5 Things I’ve Learned about Happiness
[Trying to Spread Happiness in 16 Countries Across 3 Continents Over 5 Years]
1. Everybody wants it.
“I want to be miserable every day,” says nobody ever. There’s a difference between wanting something and well, changing your daily behavior and mindset to get it. I mean, everybody wants that insta-worthy life where you work remotely from that balmy beach in Thailand, but there is a gap: a gap between the wanting and the doing.
2. People don’t know why they want it.
You know how you’re supposed to eat kale and other green veggies, but you’d much rather eat that burger with fries? Same thing with happiness. You know happiness is good for you, you’re more successful if you’re happy, your relationships improve, your health improves, blah blah, yet somehow you have no idea why. You’d much rather binge watch that Netflix series while eating that burger and fries.
3. Nobody really gets it.
And by “it” I purposefully use a double entendre: happiness and the why. The vast majority spend much more time pursuing money in the hopes that somehow it will buy happiness or at least that insta-worthy lifestyle and they continue in that vicious cycle of keeping up with the Jones’.
We’re going to get deeper with 4 and 5. Are you up for it?
4.There’s no happiness without healing.
In my own quest for understanding happiness so that I could improve my own life and also explain it better in my workshops (and let’s face it, anyone who would listen), I thought if I just memorized enough data and facts around the science of happiness, I was good to go. Turns out not so good to go anywhere. Like everything in life, you have to learn the hard way. It’s kind of like putting on concealer on a wound: it’s still there below the surface no matter how much concealer you put on. Even if it has SPF in it.
5. Get a Ph.D. in YOU.
The only way forward is inward. Here’s the deal: how many years have you spent learning about things other than yourself? If you’ve gone to college, let’s put that number at roughly 17 years. It goes upward from there if you’ve gone on to get your master’s degree and beyond. If you don’t know who you really are, you don’t know what brings you true happiness. So my friend, it’s time to put that burger and fries down, and work on getting a Ph.D. in YOU.