Sonja Lyubomirsky, a psy­chol­o­gist of the Uni­ver­sity of Cal­i­for­nia sug­gests these eight prac­ti­cal things to a more sat­is­fy­ing life—or at least to give you a tem­po­rary boost. This is based on research by her and oth­ers. If you have time, you might want to check out your archives of Time Mag­a­zine (Jan­u­ary 17, 2005 issue), for their issue on Happiness.

1. Count your blessings.

One way to do this is with a “grat­i­tude jour­nal” in which you write down three to ?ve things for which you are cur­rently thankful—from the mun­dane (your peonies are in bloom) to the magni?cent (a child’s ?rst steps). Do this once a week, say, on Sun­day night. Keep it fresh by vary­ing your entries as much as possible.

A friend of mine have appar­ently been read­ing my posts on dis­cern­ment and deci­sion mak­ing the past weeks. He asked me over the week­end if he was meant to be in his job. We had a longish con­ver­sa­tion after­wards and we made sev­eral dis­cov­er­ies. These I will dis­cuss in more detail here.

First of all, let me say that I think it’s a human thing to ask whether we are meant to be doing some­thing, or meant to be with some­one. It’s some­thing very human to look for some kind of final­ity and ought­ness and mean­ing in things. It assures us not only that we are doing things right but that we are doing the right things.

This is from the Philip­pine Daily Inquirer. Very inter­est­ing points and some­thing to think about, spe­cially after our deba­cle in the last Olympics. In fact there is a new mea­sure for peo­ple nowa­days. Before, we talked about IQ (Intel­li­gence), and EQ (Emo­tional Quo­tient); right now, there is such a thing as AQ (Adver­sity Quo­tient). More on that in upcom­ing arti­cles. I am reprint­ing an excerpt of the arti­cle here; please click on the link below to read the rest of the article.

To over­come adver­sity is com­mon trait of cham­pi­ons
By Bev­erly T. Nativi­dad
Philip­pine Daily Inquirer
First Posted 01:10:00 08/17/2008

THE WORLD’S EYES ARE FIXED on the Bei­jing Olympics to wit­ness the feats of world cham­pi­ons. But the Olympics really serve to remind us that cham­pi­ons are not only found in the sports arena, they are also found in other areas of life.

This is an inter­est­ing arti­cle. Here is a Mex­i­can writer talk­ing about Manny Pacquiao–known to many Mex­i­cans as the “Mex­i­cu­tioner” or “Repub­lic Enemy #1″ for defeat­ing the best box­ers Mex­ico had to offer.

I did not edit the arti­cle so there would be some gram­mat­i­cal errors here and there.

The Mex­i­can Point of View
Hes­siquio Balderas

Pac­quiao here in Méx­ico is an icon. Despite he has beaten a large list of mex­i­can fight­ers. i´ve gone to cover many fights here in mex­ico (all over the coun­try) and its amaz­ing to see how the ring is the dirt floor, no ropes, no real referi, just two guys beat­ing each other with­out box­ing trunks, with­out box­ing shoes, just their daily out­fit. Wether its boots and pants. But they want to be Pac­quiao. You would hear the intro­duc­c­tions as Juan Anto­nio “El Pac­quiao“ Mar­tinez. Or in other venues the crowd would scream to the fighter who is agres­sive “lets go Pac­quiao“ this gives you an idea of how big Pac­quiao is here in Mexico.

Boing­bo­ing is #5 in the list of the Top 100 Blogs in the world right now. And rightly so.

Boing­bo­ing has the catchy tagline: A DIRECTORY OF WONDERFUL THINGS (which is a more suc­cinct tagline com­pared to COOL THINGS YOU PICK UP ON THE ROAD CALLED LIFE—this made me think. Should I replace this? What do you think?). And it is a direc­tory of really won­der­ful things.

It started out as a fanzine in 1988 by Mark Frauen­felder and Carla Sin­clair. Along with Mondo 2000, Boing Boing was an influ­ence in the devel­op­ment of the cyber­punk sub­cul­ture. Com­mon themes included tech­nol­ogy, futur­ism, sci­ence fic­tion, gad­gets, intel­lec­tual prop­erty, Dis­ney and politics.