This week I’ve been reading Richard Wiseman’s 59 Seconds: Think a Little, Change a Lot. This is a self-help book but with a big difference. As the book blurb says
Welcome to the new science of rapid change. In 59 Seconds psychologist Richard Wiseman exposes modern-day mind myths promoted by the self-help industry, and outlines quick and quirky techniques that help people to achieve their aims in minutes, not months.
And from New Scientist
This is a self-help book, but with a difference: almost everything in it is underpinned by peer-reviewed and often fascinating research. It could actually help you be a little happier, perform better at interviews, procrastinate less, improve your relationships, reduce your stress levels and be a better parent
And it does exactly what it says on the tin!
In the final chapter Wiseman briefly summarises ten things which he could explain in under a minute (the challenge he set himself at the start of the book) and which could make a difference:
- Develop the gratitude attitude
- Place a picture of a baby in your wallet
- Hang a mirror in your kitchen
- Buy a pot plant for the office
- Touch people lightly on the upper arm
- Wite about your relationship
- Deal with potential liars by closing your eyes and asking for an email
- Praise children’s effort over ability
- Visualise your self doing, not achieving
- Consider your legacy
No they aren’t all inherently obvious. And I’m not going to try to explain them here — you’ll just have to splash out a few quid on the paperback.
Do they work. Well clearly Wiseman thinks they do. I don’t know, although I follow the logic behind most of them. So what I’m going to do is try a little experiment of my own here: and that’s try the first on Wiseman’s list which he summarises as:
Develop the gratitude attitude
Having people list three things that they are grateful for in life, or three events that have gone especially well over the past week, can significantly increase their level of happiness for about a month. This, in turn, can cause them to be more optimistic about the future and improve their physical health.
So each weekend I’ll write a short post about at least three (I’ll aim for five) things which have made me happy or which I’m grateful for over the last week. And I’ll aim to do this trough to at least the end of 2012. There’s no control group so it will be hard to know how well it succeeds, other than maybe my qualitative perceptions — but then that is at least half of what it’s all about. Anthony Powell attributes to his character General Conyers in Books Do Furnish a Room:
The General, speaking one felt with authority, always insisted that, if you bring off adequate preservation of your personal myth, nothing much else in life matters. It is not what happens to people that is significant, but what they think happens to them.
So here are my first five things which have made me happy/grateful over the last week:
- An excellent Anthony Powell Annual Lecture last evening from Prof. Vernon Bogdanor
- Noreen
- A stunning flower on our Hibiscus
- Sunshine
- Beaujolais Nouveau
The moon lives twenty-eight days and this is our month. Each of these days represents something sacred to us: two of the days represent the Great Spirit; two are for Mother Earth; four are for the four winds; one is for the Spotted Eagle; one for the sun; and one for the moon; one is for the Morning Star; and four are for the four ages; seven for our seven great rites; one is for the buffalo; one for the fire; one for the water; one for the rock; and finally, one is for the two-legged people. If you add all these days up you will see that they come to twenty-eight. You should know also that the buffalo has twenty-eight ribs, and that in our war bonnets we usually wear twenty-eight feathers. You see, there is a significance for everything, and these are things that are good for men to know and to remember.
Campbell: That’s exactly it. That’s the significance of the puberty rites. In primal societies, there are teeth knocked out, there are scarifications, there are circumcisions, there are all kinds of things done. So you don’t have your little baby body any more, you’re something else entirely.
We now return to the spring of 1593 and the events leading up to the killing of Christopher Marlowe … with a new understanding of the continuity of secret politics as a factor in his life. He is remembered as a poet … and as a wild young blasphemer in an age of enforced devotion, but he was also a spy … one of hundreds of such men, part of a maverick army of intelligencers and projectors on which the government of the day depended, sometimes out of a genuine need for information, but often in ways that relate more to political expediency, to courtly in-fighting, to police-state repression.
Even the cats were different, and Aubrey could recall when ‘the common English Catt was white with some blewish piednesse sc gallipot-blew, the race or breed of them are now almost lost’ … Aubrey says that Archbishop Laud had been ‘a great lover of Catts. He was presented with some Cypruss-catts, our Tabby-catts, which were sold at first for 5li a piece. This was about 1637 or 1638’. Tabbies are still called ‘cyprus cats’ in Norfolk.
I have a very proper present for your Lordship. I know your love of antiquities makes you a little superstitious. I have an elderstick, that was cut in the minute that the sun entered Taurus. Such a planetary cutting of it gives virtue to stop bleeding to which you know you are subject. If you desire to know more of the time and manner of cutting it, you must consult Aubrey’s Miscellanies. You may meet with it without doubt amongst your father’s collection of mad books.
