I was invited to a press teleconference (don’t ask me why) for Ben Stein’s creationist abomination of a movie, Expelled. Most of it was the usual lies and logical fallacies, the only high point being when noted atheist P.Z. Myers crashed the call for a couple minutes. Drama-rama! Although, sitting in front of my computer with my Skype phone on mute, there’s no interactivity, I may as well be listening to a recording, and somehow the excitement of the moment was lost.
My friend Fil is moving to New York. I’ll miss him, but I’m grateful I got to know him a lot better during one final week of adventure. And the 50-person farewell potluck was epically epic. Speaking of gratitude, after nearly a month I’m ending my experiment of writing down five things I’m grateful for every evening. I’m pretty optimistic already, and though I did feel particularly grateful during the thirty seconds it took me to write each night, I wasn’t seeing any repercussions during the rest of my day.
I’ve started salsa lessons. It’s something I’ve been meaning to do for months and I finally got up the motivation to make it happen. Rather than memorize a hundred moves, I’m hoping to just get a better sense of my body and the way it moves. Check back with me in six months, I’ll let you know.
April Fool’s Day went off well at the House on the Hill. I wasn’t planning to do anything, but after Craig greased the toilet seat, I figured it was only fair for me to roll down his car window and spread broken glass all around. I’m somewhat worried about how far this will escalate next year.
I have two business ideas that I’m really excited about. After months and months of tossing ideas around, each a bit better than the last, I finally have two ideas that I strongly believe would make money. The question is, do I pull the trigger on these or hold out for something even better? I’m planning to outsource the market research and as much of the process as possible, we’ll see how that works out…
And, even more exciting, within days I may have an actual job that I’m really excited about. Outsourceable business ideas, a job that challenges me while using both my technical background and my sales experience… things are looking rosy!
Comments on this entry are closed.
Maybe someone thought it would be cute if you and Ben Stein ended up talking about your MBHS experiences with each other?
Niels,
I’m reading *The How of Happiness* by Sonja Lyubomirsky, a professor of psychology at UC Riverside. She did a study in which she compared a control group, a group whose members wrote down five things they were grateful for three times a week, and a group whose members wrote down five things they were grateful for once a week. She found that only the members of the last group experienced a significant increase in happiness: those who performed the gratitude exercise three times a week didn’t become happier! She writes: “This finding might seem puzzling at first, but we believe there is an explanation: the average person made to express his or her gratitude every Tuesday, Thursday and Sunday appeared to have become bored of the practice, perhaps finding it a chore, whereas the person made to express gratitude only once a week probably continued to find it fresh and meaningful over time” (p. 91, UK paperback edition). It’s possible, then, that you would have gotten better results if you had done the gratitude exercise less often.
Lyubomirsky also emphasizes, though, that different happiness-boosting techniques are better suited to different people. In her book, there is a questionnaire designed to reveal which of the 12 happiness-boosting strategies she covers in her book would be most effective for you. (She also confesses that, although her own research has demonstrated the effectiveness of the gratitude exercise, it is one of the happiness-boosting strategies that suits her the least.)
Nice, the book is now on my request list from the Seattle public library.