“The great Sufi poet and philosopher Rumi once advised his students to write down the three things they most wanted in life. If any item on the list clashes with any other item, Rumi warned, you are destined for unhappiness. Better to live a life of single-pointed focus, he taught. But what about the benefits of living harmoniously among extremes? What if you could somehow create an expansive enough life that you could synchronize seemingly incongruous opposites into a worldview that excludes nothing?”

“Try this exercise:Make a list of whatever is going wrong in your life, from the biggest events to the most trivial items, and then beside that list write down everything and everyone you want to blame for that particular problem. For instance, let's say you think you're too fat. If you want to blame it on McDonald's cheeseburgers, then write that down. Perhaps you just don't normally feel well. If you want to blame that feeling on a bad doctor or on the pollen in the air, then write that down. Maybe you can't find a suitable partner. If you want to blame that on the argument that "men are creeps," then write that down.Now look at your list. Ask yourself if you are any different now that you know exactly what or who to blame, and then ask yourself if that has helped you come up with a more constructive program to solve your problems.Not a very positive picture, is it? Wouldn't it be better simply to decide to eliminate all blame from your life and focus instead on what you can do to rid yourself of the unhappiness that afflicts you? Wouldn't it be better to evaluate all the stones that you are carrying in your own bag of life--your stones of resentment, anger, and spite?Blaming will not change you. It only gives you some shallow justification for continuing to look outside yourself, rather than turning inward and rebuilding your life.”

“It is always worth itemizing happiness, there is so much of the other thing in a life, you had better put down the markers of happiness while you can.”

“They were ticking off items on a to-do list that was magnet-attached to the fridge. There were nineteen items on the list. They'd crossed off fifteen. The final item was underlined: Make a life.”

“Once a response becomes a habit, you stop learning. Theoretically, you could act differently, but in practice you do not. Habits are extremely useful, they streamline the parts of our lives we do not want to think about...But there is an art to deciding what parts of your life you want to turn over to habit, and what parts of your life you want to continue to learn from and have choice about. This is a key question of balance.”

“The sense of "having a goal in your life "will put you in the side of "giving" instead of "getting" ...... most of people focus "more" on what they want from their lives and that could lead to thinking in a (victim-of-life) way ... when you start to play the role of a person who's having a meaning and a goal for his/her life, you will get back the self-esteem you deserve.”