https://www.bakadesuyo.com/2018/10/how-to-have-more-energy/
This is how to have more energy:

• Meaning: Do things that benefit others. Effective “job crafting” starts by looking at how much time you dedicate to specific tasks that give you energy each day. When university call center employees who were asking alums for donations got to meet the scholarship students who benefited from their work, productivity, enthusiasm and the amount of money coming in went up dramatically.
• Interaction: Be 80% positive. (I am 99% certain of this.) People consistently said that the most positive times in their lives all had to do with belonging and connecting -- not achieving. When researchers ask people to reconstruct the most positive and negative experiences of their lives, they consistently describe social events as their most influential memories over a lifetime. “In short, it was the moments of connecting to others that touched people’s lives the most.” 

  My team’s research found that people who reported having great interactions throughout the day were nearly four times as likely to have very high well-being.

  
  How can you guarantee that? Make close pals at work. But how do you know if you're really friends with someone at the office?
  
  Ask yourself how much you share your personal problems with each other.
  The telltale sign of a friendship between co-workers was the amount of time they spent talking about topics unrelated to work. Then the next phase, a very close friendship at work, was marked by something less intuitive: sharing problems from one another’s personal and work lives.
• Health: Eat better, move more, sleep long and well. A 2014 study suggests that highly processed foods with added sugar may also contribute to laziness. Even “comfort foods” like baked goods actually have the opposite effect of comfort and are likely to make people more depressed. When people exercised moderately for 20 minutes they felt better... for up to 12 hours. So get to the gym early and you can boost your mood for almost the entire day.
  

  When researchers assigned one group of participants in a study to do 20 minutes of a moderate-intensity workout, they found that the participants had a much better mood immediately following the exercise than a control group who did not exercise. What surprised researchers was how long this increase in mood lasted. Those who exercised continued to feel better throughout the day. Even two, four, eight, and twelve hours later, they were in a better mood than the control group.

  While many concentrated on his findings relevant to 10,000 hours of deliberate practice, the other factor that differentiated top performance was sleep.  

The importance of friendships for only children cannot be overemphasized. 

From Arne Duncan's "How Schools Work":

Our sixth graders are not given any assignments. They are given coloring pages,  scissors, construction paper, and tape. A good day wasn't a day when they mastered fractions, or learned how a bill gets turned into a law. A good day was a day when no one got hurt.
There was no homework. We changed that from the very beginning, giving these kids assignments, to train them everyday after school, putting in long hours to bring the academics up to grade level.

- We found that categories had to slide one slot to the right. The kids who were in "exceeds standards", were actually just meeting the standard.

- we don't need rote knowledge anymore, we have the Internet for that. What we need are kids who can learn anything and continue to be able to learn for the rest of their lives. We need kids who can think, not just recall. We need kids were comfortable solving problems in the group, working together, supporting and challenging each other, and bringing out the best thinking in everyone.

-

https://www.bakadesuyo.com/2012/05/the-last-damn-thing-youll-ever-need-to-read-a/

Achieving Goals: Everything You Need To Know

Huh? Set goals? Why?

• Setting goals can improve your life. Goal setting is one of the four techniques the military used to increase Navy SEAL passing rates from 25% to 33%.
• Studies have also shown it makes you happier.

How do you set goals?

• Initially, the research says, aim high. Set ambitious goals. (But later on down the road don’t be afraid to settle to be happy.)

• Keeping goals vague sometimes produces higher rates of success but being specific will prevent procrastination.

• Structure your goals so that the focus is to learn and improve, not to outdo someone else. The former helps you grow. The latter can turn you into a jerk.
• 
  
• If you really have no idea what you want, imagine your funeral. In his famous Stanford commencement speech Steve Jobs said: “Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life.” And science agrees with him.

What are the first steps in moving toward your goals?

• Write them down. Writing about goals makes you happier and makes you more likely to follow through with them.
• Sometimes the best way to figure out how to do something is to focus on why you want to do something.

• Grease the wheels for any behavior change by manipulating your context.

• Don’t look at goals like a death march. Putting some time into making them fun is both more enjoyable and more effective.

• Make the first couple milestones easy. Track your accomplishments on a chart. Do anything so that you can see progress because nothing motivates you more than seeing progress.

How do I keep going and not give up?

• Use checklists to make sure you’re accomplishing everything. They work. And depending on your goal sometimes you don’t need a “to-do list”, you need a “not to-do list.”

• Do NOT fantasize about achieving your goal. That’s eating dessert first and saps motivation. Thinking about what you have to do to prepare for a challenge was more likely to lead to success than imagining the victory.

• The secret to avoiding goal-induced stress is more planning. This reduces random factors that can throw a wrench into things and knock you off course.

• You can measure progress by how much you’ve completed or how much you have left to do. Research says you’ll be more motivated if you focus on whichever of those two is smaller.

• Understand the steps to expert performance. Keep in mind the lessons from Daniel Pink’s excellent book on the science of motivation, Drive. Know the techniques the Army uses to instill mental toughness.

What are 5 things that make achieving goals easier?

1. Make a step-by-step plan.
2. Tell other people about your goal.
3. Think about the good things that will happen if you achieve your goal.
4. Record your progress (e.g., in a journal or on a chart).

https://www.bakadesuyo.com/2011/08/is-it-better-to-start-off-with-ambitious-goal/

Consumers who set ambitious goals have a greater level of satisfaction compared to those who set conservative goals

“The moral of the story is don’t sell yourself short,” Cho said. “Aim high.”

From https://www.bakadesuyo.com/2018/09/how-to-quit-bad-habits/

Here’s how to quit bad habits without willpower:

• Gratitude: The same feeling that energizes us to do good for others can help us do good for ourselves. See positive things as blessings; don’t take them for granted. And then write them down.
• Compassion: The emotion that drives us to help others can also benefit “future you.” Crazy as it sounds, write a letter to “future you.” Feel some compassion for the difficult situations you often put him/her in and you’ll boost self-control.
• Pride: Combined with an appreciation for the hard work and support that goes into any achievement, this deadly sin can be a virtue. Keep track of your accomplishments and you’ll end up more disciplined.