The secret of success is concentrating interest in life, interest in sports and good times, interest in your studies, interest in your fellow students, interest in the small things of nature, insects, birds, flowers, leaves, etc. In other words to be fully awake to everything about you & the more you learn the more you can appreciate & get a full measure of joy & happiness out of life. I do not think a young fellow should be too serious, he should be full of the Dickens some times to create a balance.

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Two kind of related articles:

In fact, we have shown that when people create objects in the sweet spot of “difficult-enough-but-not-too-difficult,” they not only love those objects more, but also experience greater happiness; it really is fun to create. [Source]

But is it really the act of creating something that increases our sense of its worth? [Source]

A quick post:

“It is an occupational hazard of being a writer to be appalled by the prose style you deployed in your youth.” via NYTimes

And this: Worst College Essays 1989, via The New Yorker.

Note to self to write about risks/diversity/Black Swan (a la Nassim Taleb, not Natalie Portman), irrationality/confidence, rationality/emotions with Tenhouten & semiotics/design with Huhtamo.

Whether in a crowded 19th-century French arcade, or an Internet café in Beijing, or a subway car, or home, existing in modern social space is being engaged in the weird, counterintuitive practice of having a private life in public because it is so difficult to have a private life in private. Modern cities promised an alternative to the social loneliness of rural life, promised to make people less isolated from each other. Cities — along with their products and technologies — would bring small communities of families together, out of the countryside and into the marketplace. Communities would become societies.

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I have come to the frightening conclusion that I am the decisive element. It is my personal approach that creates the climate. It is my daily mood that makes the weather. I possess tremendous power to make life miserable or joyous. I can be a tool of torture or an instrument of inspiration, I can humiliate or humor, hurt or heal. In all situations, it is my response that decides whether a crisis is escalated or de-escalated, and a person is humanized or de-humanized. If we treat people as they are, we make them worse. If we treat people as they ought to be, we help them become what they are capable of becoming. —Goethe

Have you ever been surprised that something you expected would make you very happy, didn’t – or vice versa? Oh yes. And out of this I learned that the secret to a truly happy life is to not have expectations.

From an interview with Tina Eisenberg of Swiss Miss on The Happiness Project.