#optimism

#optimism

Many mistakes move us forward more than backward. Conscientious people often experience a springboard effect following mistakes, whereby fixing the mistakes accelerates growth faster than if they'd never made any missteps.

The money was supposed to feel like something. You work your whole life thinking about the payoff. The day you can finally relax. The moment you don't have to worry about making payroll or whether that big invoice will come through.

Lasting change begins with honest self-awareness and self-compassion. Every habit and coping pattern has served a purpose, meeting a need at some point in time.

Breakups can make you depressed and even damage your heart and immune system. Being the one who says 'it's over' can be torturous, especially if you're hurting someone you still care deeply about.

We tend to think of the five-day workweek as a law of nature, as certain as the rising of the sun. But it's nothing of the sort. The five-day workweek is a human invention that was introduced just over a century ago to solve the specific problems of the industrial age. By now it's so ingrained in our lives that we've forgotten we created it in the first place-but we did create it and we can also un-create it.

For my colleagues and me, whose task it is to improve population health, we architect specific health interventions because doing so gives us a measurement advantage. Through good intervention design, we (or the intervention's facilitators) can track attendance, program completion, vital signs, functional capacity, clinical labs, and downstream health utilization. Yet, despite our best design efforts, we still chronically face a fundamental challenge: program adherence.

In the interview, Tweedy dropped a line that's been echoing in my head, "Do not postpone happiness." This is so deceptively simple yet psychologically sharp, and it rings true to how I try to live my life. Most of us don't mean to delay joy. We tell ourselves we're being responsible: After this deadline...after the kids are older...After I lose the weight...After I finally feel less anxious...then I'll really live.

No reputable financial advisor would suggest risking your entire life savings on a single stock-like the old saying, Don't put all your eggs in one basket. Still, many people who might follow this financial advice often ignore it when it comes to their daily lives: their self-esteem may depend on whether they get promoted to VP at work, or their success as a parent is tied to their child getting into an Ivy League college or making the varsity football team;

We're experiencing chronic stress, which blocks our ability to hope. Here's why: the amygdala, the brain's alarm center, reacts with fight, flight, or freeze (Akil & Nestler, 2023; LeDoux, 1996). This reaction can save our lives in an emergency. When we're in a crosswalk and see a car speeding toward us, we can react by stopping or jumping out of the way.

Henry Ford famously noted, "Whether you think you can do it or not, you are usually right." His point was that beliefs, especially about our talents, performance, and even luck, can be self-fulfilling. Irrespective of whether they are right or wrong, they will become true by influencing objective success outcomes. Ford was hardly alone. Along the same lines, decades of psychological research show that beliefs matter, often profoundly so.