Happiness and Hope

The Social Power of Integrity
Recent research shows that happy people you’ve never met, three degrees of separation away, have a positive effect on your own happiness. Psychotherapist Joel Wade takes a look at research showing that good and bad behaviors pass from friend to friend and he explains why you don't have to be in a position of power to have a positive impact on culture.

Ten Habits of Hope
Psychologist and educator Marsha Enright explains why you should not accept impossibility without overwhelming evidence. For many, many situations, we do not and cannot have complete certainty about the outcome. But that alone is not reason to give up on a course of action. Develop a habit of looking for alternative means of achieving your goals.

Hope
A central tenet of Objectivism is the benevolent view of the universe: the view that the world is auspicious to man's efforts, and that happiness and success are possible. But this view is not a Panglossian denial that bad things happen. Businesses that took years to build are wrecked by mindless government edicts. Homes are lost to fire and flood. People live with depression that eclipses their aims and stifles joy. Hope is the outlook that gets us through these trials. It is at once a belief and an act of will: a conviction that misfortune is not our normal fate, and a refusal to let it drain our lives of meaning.

Life: Your Adventure in Entrepreneurship
The entrepreneurial spirit is the spirit of enterprise: ambition to succeed, initiative in taking action, alertness to opportunity. It means being proactive rather than reacting to events and opportunities as they come along. It involves a full acceptance of the responsibility for initiating action to achieve one’s goals and for dealing with the consequences that arise as one does so.

I Don't Have To
To say "I have to" is to speak the language of compulsion, duty, authority—the language of injunctions imposed on us from without. Objectivism is not a duty ethic, but an ethic of values, the ultimate value being one's own life and happiness. The language of values is "I want" and "I will": I want this, and I will do what it takes to get it. Speaking the language of values instead of the language of duty, "want-to" instead of "have-to," is a daily reminder that we live by choice, with both the freedom and the responsibility that that entails.