1: Researchers at Harvard and MIT analyzed the moods and behaviors of 28,000 smartphone users.

What did they learn?

“When people felt down,” Rachel Barr writes in How to Make Your Brain Your Best Friend, “they tended to seek out activities that promised instant gratification, like watching TV or drinking wine.”

When the participants were in a good mood, however, “they leaned toward more productive activities,” Rachel notes, “that … continue reading

1: Ever eaten every French fry in the bag, even though we knew from the first bite they weren’t very good?

Me, too.

Turns out chasing pleasure isn’t always the key to feeling good.

“That’s not a moralistic perspective; it’s a neurobiological one,” Rachel Barr writes in How to Make Your Brain Your Best Friend: A Neuroscientist’s Guide to a Healthier, Happier Life.

“To understand why, let’s go beyond … continue reading

1:  For more than two decades, Jay had been “shaming himself for his drinking, always apologizing and promising to do better,” Gay Hendricks writes in The Genius Zone: The Breakthrough Process to End Negative Thinking and Live in True Creativity.

For twenty years, he’d insisted to his concerned family and friends that he wasn’t an alcoholic.  He told himself he could control his drinking.   

“All the while, though, he … continue reading

1: “Invert.  Always invert.” Charlie Munger loved to quote the great algebraist Carl Jacobi.

Inversion is defined as: “A reversal of position, order, form, or relationship.”

Charlie is telling us the power of “turning the question backward.”  Because “many hard problems are best solved only when they are addressed backward” he writes in  Poor Charlie’s Almanack. 

So that was his approach when he was invited to give a … continue reading