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HOW TO BUILD A BETTER LIFE

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  Whenever we want to change our lives, we come up with some pithy goal like: “make more money” or “lose 15 pounds” or “stop masturbating 6 times a day.” OK, umm, that’s a start. The problem is that these are just big actions. And anyone with some willpower can half-ass their way through a certain number of big actions. Real change comes from a change in your habits. And a change in habits comes from a long, sustained alteration of  small actions . Let me illustrate it this way for you: Let’s say you and I are driving along down the road, side by side, in separate vehicles. We come to a fork in the road, but the two roads in this fork are actually only separated by about one degree. I take one road, you take the other. Now we’re only traveling away from each other ever so slightly at one degree of separation. At first, the change is so slight, you can barely tell that we’re technically traveling in different directions. But over a long enough period of time, if our paths maint...
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HOW TO MAKE YOUR OWN LUCK

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  1. BE A SOCIAL BUTTERFLY Psychologist Richard Wiseman is an authority on luck — or what is perceived as luck in our lives. In his book  The Luck Factor , Wiseman found that the best predictor of how many “lucky breaks” a person has was how social and interconnected they were with those around them. Lucky people enjoy connecting and relating to other people and are comfortable doing so. When presented with new social situations, unlucky people talked to people they already knew or people who were most like themselves, whereas lucky people talked to a large array of people equally. Most of life’s opportunities don’t land on us mysteriously. They come through our networks, our connections, people we stumble across at random. My one-and-only attempt at a day job was landed through an acquaintance I had made when I was going out five nights-a-week in Boston back in 2007. I once landed an audition for a touring rock band by randomly meeting the singer at a Four...
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HOW TO BE MORE PRODUCTIVE BY WORKING LESS

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  WORK AS A LINEAR FUNCTION Most of us, for most of our lives, conceptualize work as a linear function. What I mean by “linear” is that the amount of productive output you create is directly proportional to a number of hours you input. So working two hours will produce twice the results as one hour. And eight hours will produce four times that of two hours. We all kind of go through life assuming this is the way things work (for the most part). This is mostly because school work functions pretty linearly. They give you a bunch of stuff to memorize, and if you spend two hours memorizing it, you’ll remember about twice as much as if you had spent one hour. Then we get older and stop picking our noses in public and we just assume that the rest of life will function the same way. But it doesn’t. The truth is that most thoughtful, brain-intensive work does not unfold like this. And this feels really unfair to us. So we spend a lot of time complaining to our parents a...
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