When sages and elders urge virtue on the young, they sometimes sound like snake oil salesmen. The wisdom literature of many cultures essentially says, “Gather round! I have a tonic that will make you happy, healthy, wealthy, and wise! It will get you into heaven, and bring you joy on earth along the way! Just be virtuous!” Young people are extremely good, though, at rolling their eyes and shutting their ears. Their interests and desires are often at odds with those of adults, and they quickly find ways to pursue their goals and get themselves into trouble, which often becomes character-building adventure... In this light, Ben Franklin is supremely admirable.

Knowing your strengths -- and weaknesses -- may give you insight into why some parts of your job are enjoyable while others fill you with dread. If you have the luxury of adjusting the scope of your job then of course you should focus on the tasks that draw on your strengths while delegating away the parts that don't -- even if you are perfectly competent at them. But even if your job is defined for you by others, you can still control how you approach it and how you interact with your boss, coworkers, or customers.

“When you are surrounded by facts, and quotes and things like that, your eye can run over an idea, you can think about it consciously; but it won’t really become wisdom until you have, I think, a much more intuitive and emotional experience to it.  Until you see connections and feel it’s importance."

Beethoven can be seen as one of the superstars of thriving. He did not suddenly transform himself from Beethoven - someone living in helpless despair - to a person living in constant joy and elation. Like all ordinary thrivers, he continued to suffer through many terrible times and remained prone to dark moods throughout most of his life. "I will seize Fate by the throat. It will not wholly conquer me. Oh, how beautiful it is to live.."

"What I would like to do now is to explore some aspects of the nature of self-actualization, not as a grand abstraction, but in terms of the operational meaning of the self-actualization process. What does self-actualization mean in moment-to-moment terms? What does it mean on Tuesday at four o'clock?"

It is true that human beings strive perpetually toward ultimate humanness, which itself may be anyway a different kind of Becoming and growing. It's as if we were doomed forever to try to arrive at a state to which we could never attain. Fortunately we now know this not to be true, or at least it is not the only truth. There is another truth which integrates with it. We are again and again rewarded for good Becoming by transient states of absolute Being, by peak-experiences.

By Sylvia Boorstein, Ph.D. [Transcribed from ShrinkRapRadio.com podcast] Excerpt: Happiness has quite a specific meaning. It doesn’t necessarily mean “pleased.” We often, I think, equate “pleased” with “happy.” Things are going my way. I feel pleased, that’s good, I’m happy. This is the kind of happiness that means the mind and the heart engaged in a warm way with one’s self, with other people, with people we know, with people we don’t know... with the whole world, actually. And I would really – I do, in fact – define happiness as the ability to engage in warm relationship.

Paul Pearsall: The Beethoven Factor is "SIG, Stress Induced Growth.” Like the composer, there are persons for whom adversity is a stimulus for personal growth and creativity. Also like Beethoven, they aren't "super humans." Like all of us, they are flawed beings, but something within and about them allows them to construe their lives with an upward psychological trajectory even when things seem at their worst. They are not just naive blind optimists. They are "benefit finders" who can discover growth where many others see only disaster.

In the recently published "Against Happiness," popular writer Eric Wilson disparages our current love affair with putting on a happy face. With our "feel good" culture and the widespread use of happy drugs, everybody's trying to be cheerful and there are no decent dollops of melancholy and sadness, he says. When this happens, art becomes bland, unchallenging and redundant.
http://talentdevelop.com/articles/ArtandHapp.html

Anyone who's been exposed to even a small amount of traditional spiritual teachings, particularly from the East, has heard all the ways that the human ego gets debased and despised. To most, the ego is a selfish, materialistic, stingy, controlling monster that must be at least controlled and at best destroyed. This is ignorance and a lack of understanding of something that will never be actualized.