Our wants and likes were shaped our ancestors. Desires and preferences that favored survival and mating gradually spread. But since wanting leads to action while liking leads to inaction, we’re wired for continual desire but fleeting contentment; for the pursuit of happiness but not its attainment.

We’re also wired to not notice the distinction. We inherited this from our ancestors, because those who repeatedly fell for the trick kept striving, climbing, and collecting, and they outcompeted any rivals who didn’t. So we want something, buy it or achieve it, like it less than we expected, and then want more of it. Money, status, promotions, shopping, nicotine…

Why does the distinction matter? Because we’re driven by our desires, but should be driven by our preferences. Because there are things you don’t naturally desire but would enjoy or benefit from. Because marketing manufactures wants and discourages liking; a permanently contented customer is a one-time buyer. Because being preoccupied with wanting interferes with liking; it’s hard to fully enjoy the present when you’re focused on changing it into something else.

So what should you do? Bring awareness to the differences between wanting and liking. See how each feels in your body: does wanting feel closed, tense, constricted? does liking feel open, relaxed, freeing? Add accountability to your desires by improving your affective forecasting skills: notice what you want, see how much you like it when you get it, and use that knowledge to choose what’s worth wanting. Do what you can to like more and want less, or even to consciously choose what you want. Do things you don’t desire but will enjoy or benefit from. And live more in the present than the future, favoring process over outcome and journey over destination.

Flow is a tremendously beneficial state of being. It contributes to the best kind of happiness: intensely pleasurable, infinitely renewable, and within your control. It also contributes to success, by enabling peak performance toward your goal and faster advancement toward mastery.

Flow requires a very specific set of conditions. There must be a clear goal, one requiring skill; beginners don’t feel flow. You need to believe you have the skills to meet the challenge. The goal must not be so hard that you can’t reach it, nor so easy that you can reach it without your full attention. And you need continuous and clear feedback about your progress toward the goal, so you know which direction to flow from moment to moment.

Although flow requires a goal, it’s more about the present than the future, more about the process than the outcome. Flow doesn’t arise when you do things you don’t want to be doing, no matter how meaningful the results will be to you. Flow arises when you do things you find intrinsically rewarding, as ends in themselves rather than purely as means to some other ends.

Flow also requires intense focus and absorption, to the exclusion of everything else, even self-awareness. You may lose orientation in time and place, forgetting where you are, or even that you are. Self-consciousness fades: all your energy is devoted to the performance itself, leaving none for your inner critic to worry about the risk of failure or what others will think of you.

Because these conditions are not part of our normal waking state, flow is rare and fleeting for most. Obstacles prevail: We often lack the necessary skill level. We opt for the easy route through life and avoid challenges when we can. We spend most of our time doing things we already know how to do. We often act without clear goals. We lack focus and are easily distracted. Our emotions sidetrack us. Our egos get in the way. We are too future-focused, sacrificing today for tomorrow, spending our time on activities we simply don’t enjoy.

But it’s possible to cultivate flow experiences. The first technique is selecting activities conducive to flow, ones that have the conditions mentioned above. The second technique is approaching any activity the right way: Give it your full attention, by quieting your mind and your environment and filtering out distractions. Make routine tasks challenging by imposing constraints. Focus on means over ends by cultivating curiosity and being more present. Banish your ego from the process and shut off your inner critic.

Interestingly, many of the skills needed for flow match those needed for living your best life:  curiosity… learning… mastery… quiet mind… egolessness… focus… presence… process over results… What’s more, the arrow goes in both directions. These traits foster happiness, meaning, and flow; and happiness, meaning and flow foster these traits. A simple recipe for a great life is to search for upward spirals like these, cultivate them, and then start climbing.

Perfectionism takes many forms: Needing to be perfect. Needing to become perfect. Needing to appear perfect. Perfect career, perfect relationship, perfect life.

For some, perfectionism arises from a mistaken belief that achievement is the best or only route to a good life, that happiness is a place and not a process. For others, it arises from a desire to win social approval by impressing others, avoiding criticism, not being seen making mistakes.

Whatever its source and whatever its form, perfection is impossible. What would it mean to have a perfect career, relationship, or life? No matter how you define it, there’s something you could change to make it even better. There is no perfect.

Even if perfection can’t be reached, could it be worth striving for? Maybe the higher you aim the higher you reach, even if you miss the target? Sometimes. But more often, perfectionism impedes success. Being afraid to put anything imperfect into the world stifles playfulness, creativity and experimentation, essentials for mastery and impact. Perfectionism encourages procrastination and inaction.

Not only does perfectionism often reduce success, it also reduces happiness. The problem often isn’t in wanting the ideal, but in needing it. When nothing but the best outcome is acceptable, disappointment is almost assured. And happiness is reduced not only at the destination but also on the journey. By straining compulsively toward an unrealistic goal, the present is sacrificed for the future, and perfectionism leads not to happiness but to anxiety.

But even if perfection isn’t worth striving for, appearing to be perfect could be desirable. But it isn’t. Working to impress others makes you accept their definition of success, focus too much on what’s easily measured, and base your self-worth on your achievements. If you believe your imperfections make you less worthy, your self-esteem will fall and you’ll be trapped in a cycle of perfoming, pleasing, proving. That’s not an ideal life, that’s an inauthentic life.

So what’s the solution? To free yourself from perfectionism:

• Abandon the pretense of perfectability. You aren’t perfect, won’t ever be perfect, and don’t need to be perfect. Same with everyone else.
• Bring awareness to your thoughts and actions, and notice when perfectionism is pulling at you.
• Learn to prioritize and focus, so you can be excellent at what’s important and good enough at everything else.
• Set your own goals.
• Be optimistic, and aim high. Reserve your contentment for the outcome, not the process.
• Define success based on effort, which is within your control, rather than outcome, which isn’t.
• Don’t worry about what others think.
• Be pulled by a desire for excellence, not pushed by a fear of imperfection.
• View mistakes as necessary steps on the path to improvement, not as flaws. See each attempt as training for the next. Think mastery, not victory.
• Derive satisfaction from giving your best effort to everything that matters. Let every act be a work of art, an expression of gratitude to your creator or the universe. Perfectionism is a burden; excellence is a celebration.

Purpose pervades life, gives breath to life, like air. Every action is in service of some goal. But not all purposes are meaningful; simply working toward a goal doesn’t endow the effort with value.

But consciousness lets you aspire to loftier, meaning-based purposes. It lets you figure out what you were meant to do, and use your talents in service of that meaning. By reshaping your life around noble purposes you can imbue your actions with value and live not just purposefully but meaningfully.

Meaningful purposes are intrinsically good, by virtue of their impact: creating value for the world. But they have other benefits too. They give you energy, motivating you to channel your passion into action. They give you focus, letting you confidently ignore the meaningless. They give you connection, bringing you closer to others with shared values. They give you esteem, increasing your sense of self-worth and fulfillment as you live a life of significance, integrity and authenticity. These benefits enable an upward spiral, since they foster happiness, which fosters meaning-making, which fosters happiness, and so on.

Is purpose discovered or invented? The word purpose has two definitions: the goal of an action, and the function of a thing brought into existence. If you believe you were brought into existence with some specific purpose, then your task is to discover that purpose. How do you think your creator wants you to behave? This could be futile speculation; or there might be clues hidden in the universe, in humanity, in yourself, placed there for you to discover.

If you don’t think your purpose is written in the stars, then your task is to invent your own meaningful purposes. No purpose of life need not imply no purpose in life; you can have a calling without a caller. If you do think the universe is purposeless, and if you think this implies that nothing is meaningful, start with the premise that reducing suffering has some value; even nihilists want their headaches to go away. Do what you can to reduce the suffering in yourself and others. From there it’s just a small step to accepting that there’s also value in helping people to flourish, to live the best lives they can. Find purpose in meaning, and meaning in value, and value in flourishing.

We’re wired to search for purposes, and quick to accept and cling to whatever purposes we find. Don’t unthinkingly accept purposes imposed by your genes, your culture, or your web of affiliations; purposes shaped by expectation or obligation are disempowering. But having an internal locus of purpose doesn’t mean having selfish purposes. The best purposes are directed outward, at something larger than the self. You can also help others discover and pursue their purposes.

What makes a good meaningful purpose? It should be:

• clear, concise, and specific
• focused but flexible
• energizing and nourishing
• rooted in love, not fear
• aligned with your fundamentals, especially your passions and desires
• something you connect with emotionally, not just intellectually
• grand and inspiring, worth building a life around

By default we tend to be forward-looking, goal-pursuing, results-focused. Why? Because we’re wired for a discontentment with the present and a striving for a better future. Because results are easier to measure and evaluate than processes. Because we know others judge us based on results and we tend to care too much what others think.

But focusing on process rather than outcome is a much better strategy. Why?

• It eliminates the noise of external factors. Success can follow a flawed effort and failure can follow a flawless effort. In those cases, judging performance by outcome will reinforce the wrong techniques. You’ll achieve mastery of a new skill more quickly if you can learn to detect those cases and reinforce the correct processes whether or not they happened to lead to the desired outcome in that instance.
• It encourages experimentation. When you’re wholly focused on a specific desired result, you’re less willing to try long shots, less inclined to experiment, less open to serendipity, and less likely to stumble on an even better outcome than the one you were aiming for
• It lets you enjoy the process more. Life is lived in the present, not the future, and happiness is a process, not a place. Focusing on process will let you engage more deeply with the present and experience it more fully, which will help you learn faster and experience life more completely.
• It puts you in control. You have only partial control over whether you reach a specific external goal. But you have complete control over the process you use. Whether you give your best effort is entirely within your power. An internal locus of control leads to empowerment, higher self-esteem, and success, all of which contribute meaningfully to life satisfaction.
• It lets you enjoy and benefit more from whatever outcome does occur. In the long run things rarely turn out the way we expect them to. If your happiness is predicated on your success, and if your success is predicated on a specific outcome, you are setting yourself up for a high likelihood of frustration and disappointment. If you instead let go of the need for any particular outcome, you increase your chances for success and contentment. It’s fine to desire a certain outcome; just don’t make your happiness contigent on it. Instead, derive happiness from knowing that you gave every attempt your best effort.
• It will give you confidence. Not confidence that you’ll succeed in the current attempt, but confidence that you’re on the right path to mastery. You’ll worry less about the future because you’ll know that you’ll be happy regardless of the outcome of any given situation or event. You’ll be more free to get out of your comfort zone, to be spontaneous and take risks. And being unattached to a specific outcome means you won’t be needy, or get upset when things don’t go as you had hoped. The more you focus on process over outcome, the more confident you’ll become, and there’s nothing more attractive than confidence.

Most days for most people are savorless. We don’t cultivate moments worth savoring. And when such moments do arrive, we’re too distracted by the busyness of life to notice. Rather than lingering on something good we get right to work on the search for something better.

Savoring is mindful enjoyment of the present experience. It’s a great source of happiness, pleasure, and meaning, the foundations of a well-lived life. It grounds you in the present, which fosters equanimity and gratitude. And it encourages awareness and a more vivid experiencing of your world.

Most people think taking pleasure in good things comes naturally, but savoring is a skill. Here’s how to savor, in eight easy steps:

• Anticipate: Watch for opportunities to savor. Plan to notice when they happen.
• Generate: Actively create savorous experiences; fill your days with them. Savor special moments of joy, transcendence, serendipity. Lover’s embrace. Child’s smile. Laughter, music, connection, achievement. Also savor the thousand details of everyday, “ordinary” experience. And vicariously savor the pleasurable experiences of people you care about.
• Attend to: When shining, glowing moments happen, wake up, take a step back and see yourself having the experience. Focus on the present; resist distractions and forget what else you could be doing. Be mindful, but non-judging and unreflective. If you’re with someone, actually be with them.
• Experience: Fully immerse yourself in the moment. Luxuriate in it. Use your senses for more than just information processing. Don’t just eat: taste. Don’t just hear music: feel it. Have a beginner’s mind, as if experiencing it for the first time.
• Appreciate: Treasure the moment. Realize how fortunate you are to be having this experience, and give thanks to your creator or the universe for it. Remember that this moment will soon end, and will never happen again, so this is your one chance to fully experience it.
• Intensify: Outwardly express your positive feelings in the moment, with unrestrained enthusiasm. Live out loud! Share the experience with others, especially people you care about. Take a mental or actual picture to more vividly remember pleasurable aspects of the experience, focusing on feelings more than facts.
• Extend: Let time slow down. Don’t let the moment get hijacked by negative emotions or distractions. Ride the buzz as long as you can. But don’t cling; let it linger, accepting that the moment will eventually pass but doing nothing to hasten its departure.
• Remember: Cherish delicious moments past. Let them be renewable sources of happiness. Reminisce with family and friends, not with a sense of wistful longing, but grateful that those experiences have become a part of you.

Gratitude is a feeling of ongoing thankfulness for what you have and an expression of your dependence upon the contributions and conditions that make those blessings possible.

We have so much to be thankful for, but often take it all for granted. In many ways, we’re hardwired for thanklessness. We focus our mental energy on what we lack, not what we have. We value scarcity, so everyday miracles go unappreciated. We’re driven by our emotions, seesawing as expectations and conditions change. We take for granted things we knew before we could appreciate their implications. We compare ourselves to others, and get no joy from shared blessings. These hardwired biases mask the reality of our condition and make lasting gratitude difficult.

What do you have to be grateful for? You exist; most possible things never will. You exist now; most things that existed no longer do. You are a person, a spectacular manifestation of life, capable of thought, awareness, emotion, language, music, laughter, love, and a thousand other amazing things. You are fortunate beyond comprehension. Be grateful for the abundance all around you. Be grateful for good things that have happened and will happen, and bad things that haven’t happened and won’t happen. Be grateful for every day, every meal, every breath.

Be grateful because it’s justified, but also because it’s a powerful enabler of happiness and meaning. Gratitude fosters the good: joy, savoring, resilience, self-esteem, life satisfaction. It also pushes away the bad: greed, envy, bitterness, stress, depression. And its benefits extend beyond the self; it encourages friendliness, forgiveness, and compassion, fostering a deeper caring about others and a desire to act on that caring. In a hundred ways it reduces suffering and increases happiness and meaning for you and those around you.

Gratitude is a skill that requires practice to master. Fortunately, it’s very highly learnable, but takes effort, so be compassionate toward yourself if it doesn’t come naturally. Bring awareness to your blessings. Cultivate a sense of deep appreciation of how privileged you are. Notice what you take for granted, and stop. Welcome new blessings into your life; know that you deserve them. Feel gratitude, not just intellectually, but also emotionally. Expand what you consider worthy of gratitude: not just gifts other people generously gave you, but everything positive in your life, regardless of its source.

Feeling gratitude is the first step; the second is expressing it. Make gratitude an external process, not an internal state. Let your appreciation for ongoing blessings color your interactions with the world. Thank others for being a part of what’s good in your life. Let your gratitude motivate you to improve their lives, not out of a sense of obligation or debt but because your gifts are too valuable to be wasted.

Life unfolds in the present. The past was, and the future will be, but the present is all that ever is. Now is the moment of power, where all decisions are made, all emotions are felt, all life is lived. Give the present the attention it deserves.

To be present is to experience yourself from moment to moment, awake to the immediacy, the nowness, of everything that’s happening around you. Celebrating the act of being, undistracted by the past or the future. Like a child at play: carefree, exuberant, unselfconscious.

Being present has other benefits as well. You’ll feel fewer negative emotions and more positive emotions. Guilt and regret result from a focus on the past. Fear and stress result from a focus on the future. A focus on the present fosters openness, equanimity, and gratitude.

How can you be more present?

– Through awareness. It’s hard to stay present because when you aren’t present, you’re not there to notice your absence. But with practice you can awaken to the richness of the present moment and appreciate your role in it. Thinking about being present is not being present, so turn off your analytical mind and turn on your observing mind. Focus on your body, which is always in the present no matter where your mind is. Or your breath, or your senses, or your surroundings. Anything that can anchor you in the current moment.

– Through acceptance. Don’t resist the present; embrace it. As each moment reveals itself to you, greet it with unhurried appreciation. Surrender to whatever the moment brings, and be open to the present as it opens into the future. Love what is and what is becoming.

– Through involvement. Inhabit the present more fully by sensing the immediacy of experience, free of yesterday’s regrets and tomorrow’s expectations. Get out of the there-and-then of thinking and into the here-and-now of experiencing. Welcome each new moment, and dance with it.

– Through authenticity. Stop worrying about what others will think. See every new moment as an opportunity to embrace your passions, to live in alignment with your values, to fill the present with what matters.

Some people focus on the present, but in the wrong way. They place too much weight on what they’re doing today. But this is future-focus in disguise: valuing today merely for its perceived impact on tomorrow. The results are worry, fear and stress. It also makes them focus on only those aspects of the present that are useful for the future, to the neglect of everything else. Being present is not overweighting certain aspects of what’s happening now, but connecting more fully with all of it. Treat today as an end, not just a means to some longed-for tomorrow.

Right now, this thing that’s happening is your life. You have been blessed with this instant, and this one, and this one. These moments will only happen once. Be present for them.

– Be grateful for the time you have. You can lament that your time is finite, or you can rejoice that you have any time at all. You didn’t do anything to deserve a life. The sequence of events necessary for you to have arisen out of nothing were so unimaginably improbable that you should be stunned that you’re here. Out of all of the people who could’ve existed, you’re among the vanishingly small percentage who actually do.

You can complain that you don’t have much time, or you can celebrate that you have a lot of time. At the cosmic scale, your life is an infinitesimal dot between two infinite spans. But at the human scale, a lifetime is long enough to do amazing things. To pursue and master a dozen passions. To build a hundred friendships. To love and lose and love again, and again. To chase your dreams and, if you care enough to work hard, to reach them. To have an exciting, fulfilling, meaningful, awesome life.

– Feel compassion for others. Each of them is also hanging from a branch that will eventually break. Let the commonality of our plight foster empathy and kinship. Help them to cope with their mortality and to get the most out of the time they do have.

– Live as long as you can, and stay as healthy as you can. Grasp the branch firmly; don’t fall before it breaks. And help others to live healthier, longer lives as well.

– Be less self-centric. The idea of an ongoing, bounded self is an illusion. The child you once were no longer exists; as you change you are continually dying and being reborn. With this frame of mind, what we call death affects only the last of a long series of yous, all of whose predecessors had already passed on.

In the bigger picture, your body is on loan from the universe. It’s an incredibly fortunate collection of atoms forged in stellar furnaces and pulled together by gravity or some deeper, hidden force. When you’re finished with your body, its atoms will be recycled to further serve spirit along its upward journey toward ever more complex and useful forms. Celebrate that you get to participate in such a beautiful process.

– Take more risks. Each of us descended from an incredibly long and unbroken series of creatures who survived long enough to reproduce, and so we’re instinctively wired for survival. This makes us fearful of death but not fearful of living wrong. Ignoring mortality encourages the belief that we have something to lose. But it’s merely a question of when, not if. You’re not risking your life, you’re risking the time you have left, and what you could’ve experienced and accomplished in that time. It’s possible to carry this too far and take too many risks, but most people take too few, and as a result they live unnecessarily small lives. Life shouldn’t be safe; death will be safe.

– Pursue meaning. Some people don’t like to think about mortality because they fear that it renders life meaningless. But the transience of life renders the search for meaning not absurd, but urgent. This fear results from a focus on the self as a source of meaning. But you can create meaning that death can’t destroy by looking outside yourself. Make a small difference each day by increasing the happiness and reducing the suffering of those around you. Make a big difference over the course of your life by changing the world a little at a time. Do something to let the future know you were here.

– Live urgently. Trying to prepare for death is largely futile. Once you’re living your ideal life you’ll love every day and won’t want it to end. Closure is impossible. The best you can do to prepare is to do everything you want to do, as often as you can. Value your time highly and make the most of every day.

Also, not only is your time finite, but you probably won’t know in advance when your branch will break. Tomorrow is not guaranteed. So sing and dance while you can. Tell people how you feel about them, repair regrets, and forgive. And don’t say anything that you wouldn’t want to stand as the last thing you ever say to them.

Don’t make a practice of ruminating on your mortality, it’s depressing and counterproductive. Factor it in to your behavior and then get on with living. Think about it only to the extent that it improves your life, by cultivating gratitude, compassion, selflessness, health, boldness, urgency, and meaning.

All these forces encourage a constriction of the mind that leads to meager, unfocused action, or even inaction.

This is a shame. Thinking small doesn’t serve you or the world, and it dishonors the gifts you’ve been given. Thinking small leads to living small; thinking big leads to living big. The more you expect out of life, the more you will get from life and give to life.

Thinking big is all about attitude. Believe that you were meant for greatness. Not delusions of grandeur — expectations of grandeur. Set outrageous goals and pursue them with boundless ambition. Banish limiting beliefs. Decide what you want before you decide what’s possible. Ask how, not if. Don’t let reality get in your way.

Don’t just think big, think big about big things: who you are, why you’re here, what you can contribute to the world, how life should be lived. Trivialize the trivial. Strive only for what’s worth striving for. And be sure to turn big thinking into big action. Exist significantly, expansively. Try to achieve something important that no one else has. What could you create that you would be proud to have as the only evidence that you had ever existed? Get started on creating it, today.