The Little book of Contentment by Leo Babauta

Contentment Isn’t Doing Nothing Before we get to the practical steps, let’s talk about contentment and change. Many people think that if you’re content, you’re just going to lay around doing nothing all day.

Why do anything if you’re content with the way things are?

How does contentment mesh with self-improvement?

But contentment actually is a much better place from which to start making changes (self-improvement) than an unhappiness with who you are.

Most of us are driven by the need or desire to improve ourselves, to fix certain things about ourselves that we don’t like. While that can definitely be a place for driving some changes, it’s not a good place to start from with those kinds of changes.

If you feel there’s something wrong with you that needs to be improved, you’re going to be driven to improve yourself, but you may or may not succeed. Let’s say you fail in your habit change. Then you start to feel worse about yourself, and you’re