The decision

Everything so far comes down to one decision. It isn't to stop wanting things, and it isn't to stay where you are. It's this.

No next thing gets to be a hope.

Any big change, the job, the house, the move, the person, the child, the retirement, has to pass the Thursday question in writing before it gets another evening of your attention. If it produces facts, it's a fix, and you go towards it as clearly as you like. If it produces feelings, it goes back on the shelf, and the month goes to the life in hand instead. You lose nothing by this. A real fix answers the question easily. It's only the hopes that can't, and the hopes were never going to work.

Here's how I'd set it up.

Tonight, take the next thing you've got lined up and write its Thursday. Four o'clock, third month, where you'll be and what will be different. Underline the facts. Run the cause test. Write the honest paragraph with the rest of your life put back in. Then decide, from what's on the page and not from the preview, which it is.

If it's a fix, plan it. If it's a hope, close the search for a month and choose the one improvement from chapter 20. Put the month's end date in the diary, with the Thursday question next to it.

Plans of the form "when this happens, then I'll do that" have a good record in research on habits. Peter Gollwitzer and Paschal Sheeran reviewed ninety-four studies of them in 2006 and found that people who fix in advance what they'll do at a particular moment follow through far more often than people who only hold the intention. So write three.

"When I notice I've opened the listings or the job board, I'll ask what four o'clock on Thursday looks like there, out loud, and then decide whether to keep reading."

"When I catch the if-only, I'll finish the sentence with a fact or drop it."

"When someone tells me about their next thing and I feel the hum stir, I'll ask them what a Thursday's like."

What to expect. This is my expectation and not a finding. The first Thursday question will be uncomfortable, because the next thing you've got lined up has probably been a hope for a while and the page will show it. The listings will still pull at nine for weeks, because the hum will still be there and the listings are where it's been going. That's an urge, not an instruction, and you can have it without acting on it. By the end of the month, if you chose the improvement well, one Thursday afternoon will be different in a way you can name, and it'll be the first change in years that you didn't have to wait for. Phillippa Lally and her colleagues found that new behaviours become automatic over weeks and months rather than days, and that a missed day didn't set people back much. Expect the same shape here. The question gets easier to ask each time, and one evening back on the listings doesn't undo it.

The hum may not go. I want to be honest about that, because the research says levels are partly temperament and partly what's happened to you, and a book can't reach either. What changes is what the hum is allowed to do. It stops being a destination and goes back to being weather, and you get on with the afternoon underneath it.