Happiness – Page 2

12 Things My Grandmother Told Me Before She Died

03.25.2022 by Marc Chernoff // 22 Comments

When my grandmother, Zelda, passed away fifteen years ago at the age of ninety, she left me with a box of miscellaneous items from her house that she knew I had grown to appreciate over the years. Among these items is an old leather-bound journal that she aptly named her Inspiration Journal.

Throughout the second half of her life, she used this journal to jot down ideas, thoughts, quotes, song lyrics, and anything else that moved her. She would read excerpts from her journal to me when I was growing up, and I would listen and ask questions. I honestly credit a part of who I am now to the wisdom she bestowed on me when I was young.

Although I’ve shared her wisdom with blog subscribers and book readers in the past, today is the day she became an angel fifteen years ago. So to honor her, I want to share some of my favorite excerpts from her journal with you. I’ve done my best to sort, copyedit, and reorganize her thoughts into twelve inspiring bullet points. I hope you find value in them. [Read more…]

20 Things We Should Say to Ourselves More Often

03.15.2022 by Marc Chernoff // 25 Comments

What we ultimately do comes out of who we believe we are.

A good friend of mine, who graduated with honors from Cal Berkley several years ago, is now the co-founder and CEO of a successful start-up in Silicon Valley. Throughout grade school she struggled with reading and writing disabilities. She spent kindergarten all the way through 12th grade in English ESE classes. During a parent-teacher conference when she was a freshman in high school, two ESE teachers collectively informed her mom that it was highly unlikely she would ever graduate.

So how did she do it? How did she push through and overcome the odds? “Affirmations,” she told me with a serious smile when I interviewed her recently for a side-project I’m working on. “I literally told myself that they were wrong about me. I told myself exactly what I needed to hear, every single day, to move my life forward. It may sound like a cliché to some people, but it’s not. It’s powerful stuff!”

I love her sentiment and I agree with her 100%. In fact, there’s a good reason why training our minds with positive affirmations works wonders like this.

Just like every muscle in the body, the mind needs to be exercised to gain strength. It needs to be worked consistently to grow and develop over time. If you haven’t pushed your mind in thousands of little ways over time, of course it’ll crumble on the one day that things get really challenging.

A mind well trained with positive affirmations has the right thoughts queued up and ready for retrieval at a moment’s notice.

If you’d like to begin (or enhance) this practice in your own life, here’s a selection of affirmations I often suggest to our course students, as starting point: [Read more…]

16 Tiny Stories of Regret that Will Change the Way You Live

03.02.2022 by Marc Chernoff // 41 Comments

Ten years from now, it won’t really matter what shoes you wore today, how your hair looked, or what brand of clothes you wore. What will matter is how you lived, how you loved, and what you learned along the way.

Deep down you know this already, right?

Yet today, just like the majority of us, you are easily distracted and derailed by the insignificant.

You give too much of your time to meaningless time-wasters.

You step through days, skeptically, with inner resistance.

You take your important relationships for granted.

You get caught up in hurtful drama.

You give in to your doubts.

And the list goes on.

But why?

Why do you follow these hurtful patterns of behavior?

Why do you set yourself up for regret when you know better?

Because [Read more…]

One Hard Thing Mentally Strong People Do When Life Doesn’t Go as Planned

02.23.2022 by Angel Chernoff // 29 Comments

It’s wild how we outgrow what we once thought we couldn’t live without, and then we fall in love with what we didn’t even know we wanted. Life keeps leading us down paths we would never travel if it were up to us.

Don’t be afraid.

Have faith.

Trust the journey.

Don’t let your expectations of how life “should be” blind you to the [Read more…]

10 Little Things to Remember When Life No Longer Excites You

02.16.2022 by Marc Chernoff // 46 Comments

Once upon a time, there was a girl who could do anything in the world she wanted. All she had to do was choose something and focus. So one day she sat down in front of a blank canvas and began to paint. Every stroke was more perfect than the next, slowly and gracefully converging to build a flawless masterpiece. And when she eventually finished painting, she stared proudly at her work and smiled.

It was obvious to the clouds and the stars, who were always watching over her, that she had a gift. She was an artist. And she knew it too. She felt it in every fiber of her being. But a few moments after she finished painting, she got anxious and quickly stood up. Because she realized that while she had the ability to do anything in the world she wanted to do, she was simply spending her time moving paint around on a piece of canvas.

She felt like there was so much more in the world to see and do – so many options. And if she ultimately decided to do something else with her life, then all the time she spent painting would be a waste. So she [Read more…]