"We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit."
- Aristotle
I make a habit of regularly thinking positive thoughts at certain intervals during the day. Does that sound odd? If I contemplated it from a common sense point of view, I think it would. I, personally, don't know anyone who does that.
But what Aristotle said struck a chord in me. Why are we able to wake up at the same time every day? Why can we alter our bodies through diet and exercise? How can we build a skill or competence at something? Habit.
Why, then, should our thoughts, our mental processes, even our personalities be any different? What, if anything, defines a personality? How can other people accurately say that we're happy or motivated or kind or shy or ascribe to us any other personality trait? By observing how we normally behave.
If that's the case, then optimism, like any other dispositional trait, is just a succession of habitual behaviors, the act of continuously and repetitively being optimistic. So my strategy is simple: Be optimistic regularly. Three or four times a day, my bell goes off on my phone and I stop and think about why I'm happy, or what's going well, or what I did well. It doesn't matter how trivial it might be, for just a couple moments, I contemplate only the positive. And I think it's working. You will be hard-pressed to find me complaining and even if I do venture into the negative, it's pretty fleeting. It's soon succeeded by a positive outlook. Almost as if by habit.
Basically what I'm saying is that if you want to change, if you want to be more motivated, happier, upbeat, outgoing, brave, confident, whatever, it's simple: don't assume it's never going to happen, or that it will magically happen some day. Start changing what you do. Rather than ask "Why aren't I happy?" ask yourself a more productive question like "What do happy people do? Am I doing that?" If you're not, try it. What do you have to lose?
- Aristotle
I make a habit of regularly thinking positive thoughts at certain intervals during the day. Does that sound odd? If I contemplated it from a common sense point of view, I think it would. I, personally, don't know anyone who does that.
But what Aristotle said struck a chord in me. Why are we able to wake up at the same time every day? Why can we alter our bodies through diet and exercise? How can we build a skill or competence at something? Habit.
Why, then, should our thoughts, our mental processes, even our personalities be any different? What, if anything, defines a personality? How can other people accurately say that we're happy or motivated or kind or shy or ascribe to us any other personality trait? By observing how we normally behave.
If that's the case, then optimism, like any other dispositional trait, is just a succession of habitual behaviors, the act of continuously and repetitively being optimistic. So my strategy is simple: Be optimistic regularly. Three or four times a day, my bell goes off on my phone and I stop and think about why I'm happy, or what's going well, or what I did well. It doesn't matter how trivial it might be, for just a couple moments, I contemplate only the positive. And I think it's working. You will be hard-pressed to find me complaining and even if I do venture into the negative, it's pretty fleeting. It's soon succeeded by a positive outlook. Almost as if by habit.
Basically what I'm saying is that if you want to change, if you want to be more motivated, happier, upbeat, outgoing, brave, confident, whatever, it's simple: don't assume it's never going to happen, or that it will magically happen some day. Start changing what you do. Rather than ask "Why aren't I happy?" ask yourself a more productive question like "What do happy people do? Am I doing that?" If you're not, try it. What do you have to lose?
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