Use all the willpower at your disposal to make yourself happy. Construct the right stories about yourself - and believe them!

80% of the results come from 20% of the causes. A few things are important; most are not.

Make the choice that you want to be happy. You owe it to yourself and you owe it to other people too.

There is no rush. If we think intelligently about what we can achieve with our time, we can be relaxed, even lazy. In fact, being lazy - having plenty of time to think - may actually be a precondition for achieving a great deal.

There is no shortage of time. In fact, we are positively awash with it. We only make good use of 20 per cent of our time.... The 80/20 principle says that if we doubled our time on the top 20% of activities, we could work a two-day week and achieve 60 per cent more than now.

If we want to sum up the theory of evolution by natural selection in two words, which have great relevance for all societies and businesses, we should simply remember: diversity works.

To be strategic is to concentrate on what is important, on those few objectives that can give us a comparative advantage, on what is important to us rather than others, and to plan and execute the resulting plan with determination and steadfastness.