For the last couple weeks we’ve been revisiting the themes that we’ve spent 2018 exploring.
We have already reviewed what we learned about life planning, personal finance basics, and time management and productivity.
Today we’re getting into the good stuff. Today we learn about happiness. Continue reading “How to Be Happier”
Today we’re continuing the journey we started last week traveling through the different subjects that we’ve covered this year.
Last week we took a big picture look at life planning, which was our topic for January.
Today, we’re diving into our February research, which was on personal finance basics. Continue reading “Personal Finance 101”
2018 has been a pretty big year.
New baby. New job. And lots of introspection and self improvement.
Around the blog we’ve been focusing on a different subject each month and learning everything that we can in order to try to live a happier, wealthier, more productive life.
Because we’ve covered so much ground, I wanted to take some time to review rather than plowing through to a new topic. Learning new things is great. But it’s tempting to learn them, move on, and forget them.
Because these are all things I want to incorporate into my life on a permanent basis, it is worth doubling back to revisit, both as a reminder and to measure how I’ve done.
Today we’re going to start by reviewing our January topic: life planning. Continue reading “How to Plan Your Life”
You always have a choice.
This is not an empty maxim. Not an inspirational quote.
It is a fact of life. And recognizing this fact will make you happier and allow you to live a better life.
While there are times when things happen to us that are outside of our control, it is always our choice how we respond to them. Continue reading “There is Always a Choice”
We’ve been spending the month of July exploring what we can learn from philosophy to live a better life.
Much of what we’ve learned so far has been about adjusting our outlook and mindset in order to get more out of whatever situation we happen to be in at any given time. I want to stick with that theme today, but I’d like to zoom in on one particular issue that tends to be problematic for people.
If we want to live a happier life, we need to recognize the difference between responding and reacting. Continue reading “Stop Reacting. Start Responding.”
We’re spending the month of July looking for keys to happiness in philosophy. Today, we’re going to explore one specific quote.
There is often a great power in quotes.
When someone can distill an idea or a philosophy into a short, memorable collection of words, it can become a kind of mantra for people. It can be a reminder of how they want to live their life and how to be their best selves.
One example of this is the Serenity Prayer. Continue reading “Finding Serenity”
2018 is a year of self-improvement.
I’m spending each month exploring a different area of life and figuring out how best to improve and optimize.
So far we’ve covered life planning, personal finance basics, time management, the science of happiness, money and happiness, and health.
We’re halfway through the year, so it’s time for a quarterly check in. Continue reading “Better Life – Second Quarter Update”
As we close out our month exploring the intersection of money and happiness, we’ve learned quite a bit.
We’ve learned how money and happiness are linked and how a threshold level of income avoids unhappiness. We’ve also learned a few methods for getting more happiness out of the money that we already spend.
Last week we looked at where we should be spending more money to make ourselves happier and Tuesday we explored the issue of opportunity cost and where more money would make us less happy.
Today, we’re going to take a more complicated look at opportunity cost and tackle a very tricky issue that most people struggle with: weighing the short term against the long term when it comes to money and happiness. Continue reading “Balancing Money and Happiness Over Time”
Last month, while exploring the science of happiness, we learned about hedonic adaptation.
Hedonic adaptation is one of the key forces that prevents us from becoming happier. It misleads us into thinking that the wrong things will make us happy.
Instead, we end up on a treadmill where we continuously adapt to our new situations and material possessions and stay at the same level of happiness.
Today, we return to hedonic adaptation to see how it impacts the intersection of money and happiness. Continue reading “Materialism and Happiness”
We’ve covered a lot of big topics so far this year in our quest for a better life.
We spent January figuring out how to plan and strive for our ideal life. How to make changes big and small to achieve that dream.
In February we explored the basics of personal finance. We learned how to get control of our money and make a plan so that our money supports our ideal life, as well.
March was an exploration of time management so that we can fit more into the life we have now.
But how do these actually help us have a better life? What actually makes life better?
