Without using phrases like “this post” and “this article” or first-person pronouns write a 40-60 word in-article description of this blog post and without using 3rd-party descriptive language:
Do you know what makes you happy?
Do you even know what happy really is?
I’ve spent too many years chasing things that I thought would make me happy. The sad fact is that I would find something that made me happy for a short time, but I quickly found that I wasn’t happy anymore. I have a friend who thinks a lot about success in business and in life, and we were discussing happiness recently.
This caused me to eventually start thinking that the problem must be me. It looked like I just couldn’t be happy.
And of course, this didn’t make me happy either.
Happiness is vital to our good health and long life.
Eventually I figured out that I was basing what I thought would make me happy on what looked like it made other people happy. Fortunately I figured out that just because something made someone else happy, it didn’t mean that it would make me happy.
To take this another step, I also spent some time trying to do things that people told me would make me happy. I’m sure you’ve heard the standard plan for most people. Go to school, get a degree, and get a job, work until you die.
Of course they don’t phrase it exactly that way. Instead of saying you have to work until you die, they say that you work until you retire and then you enjoy retirement. But I’m not convinced this is based in fact. I think work until you die is the end of the standard plan for many people.
I tried the standard plan and I sure wasn’t happy. While many people who probably have mu best interest at heart told me some variation of the standard plan would make me happy, the truth is that it didn’t make me happy.
Here’s the fascinating, and sometimes maddening, thing about happiness. What makes me happy is probably not the same thing that makes you happy. And that’s a great thing. If the exact same thing made everyone happy the world would get boring pretty quickly.
The maddening thing is that you have to figure some things out for yourself. Everyone wants a shortcut or easy button, but in some areas there isn’t one. Sure, it might seem easier if someone could tell you what makes you happy. But most people that try to tell you how to be happy aren’t really happy themselves. How can someone who isn’t really happy tell you how to be happy?
This brings us back to the questions that I opened this post with. I challenge you to take a few minutes and try to answer each of the following two questions as honestly as you can.
Do you know what happy is?
Do you know what makes you happy?
Forget about everything that you’ve been told about being happy and focus on what you want and what makes you happy, no matter what anyone else thinks.
I read something one time where the writer said that what makes him happy is swinging in a hammock in his backyard watching football games. The problem was that he hadn’t been able to find anyone who would pay him enough to live on to do that all of the time.
If this is truly what makes him happy, then all he needs to figure out how to do is survive while doing it. This might mean getting a job that pays enough so he can do what he wants every hour that he’s not working. Or it might mean that he needs to learn how to make enough money betting on football games to support what makes him happy.
I suspect that he wouldn’t be entirely happy all of the time doing this and that he was simply trying to make a point. But the point I’m making is that if that’s what really makes him happy he needs to figure out how to make it work.
This is why it’s so important to answer the questions I posed above. If you can figure out what truly makes you happy, then all you have to do is figure out how to make it happy. If I can figure out how a guy can sit in a hammock 60 hours a week watching football, then you can figure out how to make your happiness a reality, as long as you know what happiness is and what makes you happy.
Here’s my challenge to you:
Decide what makes you happy and then go for it. Give it everything you’ve got. Stop listening to other people who think they know what makes you happy. Only you can decide what truly makes you happy.