Norman Garmezy, a developmental psychologist and clinician at the University of Minnesota, met thousands of children in his four decades of research. But one boy in particular stuck with him. He was nine years old, with an alcoholic mother and an absent father. Each day, he would arrive at school with the exact same sandwich:…

The pursuit of happiness and meaning are two of our most central motivations in life. A wealth of research in positive psychology suggests that happiness and meaning are, in fact, essential elements of well-being. Happiness and meaning are strongly correlated with each other, and often feed off each other. The more meaning we find in life, the more…

It’s easy to overestimate the importance of luck on success and underestimate the importance of investing in success every single day. Too often, we convince ourselves that success was just luck. We tell ourselves, the school teacher that left millions was just lucky. No. She wasn’t. She was playing a different game than you were. She was…

Im someone who agonizes and agonizes and agonizes over the simplest of decisions until I’ve expended an inordinate amount of mental energy on something that usually doesn’t matter that much. So, when I’m tasked with making choices that are actually of consequence? Forget about it. But, as it turns out, it’s entirely impossible to learn…

1. We’re unintentionally stupid We like to think that we can rationally process information like a computer, but we can’t. Cognitive biases explain why we made a bad decision but rarely help us avoid them in the first place. It’s better to focus on these warning signs that signal something is about to go wrong. Warning signs…

The story of Donald Lowry and the “Church of Love” is weird and captivating: a balding, middle-​aged writer in a small Midwestern town had assumed the personas of dozens of fictitious women. He had written love letters in their voices to tens of thousands of men. Each woman had her own unique writing style, vocabulary…