HAPPINESS
"Those obsessed with glory attach their well-being to the regard of others, those who love pleasure tie it to feelings, but the one with true understanding seeks it only in their own actions."
- Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, 6:51, 59
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Not to be confused with joy, a temporary and immediate elation from a process or outcome. Happiness is the result of a balance in your life. It sums up your overall wellbeing and satisfaction and spews out the answer to that calculation in the form of a feeling.
GRATITUDE
You'll never be happy if you don't account for things that have already gone right to get you where you are today. You've probably started a daily gratitude practice to remind yourself of all the good that's already around you. Haven't you?
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I liked the Headway App's structure to daily journaling practice but ultimately ended up with a more tactile pen and paper approach.
THE LITTLE THINGS
Once you start to develop a consicous process of being grateful for everything in your life, you'll also start to open up to the simplicity of the little things in your life that previously went unnoticed.
HUMBLE STUDENT
Humility takes root in how you define yourself. Typically - the narrower the definition (neo Buddhist, vegan, monk), the more unique you think yourself to be, the harder it is to defend this definition and the more things will threaten it. Think broad, think simple, think humble.
THE PITFALL OF MONEY
To achieve this level, you have to internalize the fact that money is a fictional tool made to facilitate the exchange of value, not a source of endless and immense happiness. Somwhere down your financial path there exists a breaking point where more money will not bring you that much more happiness.
LESS IS MORE
Have you heard of the Free-choice Paradigm experiment? By now you've probably immersed yourself in excess and feel that this doesn't make you happy? Do you own your stuff or does your stuff own you?
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Here's a great TED talk to crunch on.
UPGRADED PROBLEMS
We are creative problem solvers. That's just what we do and what makes us happy and fulfilled. You've learned to embrace problems and challenges rather than avoid them. It's a game after all, and a game that doesn't challenge you is going to get very boring, very soon. So long as you live, problems will keep coming your way. If you keep solving them, then hopefully they will become better in time. Both the richest and the proorest man in the world have money problems. The difference between the two is that the rich man has better, upgraded ones.
VALUES, VALUES, VALUES
Not all values are made equal. Some are better than others, but identifying, adopting, and internalizing the right ones for you is critical when weighing against your goals in life.
SHOWDOWN WITH FEAR
A healthy dose of fear is of course necessary for survival, but that't not what this is about. More than likely your fears will be irrational and exist only in our own minds. This achievement is about learning to identify, rationalize, and manage them in order to overcome them.
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BURN YOUR BRIDGES
Another way of saying tht you've learned to commit 100% to the choice you've made. This is certainly a level up from "Less is More" achievement. If you allow yourself to think of your decisions as reversible, then there is a 60%-70% probability that you won't be happy with your initial choice or any other choice in that process thereafter. Therefore, if external factors don't make your choices irreversible - you should do it yourself.
Wanting what you get, not getting what you want.
YOUR CHOICE
No matter how happy or unhappy you feel at the present moment there's good news! You can choose to do something about it. Seek to limit the number of choices that you have in front of you. This will help you focus on the important things and allow you to go for depth, not breadth. Typically, you won't find gold in shallow grounds, you have to go deep.
EXTERNAL FACTORS
FRIENDSHIP
FREEDOM
I truly do believe that achieving and maintaining happiness is all about mindset and philosophy of life. However, for most of us, our ability to feel happy also relies heavily upon external factors such as:
MEANINGFUL WORK
PRIVACY
COMMUNITY
A LIFE LIVED WELL
Regret is one of the most coomon feelings for people on their death beds. You inevitably look back on your life and the choices that you've made at that point in time. Much like in business - think of the end in order to make the right choices at the beginning.