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Happiness is mysterious and elusive: we like to associate it with things like wealth, status, and success, and yet we see people wealthier than us, higher status than us, and more successful than us, who don’t seem particularly thrilled with their lives. At the same time, people who have nothing are perfectly capable of just [...]

In no particular order… 1. Having a great dream, and remembering it vividly after waking up. 2. Sharing a smile with a cute stranger. 3. Getting invited to a party. 4. Making new friends and hanging out with old ones. 5. Publishing a great article. 6. Solving a tough math exercise I’ve been stuck on. [...]

What happens when an unstoppable force hits an immovable object? The answer is, it depends whether you’re an orthodox objectolic or a born-again forcestant. Belief is the most powerful agent in the natural universe. It can out-move the unstoppable force and dislodge the immovable object. This is because of the Universal Law of Belief, which [...]

When you look at the glass and say it’s half full, that’s an example of an Abundance Mentality. This is in contrast with the opposite, the Scarcity Mentality, through which lens one would call the glass half-empty. Optimism and pessimism. I was a pessimist for most of my childhood, and it did nothing but make [...]

One of the most beautiful artifacts of Judaism is Psalm 23, a song composed 3000 years ago by David, second king of ancient Israel. As is so often the case in the Bible, the deep profound truth in this passage is muddied by over-anthropomorphism of the collective wonder of the universe, refered to by David [...]

There is a great schism dividing the personal-development movement. On the one hand there are gurus like Anthony Robbins who take a more mentalist approach, advocating all sorts of thought-based techniques like positive affirmations. On the other, there are people like Eckhart Tolle who tell us we should minimize our thoughts as much as possible, [...]

If you haven’t already read it, check out my main article on Positive Affirmations. I discovered these as a kid and have been using them off and on all my life. The basic idea is so simple, and yet at the same time so powerful: whatever goes through the conscious mind, will be programmed into [...]

I grew up in a family where prayer was a daily thing. We prayed every evening around the supper table, holding hands and everything. My parents were wise to teach me about the power of gratitude, making a habit of being grateful for every morsel of food, in good times and bad. However, I never [...]

I was fortunate to discover positive affirmations at a young age. When I was a youngster, I went through a phase where I was interested in psychic power development. Back then, the Internet was just a collection of crappy geocities sites (people still talked about the Gopher protocol and used BBS’s as their internet service [...]

When I posted my last challenge report, 30-Day Workout-Every-Day Challenge Complete!, I resolved that my next challenge would be a 30-Day positive affirmation challenge. That means writing at least one page of positive affirmations a day for 30 days. I did it for 24 days, from October 18th until November 10th, before stopping. Now I’ve [...]