The Happiness Pie Chart

• They surround themselves with other happy people.
• They cultivate resilience.
• They appreciate simple pleasures.
• They devote some of their time to giving.
• They get immersed in activities that bring joy.
• They nix the small talk for deeper conversations. 
• They make a point to listen. 
• They look on the bright side.
• They make exercise a priority.
• They listen to good music.
• They spend time in nature.
• They laugh a lot.

• People who win the lottery are likely to revert to their original levels of happiness after the novelty of the win has worn off.
• It is also true for those who are in major accidents. People generally tend to return to their pre-accident levels of happiness after a period.
• Research has found that the first bite of something delicious is experienced as more pleasurable than the subsequent bites.

Researcher Sonja Lyubomirsky has examined this set-point:

A full 50 percent of our happiness set-point is due to genetics. 10 percent is affected primarily by circumstances like where we were born and to whom. 40 percent is subject to our influence.

• The level of positive emotions. This includes pride, joy, contentment, and curiosity we experience on a day-to-day basis. How happy you are on an immediate basis fluctuates by the day or even the hour.
• The overarching sense of contentment. How happy you are overall, generally remains the same. When you rate your happiness on a 10-point scale, if you are a seven kind of person, you will often stay around seven.

Buying time by outsourcing unpleasant or disliked tasks can benefit our well-being. 

Unfortunately, we're not great at valuing time over money. To change our spending habits, it helps to value time more than money. It could mean that we seek a job for its flexibility rather than the salary and prestige.

Happiness has always been difficult to quantify because it is subjective, depending on if you have a short- or a long-term outlook on life. Recently, researchers have started to distinguish between two types of happiness: 

• Hedonic happiness that provides a mental high;
• Eudaimonic happiness, a sense of well-being which involves a life well-lived.

People will always be happy when they see their children prosper when they feel loved, secure, and well-fed.

But, this formula for happiness is so obvious that most people dismiss it. They would rather look for a secret ingredient. The answer is that there is no secret.

It is marked by intense concentration, a sense of timelessness, and a loss of self-consciousness. It’s a deeply healing and enjoyable state and one that greatly contributes to our happiness.

• They meditate.
• They exercise regularly. “Surveys show that exercise may very well be the most effective instant happiness booster of all activities.”
• They stop and smell the roses. 
• They spend time with their furry friends.
• They spend time outside.

"Success is a few simple disciplines, practiced every day; while failure is simply a few errors in judgment, repeated every day."

You need to have absolute clarity over 3 fundamental facts:

• Your goals (the destination)
• Your current situation (your coordinates)
• The path that connects both of them (the route).

A very simple, but crucial principle: if you don’t know where you are, you can never reach the place where you want to be.

Making an alternative choice is hard because we are neurologically wired to favor the default solution, even if it brings suboptimal results.

As the complexity of a decision increases, so does our tendency to stick with the answer we know.

The quality of our lives isn't based on the events of our lives but on the reaction to the events in our lives. 

Make the choice to declare that you won’t be defined or determined by the circumstances of your life. This declaration is liberating.

"Optimism doesn’t mean the future is going to necessarily be better. It means seeing that the present is better."

In a fundamental sense, workplace happiness comes when:

• We enjoy doing the tasks assigned to us
• We feel right about the people we are working with
• We are happy with the financial benefits we get from the job
• We have the scope of improving our existing skills
• We feel respected and acknowledged at work

Happy employees are compulsory for a growing business.

A study on organizational success revealed that employees who feel happy in the workplace are 65% more energetic than employees who don’t. They are two times more productive and are more likely to sustain their jobs over a long period of time.