“.. .she pointed the audience to people who were great examples of living their dreams with a very motivating and empowering attitude,” Heather Parlato wrote about Colleen Wainwright.
Praising individuals in the audience is especially helpful when facing a tough crowd as I described in a comment here. Bill Clinton, at his best, is a master [...]

Recently two friends broke trust with me. One offered to do something that was vital to me, didn’t and didn’t tell me. Another shared private information about me with a stranger who then told several people who work with me.
I don’t know which betrayal felt worse. I do know they can be seen as an [...]

Just as Daniel Gilbert discovered in Stumbling on Happiness that we aren’t adept at knowing how happy we will be in the future, Gal Zauberman and John G. Lynch found that we get it wrong about how much free time we’ll have. They dryly dub this effect, “Resource Slack.” 

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Something in yesterday’s “Modern Love“ column struck me as ringing true, not only for enduring marriages but for flourishing friendships, “Being single is all about the future, about the person you’re going to meet at Starbucks or after answering the next scientific compatibility questionnaire. Being married, after a certain point, is about the past, about a steadily [...]

In a world that increasingly favors thinkers (vs. laborers) huge changes are happening, including these four, observes Arnold King:
1.  The nature of marriage has changed: “Men & women look for complementarity in consumption rather than in production.”
2.  “Achievement-oriented men looking for interesting mates rather than for good maids.”
3.  There’s “greater inequality across households” - [...]

When you first glimpse someone (or something) new your brain reacts instantly, but you knew that. What’s destructive is that when you instinctively feel danger – or simply irritation –  you respond quicker, longer and more intensely than if you feel safe or another positive emotion.

Your negative reaction to “the new” affects you much more than a [...]

… then as we stay in touch on meaningless things, we can eventually work effectively together,” John T. Cacioppo says, observing what is happening with the daily tidbits of news we get about each other via Facebook and Twitter.  

Ironically, reading online about each other’s daily life means, for some including Julia Angwin, that they can dive into a “deeper conversation” [...]

Only the loony disregard this crashing economy. Yet the prudent recognize it’s vital now to practice resilience, even virtue. It helps to be near friends who feel the same. (Who lifts your spirits?) So it also helps to know that we’re born with a set point for happiness.

The good news is that set point “determines just 50% of happiness. [...]

That’s what Loopt founder, Sam Ashton did at the huge Consumer Electronics Show.  How?  Like his contacts he used Loopt to make his whereabouts known. Find friends out shopping on a nearby street or out dining at a restaurant in the same neighborhood. 

Willing to lose locational privacy to find selected friends or colleagues? Increasingly people are –and this may be somewhat age-related.  Brave ones like Ben Hoffman, are using it to find [...]

It took me awhile to finally decide to write this post as it runs against the tide of most readers’ opinions. And many feel strongly as I discovered at dinner last night with friends, but here goes. Outliers purports to reveal the real reason some people — like Bill Joy, the Beatles and Bill Gates— are successful. [...]