Trashflower » changes

Happiness Project

admin — Fri, 26 Nov 2010 23:19:22 +0000

I finished reading The Happiness Project today. I won’t make the blanket statements that everyone should read it, or that it will change your life – all I can say is that I’m glad that I read it, and that I’m hoping to use it’s lessons to change my life. Unlike Eat Pray Love (which I also really enjoyed), The Happiness Project helps you to find ways to increase your happiness levels in your everyday life – not traveling around the world.

I’m hoping to spend the month of December getting ready to kick off my own happiness project for 2011. You don’t have to be unhappy to want to be happier – you just need to recognize that there is more room for joy.

If you’re interested in learning more about The Happiness Project, the author (Gretchin Rubin) has a terrific website.

Change

admin — Sun, 01 Mar 2009 16:30:22 +0000

“You don’t have to like change to take advantage of it,” says Seth Godin.

Change is hard. Whether I want to lose 10 pounds, give up diet coke, or just make my day-to-day life more managable, it’s HARD. Its much easier to get up every Sunday morning, eat a freshly baked cinnamon roll, and read through your emails just like you have for weeks. Its easier to sit discontently at your desk and shuffle papers and to-do lists from pile to pile.

External change, like a change in work situation, serves as a great catalyst for internal change – if you’re willing to take advantage of it. Use it to clean house – to get rid of some of those piles, to eat the last cinnamon roll (and not buy anymore!), and to start in on a work out regimine.

As you can probably guess, I’ve been reading a lot of productivity and organization books lately, trying to get my life in order. There’s a big change heading my way in just a few weeks; a change that will make everything different, forever.

Happy New Year!

admin — Sat, 03 Jan 2009 05:00:41 +0000

Not so long ago, my very wise friend said “I effin hate New Years Eve!” At first, I was a bit horrified. I loved New Years. The champagne, the fresh starts, the kissing at midnight. But when I heard more of what he had to say, I agree. Basically, New Years signals a number of fresh starts – a new set of calendars. For some companies, its the new budget cycle, and for most of us, its a new start to our medical insurance premiums. But New Year’s Eve has become merely an excuse, for many, to get dressed up, drink and eat too much, and start out the New Year vowing to eat and drink less while we reach for the antacid.

If you don’t have plans to attend some spectacular party that allows you to get wasted among 300 of your closest friends, then you’re framed as being “lame.”

The truth, as I see it, is that very very few people are going to truly change because of another trip around the sun. A new calendar isn’t going to organize your house, and saying at midnight one night that you’re going to start exercising doesn’t mean that you will. Every day is a new opportunity to make these resolutions. Really, the success of your resolution depends on how much importance it has in your life.

Oh, and Happy New Year. I love new calendars.

Seth Godin Changed My Life

admin — Thu, 13 Nov 2008 01:07:14 +0000

You think I’m kidding when I write this, but I’m not. Between the presentation he gave at the LinkedIN conference last Thursday in New York and his book “The Dip” I feel like I see the light. Yeah, crazy, I know! But the whole book is about knowing when to keep going and knowing when to quit. I’m awful about knowing when to quit on something… I don’t officially quit. I just…. wander away for a little while. I keep telling myself that I’ll come back to whatever it was that I was working on (short stories, knitting, drawing, yoga, blogging… you see my point…)

Well, after reading this, I honestly felt like it was OK to take some of those projects or activities and say “I’m not willing to put the time into doing that enough for me to be amazing at it. So its best for me to just not do it at all.”

I normally am not the type to gush about a book, and suggest that everyone I know read it, but this one I do.

Buy. Read. Change.

The Dip by Seth Godin