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When he was filming the movie “The Lake House,” he overheard a conversation between two costume assistants. One was crying as he would lose his house if he did not pay $20,000 - On the same day, Keanu deposited the necessary amount in his bank account.
In his career, he has donated large sums to hospitals including $75 million of his earnings from “The Matrix” to charities.
In 2010, on his birthday, Keanu walked into a bakery & bought a brioche with a single candle, ate it in front of the bakery, and offered coffee to people who stopped to talk to him. In 1997, paparazzi found him walking one morning with a homeless man in Los Angeles, listening to him and sharing his life for a few hours. This man could buy anything, but instead he gets up every day and chooses one thing that cannot be bought: to be a good person.
Staying positive can feel like a full-time job sometimes. Between climate disasters, wars breaking out, the cost of living climbing and yet another corrupt politician getting exposed, the bad news just never stops.
When that’s all you see in front of you, keeping your hopes up starts to feel kind of impractical. Being cheerful all the time feels forced. No wonder so many people prefer to just be pessimists. After all, you’re either proven right or pleasantly surprised.
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The students were given 5 minutes to find their own balloon. No one found their balloon. The professor told the students to take the 1st balloon they found and hand it to the person whose name was written on it.
Within 5 minutes, everyone had their own balloon. The professor said to the students: "These balloons are like happiness. We will never find it if everyone is looking for their own. But if we care about other people's happiness, we'll find ours too."
The constant flood of depressing news is only part of the problem, though. As humans, we’re actually biologically wired to have something called a negativity bias, Laurie Santos, PhD, professor of psychology at Yale University and host of The Happiness Lab podcast, told SELF.
That means our brains naturally gravitate towards potential problems and worst-case scenarios way more than anything good that’s happening. So even when things are going perfectly fine, our minds are still looking for what could go wrong next, Dr. Santos explains.
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Still, just because our brains tend to focus on the negative doesn’t mean we have to be stuck in that mindset forever.
Experts say there are genuinely helpful ways to become a more hopeful person, and it doesn’t have to mean putting on a fake smile. Hope can be real and sincere.
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What started as a family initiative has become a workplace that provides meaningful jobs for over 90 individuals with autism. The company succeeds by embracing strengths such as structure, consistency, and strong attention to detail — qualities that make many of their team members exceptional at what they do.
Today, Rising Tide Car Wash operates two locations in Parkland, Florida, with the vast majority of its staff proudly on the autism spectrum.
#12
One good starting point is to let go of the pressure to be perfectly happy all the time. That’s unrealistic, and you can’t really fool yourself into believing everything is great when it clearly isn’t. Instead, it can help to aim for neutral.
“You don’t have to be relentlessly or delusionally cheerful to avoid worst-case-scenario thinking,” Dr. Santos said, because your brain is smart enough to know when you’re forcing it.
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Over the last 15 years, Thomas has fostered more than 30 kids. He did so all as a single parent and with all of his heart. ”Every child that I have had, it was my goal to make a difference in their lives,” he said. ”I wanted to make a difference by being a difference, and I love what I do,” he added.
Another thing worth trying is removing exaggerations from the way you talk to yourself. It’s easy to slip into thoughts like, “Why do bad things always happen to me?” or “Nothing ever works out in my favor.” But chances are, that’s not actually true.
At the same time, repeating “I’m fine, I’m fine” when you’re clearly not fine isn’t very helpful either. The goal isn’t to pretend everything is okay. It’s to be honest without making things feel worse than they are.
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“The truth is somewhere in the middle,” Amy Morin, LCSW, author of 13 Things Mentally Strong People Don’t Do, told SELF.
Life can be hard, but it can also get better. So “it’s important to recognize the gray area that there’s some good and some bad.”
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