The Tools: 5 Tools to Help You Find Courage, Creativity, and Willpower--and Inspire You to Live Life in Forward Motion

WHAT KEEPS US unhappy and stuck in a limited view of reality is our tendency to seek pleasure and avoid pain, to seek security and avoid groundlessness, to seek comfort and avoid discomfort. This is how we keep ourselves enclosed in a cocoon. Out there are all the planets and all the galaxies and vast space, but we’re stuck here in this cocoon. Mom

What are these tools, these techniques of suffering, these means of experiencing the pain of problems constructively that I call discipline? There are four: delaying of gratification, acceptance of responsibility, dedication to truth, and balancing.

Whereas staying focused on the present had made the agonies of the ice-water ritual more tolerable, it made less unpleasant undertakings – daily chores that might previously have been a source not of agony but of boredom or annoyance – positively engrossing. The more intensely he could hold his attention on the experience of whatever he was doing,

“A typical day is full of anxiety and boredom,” writes Mihály Csíkszentmihályi, who is “the brains behind positive psychology,” according to Seligman. He credits Csíkszentmihályi with adding the concept of “flow” to the movement’s ideas.6 “Flow experiences provide the flashes of intense living against this dull background.” “Flow” is described by C