The Emotion Machine

When I was first seeking self improvement about 8 years ago I was in a dark place, so I was pretty desperate and gullible. The more someone claimed they could help me, the more I was willing to devour everything they said.

I was quickly introduced to the promising ideas found in Law of Attraction, The Secret, and What the Bleep? – and I was captivated.

They offered the perception that everything in the universe was a product of my own mind. And if I didn’t like reality, all I had to do was change my mind and through some mysterious power in the universe things would begin to work out for me.

How can anyone not find that idea just wonderful and amazing? It makes you feel like some kind of omnipotent God.

Today, millions of people fall for this idea just like me, but I think in the long-term these fanciful ideas actually lead to disappointment, and in worse cases even self-blame and self-hate.

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I’d rather do what I love and make a modest living than do what I hate to become rich and famous.

A false understanding of the human mind, even if it makes you feel good, cannot bring you true happiness.

Inner peace means you don’t always need to smile to be happy.

A lot of people think happiness depends on what we gain and lose in our lives, but the truth is that one of the most important contributors to our happiness isn’t what happens to us, but our perspective of what happens.

There was a ground-breaking study published in The Journal of Personality and Social Psychology in 1978 that compared the happiness of individuals who just won the lottery with individuals who just experienced paralyzing accidents.

At first, the individuals who won the lottery reported much greater happiness than the paralyzed victims; however, the effect was increasingly diminished over time, and after just a few months both reported very similar levels of happiness again.

This concept is known as happiness adaptation theory. The basic idea is that we each have a “baseline level” of happiness, and over time we tend to adapt to both the “good” and “bad” events in our lives – so neither really have a major influence over our overall happiness in the long-term.

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Authentic happiness doesn’t mean you’re never sad - but that you understand your sadness when it happens and you see the bigger picture.

Sometimes you have to break yourself down before you can build yourself back up again.

A happy and successful life often requires a healthy sense of urgency to do the right things.