Philip Zimbardo narrates this RSA Animate piece on the power of time.
If you don’t see the video, you can click here for the Youtube video.
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From the category archives:
Thoughts
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.
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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.
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Recently I heard this called “the second life.” You might have heard the phrase “midlife crisis.” And you’re probably aware of baby boomers turning 60, and boomer entrepreneurship. Retirement? Golden years? Hooey. 
Amazing fact: Humans have existed for a few million years, but it’s only in the last century or so that we have this second life. In 1900 the average life expectancy was 47 years, and only 1 in 25 people reached 60.
Think about it: most of us spend our first adulthood marking a living, pairing up, building careers, raising children, and having not a spare moment to think about anything but work, kids, problems, and getting by. We hope we’re developing and growing, but we don’t have a lot of time to reflect.
Then, in what seems afterwards to have been in a blink of an eye, you’re 50 something, and wondering what’s next. Maybe you buy into retirement, and the lure of the golden years, and maybe not. But when you reach 60 you still have a life expectancy of another 25 years or so. And that’s a lifetime. A second lifetime.
I don’t buy the golden years idea, sitting around, beaches and rocking chairs … normal people need something to do. And it has to be something they believe matters.
A couple of Saturdays ago I attended a seminar given by James Hollis, author and psychologist, during which he brought up his version of the second life. It was an interesting day. Hollis has done a lot of writing, analysis, speaking, and teaching about how we deal with the second life. This seminar was built around his latest book, what matters most.
I think I’ve been lucky. What I do now — this blog, twitter, several books, speaking, and teaching — seems as important to me as what I used to do. And I really like it. I posted earlier here Why I’ll Never Retire, and I’m sticking to it.
But what about you? What are you going to do with your second life?
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“The stairway to heaven.” I think of the Led Zeppelin song, or maybe God, or heaven. Lately that phrase has new meaning for me. There’s a new picture in my head.
I imagine a stairway something like the picture here, a long stairway heading up into the sky, with landings or stopping points, and changing directions. Life is a lot of walking up the stairs. Towards something good, I hope.
The landings are pauses. You stop the climbing. You look around. The landscape is perfect. You breathe deeply and exist fully. There are moments of perfection.
I had a perfect moment a few days ago. I was driving in the dark before dawn, alone, over the Washington Street bridge and around the big curve to the left, in tune with the music I was playing, at peace with the trip I was starting, with myself, and with the cosmos. I felt one and unified with all those young people who were me at different times, with the people I’ve shared my life with, the people who are my life. My history was neither good or bad, but, in that moment, a continuity. And it was okay. The worries – aging, loving, the various fates of “my” people – disappeared. It was all okay.
Something about that moment reminded me of similar moments from years earlier. When I was young, backpacking in the High Sierra, straining under the weight of the pack, struggling up a long uphill stretch at 10,000 feet altitude, I would occasionally stop, relax, breathe, and consciously enjoy the beautiful view of the mountains around me. I would forget the struggle of walking up hill with a pack and remember why I was there. The mountains made me happy. They were beautiful.
And then I realized that I’ve had perfect moments in perfect times strung together between the struggles throughout my life. A sunny afternoon after school, talking to my mom in the kitchen. Those first few days of a schoolkid’s summer vacation. Arriving in Europe, living in Innsbruck. The stages of falling in love, the first Spring together at Notre Dame, then early marriage. The magic of having kids. Weekends with kids. Weekends without kids. The time we lived on campus at Stanford. Moving from San Jose to Palo Alto, and, again, from Palo Alto to Eugene. Traveling alone with one or another of my grown-up children. Watching them achieve adulthood. Lots of perfect moments.
Later, reflecting on that, I thought of the stairway to heaven. The climb is the struggle of life. Childhood, school, adulthood, children, careers, aging, and death. It’s getting up in the morning, working, getting things done, dealing with problems, wanting more, worrying. It’s sick toddlers crying in the night, teenagers rebelling against the world, things we want that don’t come true. In my case it was a lot of projects, and a lot of business travel, sitting alone in airports waiting for flights, finding taxis, sleeping alone in hotels, waking up way too early to catch a taxi to an airport.
But you pause. You drink it all in. The people you love. The magic of birth and childhood and loving real people, imperfect love for imperfect people, at once both the potential for perfection and the impossibility of perfection, joined together.
(Image credit: Saiva_l/Shutterstock)
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What a strange moment. The car, the music, and suddenly, in the midst of unwarranted stress, an unexpected peace. Sort of like the right mellow music at just the right time. When the mood changes all at once.
I was driving home from the office at night. I’d been home for dinner, but gone back to the office for a while after dinner. The car drove smoothly over a newly paved street under soft street lights highlighting shade trees in the darkening dusk of late summer or early fall.
Hours earlier, a truck ran over and knocked out our Internet and our television. “Our” in this case means most of the Willamette Valley, from Eugene north about 100 miles to Portland. A fiber optic cable trunk line was cut by a dump truck, or something like that.
What to do? First, the shortness of breath, the shudder at contemplating hours without web or TV. It took effort not to panic. I went to the office, finished up some things pending before leaving for California later this morning.
And then, later, that moment of realization when things came together correctly: the car, the trees, the darkening sky, the music.
Then I realized, with a long peaceful exhale, enjoying the heat of the evening, the people playing on the streets, the truth of the crisis that wasn’t. We have books. We have movies, on DVD and on our iPads. And we even have email on the iPad, and on our phones.We have books and magazines. We have each other. We’d be fine.
We could even talk to each other.
And so we were fine. Comcast was restored before midnight. We were asleep when it came back. Peacefully.
(Image: Aleksi Markku/Shutterstock)
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I caught this post on Huffington: Who’s Happy And Why?
One thing that struck me immediately was this, a quote from that story:
For example, studies by Dr. Ruut Veenhoven, a sociologist at Erasmus University in Rotterdam, show that the extremely poor — those earning less than $10,000 a year — may be rendered unhappy by the relentless stress of poverty. Yet his work shows that after a poor person’s income exceeds that level there is no further correlation between money and happiness. After a certain level of income, typically enough to meet basic expenses, money ceases to be a factor.
What I like about this, particularly, is an idea I think I heard first from my older brother. “For me,” he said, “money has always been a binary thing. Enough or not enough.” I like that. I think it applies to me, and my life. For most of our life, we didn’t have enough. Finally, after the company made it, we did have enough. 
“Enough” is a relative concept, of course. And it evolves. For years, when we lived in Mexico City and the first three kids had been born but were still young, we used to take walks when we could and dream together. Our most common dream was “having a down payment to buy our own house.”
A few years later, it was to buy a house in Palo Alto; to move out of San Jose. And then it was a house big enough for a growing family, two parents and five kids. And it became private high school and then college educations, five of them, all very expensive. “Enough” evolved.
The example of cars. Being able to buy a 1975 rambler station wagon was huge, when that happened. But we survived the old orange-yellow VW van and going up the Sierra highways in second gear, which made the Toyota Corolla station wagon a big deal when we were able to get that. Later, it was never a Mercedes or Porsche, but having a relatively new car, and especially one with 4WD, mattered.
Vacations were fine when they were camping in Camomila, or outside of San Miguel de Allende. And one of the best vacations ever was in Acapulco where we thought we’d been invited to a luxury place (journalist perks) but ended up in Las Hamacas instead. Tour guiding worked fine. We had some really nice vacations later, when there was “enough;” but we didn’t really miss them when we couldn’t afford them.
I liked this, from the same post:
Some years ago I was helping Jimmy Carter gather his thoughts for his book Virtues of Aging, and at one point I said to him, “President Carter, I have a crazy question for you. I’m about the age now that you were when you were president. Have you come to any new perspectives about what matters in life, now that you’re older?” His answer was to the point: “Earlier in my life I thought the things that mattered were the things that you could see, like your car, your house, your wealth, your property, your office. But as I’ve grown older I’ve become convinced that the things that matter most are the things that you can’t see — the love you share with others, your inner purpose, your comfort with who you are.”
So here’s the thing. At the end of the day, it may be wisest to judge each of our own life successes not from the outside looking in but from the inside out. It’s not about the material things I can show the world, but about how I feel about the work I do; it’s about the relationships I have and the love I share.
Ken Dychtwald Ph.D.: Who’s Happy And Why?
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I picked this up browsing Seth Godin’s recent post over the weekend. He had it here, as part of a riff on the new world of commercial advertising on youtube. Good post too, but I ended up thinking this Dove commercial on youtube deserves special attention.
(If you don’t see the video, click here for the Youtube source.)
I assume you’re aware of how much we distort the supposedly ideal beauty in women. I am. But we forget. This is a bad thing, it hurts people, both women and men, and we should remind ourselves frequently.
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Statistics. Picturing large numbers. Communicating numbers. Some of the numbers in this 11-minute talk are just amazing. He asks: "have we lost our sense of outrage?"
If the video here doesn’t show up — technical details — the link is Picturing Excess. Or, alternatively, here is the video, from Chris Jordan, speaking at TED.
What is this doing on this blog, you ask? We’re people who care, no? People who think too.
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