Rendering yourself more efficient — either by implementing various productivity techniques or by driving yourself harder — won't generally result in … - Oliver Burkeman

...once you have resolved to embrace the ideology of positive thinking, you will find a way to interpret virtually any eventuality as a justification for thinking positively. You need never spend time considering how your actions might go wrong.

As the American author Jay Jennifer Matthews puts it in her excellently titled short book Radically Condensed Instructions for Being Just as You Are, 'We cannot get anything out of life.14 There is no outside where we could take this thing to. There is no little pocket, situated outside of life, [to which we could] steal life's provisions and squirrel them away. The life of this moment has no outside.' Living more fully in the present may be simply a matter of finally realising that you never had any other option but to be here now. 9.

We seek the fulfilment of strong romantic relationships and friendships, yet striving too hard to achieve security in such relationships stifles them; their flourishing depends on a certain degree of not being protected, of being open to experiences both negative and positive.