With that in mind, here are the four ways I know of for getting more enjoyment from a positive moment without changing the circumstances of that moment:

1) Gratitude. Think about the fact that you have this nice thing, that there is a possible world where you don’t have it, and aim to feel thankful for having it. For instance, if you’re enjoying a cup of tea, you can remind yourself how nice it is to have tea whenever you want, and how much more difficult it was to acquire tea hundreds of years ago.

2) Presence. Try to pay as much attention to the present moment as you can. For instance, rather than being 20% focused on what you’ll be doing later, or having stray thoughts about something else while you’re sipping your tea, focus fully on the experience of your tea.

3) Focus. Narrow your focus from this full moment to the very best aspects of this moment. For instance, focus on the tiny spot in your mouth where the tea tastes most delicious.

4) Acceptance. Stop resisting *everything* that’s imperfect about this moment. If we pay close attention, we can usually find something about any moment that feels imperfect, and it’s that desire for things to be different and that label assigned to aspects of this experience (that things aren’t what you want) that you’re letting go of. Relax all judgment and accept every last detail about this moment without wanting any aspect of it whatsoever to change. When your brain labels something as imperfect, or you notice a desire for something about this moment to change, note the thought or desire and let it go. For instance, fully accept that your face is slightly itchy, that you’re seated in a slightly awkward position, and that your tea tastes exactly as it does, without wanting those aspects of this moment to be any different. One way to do this is to think of this moment as a perfect snapshot of a moment in your life – and you want that snapshot to be exactly as it is to capture this exact moment, not a snapshot of a different moment.

Are there any other approaches to enhancing positive moments that I’m missing here?

This piece was first written on December 24, 2025, and first appeared on my website on January 12, 2026.

1. How much dogs love us. There is no way we’ve been good enough boys/girls/humans to deserve this.

2. Popcorn. It’s freakily amazing that corn kernels turn into this stuff. And as a bonus, it’s delicious.

3. That humans, working together, eradicated the last wild strain of smallpox in the 1970s.

This was a mind-blowingly huge win for our species. It had plagued us since ~3rd century BCE and is estimated to have killed ~500 million people just during the last 100 years it was around.

4. That we have three types of color receptors. This allows most people to see an AMAZING array of colors!

Cats and dogs can’t do this, and things must look way duller.

However, colors probably are way cooler to birds, some of whom have FOUR color receptors and can see ultraviolets!

5. That we freaking EXIST! Think about that for a moment. Almost every human that has ever lived is not alive right now, but you and I are!

It seems to be crazy luck that we were born at all. If your parents had sex moments later, a different baby likely would have been born, as a different sperm likely would have fertilized the egg (or none would have at all). As  A.J. Jacobs points out, with an average of hundreds of millions of sperm per ejaculate, these odds are like winning a major Powerball lottery!

6. That we’re not chickens (or insects)!

Probabilistically speaking, shouldn’t we expect to be a member of the most abundant category of conscious beings on Earth rather than a rarer category?

If chickens are conscious (as I think they are), we really lucked out to be born human instead of one of the >20 billion chickens alive right now that’s living in terrible factory farm conditions (and that will die as soon as it is big enough or isn’t laying enough eggs).

If insects are conscious (have something that it’s like to be them, which might be true for some insect species, though I doubt it is true for all of them), then it’s REALLY weird we don’t find ourselves to be insects since there are vastly more of them than humans!

7. That any conscious beings exist at all! Why isn’t the universe just a bunch of gas and rocks and shit? It’s not at all obvious there should be anything that has the ability to have experiences – yet here we are!

It’s not even obvious why there is SOMETHING instead of NOTHING!

This was first written on February 19, 2021, and first appeared on this site on November 25, 2022.

One way to cut through the noise is to look at the commonalities between the advice that many different highly successful people give (i.e., take the “intersection”), letting the noise and contradictions drop away. If many of them provide the same advice, we can be at least somewhat more confident that it generalizes. Having said that, we should nevertheless remain mindful of selection effects (affecting who we hear advice from), including survivorship bias.

With that in mind, here’s my attempt to “intersect” the repeated advice I’ve read or heard from many different highly successful people who come from a wide range of fields and life circumstances. I expand on each piece of advice by listing common themes I’ve heard around that advice (that I also largely agree with), and then I give a relevant quote.

Ten Repeated Pieces of Advice From Highly Successful People

1. You won’t automatically be happy when you reach your goals.

Achieving goals breeds new ones.

A terrible situation creates misery, but a good situation doesn’t imply you’ll be happy. Happiness takes inner work, and it benefits a lot from gratitude for whatever it is you already have. The good life is a journey, not a destination.

Quote: “Happiness cannot be traveled to, owned, earned, worn, or consumed. Happiness is the spiritual experience of living every minute with love, grace, and gratitude.” – Denis Waitley

2. High levels of accomplishment almost always require hard work over a long time. “Overnight successes” are rare and are often misidentified. If you look closely, usually, the person was practicing for 5-20 years before they were an “overnight success.”

Always be looking for how you can do your work better, and focus on improving in those areas. Compounding improvement over a long period is how people become great at things.

Quote: “I’m a great believer in luck, and I find the harder I work, the more I have of it.” – Thomas Jefferson

3. Life is unpredictable. When young, people usually don’t know what they’re going to “do with their life.” That’s fine!

Life takes crazy, unexpected twists and turns. Plans are great, but you should expect to modify them. Be adaptable and on the lookout for great, unexpected opportunities.

Quote: “Sometimes, when you go looking for what you want, you run right into what you need.” – Wally Lamb

4. Don’t let fear stop you. Attempting hard things will bring stress, fear, and anxiety. 

If you avoid what you fear (more than is warranted by the level of danger), your potential will be curtailed. Learn to push through your fears to do stressful things that are valuable.

Quote: “Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one’s courage.” – Anaïs Nin

5. Choose who you spend time with wisely. Be thoughtful about who you are friends with, whether you spend enough quality time with your loved ones, etc.

Spending time with the wrong people will waste time or even sap potential. Make enough time for the people that matter most to you.

Quote: “You Are The Average Of The Five People You Spend The Most Time With” – Jim Rohn

6. Learn to say no. People will ask you many things from you. If you always say “yes,” it will drain energy & focus.

Say “yes” to your loved ones and to requests that are aligned with your deepest values. For others, consider if you realistically have the bandwidth to handle the request without taking away from your most important priorities. If not, give an authentic “no.”

When you’re starting out, it makes sense to say “yes” to more things. The more successful you become, the better you have to get at saying “no” – otherwise, your life will be dictated by other people’s demands.

Make choices based on your own values rather than based on what pleases or impresses others. Be your authentic self.

Quote: “Half of the troubles of this life can be traced to saying yes too quickly and not saying no soon enough.” – Josh Billings

7. Take care of your body. Exercise regularly, reduce sugar intake, eat healthy foods that make you feel good, make enough time for sleep, and avoid excessive alcohol/drugs.

Good health has ripple effects and will help you achieve your goals. Your body impacts your mind.

Quote: “The groundwork for all happiness is good health.” – Leigh Hunt

8. Take care of your mind. Meditate regularly (or find another practice that refreshes and resets you). Sleep enough. Seek treatment for mental health challenges.

Get out of relationships where people mistreat you. Have compassion for yourself, and treat yourself with kindness.

Know your limits, and keep stress within those limits. Take some time just to relax and have fun with no obligations. Take vacations.

Quote: “If your compassion does not include yourself, it is incomplete.” -Jack Kornfield

9. Expect to fail many times. That’s normal and expected. 

The key is to learn from every failure, pick yourself back up, and keep going. If you’re not willing to fail many times, you aren’t prepared to do hard things.

Quote: “I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.” – Thomas Edison

10. Leverage habits. Figure out what daily pattern works for you. 

Maybe it’s an hour of writing at 6 am, strong tea in the morning, a carefree walk in nature at noon, or jumping jacks in the early afternoon. Experiment to find what works well for you, and stick to it.

Quote: “First, forget inspiration. Habit is more dependable. Habit will sustain you whether you’re inspired or not.” – Octavia Butler

This piece was first written on January 26, 2021, and first appeared on this site on October 14, 2022.

Many of us might be feeling bad about life at the moment. One approach that may improve your mood is shifting your psychological “baseline” of what you view as normal to reflect the reality you’re currently living in. This blog examines how to accept the state of things as they currently are instead of getting stuck wishing the world looked how you want it to be. This valuable technique, which we describe below, can be applied to many different kinds of setbacks and difficult situations you encounter.

Understanding your psychological baseline

How bad we feel depends on our psychological “baseline” for what we consider normal. For example, if you view the baseline for your finances as having $5000 in the bank, having $3000 is going to make you feel bad. But if you view your baseline as having $1000, then $3000 is going to make you feel good!

Accepting reality as it actually is (letting go of what we call “mental rebelling”) can reset your baseline, which can tremendously improve your outlook in some circumstances. If your baseline reflects the way the world actually is, rather than the way it recently was (before something was lost) or the way you want it to be, reality hurts less. Of course, we can (and should) strive to make reality better than it is. But you can still do this while accepting the facts about the current state of the world. Acceptance doesn’t stop you from taking valuable actions, but it does make it easier to deal with reality.

What does acceptance really mean?

Acceptance is a mental maneuver that is hard to define (we generally lack the vocabulary in English for these kind of mental actions), but it might involve steps like: 

• Noting the facts that actually constitute reality (not how you would like reality to be or what reality recently looked like). 
• Noting that you CAN handle the fact that the state of the world is what it is (unless you literally can’t, which is another matter, but that’s rarely true). 
• Noting that the state of the world does not mean that everything important is lost; there are likely to still be many things of value that exist. 
• Avoiding “mental rebelling.” Mental rebelling might involve thoughts like: “This can’t be happening,” “This is awful,” “I can’t take this,” “This sucks,” or “Why me?” When you notice this kind of thought, acknowledge it (“I just had the thought “this can’t be happening”), but don’t dwell on it. Let it drift out of your mind once you’ve acknowledged it. 
• Reflecting on the real state of the world and trying to feel an emotion of “acceptance” towards it. Feeling this emotion doesn’t mean you like the current state of the world, but it might help you accept the facts of reality instead of trying to resist them. You can accept a situation that you really dislike, and sometimes, it is essential to do so. And, of course, even after accepting it, you probably will want to work to make that situation better (acceptance doesn’t stop you from trying to improve things; it just makes reality easier to handle). 
• Paying the psychological cost of acknowledging that the reality you want doesn’t exist NOW (instead of putting off that cost). This means not trying to delay the sense of loss that you will feel; that would not be productive, since this loss has already occurred (the state of the world isn’t the way you want it to be, and it’s better to acknowledge that now rather than later). It is tempting to avoid acknowledging this because the loss will hurt, but you actually hurt yourself more by delaying the experience. 

An example of acceptance

To give another monetary example, suppose $100 accidentally fell out of your wallet while you were walking, and now it is gone. You’re beating yourself up for having lost it and are continuing to search the streets you walked down for the money even though it’s become abundantly clear you won’t find it, and you’re feeling really bad about it. 

Acceptance in this situation might look like: 

• Fully acknowledging that the $100 is gone 
• Noting any negative self-talk (“I’m such an idiot”) but letting those thoughts drift away without getting stuck in them 
• Experiencing the full psychological loss of the money right NOW (not trying to delay the feeling of loss or deny it) 
• Acknowledging that you can survive without the $100 
• Attempting to move your baseline (the state you were in when you had $100) to be one that doesn’t involve having that $100 (so that not having this money feels normal instead of bad). You want to get yourself to the mental state where suddenly stumbling on the $100 would feel like gaining $100, rather than it feeling like simply restoring you back to the prior baseline! 

 Using gratitude to shift your baseline

Shifting your psychological baseline can also be achieved with gratitude. By reminding yourself that not everyone has the good things you have, that you may never have had what you have now, or that you won’t have it forever, you can move your baseline below the way you currently perceive it. Then, what’s real starts to look like a gift rather than something merely neutral. Your food feels like more of a gift if you remember not everyone has enough food to eat. Your loved ones are more precious when you remember that not everyone is around people they love.

Faulty baselines can bias your decision-making.

Our psychological baselines also play an important role in decision-making (“Prospect Theory” is one example of this). If you just made a lot of money at a casino, your mental baseline may not yet have caught up to having that extra money. Hence, you view that money as above and beyond what’s normal, so you are more willing to gamble it than you would be if you came back to the casino tomorrow (after your baseline has adjusted). A way to reduce this bias is to adjust our baseline to match reality faster (though, in this case, it could have the negative side effect of making you not feel as excited about your winnings). 

There is a related bias that can occur in the opposite situation: if you’ve just lost a lot of money at a casino but not adjusted your baseline to incorporate this new state of affairs, you may take unusually risky gambles to try to win the money back (perhaps in the hopes of not having to incorporate this loss into your view of reality). This is obviously a bad idea in a gambling context, and you’d be better off adjusting your baseline to match reality instead. 

When we fall prey to the “Sunk Cost Fallacy,” we’re also failing to adjust our baselines to reality. This fallacy describes what happens when we continue with a project even when we know the future prospects of the project are bad; we don’t want to have “wasted” (or “sunk”) all the effort and resources we’ve put into it already. But if we accept reality and adjust our baseline to incorporate this loss (which has indeed already occurred), the temptation to engage in the sunk cost fallacy may be reduced (or disappear completely).

How can you use this information to become happier?

If you’re feeling bad about something, try shifting your baseline to reflect your reality by practicing the different forms of acceptance outlined above, and use gratitude to adjust your baseline BELOW reality (so that the state of the world looks better than you might have otherwise thought). 

Consider the state of your psychological baseline when making decisions that will affect your future. Does your baseline reflect the way that reality is in the current moment? Are there any recent changes you might have missed?

Why discard these valuable things in the leaky waste bin we call memory?
The flip side of this, of course, is: if you have a meaningful and genuine compliment to give, then don’t forget to tell the person who it’s about! What a loss not to do so.

Thank you to those of you who have contributed to my list, I’ve benefited many times over from your thoughtfulness!