Martha Beck describes the ten most life-enhancing behaviours that she has found in years of research and practice. By adding stillness, compassion, truth, desire, creativity, risk, play, treats, gratitude and rest to your daily routine, you should be empowered to find purpose and overcome obstacles....

10 Steps to a Happier Life

The Joy Diet

Our most commonly held formula for success is broken. Conventional wisdom holds that if we work hard we will be more successful, and if we are more successful, then we'll be happy. If we can just find that great job, win that next promotion, lose those five pounds, happiness will follow. But recent discoveries in the field of positive psychology ha...

How a Positive Brain Fuels Success in Work and Life

The Happiness Advantage

Psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's famous investigations of "optimal experience" have revealed that what makes an experience genuinely satisfying is a state of consciousness called flow. During flow, people typically experience deep enjoyment, creativity, and a total involvement with life. In this new edition of his groundbreaking classic work,...

The Psychology of Optimal Experience (Harper Perennial Modern Classics)

Flow

Creativity is about capturing those moments that make life worth living. The author's objective is to offer an understanding of what leads to these moments, be it the excitement of the artist at the easel or the scientist in the lab, so that knowledge can be used to enrich people's lives. Drawing on 100 interviews with exceptional people, from biol...

Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and Invention

Creativity

Read Stuart Brown's posts on the Penguin Blog. From a leading expert, a groundbreaking book on the science of play, and its essential role in fueling our happiness and intelligence throughout our lives We've all seen the happiness on the face of a child while playing in the school yard. Or the blissful abandon of a golden retriever racing across a ...

How it Shapes the Brain, Opens the Imagination, and Invigorates the Soul

Play

• Why are lovers quicker to forgive their partners for infidelity than for leaving dirty dishes in the sink? • Why will sighted people pay more to avoid going blind than blind people will pay to regain their sight? • Why do dining companions insist on ordering different meals instead of getting what they really want? • Why do pigeons seem to have s...

Stumbling on Happiness

Two great spiritual masters share their own hard-won wisdom about living with joy even in the face of adversity.  The occasion was a big birthday. And it inspired two close friends to get together in Dharamsala for a talk about something very important to them. The friends were His Holiness the Dalai Lama and Archbishop Desmond Tutu. The subject wa...

Lasting Happiness in a Changing World

The Book of Joy

In his riveting new book, The Art of Learning, Waitzkin tells his remarkable story of personal achievement and shares the principles of learning and performance that have propelled him to the top—twice.Josh Waitzkin knows what it means to be at the top of his game. A public figure since winning his first National Chess Championship at the age of ni...

An Inner Journey to Optimal Performance

The Art of Learning

There are at least two kinds of games, states James P. Carse as he begins this extraordinary book. One could be called finite; the other infinite. A finite game is played for the purpose of winning, an infinite game for the purpose of continuing the play.Finite games are the familiar contests of everyday life; they are played in order to be won, wh...

Finite and Infinite Games

In an irresistible invitation to lighten up, look around, and live an unscripted life, a master of the art of improvisation explains how to adopt the attitudes and techniques used by generations of musicians and actors.Let’s face it: Life is something we all make up as we go along. No matter how carefully we formulate a “script,” it is bound to cha...

Curiosity List: Games, Joy, Flow