Health and Happiness
The Key to Happiness
Your ability to achieve your own
happiness is the key measure of your success, of how well you are doing as a
person.
You learn the key to happiness that
has been the same through all of history. You learn how to dispel the two myths
that may be holding you back and how to achieve more happiness in everything
you do.
Dedicate Yourself to Your Best
Talents
The key to happiness is this:
dedicate yourself to the development of your natural talents and abilities by
doing what you love to do, and doing it better and better in the service of
a cause that is greater than yourself.
This is a big statement and a big
commitment. Being happy requires that you define your life in your own terms
and then throw your whole heart into living your life to the fullest. In a way,
happiness requires that you be perfectly selfish in order to develop yourself
to a point where you can be unselfish for the rest of your life.
Please Yourself First
In Edmond Rostand’s play Cyrano de
Bergerac, Cyrano is asked why he is so intensely individualistic and
unconcerned with the opinions and judgments of others. He replies with these
wonderful words: “I am what I am because early in life I decided that I would
please at least myself in all things.”
Your happiness likewise depends upon
your ability to please at least yourself in all things. You can be happy
only when you are living your life in the very best way possible. No one can
define happiness for you. Only you know what makes you happy.
Happiness is an
inside job.
Your Happiness is Up to You
The biggest myth about happiness is
when people say that it is not legitimate or correct for you to put your
happiness ahead of everyone else’s. Throughout my life, I’ve met people who
have said that it is more important to make other people happy than it is to
make yourself happy. This is nonsense.
The fact is that you can’t give
away to anyone else what you don’t have for yourself. Just as you can’t give
money to the poor if you don’t have any, you can’t make someone else happy if
you yourself are miserable.
The very best way to assure the
happiness of others is to be happy yourself and then to share your happiness
with them. Suffering and self-sacrifice merely depress and discourage other
people. If you want to make others happy, start by living the kind of life and
doing the kind of things that make you happy.
Action Exercises
Here are three steps you can take
immediately to put these ideas into action.
First, define for yourself the
activities that you really love and enjoy, at home and work, and then organize
your life so you do more of them.
Second, believe in yourself and
trust your own feelings. Then, please at least yourself in all things.
Third, determine what it is that you
do that brings the most happiness to others and then organize your life so that
you can do more of it.
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