Happy Thoughts: Here are the things proven to make you happier:

 

What’s the secret to a head full of happy thoughts?

Time to round up the research on living a happy life to see what we can use.
First, yeah, a good chunk of happiness is controlled by your genes but there’s a lot you can do to make yourself happier. Many of these techniques have been repeatedly tested and even worked with the clinically depressed.

Gratitude, Gratitude, Gratitude

I can’t emphasize this one enough. Showing gratitude for the good things you have is the most powerful happiness boosting activity there is.

It will make you happier.

It will improve your relationships.

It can make you a better person.

It can make life better for everyone around you.

Bronze medalists are happier than silver medalists. Why? They feel grateful to get a medal at all.
Every night before you go to bed write three good things that happened to you that day. Jotting those down is pretty much all it takes to get a boost in well-being over time.
There’s a second lesson here: the reverse is also true. Keeping track of the bad things will make you miserable. A convenient memory is a powerful thing. Do not train your brain to see the negative, teach it to see the positive.
Wanna make yourself and someone else extremely happy? Try a gratitude visit. Write someone a letter thanking them and telling them how much what they have done for you means. Visit them and read it in person. It’s a proven happiness WMD. More info here.

Do what you are good at as often as you can

“Signature strengths” are the things you are uniquely good at and using them increases happy thoughts. Exercising signature strengths is why starving artists are happier with their jobs.
Think about the best possible version of yourself and move toward that. Signature strengths are the secret to experiencing more “flow” at work and in life.

Spend as much time as possible with people you like

Spend as much time as possible with people you like. The happiest people are social with strong relationships. Not spending more time with people we love is something we regret the most.

Being able to spend more time with friends provides an increase in happiness worth up to an additional $133,000 a year. (Values for your other relationships are here.)

Being compassionate makes us happier (causal, not correlative.) Share the best events of your day with loved ones and ask them to do the same. And compliment them — we love compliments more than money or sex.

But I’m an introvert, you say? A little bit of extraversion here would do you good. Happiness is more contagious than unhappiness so with amount of exposure to others well-being scales.

Money is good. Many other things are better.

After about 75K a year, money has minimal effects on happiness. Read that again. Not that money won’t increase happiness but if you want to be happier your time and energy are better spent elsewhere. It will not increase your moment to moment mood.
The Amish are as satisfied as billionaires and slumdwellers can be surprisingly happy. The happiest of all income groups is people making 50-75k a year. Money is good but wanting money can be bad.

Give

Giving makes us happier than receiving. In fact, it can create a feedback loop of happiness in your life. Volunteering makes us happier and can therefore be the most selfless way to be selfish.
Helping others reach their goals brings joy. Doing nice things for others today can literally make you happier for the rest of the week.

Savor

Take time to really enjoy the good things. What are the best ways to savor?

• Positive mental time travel: Happy memories or looking forward to something
• Being present: Not letting your mind wander and being absorbed in the moment.

Savoring is one of the secrets of the happiest people. Focusing on the limited time you have in this life is a good way to remind you to savor what is important.

Strive

You don’t usually do what brings you joy, you do what is easy. Set ambitious goals and strive. Thinking about what happens to you in terms of your self-esteem will crush you — look at life as growing and learning.
Sitting on the couch watching TV does not make you happy. You are happier when you are busy and are probably have more fun at work than at home. Thinking and working can beat sad feelings. A wandering mind is not a happy mind. Mastering skills is stressful in the short term and happiness-boosting in the long term.

Be optimistic, even to the border of delusion

Optimism is key. Yes, pessimism softens the blow of bad news but it isn’t worth it.
Does this make you out of touch with reality? Maybe but being a little deluded is good:

• People with positive illusions about their relationship are more satisfied, score higher on love and trust and have fewer problems.

• Overconfidence increases producitivity and improves teamwork.

• “Self-deception has been associated with stress reduction, a positive self-bias, and increased pain tolerance, all of which could enhance motivation and performance during competitive tasks.“

Love means being slightly deluded. Happy people believe their partner is a little more awesome than they really are. Someone you think is great who also thinks you’re great — it’s one of the primary things you should look for in a marriage partner.
Thinking happy thoughts, giving hugs and smiling sound like unscientific hippie silliness but they all work.

Fundamentals are fundamental

Cranky? Before you blame the world, eat something. Take a nap — it can purge negative emotions and increase happy thoughts. Sleep is vital because your mood in the morning affects your mood all day.
Get your sleep. You cannot get away with cheating yourself on sleep and being tired makes it harder to be happy.

Frequency beats intensity

Lots of little good things is the path to happiness. You want frequent boosts not rare big stuff. (And this explains the best method of how to split a dinner bill with friends.) For the most part, don’t bother to try and reduce the bad so much as you increase the good.
Stop thinking about big events that might make you thrilled — it’s the little things of everyday life that make lasting improvements to our happiness. You’re not going to win the lottery and it wouldn’t have the impact you think it would.

Avoid life’s most common regrets

We know what people most often regret before they die:

1. I wish I’d had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.

2. I wish I didn’t work so hard.

3. I wish I’d had the courage to express my feelings.

4. I wish I had stayed in touch with my friends.

5. I wish that I had let myself be happier.

There are things you can do every day to improve your life.

6 hostage negotiation techniques that will get you what you want

How does hostage negotiation get people to change their minds?

The Behavioral Change Stairway Model was developed by the FBI’s hostage negotiation unit, and it shows the 5 steps to getting someone else to see your point of view and change what they’re doing.
It’s not something that only works with barricaded criminals wielding assault rifles — it applies to most any form of disagreement.
There are five steps:

1. Active Listening: Listen to their side and make them aware you’re listening.
2. Empathy: You get an understanding of where they’re coming from and how they feel.
3. Rapport: Empathy is what you feel. Rapport is when they feel it back. They start to trust you.
4. Influence: Now that they trust you, you’ve earned the right to work on problem solving with them and recommend a course of action.
5. Behavioral Change: They act. (And maybe come out with their hands up.)

The problem is, you’re probably screwing it up.

What you’re doing wrong

In all likelihood you usually skip the first three steps. You start at 4 (Influence) and expect the other person to immediately go to 5 (Behavioral Change).
And that never works.
Saying “Here’s why I’m right and you’re wrong” might be effective if people were fundamentally rational.
But they’re not.
From my interview with former head of FBI international hostage negotiation, Chris Voss:

…business negotiations try to pretend that emotions don’t exist. What’s your best alternative to a negotiated agreement, or ‘BATNA’?  That’s to try to be completely unemotional and rational, which is a fiction about negotiation. Human beings are incapable of being rational, regardless… So instead of pretending emotions don’t exist in negotiations, hostage negotiators have actually designed an approach that takes emotions fully into account and uses them to influence situations, which is the reality of the way all negotiations go…

The most critical step in the Behavioral Change Staircase is actually the first part: Active listening.
The other steps all follow from it. But most people are terrible at listening.
Here’s Chris again:

If while you’re making your argument, the only time the other side is silent is because they’re thinking about their own argument, they’ve got a voice in their head that’s talking to them. They’re not listening to you. When they’re making their argument to you, you’re thinking about your argument, that’s the voice in your head that’s talking to you. So it’s very much like dealing with a schizophrenic.

If your first objective in the negotiation, instead of making your argument, is to hear the other side out, that’s the only way you can quiet the voice in the other guy’s mind. But most people don’t do that. They don’t walk into a negotiation wanting to hear what the other side has to say. They walk into a negotiation wanting to make an argument. They don’t pay attention to emotions and they don’t listen.

The basics of active listening are pretty straightforward:

1. Listen to what they say. Don’t interrupt, disagree or “evaluate.”
2. Nod your head, and make brief acknowledging comments like “yes” and “uh-huh.”
3. Without being awkward, repeat back the gist of what they just said, from their frame of reference.
4. Inquire. Ask questions that show you’ve been paying attention and that move the discussion forward.

So what six techniques do FBI hostage negotiation professionals use to take it to the next level?

1. Ask open-ended questions

You don’t want yes/no answers, you want them to open up.
Via Crisis Negotiations, Fourth Edition: Managing Critical Incidents and Hostage Situations in Law Enforcement and Corrections:

A good open-ended question would be “Sounds like a tough deal. Tell me how it all happened.” It is non-judgmental, shows interest, and is likely to lead to more information about the man’s situation. A poor response would be “Do you have a gun? What kind? How many bullets do you have?” because it forces the man into one-word answers, gives the impression that the negotiator is more interested in the gun than the man, and communicates a sense of urgency that will build rather than defuse tension.

2. Effective pauses

Pausing is powerful. Use it for emphasis, to encourage someone to keep talking or to defuse things when people get emotional.
Gary Noesner, author of Stalling for Time: My Life as an FBI Hostage Negotiator has said:

Eventually, even the most emotionally overwrought subjects will find it difficult to sustain a one-sided argument, and they again will return to meaningful dialogue with negotiators. Thus, by remaining silent at the right times, negotiators actually can move the overall negotiation process forward.

3. Minimal Encouragers

Brief statements to let the person know you’re listening and to keep them talking.
Gary Noesner:

Even relatively simple phrases, such as “yes,” “O.K.,” or “I see,” effectively convey that a negotiator is paying attention to the subject. These responses will encourage the subject to continue talking and gradually relinquish more control of the situation to the negotiator.

4. Mirroring

Repeating the last word or phrase the person said to show you’re listening and engaged. Yes, it’s that simple — just repeat the last word or two:
Gary Noesner:

For example, a subject may declare, “I’m sick and tired of being pushed around,” to which the negotiator can respond, “Feel pushed, huh?”

5. Paraphrasing

Repeating what the other person is saying back to them in your own words. This powerfully shows you really do understand and aren’t merely parroting.
From my interview with former head of FBI international hostage negotiation, Chris Voss:

The idea is to really listen to what the other side is saying and feed it back to them. It’s kind of a discovery process for both sides. First of all, you’re trying to discover what’s important to them, and secondly, you’re trying to help them hear what they’re saying to find out if what they are saying makes sense to them.

6. Emotional Labeling

Give their feelings a name. It shows you’re identifying with how they feel. Don’t comment on the validity of the feelings — they could be totally crazy — but show them you understand.
Via Crisis Negotiations, Fourth Edition: Managing Critical Incidents and Hostage Situations in Law Enforcement and Corrections:

A good use of emotional labeling would be “You sound pretty hurt about being left. It doesn’t seem fair.” because it recognizes the feelings without judging them. It is a good Additive Empathetic response because it identifies the hurt that underlies the anger the woman feels and adds the idea of justice to the actor’s message, an idea that can lead to other ways of getting justice.

A poor response would be “You don’t need to feel that way. If he was messing around on you, he was not worth the energy.” It is judgmental. It tells the subject how not to feel. It minimizes the subject’s feelings, which are a major part of who she is. It is Subtractive Empathy.

10 Things Should You Do Every Day To Improve Your Life

10 things that scientific research shows can help improve your life.

1) Get out in nature

You probably seriously underestimate how important this is. (Actually, there’s research that says you do.) Being in nature reduces stress, makes you more creative, improves your memory and may even make you a better person.

2) Exercise

We all know how important this is, but few people do it consistently. Other than health benefits too numerous to mention, exercise makes you smarter, happier, improves sleep, increases libido and makes you feel better about your body. A Harvard study that has tracked a group of men for more than 70 years identified it as one of the secrets to a good life.

3) Spend time with friends and family

Harvard happiness expert Daniel Gilbert identified this as one of the biggest sources of happiness in our lives. Relationships are worth more than you think (approximately an extra $131,232 a year.) Not feeling socially connected can make you stupider and kill you. Loneliness can lead to heart attack, stroke and diabetes. The longest lived people on the planet all place a strong emphasis on social engagement and good relationships are more important to a long life than even exercise. Friends are key to improving your life. Share good news and enthusiatically respond when others share good news with you to improve your relationships. Want to instantly be happier? Do something kind for them.

4) Express gratitude

It will make you happier.
It will improve your relationships.
It can make you a better person.
It can make life better for everyone around you.

5) Meditate

Meditation can increase happiness, meaning in life, social support and attention span while reducing anger, anxiety, depression and fatigue. Along similar lines, prayer can make you feel better — even if you’re not religious.

6) Get enough sleep

You can’t cheat yourself on sleep and not have it affect you. Being tired actually makes it harder to be happy. Lack of sleep = more likely to get sick. “Sleeping on it” does improve decision making. Lack of sleep can make you more likely to behave unethically. There is such a thing as beauty sleep.
Naps are great too. Naps increase alertness and performance on the job, enhance learning ability and purge negative emotions while enhancing positive ones. Here’s how to improve your naps.

7) Challenge yourself

Learning another language can keep your mind sharp. Music lessons increase intelligence. Challenging your beliefs strengthens your mind. Increasing willpower just takes a little effort each day and it’s more responsible for your success than IQ. Not getting an education or taking advantage of opportunities are two of the things people look back on their lives and regret the most.

8) Laugh

People who use humor to cope with stress have better immune systems, reduced risk of heart attack and stroke, experience less pain during dental work and live longer. Laughter should be like a daily vitamin. Just reminiscing about funny moments can improve your relationship. Humor has many benefits.

9) Touch someone

Touching can reduce stress, improve team performance, and help you be persuasive. Hugs make you happier. Sex may help prevent heart attacks and cancer, improve your immune system and extend your life.

10) Be optimistic

Optimism can make you healthier, happier and extend your life. The Army teaches it in order to increase mental toughness in soldiers. Being overconfident improves performance.

What are the 18 secrets to giving a presentation like Steve Jobs?

In his book The Presentation Secrets of Steve Jobs Carmine Gallo lays out 18 steps you can follow to give talks like the founder of Apple:

• “Plan in analog.” – Don’t get stuck in PowerPoint from the start. Play with ideas loosely on whiteboards or index cards.

• “Answer the one question that matters most.” And that question is “Why should I care?”

• “Develop a messianic sense of purpose.” Where is your passion for this subject coming from? Convey that.

• “Create Twitter-like headlines.” – Be to the point in your copy. People don’t want to read, they want to hear a story.

• “Draw a road map.” – Use a three act structure so your audience feels the presentation is organized, with a beginning, middle and end.

• “Introduce the antagonist.” – What’s the problem that needs to be solved or the enemy to be overcome?

• “Reveal the conquering hero.” – What’s the solution to the problem? What’s the new angle or development that will lead to victory?

• “Channel their inner Zen.” – Keep everything simple, to the point and minimalist.

• “Dress up your numbers.” – Present stats in a context that is relevant to your audience.

• “Use ‘amazingly zippy’ words.” – Review your copy closely, and edit, edit, edit.

• “Share the stage.” – It’s not a one-man show. Rotate in other presenters if possible.

• “Stage your presentation with props.” – Add life and break up stretches of talk by giving demos.

• “Reveal a Holy Shit moment.” – There’s always a surprise at the end — a scripted one.

• “Master stage presence.” – Manage your body language and delivery. Match them to what your presentation requires.

• “Make it look effortless.” – Rehearse, rehearse, rehearse.

• “Wear the appropriate costume.” – “Dress like the leader you want to become.”

• “Toss the script.” – Once you’ve rehearsed it all, make it relaxed and natural.

• “Have fun.” – Even if things go sideways, roll with it.

6 Ways to Encourage Innovative Ideas

1) Challenge

It’s all about assigning the right person to the right project — but most companies don’t bother to get to know their employees well enough to do that.
Via The Innovator’s Cookbook: Essentials for Inventing What Is Next:
Of all the things managers can do to stimulate creativity, perhaps the most efficacious is the deceptively simple task of matching people with the right assignments. Managers can match people with jobs that play to their expertise and their skills in creative thinking, and ignite intrinsic motivation. Perfect matches stretch employees’ abilities. The amount of stretch, however, is crucial: not so little that they feel bored but not so much that they feel overwhelmed and threatened by a loss of control.
That final sentence, I think, is key. Amabile doesn’t reference the word, but it sounds like what this does is help engineer “flow“.

2) Freedom

Companies should define goals but let workers have some autonomy in how to get there.
Via The Innovator’s Cookbook: Essentials for Inventing What Is Next:
When it comes to granting freedom, the key to creativity is giving people autonomy concerning the means–that is, concerning process–but not necessarily the ends. People will be more creative, in other words, if you give them freedom to decide how to climb a particular mountain. You needn’t let them choose which mountain to climb. In fact, clearly specified strategic goals often enhance people’s creativity.

3) Resources

Too little time or money can both dampen creativity at work.
Via The Innovator’s Cookbook: Essentials for Inventing What Is Next:
Organizations routinely kill creativity with fake deadlines or impossibly tight ones. The former create distrust and the latter cause burnout. In either case, people feel overcontrolled and unfulfilled–which invariably damages motivation. Moreover, creativity often takes time…They keep resources tight, which pushes people to channel their creativity into finding additional resources, not in actually developing new products or services.

4) Work-Group Features

Companies kill creativity by encouraging homogenous teams.
These groups do find solutions more quickly and have high morale–but their lack of diversity doesn’t lead to much creativity.
Via The Innovator’s Cookbook: Essentials for Inventing What Is Next:
If you want to build teams that comes up with creative ideas, you must pay careful attention to the design of such teams. That is, you must create mutually supportive groups with a diversity of perspectives and backgrounds. Why? Because when teams comprise people with various intellectual foundations and approaches to work–that is, different expertise and creative thinking styles–ideas often combine and combust in exciting and useful ways.

5) Supervisory Encouragement

Support and recognition by bosses isn’t just nice, it’s essential to creativity at work.
Via The Innovator’s Cookbook: Essentials for Inventing What Is Next:
Certainly, people can find their work interesting or exciting without a cheering section–for some period of time. But to sustain such passion, most people need to feel as if their work matters to the organization or to some important group of people.

6) Organizational Support

Companies that mandate information sharing and collaboration while discouraging politics will see creativity thrive.
Via The Innovator’s Cookbook: Essentials for Inventing What Is Next:
Most important, an organization’s leaders can support creativity by mandating information sharing and collaboration and by ensuring that political problems do not fester. Information sharing and collaboration support all three components of creativity… That sense of mutual purpose and excitement so central to intrinsic motivation invariably lessens when people are cliquish or at war with one another. Indeed, our research suggests that intrinsic motivation increases when people are aware that those around them are excited by their jobs.

Final Note

Of the three big factors in creativity that Amabile calls out, where most companies go wrong is motivation.
They either ignore it or try to achieve it by money — a very inefficient mechanism at best.
The best employees are motivated from inside and companies that nurture that passion see the best results.
Amabile calls upon Michael Jordan as a perfect example.
Via The Innovator’s Cookbook: Essentials for Inventing What Is Next:
And Michael Jordan, perhaps the most creative basketball player ever, had “a love of the game” clause inserted into his contract; he insisted that he be free to play pickup basketball games anytime he wished.

How to be more effective at work

1) Have A Solid Daily Ritual

Here’s a solid one from Peter Bregman that will help you maximize use of your time .
Via 18 Minutes: Find Your Focus, Master Distraction, and Get the Right Things Done:

STEP 1 (5 Minutes): Your Morning Minutes. This is your opportunity to plan ahead. Before turning on your computer, sit down with the to-do list you created…and decide what will make this day highly successful…

STEP 2 (1 Minute Every Hour): Refocus. …Set your watch, phone, or computer to ring every hour and start the work that’s listed on your calendar. When you hear the beep, take a deep breath and ask yourself if you spent your last hour productively. Then look at your calendar and deliberately recommit to how you are going to use the next hour. Manage your day hour by hour. Don’t let the hours manage you.

STEP 3 (5 Minutes): Your Evening Minutes. At the end of your day, shut off your computer and review how the day went, asking yourself… questions like: How did the day go? What did I learn about myself? Is there anyone I need to update? Shoot off a couple of emails or calls to make sure you’ve communicated with the people you need to contact.

2) Make Things Automatic

The secret to getting more done is to make things automatic. Decisons exhaust you:

The counterintuitive secret to getting things done is to make them more automatic, so they require less energy.

It turns out we each have one reservoir of will and discipline, and it gets progressively depleted by any act of conscious self-regulation. In other words, if you spend energy trying to resist a fragrant chocolate chip cookie, you’ll have less energy left over to solve a difficult problem. Will and discipline decline inexorably as the day wears on.

Build routines and habits so that you’re not deciding, you’re just doing. When you first learn to drive it’s 1000 activities like steering, shifting, checking mirrors, braking — but with practice you turned it into autopilot and it’s no stress at all.

3) Checklists are magic

Use checklists. Yeah, everybody says that. And you probably don’t consistently do it.
Harvard surgeon Atul Gawande analyzed their effectiveness in his book The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right. What happens when you consistently use checklists in an intensive care unit?

The proportion of patients who didn’t receive the recommended care dropped from seventy per cent to four per cent; the occurrence of pneumonias fell by a quarter; and twenty-one fewer patients died than in the previous year. The researchers found that simply having the doctors and nurses in the I.C.U. make their own checklists for what they thought should be done each day improved the consistency of care to the point that, within a few weeks, the average length of patient stay in intensive care dropped by half.

What makes for a good checklist? Be specific and include time estimates.

4) Beat Procrastination

Use dashes:

“…a dash, which is simply a short burst of focused activity during which you force yourself to do nothing but work on the procrastinated item for a very short period of time—perhaps as little as just one minute.”

A big part of procrastination is dread. The task seems terrible and overwhelming. And that’s the first issue that needs attacking: those feelings.
By breaking the problem down into smaller chunks — even comically small ones that require only 1 minute of activity — and doing just that one little thing, you prove to yourself the task isn’t insurmountable.
The most motivating thing in the world is progress. Any trivial progress can motivate and boost positive emotions that will help build a productive momentum.
So this sounds good in theory but you’re probably thinking: what’s that first step and won’t that be horribly, horribly painful? For any procrastinated task, first thing is to take one minute and just write down the steps you need to do to finish the task.

This should be enough to kill negative emotions, build some momentum and get you going.

5) How to relieve stress

The secret to being stress free is feeling in control:
Via Your Brain at Work: Strategies for Overcoming Distraction, Regaining Focus, and Working Smarter All Day Long:

Over and over, scientists see that the perception of control over a stressor alters the stressor’s impact.

Do things that increase your control of a situation ahead of time. According to one study, the stress management technique that worked best was deliberately planning your day so that stress is minimized.
The best way to reduce job stress is to get a clear idea of what is expected of you.
The trick to not worrying about work stuff while at home is to make specific plans to address concerns before you leave the office.
Most of the things you instinctively do to relieve stress don’t work.
Via The Willpower Instinct: How Self-Control Works, Why It Matters, and What You Can Do To Get More of It:

The APA’s national survey on stress found that the most commonly used strategies were also rated as highly ineffective by the same people who reported using them. For example, only 16 percent of people who eat to reduce stress report that it actually helps them. Another study found that women are most likely to eat chocolate when they are feeling anxious or depressed, but the only reliable change in mood they experience from their drug of choice is an increase in guilt.

So what does work?

According to the American Psychological Association, the most effective stress-relief strategies are exercising or playing sports, praying or attending a religious service, reading, listening to music, spending time with friends or family, getting a massage, going outside for a walk, meditating or doing yoga, and spending time with a creative hobby. (The least effective strategies are gambling, shopping, smoking, drinking, eating, playing video games, surfing the Internet, and watching TV or movies for more than two hours.)

8 Things I Wish I'd Known As A Newlywed

We walked the aisle, said “I do,” and stuffed cake in each others faces when I was 24.
I wasn’t 25 before I realized that I had absolutely no idea how to be married.
I brought a lifetime of bad ideas and bloated expectations to this enigmatic relationship, and the deeper we got into marriage, the more ridiculous some of my most basic assumptions about it proved to be.
After slamming doors and screaming matches became regular hobbies of ours, I knew I needed to put some of these basic expectations to the test.
My personal exploration hasn’t ended—and ideally, never will. But here are a few things I’ve picked up along the way that could save newlyweds at least a few hard days.

1. Happily Ever After is a Perk—Not the Point.

Our modern obsession with being happy often makes it far easier for us to love happiness more than we ever love another human. And though being happy is a very real by-product of a healthy relationship, the value we put on personal fulfillment is so inflated, it’s causing us to miss one of the more beautiful purposes of marriage.
In Hebrew, the word used for marriage actually means "Fire." And not-so-coincidentally, fire is also the element used throughout ancient Hebrew culture to represent personal reformation. In this light, marriage, and its necessary—but often unhappy—friction, is seen less as a doorway to happily ever after and more as a tool in God’s hands to help us become increasingly beautiful—increasingly our best and brightest selves.

2. The Perks of Marriage are Incredible—but They Take Work.

Many experts say young people simply expect too much from marriage. But I tend to think that it's not what perks we expect, but how we expect to get them that sets us up for disappointment in marriage.
We walk the aisle, recite a few vows and subconsciously expect marriage to be a genie in a bottle without a price tag—freely giving out sustainable happiness, breathtaking sex and emotional security.
But you aren’t entitled to the benefits of love just because you put a ring on it. Those perks only come with intentional investment and personal sacrifice.

3. Good Consumers Make Bad Lovers.

The Hebrew word for love, ahava, has little to do with what one feels or receives. To the contrary ahava is actually a verb that means "I give."
Love is not the fleeting butterflies we get when looking into the eyes of our significant other. It's far simpler—and far wilder—than all of that. It is the big, small, mundane—but generous—choices to give to our spouse. And as we begin to orient ourselves to this brand of love that requires us to show up continually, we're sure to discover the beautiful paradox that it is.

4. Love is a Journey—Not a Free Fall.

Many of us think we meet someone, date, fall in love and then get married. We then expect to reap the rewards of love immediately—and inevitably learn that true love isn't, in fact, something we fall into. This state of "Love" (and all of its benefits) is developed over years of learning to relate to one another—it's a journey.
These benefits are very real perks of love, but we don’t simply fall into them. Why? Because trust requires time, true companionship comes from years of conversation, and the kind of romance that doesn't fade only comes from being intentional over the long-haul.

5. Marriage isn’t Just a Choice.

“I do.”
With those words, we choose to embark on a journey to learn how to give, to value and to care for another human as much as we do ourselves. But marriage isn’t just a choice we make on our wedding day. Its a choice we make every day.
A good friend says it this way, “Marriage isn’t something we accomplished the day we said ‘I do.’ It is an ongoing action of marrying our individual lives—with all of our thoughts, responses, fears and strengths—together.”

6. Marriage is Designed to be Priority No. 1.

One of the most useful tips I’ve been given on marriage comes from a rabbi who said, “All of your problems (financial, relational, marital, etc.) are because your marriage isn’t your highest priority (this is not considering relationship to the Divine). The gains that a spouse will feel on both a spiritual and material level defy description, once they make their marriage first place.”
The moment our spouse feels less important than our work, friends or hobbies—our efforts of love suddenly mean very little to them. But when marriage is given its rightful place in our priorities—our spouse becomes a partner and asset to every other area of life.

7. Your Spouse isn’t the Problem. You are.

It took me a long time (and an absurd number of yelling matches) to see my wife’s “issues” were actually just a reflection of much deeper brokenness in me.
This is the phenomenon Solomon of the Bible alludes to when he says, “As in water, face reflects face, so the heart of man reflects man.” Or the truth of what Rabbi Shalom Arush is pointing at when he says,
“You didn’t get married to correct your spouse. You got married to be corrected, by using your spouse as a mirror.”

8. The World Needs Love.

Social & scientific studies show that for better or worse, your marriage changes you, determines your spouse’s growth, affects your kids development, alters the future of your community and has implications on your economy.
Marriage is not simply a private endeavor between two people. When looking through the lens of research, healthy marriage is clearly a social good.
Our modern world doesn’t need any more millionaires or leaders or pastors or soldiers or philanthropists—not primarily, anyway. What the world needs are better lovers—husbands and wives committed to learning the unnatural art of loving another person.

Read more at http://www.relevantmagazine.com/life/relationships/8-things-i-wish-id-known-newlywed#FmF6bC5JuQ5jYows.99