Okay, so I've been a "self-programmer" since, oh, say 1996, when I first read Dale Carnegie's How to Win Friends And Influence People.

Recently, the question has been posed to me, "has all this self-programming stuff worked for you?"

So, well, it's time to be honest and get full disclosure out there.

How much have I improved over the past five years? Below are areas that I've been interested in improving with self-programming. For each area, I describe how things were in the summer of 2004. And in the bullet points, I describe what were the primary contributing factors to the change (whether or not they came from self-programming or other sources):

Work: I was three times as confused about what to do workwise. I had between 2-3 times as much fear about my prospects. I had one-fourth of the stability that I have now.

• Good old-fashioned "experience." i.e. getting burned by a lot of crappy jobs and learning why I hated them.
• Books like Pathfinder and What Color Is Your Parachute.

Social: A third as many meaningful and fulfilling social encounters per week. Five times as much social anxiety as I have now. I don't want to get into too many details, but socializing for me back then was not necessarily a chore, and I wasn't averse to it, but small social activities and encounters caused many many more problems for me, which limited how much I could socialize.

• Giving up on trying too hard to improve my social skills, including giving up on social self-improvement programs.
• Creating principles about "being natural" and some on the mechanics of socialization, like pinning down how to apply empathy.

Mental: Four times the number of obsessive, neurotic, over-thinking episodes. About a third as much peace-of-mind as I have now.

• Learning about OCD and how that relates to negative feedback loop thought patterns
• Creating principles about peace-of-mind and over-thinking.

Happiness: About two-thirds as much happiness as I have now. About one-and-a-half as much really negative or dysphoric thoughts as I have now.

• Improvements from these other domains of my life.

Personal: Sick more than three times as often as now. However, I was also about as physically fit as I am now. At the same time, back then, I enjoyed exercise about half as much as I do now (since now I play tennis and do other enjoyable, physically engaging activities).

• Improvements from these other domains of my life have reduced stress and improved my immune system.

Change itself: Only about 5% of my self-improvement attempts fulfilled their promise back then, while as about 25% of my attempts now have lasting sustainable impact. Also, back then, self-improvement caused a lot of problems in my life, like over-thinking and addiction to self-improvement. I'd say the negative consequences of self-improvement have been reduced by 80%.

• Principle-centered thinking
• Understanding OCD thought patterns

Principle-centered thinking figures a lot in the above, which I got into about 15 months ago. This practice is generally associated with Stephen Covey's 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, but if you saw my version, you may not even recognize it. For me, principle-centered thinking manifests in a series of one-line slogans that have meaning for me. I have generally posted these on my twitter account. For example, here's one, "how can you be happy if you don't proceed in the direction of your most important desires, values, interests?" That principle really got me to think about having goals and looking at where I was spending my attention. Otherwise, I'd hear about at least one time a year from various self-help sources on the "importance of goals" and I'd maybe play with that for a while, but never really stick to the practice. Likewise, principle-centered thinking helps me lay down concepts that will still retain meaning 5 years from now, and therefore become the building blocks of sustainable self-improvement. Next time you read a self-help book, try to codify it into a few meaningful principles.

Understanding OCD thought patterns figures prominently as well. Here is how an OCD works in general: there's a trigger that makes you anxious (e.g. dirty hands). Then there is a compulsive activity that provides relief for that anxiety (e.g. washing hands). In neurotypical people, washing their hands relieves their anxiety and they move on. In OCD people, the relief is temporary and their anxiety about dirty hands comes back even stronger, which requires more hand-washing, and so on, in a feedback spiral. In my case, I don't have a hand-washing problem, but my thinking was very often an addiction to anxiety-relief. I'd have an anxious thought, like, "what am I going to do about work?" and then my anxiety-relief mechanism would be to introspect. This would lead me to some sort of epiphany which could drive relief for a day. But then when the epiphany ceased to have any hold over me, the anxious thoughts would return back, and I'd then double-down on another some temporary relief thought pattern. These patterns are the reason that most self-help seems farcical. Most programs will temporarily relieve your anxiety by giving you hope that you've "got it all figured out now." Steve Pavalina has more things to say about self-help junkies.

Just saw this provocative title and article on BBC. There's got to be an evolutionary basis for everything. One of the purposes of happiness has got to be approach. Happy people approach others and share their happiness. Sad people withdraw. At least one purpose of depression is to slow down, stop what you're doing, and reassess.

But often these systems go out of whack, and you can drive yourself crazy wondering whether there's a reason for you to be depressed right now. In fact, that's a distortion mentioned in cognitive-behavioral therapy, where the patient is constantly finding reasons and circumstances that are making her depressed.

Aristotle said something like: "It is easy to fly into a passion--anybody can do that--but to be angry with the right person to the right extent and at the right time with the right object and in the right way--that is not easy, and it is not everyone who can do it."

Likewise, there's times when being depressed is probably very useful. The most obvious one that comes to mind is when you're in an abusive relationship. Being depressed may force you to reflect and reassess yourself, giving you the necessary gumption to get out.

Here are two stories from which we can draw lessons on how to achieve meaningful work:

Treating yourself like an athlete

Probably the best treatment on this subject is found in Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's book Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience. In addition to being a seminal work of accessible psychology, his book is a treasure trove of stories about people engaged in perfect activity fulfillment. This one in particular has lingered in my mind for years as it deals with a factory worker who turned a mundane career into something he relishes with enthusiasm:

The task he has to perform on each unit that passes in front of his station should take forty-three seconds to perform—the same exact operation almost six hundred times in a working day. Most people would grow tired of such work very soon. But Rico has been at his job for over five years, and he still enjoys it. The reason is that he approaches his task in the same way an Olympic athlete approaches his event: How can I beat my record? Like the runner who trains for years to shave a few seconds off his best performance on the track, Rico has trained himself to better his time on the assembly line. With the painstaking care of a surgeon, he has worked out a private routine for how to use his tools, how to do his moves. After five years, his best average for a day has been twenty-eight seconds per unit. In part he tries to improve his performance to earn a bonus and the respect of his supervisors. But most often he does not even let on to others that he is ahead and lets his success pass unnoticed. It is enough to know that he can do it, because when he is working at top performance the experience is so enthralling that it is almost painful for him to slow down. "It's better than anything else," Rico says. "It's a whole lot better than watching TV." Rico knows that very soon he will reach the limit beyond which he will no longer be able to improve his performance at his job. So twice a week he takes evening courses in electronics. When he has his diploma he will seek a more complex job, one that presumably he will confront with the same enthusiasm he has shown so far.

This story became the inspiration for how I handled my first job after graduating from college. After college, I took up an entry-level job at Google in the AdSense department, approving and rejecting sites into their program. While initially the job was inherently repetitive and boring, I found two ways of making the work enjoyable. The first was opening up a stop-watch app on my computer, and having it hover over my work the whole time. I jotted down times and set goals for myself, and the hours did indeed fly by. The second way was engaging in side social banter with my co-workers. We'd tell each other jokes and chit-chat, and after awhile, the computerwork faded into the background of my consciousness. It's like how you would imagine two friends spending hours working on a crafting project together, blissfully engaged. Often these tasks are repetitive, like gluing 100 jewels onto the edge of a Homecoming float. But in the context of hanging-out with your friends, it isn't so bad. Actually, it's a lot of fun!

Be mindful of the work process

Here is a video David Ullin, who in his old age shines a youthful joy when talking about the passion and purpose he finds in tree-cutting. What's even more interesting is how he articulates the larger life-philosophy implications of his attitude toward work. It's compelling to watch and I'll let it speak for itself:

I believe there are parallels between his process and that of mindfulness (for a good introduction to mindfulness read Mindfulness in Plain English). Mindfulness, as I've understood it, is usually taught in relationship to meditation, wherein the practitioner becomes keenly in touch with his senses. By focusing on your breathing, for example, you can "become one" with your body, and in some cases, feel every single muscle movement as your lungs expand and contract. Under the right conditions, this state can be called samadhi which I find very similar to Mihaly's concept of flow. To apply this concept to your job, you have to deconstruct the work activities into sub-processes and focus on how all the little things add up to achieve the desired results.

These two stories remind me that while we often naively believe that changing our surroundings will quell our anxieties, probably the most important change needs to occur within.

Sonja Lyubomirsky unravels all this in The How of Happiness. Everything she says is backed by research into positive psychology. And here is the best answer I've heard to "What is the secret to happiness?"

Yet fit is absolutely critical. So much so that I'll go out on a limb here and say that if there's any "secret" to becoming happier, the secret is in establishing which happiness strategies suit you best.

I know it sounds too simple to be true, but since reading this book, I've become a believer.

Sonja then proceeds to describe 12 happiness activities that have been proven to increase happiness. She suggests you pick four that serve as a best fit (she has a worksheet to help figure this out) and then follow those. Here's the list:

1. Gratitude
2. Optimism
3. Not thinking too much
4. Kindness
5. Socialization
6. Coping
7. Forgiveness
8. Flow
9. Savoring
10. Goals
11. Spirituality
12. Medidation, Exercise, and Smile/Laugh therapy

Most of these you may have already heard before, and maybe have even tried, but Sonja goes into the nitty-gritty about what makes each of those happiness activites tick, and how to fulfill their purpose.

For example, I've heard about "positive thinking" since I was little, but I've always been weary of the idea. "How can you think your way to happiness?" I even tried it a couple times and it just scrambled my head. Or I tried meditation for a month and after awhile I just get too fidgety to continue with the program.

With Sonja's "secret" in mind, maybe I just need to focus on goal-setting and flow-activities as my happiness program. Those are much more suited to my personality. Or maybe instead of trying to meditate, I can work on my "stillness" practice, whereby I just close my eyes, turn off all distractions, and just sit still for a while.

In other words, if you've given up on happiness strategies before, perhaps "you've been doing it all wrong" and need to be reminded of what works and what doesn't work.

In 1932, weighed down by the sorrows and agonies of his self-absorbed and aimless clients, an Australian psychiatrist named W. Béran Wolfe summed up his philosophy like this: "If you observe a really happy man you will find him building a boat, writing a symphony, educating his son, growing double dahlias in his garden, or looking for dinosaur eggs in the Gobi Desert."

There's other choice quotes in that chapter. G.K. Chesterson said, "There is one thing which gives radiance to everything. It is the idea of something around the corner." And Robert Louis Stevenson said, "An aim in life is the only fortune worth finding." I agree with this philosophy. My version:

Happiness is about constantly being on-the-way to what you really want in life.