Entries from March 2009 ↓

Image by Sean Jackson

Happiness is just a temporary attitude. It’s not a great achievement by itself, because it can be ruined at any time. The real key is constantly doing things that make you happier. This way, you’re recharging you happiness batteries each day, giving a longer life to positive energy and thoughts.

You need to cultivate happiness – to do what you love, to find an interesting hobby, to surround yourself with people who you have a great time with every time you see each other.

You find happiness only when you persue it.

So always do your best to feel great. But remember that once you take a break, you can’t expect that feeling to last long. So the more pesistent you are, the higher chance you have to actually feel happy.

I was invited by one of my regular visitors, Rayna, to share my top ten favorite books. So in today’s article I’ll share with you my list of ten life-changing books that you should own, too.

1. How to Win Friends & Influence People
2. Screw It, Let’s Do It (Expanded Edition)
3. The Dip: A Little Book That Teaches You When to Quit (and When to Stick)
4. Law of Attraction: The Science of Attracting More of What You Want and Less of What You Don’t
5. It’s Called Work for a Reason!: Your Success Is Your Own Damn Fault The most motivational book in the whole lists. I also dare to say it’s the most practical.
6. Power of Less, The: The Fine Art of Limiting Yourself to the Essential…in Business and in Life
7. The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People
8. A Guide to Confident Living
9. Peopleware: Productive Projects and Teams (Second Edition)
10. Eugene Onegin: A Novel in Verse (Oxford World’s Classics) Finally, a classic about love. It won’t teach you much about love thought. But it will teach you a lot about human relations.

Feel free to join the bloggers’ favorite books spree! Share your top ten reads. My invitation is for Mike Ramm and Jared.

Image by Henning Buchholz

The greatest success, is successful self acceptance, said once Ben Sweet. We can only be happy when we respect ourselves first.

Yet it’s so tough to say you’re fat, for example, isn’t it? I used to be, too. But one day I decided to face that hard reality and actually do something about it. Now, I’m fit and exercise daily. What I learned from this change was one of the greatest life lessons:

By admitting you have a negative side, you start taking action to change that. That’s the first step. Then, you suddenly stop worrying or complaining about it and start realizing that it’s all in your hands. Life is what you make it. And often, to make it, you have to change it. Because it was made in a way, sometimes not satisfactory enough, when we were born.

If you’ve grown up in a line of bad fathers, the only way to change that is to become a great father. That’s what my father did, and I’m deeply thankful for it.

Accepting yourself is quite easy, yet so few of us do it. There’s only two steps to it!

1. Face reality. “I’m a boring person.”
2. Change reality. “I’ll try to smile more, I’ll learn some new jokes and watch some videos on humor on YouTube.”

Are you ready to finally accept yourself? Are you willing to take action to finally change your negative sides?

I had some free time yesterday, so I played around with Maslow’s theory of human needs. Here’s a simple illustration that I created. It shows 17 basic happiness needs.

Think about this list. To which part of your life to you need to pay more attention?

Feel free to share the photo, as long as you post a link to this blog.

Image by Aldo Gonzalez

There’s little chance of doing or enjoying what must be done. But it’s great to complete a challenge. So why not think of what must be done as a challenge to your personal qualities and motivation?

Here are some good reasons for that…

What we have to do (like work, studying, house tasks) usually has a future benefit for us. It’s different from what we usually do or what we would like to do, so we take it as an obligation. Yet it still will improve our life when complete, won’t it?

Even a simple chore like washing the dishes now will leave you more free time later. So instead of thinking about before and later, like we usually do when faced with an obligation, think of now and just start doing it.

Little by little, you’ll get committed to completing it successfully and motivated to do so. You’ll realize you needed to do it. And in the middle of the task you’ll know you want to. Just because you’re doing it now.