1: “When Alan Silva was 14 years old he was in love with the movies,” Robert Waldinger and Marc Schulz write in The Good Life: Lessons from the World’s Longest Scientific Study of Happiness.
Alan was one of 456 inner-city Boston boys selected to participate in what became known as the Harvard Study of Adult Development.
“They were children who grew up in some of Boston’s most troubled … continue reading
1: “One of the most poignant expressions of the way human work can feel so profoundly meaningless comes from a very ancient document, the Old Testament book of Ecclesiastes,” Timothy Keller writes in Every Good Endeavor.
“So I hated life, because the work that is done under the sun was grievous to me. All of it is meaningless, a chasing after the wind,” says the Philosopher in Ecclesiastes … continue reading
1: Following their defeat in Pennsylvania at Gettysburg, Robert E. Lee and his Confederate Army retreated toward the refuge of Virginia.
“At that moment Lee was more vulnerable than ever before,” write Raymond Kethledge and Michael Erwin in Lead Yourself First. “Lee’s remaining troops were in enemy country, disoriented by defeat, and without reinforcements or ammunition to fight anything near a sustained battle.”
President Abraham Lincoln immediately understood the … continue reading
The answer is neither, according to the research of Harvard psychologist Daniel Gilbert.
In his popular TED talk, Dan tells us that if it happened over three months ago, major life traumas have little impact on our happiness.
In fact, his research shows external circumstances predict only 10% of our overall happiness.
This week we’ve been looking at some of the lessons from Shawn Achor’s book The Happiness Advantage… continue reading
