Volunteering to help others is the right thing to do, and it also boosts personal happiness

Your unhappiness doesn't help anyone else - and in fact, as I mentioned in another answer, happy people are more altruistically inclined. So happiness is not a selfish goal.

The thing that inspires me most is reading and just observing the people around me. I think those are the two things that make me want to write.

People feel happier when they feel like they're progressing. When they feel like something in their life is growing or getting better.

There's also something about your bed; it's sort of a symbol of yourself and of your marriage, if you're married. Making your bed doesn't seem to be an important thing in a happy life, and yet it can be that tiny foothold into a more orderly life that sometimes people need.

Happiness is a critical factor for work, and work is a critical factor for happiness. In one of those life-isn’t-fair results, it turns out that the happy out-perform the less happy.

In 'Before and After,' I identify the sixteen strategies that we can use to make or break our habits. Some are quite familiar, such as 'Monitoring,' 'Scheduling,' and 'Convenience.' Some took me a lot of effort to identify, such as 'Thinking,' 'Identity,' and 'Clarity.'