Exercise – Think about the times you typically make mistakes such as while traveling, on weekends, or after a hard day. Do you learn from your failures or ignore them?
This chapter reminded me of a podcast that I was just listening to with Mo Gawdat. Basically his contention is that happiness is a choice. One of the best ways to make the choice to be happy is setting proper expectations. If you expect to double your income every year you will be unhappy if it only goes up by 90%. If your expectation rather is that all of your needs are met, you are much more likely to look at the world in a favorable way.

I typically make mistakes when I am tired and have not been eating healthy. As a practice I try to acknowledge my mistakes and correct them as opposed to ignoring them. A way that I have found that makes it easy to tackle my shortcomings head on is talking to a therapist.
I found that when I have a weekly session with a therapist I have to confront my issues regularly. I don’t want to show up an spend an hour with a stranger with nothing to talk about, so I scour my life for things to talk about. This process of thinking about what I am going to talk about always yield some topics. For example I might have to think about a time I got angry in traffic. When I think about this my I must be curious and I ask myself, “Why did that make me so mad?” Was it really the other driver or was it something else in my life? Therapy is a good way to force me to be curious about myself and tackle my failures head on.
Author – Brian Ahlering