“Jan Pen, a Dutch economist who died last year, came up with a striking way to picture inequality. Imagine people’s height being proportional to their income, so that someone with an average income is of average height. Now imagine that the entire adult population of America is walking past you in a single hour, in ascending order of income.

The first passers-by, the owners of loss-making businesses, are invisible: their heads are below ground. Then come the jobless and the working poor, who are midgets. After half an hour the strollers are still only waist-high, since America’s median income is only half the mean. It takes nearly 45 minutes before normal-sized people appear. But then, in the final minutes, giants thunder by. With six minutes to go they are 12 feet tall. When the 400 highest earners walk by, right at the end, each is more than two miles tall.”

But what I’m really good at is parking.

One thing I know for certain: I have always succeeded at parking my car. 100% of the time. Now, some of you may think that a car can’t really hover off the ground, and so by definition, the car ends up getting parked somewhere. But let’s not split hairs here: I’m a damn good parker.

I have parked in Downtown LA during the Art Walk. I have parked on the Sunset Strip on a weekend night. I have parked overnight in Manhattan when they said it couldn’t be done. I’ve parked in downtown Seattle, Dallas, and San Diego – and for 5 years in Boston, one of the toughest parking markets in the world. Ever try finding a spot in Harvard Square? I succeeded. Just left the car right there, boom. I’ve even parked in San Francisco where there are approximately 0.037 parking spots per 100,000 vehicles.

And I have done it legally, without getting fined, and without paying (meters are allowed). No pay parking structures if at all possible, and no valets, ever. To valet a car and say you’ve parked it is to have a fertility clinic artificially inseminate your wife and then claim you knocked her up. It’s just plain cheating.

Of course now that you’ve gone through this cabinet of wonders (“You parked legally in Union Square at 9pm on a Friday night? Will you autograph my son, please?”), you must be wondering: doesn’t he have something more interesting to write about? Like curing cancer, improving education, or chocolate-covered Godiva pretzels? Mmmm, pretzels.

Well, this is about a little more than just parking your car. It’s about the structure of success. Tomfoolery aside, I am exceptionally good at finding parking spots for free where no one else can, and I’ve done it thousands of times. So here are some tips, which you are welcome to apply to other, non-parking areas of your life as well:

1. Believe that it can be done.

Any time I enter a tough parking situation – like Sunset Boulevard in LA on a weekend night – I tell myself that, beyond a shadow of a doubt, there is a free spot for me. And I find it every time.

This is important for many reasons. It precludes giving up prematurely. It also puts you in a physiological state that is more amenable to success. If you’re in a state of adrenaline-soaked panic, your brain is too stressed to function. But when you know you’re going to succeed, you’re just waiting for your opening, and then – bam – you take it as if you expected it all along. Because you were.

2. Hone your vision for opportunity.

What does a spot look like? Anyone can recognize an empty spot. But what about a proto-empty spot – the one that’s about to be vacated? That’s the one you’re much more likely to score, since an empty spot in the West Hollywood district of Santa Monica Boulevard has a half life of 1.57 microseconds, slightly longer than that of a muon.

So the major repository of spots resides in turnover. Like receptor-ligand dynamics in cell biology, parking spots have a natural turnover rate: people come and go. Recognize that and utilize it. Be ready to nab a spot right when it opens up.

This is how you spot a spot that’s about to become available: first, the driver’s seat is occupied, or about to be. Also, look for people who are walking on the street instead of the sidewalk – they’re probably risking their lives for a good reason, like getting in the car to go catch Monday Night Football.

Second, the rear taillights are on. If the white reverse-gear signaling lights are on, too, then you’ve hit pay dirt. Unless the driver’s got OCD and wants to readjust the car so he’s exactly 4.23 inches from the curb, he’s leaving.

So scan, scan, scan as soon as you get close to your destination. I even start visualizing my outcome: some parked car’s taillights coming on, along with the white reverse-gear lights, and then seeing him pull out. And, more often than not, it happens. Do I have a statistically-significant data set demonstrating at the P=0.01 level that my visualizatons actually aid parking? That it is causation, not correlation? No. Have I parked 100% of the times I tried? Yes. I rest my case.

3. Be bold.

You’d be shocked and amazed at how many times there are free, open spots directly in front of a venue you want to attend. Why? Because of the natural turnover rate. And also because most people don’t even expect a free spot there, and never look! They park 3 blocks away, then kick themselves when they find they could have parked platinum. Needless to say, I’ve never done this myself. Except for the times that I have.

So go for the gusto and, at the very least, make a point of going exactly where you want to be – you just never know when opportunity will smile at you. How many people do you know who have stopped short of their ultimate goals just because they thought, “Oh, that’ll never work out anyway – why bother trying?” There’s a Persian saying: sang moft, gonjeeshk moft – free stone, free bird, so take a shot already, geez.

To maximize your chance of securing a space, you may want to roll on the inside lane at a more leisurely pace to allow for natural turnover to pop open a spot for you. Will this annoy the cars behind you (see below)? Most likely. Will they get to see their football game anyway? Yes – and remember that someday, they’ll be the one holding up traffic with their parking crawl, so it all evens out.

For the bolder amongst you, also scan the opposite side of the street for spots and be willing to make a quasi-legal kamikaze U-turn on demand.

4. Stay with your vision.

Parking in crowded urban settings is inherently messy: you must hold up traffic as you back your car into a space. And, since you have no choice but to ruffle some feathers, make your peace with it. Some people are going to be irked – oh well.

In the entrepreneurial realm, so many people buckle and abandon their causes as soon as they encounter opposition. Remember this: detractors are not a bug – they’re a feature of any successful endeavor. So if people are honking behind you, it means you’re doing it right.

Staying with your vision also involves a little aggression. Various miscreants, varmints, scoundrels and knaves will attempt to take your hard-found spot from you, so don’t let them! Position your car behind the car that’s leaving. That way you’re blocking those behind you from snaking the spot, while allowing the parked car an open avenue to leave. This works orders of magnitude better than getting in front of the parked car which is now blocked from leaving. I’ll leave it as an exercise to the reader to find the profound metaphor that’s in there somewhere.

5. Seek underexploited opportunities.

Do you always read the entire novella printed on the parking signs to figure out when you can and cannot park? Most people don’t, leaving perfectly legal parking spots available for intrepid, literate folks like yourself.

Did you know that you can park at a yellow ‘Loading Zone’ curb for free after 6pm Mon-Sat and all day Sunday unless specifically noted otherwise? There aren’t a lot of them, but unless you have a hip-hop entourage of 17 black Escalades, one is all you need.

Did you know that if you go 2-3 blocks away from a venue – especially in the opposite direction that people are arriving – you’re more likely to find spots? At a minute’s walk per block, a spot even 5 blocks away beats circling the streets for 20min.

Are you able to park in a spot that’s only a foot or two longer than your car? If you can, the spot it yours, since most people don’t bother with those (see below).

There are always underexploited opportunities for those seeking them. The surest sign that there’s a better way of doing something is a long line of sheeple waiting obediently for their turn. Dare to bypass the beaten path and blaze your own trail – all great success stories start there.

6. Train the skills in your domain.

When you block a long line of traffic on La Cienega Blvd on a Friday night, it helps to know that you won’t take an extra 15 min to get your car parked. When you’re confident of your abilities, you become more willing to take risks that others leave alone (see kamikaze U-turn above).

I’m pretty good at parallel parking and can get into tight spots on the first try. And, as much as I’d love to brag, it ain’t rocket science. Have you ever practiced your parallel parking – even for 15 minutes? Didn’t think so. If you do, you’ll get a lot better at it. This is also true of public speaking, memory, charisma and sex – other things that we’re supposed to be good at naturally without training. Whatever! The good news is that the initial returns on training in these underserved domains can be huge. So get thee a book like Use Your Perfect Memory by Tony Buzan or The Multiorgasmic Man by Chia & Abrams and behold the miracles that ensue.

7. For real success, be willing to reassess.

It is good to find free or cheap legal parking. However, if accomplishing that means missing the first 15 minutes of the U2 concert or enduring the wrath of a crippled girlfriend after she walks 3 blocks in her tottery heels, then by all means pay for parking – or even give the car to the (gasp) valet. Yes, even I have broken down and done that sometimes. Don’t win the battle and lose the war.

Similarly, in your job, you may get the promotion, the contract, and the big pile of dough but lose your soul in process and be miserable in spite of ’success’. Know that true success makes you feel good. So if you ever deviate from feeling good, you’re not really successful. Reassess and get back on the track of real fulfillment.

One of the best of the happiness batch is The How of Happiness: A New Approach to Getting the Life You Want by UC Riverside Professor of Psychology Sonja Lyubomirsky. Amongst all the happiness texts I’ve read (and there have been about 8), this one I found to be the most practical in its ability to increase real happiness in your life.

This is because of Prof Lyubomirsky’s judicious use of questionnaires and the Person-Activity Fit Diagnostic, which figures out which activities end up creating the most happiness for you. The results for me were somewhat surprising and allowed me to focus more of my time and energy on the activities that, unbeknownst to myself, meant the most to me.

Prof Lyubomirsky, a Santa Monica neighbor and fellow Harvard grad, was kind enough to let me into her home for a very informative interview which you can watch below. I recommend everyone, young and old, to get a copy of The How of Happiness for yourself and someone you love. There is no greater gift than enabling “the experience of joy, contentment or positive well-being, combined with a sense that one’s life is good, meaningful and worthwhile.” So go forth and be a happiness enabler.

In Part 1, we talk about how the book can help you custom-design your own happiness program. We also discuss savoring, flow, and 2 of the 3 happiness myths.

In Part 2, we finish up the happiness myths, get into hedonic adaptation and the infamous story of Markus and Roland.

Get your copy of The How of Happiness on Amazon

You can think of this as a blind spot — people being oblivious to their own faults while gleefully pointing out those of others. I prefer to think of it as a homing device and highly accurate insight into the self.

Why? Because the trait we find least attractive in others tends to be a trait that we exhibit and secretly, unconsciously, don’t like about ourselves. This I’ve found to be true with remarkable consistency — pretty much always. As Jung is purported to have said, all perception is projection. And Anaïs Nin: “We don’t see the world as it is; we see the world as we are.”

The criticism is most pronounced when someone is a slightly worse version of yourself in some department. You’ll really dig into someone who’s slightly lazier than you, or slightly later than you, because you hate that laziness and lateness in yourself with a blazing passion.

So next time, whether in the context of friendship or love, you find yourself criticizing someone, take that as an opportunity to assess who you are and what you don’t like about yourself. As the Persian expression goes, kolahe khodeto ghazi kon — literally, make your own hat the judge. Or as we say in English, take a look in the mirror.

Dave ad-libs everything in this interview — watch that split second he takes to come up with ‘Defacebook’ to witness the gears turning in the mind of a comic genius. The already notorious bits in I’ll Mature When I’m Dead on vasectomies and colonoscopies are worth the admission price all by themselves, so go get yourself three copies: one for yourself, one for a mopey friend who could use a laugh, and one to replace the first copy your friends will steal from you.

Even though I’ve experienced and performed many such demonstrations myself, this one’s pretty dramatic in its impact and simplicity, so be sure to watch the first two minutes at the very least. Towards the end, he gives a practical mindfulness technique you can use at any time.

In other words, Bart has made a lot of great decisions in his life, and continues to do so every day.

Except that some time ago, he got engaged. And none of his friends thought it was a good idea. We all predicted disaster, of the Hindenberg up-in-flames variety.

Bart did get separated a few years later, and you probably know someone who was plenty smart who made a similarly disastrous decision. Whether it was taking the wrong job, buying a Hummer, selling off Microsoft stock in 1989 or launching into a destructive affair, this kind of thing happens all the time. Perhaps it’s even happened to you.

It’s easy to see all of this in hindsight. But what if you could see the faulty decision-making while it was happening? Then, instead of an “I told you so” story which helps little and irritates much, we may actually accomplish something useful — like helping avoid the error in the first place.

Psychologists who’ve studied our decision-making processes have observed cognitive biases that tend to get us in trouble.

Remember that these biases don’t make you a bad person — they just make you human. As far as we can tell, they’re deeply-ingrained features of our brain function. The more you’re aware of them, the better chance you have of avoiding them. There’s a slew of them, so I’ll highlight some of the big ones:

1) The fundamental attribution error.
This bias makes us attribute the failure of others to character and our own failures to circumstance. “Jenkins lost his job because he was incompetent; I lost mine because of the recession.” It also attributes our own successes to our competence, discounting luck, while seeing others’ successes as products of mere luck.

This lands you in hot water when you assume that bad stuff only happens to other people: you’re not going to be part of the 50 percent of people who get divorced, and the price of your house will go up even though 90 percent of them have dropped in price. I’m going to marry Charlie Sheen and make it work because I’m different; those 4,000 other women were just stupid. They did something wrong, but I know what I’m doing. The fundamental attribution error’s a pernicious one, and it nails all of us at some point.

2) The confirmation bias.
This one has two parts. First, we tend to gather and rely upon information that confirms our existing views. Second, we avoid or downplay information that goes against our pre-existing hypothesis.

Say you suspect that your computer has been hacked. Then every time it stalls or has a little glitch, you blame it on the hackers. Or you think that your boss has it in for you. Then everything she says or does you interpret as part of her plan to undermine you. It’s a bit like a self-fulfilling prophecy.

If you identify with a political party, you probably do this all the time. If you’re a scientist, you do this inadvertently as part of the scientific method. And if you’re a trial lawyer, it’s your job to do this.

If you’re interested in moving an agenda forward, then the confirmation bias works in your favor. If you’re subject to this agenda and don’t like it, recognize the confirmation bias for its fallacy. And if you’re interested in the truth, start without preconceptions. Outwitting the confirmation bias means exploring both sides of an argument with equal diligence.

3) The overconfidence bias.
I call this the ‘my guess is better than yours’ bias. People’s confidence in their own decisions tends to outstrip the accuracy of those decisions. Your friend will say he’s “100 percent positive” about something — e.g. his choice of wife – and only be right 50 percent of the time. A disastrous form of this happened in the doomed 1996 Mt Everest expedition described in Jon Krakauer’s Into Thin Air, resulting in the death of many climbers.

4) The availability bias.
We tend to estimate what’s more likely by how easily we can come up with an example from memory. The availability of our memories is biased toward vivid, unusual, or emotionally charged examples. So we tend to make those more salient, then come up with weird decisions based on them.

As a result, you may cancel your trip to the Canary Islands because mom tells you the biggest plane crash in history happened there. Or you stop going to hockey games because you heard someone in the stands got thwacked on the head with a puck last week. Or avoid investing in stocks because those crashed last year.

To bypass the availability bias, be sure to look at all the evidence around a particular decision, not the stuff that jumps to mind first. If only 1 out of 100,000 plane landings resulted in a crash, it’s safe to fly to the Canary Islands. If one out of ten million hockey fans gets nailed by a puck, you can watch a hockey game.

5) The sunk cost fallacy.
I call this the slot-machine effect. You put a quarter in a one-armed bandit, and pull the lever. You win nothing. No big deal – you put in another quarter. And another. This goes on for a while, and you start thinking, “Well, I’m invested in this machine now. It’s going to belch an avalanche of quarters any second!”

The truth is that every pull of the lever has the same winning probability of nearly zero, regardless of how much money you’ve put in. The money is effectively gone forever – it’s a sunk cost. There’s no quantifiable expectation of future return, so it’s not an investment.

This is a big one in jobs and relationships. You can be stuck in a crappy situation for a while, and then think, “But I’ve invested three years in this! I can’t just throw that away!” The fact is that those three years are never coming back – you’ve already thrown them away, so don’t worry about it! The sooner you cut bait and go for a better situation, the better off you are.

So next time you have smart friends who are about to make an unbelievably dumb decision, follow this five-step plan:

a) Look through this list, or an even more comprehensive one
b) Empathize with them for being human, coming up with an example of a time when you made a similarly boneheaded choice – “Boy, was I a goober!”
c) Instead of saying “What the hell are you thinking,” say “I have a lot of faith in your judgment, so help me understand how you came up with this decision.”
d) If you’re still convinced they’re smoking something funny, only then offer gently some insight on cognitive biases, and see what happens.
e) If they still don’t get it, take the frying pan from behind your back and give them a compassionate but bracing thwack upside the head. It probably won’t change their mind, but it’ll feel pretty satisfying.

Ali Binazir (yours truly) is Chief Evangelist and Decision Enhancement Engineer at Elite Communications LLC. Formerly a consultant at McKinsey, I use a combination of Eastern wisdom and Western science to help people and companies make better decisions. You may contact me directly at ali(at)awakenyourgenius.com.

• stickK.com — website for self-accountability
• Richard Davidson’s Google Tech Talk: Transform Your Mind, Change Your Brain
• Resolutions Tracker Spreadsheet

If you have further questions, leave a comment or shoot me an email.
Best
AB

But I digress — voila the video. It’s just over a minute, so check it out:

A fun, funny and wise book written by Gretchen Rubin, a regular HuffingtonPost.com contributor, it’s a distillation of the wisdom of the ages on happiness. It provides eminently practical ways to amplify your happiness pretty much immediately (e.g. gossip less; exercise more; launch a pet project).

In this video review, I share my impressions on The Happiness Project: Or, Why I Spent a Year Trying to Sing in the Morning, Clean My Closets, Fight Right, Read Aristotle, and Generally Have More Fun. Be sure to check out also my interview with Gretchen, her excellent blog, and the supremely useful resources of her Happiness Project Toolbox.

If you like the video, please show signs of life by rating it and leaving comments!

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