that he liked — the surgery — and left the rest for other doctors.
Today, on Father’s Day, I’m thinking about an important lesson my dad has to teach me and every father.
He has always given advice the way everybody should. His advice has no baggage. You take it, or not, and he’s okay with simply having shared what he thought was best. He gives it truly like a gift, meaning that once given, it’s yours, not his, and there’s no hard feelings about what you do with it. I love that. I wish I’d always done that as well as he has.
(Note: First published on Planning Startups Stories)
{ 0 comments }
