"The Time Paradox" by Philip Zimbardo & John Boyd

• Your attitudes toward time have a profound impact on your life and your world, yet you seldom recognize it.
• Moderate attitudes toward the past, the present, and the future are indicative of health, while extreme attitudes are indicative of biases that lead predictably to unhealthy patterns of living.
• Time is our most valuable possession.
• People are more likely to regret actions not taken, regardless of outcome.
• You are the only one who can make your time matter. If not you, who? If not know, when?
• In daily life, when faced with routine decisions, people conserve their thought cycles and rely instead on mental heuristics--simple, practical rule of thumb that we learn through trial and error.
• Your time perspective reflects attitudes, beliefs, and values related to time.
• Most people assume that their memories accurately capture what happened in the past and that these memories are permanent. Unfortunately, memories do change over time. Memories are reconstructed, and their reconstruction is influenced by current attitudes, beliefs, and available information. This reconstructive nature of the past means that how we think and feel today influences how we remember yesterday.
• Our memories are fallible. We can forget things that actually happened, and we can remember things that did not.
• Your attitude towards events in the past matter more than the events themselves.
• You cannot change what happened in the past, but you can change your attitudes toward what happened.
• The holistic present is a health perspective to have.
• Flow is involvement in the process of whatever you are doing. When in flow, you are not focused on the product of the process in which you are engaged.
• There are countless techniques for promoting present orientation. Some of them, such as meditation, yoga, and self-hypnosis, have been used for hundreds, if not thousands, of years. If you currently practice one of these techniques, terrific!
• The future, like the past, is never experienced directly. It is a psychologically constructed mental state.
• It turns out that when we practice succeeding at a task mentally, our performance actually does improve.
• Emotions deal with the present. Thinking prepares for the future.
• Volunteering not only serves the social good but, as research has shown, improves the health of those who perform it.
• It is vital to sustain a sense of personal agency in which you make meaningful choices about all aspects of your life. Do not yield responsibility or freedom of choice to others as long as you have the capacity to act rationally.
• Couples with mismatched time perspectives will be prone to miscommunication and misunderstanding.
• Whether you look for happiness in the past, the present, or the future, you experience happiness only in the present.
• Nothing will increase your baseline level of happiness for long, not even money.
• One way to increase the amount of time that you spend in the present is to practice mindfulness.
• Happiness is not a destination but a quest, a never-ending expedition to nowhere in particular. The direction in which you head matters less than that you keep moving forward and exploring.
• One thing that generally makes us happy is success.
• Identify the things in your life that make you happy, and do more of them. Identify the things in your life that make you unhappy, and do fewer of them.
• The greatest gift that you can give to others and to yourself is time.
• The primary function of our educational system is the domestication of present-hedonistic children and transformation of them into future-oriented adults ready to assume their place on the factory line.
• Your time perspective biases you.
• Start to do more by doing less.
• Work hard when it’s time to work. Play hard when it’s time to play.
• Time is what you make of it. Life is what you make of it. You can make your time matter. Now it not the time to wait. Now is the time to act. Now is the time to make the most of the time of your life.
• Finding purpose is a personal quest.
• If you can, help other people. If you cannot, at least don’t hurt them.