Go ahead. Do it poorly. Just do it!

My husband always says, one of the reasons I am successful - is I get projects completed.  I may not do them perfectly - but I get them done and that puts me well ahead of people who don't complete tasks at all.

He's right.  Don't worry about doing things well. Go ahead and do it poorly. Just - do it!

Here is a graphic that explains it better than I can.

I find this is especially helpful advice for the times I've been depressed or mentally distressed.  The hardest part for me - of climbing my way out is the knowledge that anything I do in a distressed state - is not going to be my best work. Heck - it's probably not even going to be good work.

But if I just do it anyway - I get it done. This can be as simple as convincing myself to go to the mailbox and pick up the mail.  It helps me to keep moving forward even when I really don't have it in me to do much.  And little progress - is still progress.

Overtime, that little bit of progress adds up.

My husband and I recently purchased a REALLY cheap robot vac.  It's small. It doesn't have a large canister.  It doesn't map the floor. It just randomly moves about sucking things up.   And we love it!  It's great!

Why?  Because we are comparing it to not vacuuming at all.  This things doesn't cover the entire floor when it goes out. Heck- it may miss a room entirely. But it vacuums part of the floor. And over the period of a week - it probably gets to 90% of our floor. Which is 90% of the floor vacuumed imperfectly - which is way way way better than zero percent of the floor vacuumed perfectly. 

So go ahead - do it poorly. Just do it. 

Happiness Experts

I was contacted by Online College Courses who said they created an article on happiness experts because they like my blog so much.  Being a college related site, the lists consists of actual scientists who have done work in the field of happiness. (So no, I'm not on the list - not a scientist, just a practitioner).

(Note - Online College Courses asked me to remove the link as of June 1 2013 - so I can no longer share the link with you. which makes me unhappy because it was a cool article)

Regardless, the list had some great information about the science of how to be happy and that just goes to show, it's not just me spouting off motivational quotes. There is some real science behind it. Here are my favorites from the list:

1) Seligman - father of positive psychology - not only does his studies encourage us to focus on our joys, but apparently, what is more important than happiness is a personal belief that you are accomplishing something important. You need to have worthwhile goals to be happy.

3) Diener - he found that college students that are the most happy, have a strong support system of family and friends. So be sure to be good to the people who matter to you.

6) Csikszentmihalyi - A hungarian psychologist - apparently finding meaningful work that is challenging to you and working at it helps make you happy. You can't just think happy thoughts, you need to take constructive action to be happy.

7) Veenhoven - he's the guy who created the world database of happiness - check it out: http://www1.eur.nl/fsw/happiness/

So, to summarize, what we know from science is that to be happy, you need good strong positive relationships and you need to have meaningful work that you actually work at.

(Image from the Online College Course Blog)