Archive for November, 2007
Is spending the key to a Happy Christmas?
If you’re new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!Before you empty your bank account or further increase your indebtedness, consider whether you could be just as happy without spending quite so much
This is the time of year when people spend money—lots of it. The retailers and [...]
Live to work or work to live?
How to avoid getting caught up in the wrong working attitudes
One of the differences between European attitudes to work and American ones is that Europeans see work as a necessary activity to allow them to live as they want, while Americans tend to see work as the main purpose of life.
The cause of this difference [...]
Are you getting enough sleep?
Sleep can help alleviate pain as well as stress
Research presented to a world sleep conference in Cairns, Australia, in September found that one or two hours more sleep can dull sensitivity to pain as much as 60 milligrams of analgesic drugs. And we all know that a good night‚€™s sleep is a great way of [...]
A small step towards understanding
Here’s a thought to help you cope with understanding why things happen as they do:
A Buddhist sutra states: “If you want to understand the causes that existed in the past, look at the results as they are manifested in the present. And if you want to understand what results will be manifested in the future, [...]
Are you settling for less than you ought?
While it’s unrealistic to expect everyone to be able to work at a job that makes their heart sing, that shouldn’t mean that everyone needs to settle for drudgery and pain in the workplace.
John Place recently listed seven dumb reasons why smart people settle for terrible jobs. Here they are, with my own thoughts and [...]
Make today outstanding
Many people in the USA are still on holiday, as part of the Thanksgiving long weekend. Yesterday, in traditional observance, is given over to an orgy of eating and drinking. Today, equally traditionally, comes the dash to the malls to shop until you drop. But this year, I want to suggest that you break with [...]
Why happiness often means having less
Scarcity is an essential ingredient in a life worth living
It may seem perverse to suggest that people cannot generally be happy without scarcity. After all, millions of people in this world suffer from scarcity of life’s basic necessities, and there is no way that that makes them happy.
The human mind is sometimes itself perverse. Give [...]
The positive side of procrastination
When you consider the real reasons why people procrastinate, it’s clear procrastination is often a sensible, even essential, response.
I’m amazed how many blog postings, articles, and books there are claiming to cure procrastination. If there are so many people who habitually procrastinate to justify all these words and prescriptions, it’s a miracle anything gets done [...]
Apply the daffodil principle to your life
It’s amazing what happens when you stick at something long enough
In today’s world, immediate gratification is becoming more and more an automatic requirement. We want it all—and we want it now. Sadly, life really doesn’t work like that and so we deny ourselves much of what could be possible, if only we were prepared to [...]
Dealing with incompatible filters
Your values act like filters for everything you see and hear.
You respond to the world through a different set of mental filters than everyone else. What’s important to you isn’t so compelling to others and vice versa. The trouble is, they don’t recognize it as a simple difference—and nor do you, most of the [...]
