Paul Dolan > Quotes

“Decisions about relationships, like all other decisions in life, should be based on their consequences for experiences of pleasure and purpose over time, and not by narratives surrounding them.”
― Paul Dolan, Happiness by Design: Finding Pleasure and Purpose in Everyday Life

“Change what you do, not how you think. You are what you do, your happiness is what you attend to, and you should attend to what makes you and those whom you care about happy.”
― Paul Dolan, Happiness by Design: Finding Pleasure and Purpose in Everyday Life

“future happiness cannot compensate for current misery; lost happiness is lost forever. Powered”
― Paul Dolan, Happiness by Design: Finding Pleasure and Purpose in Everyday Life

“Producing happiness involves deciding, designing, and doing, and”
― Paul Dolan, Happiness by Design: Finding Pleasure and Purpose in Everyday Life

“Optimism research teaches us that we should expect the best and have a contingency plan for the worst.”
― Paul Dolan, Happiness by Design: Finding Pleasure and Purpose in Everyday Life

“Self-improvement is important, but it needs to be conducive to your happiness. If an ambition will not make you or those you care about any happier, then there really is no point in striving to be someone else. You should carefully consider your reasons for the ideal self you construct and then select goals and ambitions that are sensible and conducive to your happiness.”
― Paul Dolan, Happiness by Design: Finding Pleasure and Purpose in Everyday Life

“To be truly happy, then, you need to feel both pleasure and purpose. You can be just as happy or sad as I am but with very different combinations of pleasure and purpose. And you may require each to different degrees at different times. But you do need to feel both. I call this the pleasure-purpose principle—the PPP.”
― Paul Dolan, Happiness by Design: Change What You Do, Not How You Think

“trying to force yourself to be different never really works.”
― Paul Dolan, Happiness by Design: Finding Pleasure and Purpose in Everyday Life

“By using priming, defaults, commitments, and norms in your own life, you can become a whole lot happier without actually having to think very hard at all about becoming happier. You will be happier by design.”
― Paul Dolan, Happiness by Design: Finding Pleasure and Purpose in Everyday Life

“It is well established that you will feel uncomfortable when there is a discrepancy between what you think and what you do. This is known as cognitive dissonance.”
― Paul Dolan, Happiness by Design: Change What You Do, Not How You Think

“Being too hard on ourselves, and not accepting the fact that we procrastinate, just leads to more procrastination and makes it harder to change. Students”
― Paul Dolan, Happiness by Design: Finding Pleasure and Purpose in Everyday Life

“Ultimately, we should all be seeking to use our time in ways that bring us the greatest overall pleasure and purpose for as long as possible. Just as you cannot recover time that is lost, you cannot recover happiness that is lost. Staying in a boring job or an annoying relationship simply prolongs the misery and any future happiness is unlikely to fully compensate for this loss. Lost happiness is lost forever.”
― Paul Dolan, Happiness by Design: Change What You Do, Not How You Think

“We often think about small decisions more than we need to and about big decisions much less than is optimal for our happiness, such as spending days looking at what colors to paint the walls but only a couple of hours visiting the house we buy.”
― Paul Dolan, Happiness by Design: Change What You Do, Not How You Think

“So experiences of pleasure and purpose are all that matter in the end. Hedonism is the school of thought that holds that pleasure is the only thing that matters in the end. By adding sentiments of purpose to pleasure, I define my position as sentimental hedonism. I am a sentimental hedonist and I think that, deep down, we all are.”
― Paul Dolan, Happiness by Design: Change What You Do, Not How You Think

“There are so many stimuli vying for your attention—sounds, places, people, smells, and your own thoughts rattling around in your head. You only have so much attentional energy and it will make you happier, more efficient, and healthier if you are able to focus it properly.”
― Paul Dolan, Happiness by Design: Finding Pleasure and Purpose in Everyday Life

“You can trust your own experiences more than your desires.”
― Paul Dolan, Happiness by Design: Change What You Do, Not How You Think

“The main point of salient feedback is to help you make decisions about the inputs into your production process of happiness.”
― Paul Dolan, Happiness by Design: Change What You Do, Not How You Think

“Our tendency to attribute our behavior to our context or to blame others for it is directly in contrast to how we tend to judge others’ actions. When it comes to other people, we are far more likely to attribute the bad meal to their inability to cook rather than to other causes. This is called the fundamental attribution error.”
― Paul Dolan, Happiness by Design: Change What You Do, Not How You Think

“It would be masochistic and sadistic of me to tell the truth about something if I knew for sure that I would create only misery for myself and others. We’ve all heard of pathological liars. Telling the truth in such circumstances would be an example of being pathologically honest. We need to judge each behavior on its specific consequences for happiness and not on the basis of whether or not it accords to a generally good rule.”
― Paul Dolan, Happiness by Design: Change What You Do, Not How You Think

“If mindless eating is the problem, then paying attention to what you eat through salient feedback will be a big part of the solution.”
― Paul Dolan, Happiness by Design: Change What You Do, Not How You Think

“When researchers looked at the regrets of college students in relation to their recent winter breaks and at the regrets of college graduates looking back at the winter breaks they had forty years earlier, the college students regretted not working harder (purposeful activities) while the alumni regretted not partying harder (pleasurable activities) all those years before”
― Paul Dolan, Happiness by Design: Change What You Do, Not How You Think

“In general, you should not give up too much happiness for too long (clinging to the mistaken belief that you will be able to recoup the loss at some point later on in life). Don’t put off until tomorrow happiness that can be experienced today.”
― Paul Dolan, Happiness by Design: Change What You Do, Not How You Think

“Psychologists often categorize feelings according to a two-by-two model—“positive and negative” as one category and “aroused and nonaroused” as the other.7 Positive and “negative” speak for themselves; though I put negative in quotation marks because, as I shall discuss shortly, what we consider a negative feeling can sometimes be entirely appropriate with good consequences. You can think of aroused and nonaroused as feelings that are “awakened” or “sleepy,” respectively. So joy is positive and aroused; contentment is positive and nonaroused; anxiety is negative and aroused; and sadness is negative and nonaroused—as shown below.”
― Paul Dolan, Happiness by Design: Change What You Do, Not How You Think

“why people who have been unfaithful to their partners are prone to trivializing their affairs.”
― Paul Dolan, Happiness by Design: Finding Pleasure and Purpose in Everyday Life

“The good news is that divorce, in Britain at least, has been shown to improve the happiness of the divorcees and their adult children (aged eighteen to thirty) after the knot is broken.”
― Paul Dolan, Happiness by Design: Change What You Do, Not How You Think

“Distinction bias is the tendency to view two options as more dissimilar when evaluating them simultaneously than when evaluating them separately.”
― Paul Dolan, Happiness by Design: Change What You Do, Not How You Think

“If a woman does marry, I suggest she has her own bed.”
― Paul Dolan, Happy Ever After: A Radical New Approach to Living Well

“And you can trust your own experiences more than your beliefs.”
― Paul Dolan, Happiness by Design: Change What You Do, Not How You Think

“We found that the self-affirmation writing task improved maths performance for free-school-meal students only, closing the existing achievement gap between these two groups by 50 per cent over the course of the year.”
― Paul Dolan, Happy Ever After: A Radical New Approach to Living Well

“to prime yourself to act differently, the defaults you set up, the commitments you make, and the norms of those you surround yourself with, as well as using these elements to alter your habits.”
― Paul Dolan, Happiness by Design: Finding Pleasure and Purpose in Everyday Life