Happiness is one of the most studied areas of human endeavor in the history of the world. When you look at psychology and philosophy, this is all they’ve been talking about for literally centuries.
So we figured out the basics of happiness, but it’s just that sometimes common sense isn’t common practice, so people struggle for no reason.
Look at what we know about happiness.
Sometimes you don’t have to have any money to make life fun or fulfilling or engaging, and sometimes even when you don’t have money you can make things work out.
You begin with yourself not your bank account. If your self-worth is low, your value in the marketplace will always be as low. If you don’t value yourself no one else is going to value you.
You have to, at first, realize that you have something to contribute, even if you don’t know what that contribution is yet. That if you’re really going to another level of financial success in life, you have to get dialed in and own the reality.
We think rejection is the thing that happens all the time, so what happens is that so many people guide their life based on this fear that they’re going to be rejected, so they don’t take action and don’t start new things or chase their dreams because they’re worried about what other people are going to think.
You have to realize that rejection actually barely ever happens. We fear it because when we were young and it happened, it felt so real and so big, but come on. As we get older we have to gain that greater sense of awareness and maturity that says, “I am my own person. I’m going to be myself regardless.”
Let’s have a higher ambition for ourselves as human beings to allow ourselves the freedom to be who we are, to genuinely express ourselves.
Consciousness means consciously designing your life, deciding who you are, deciding where you’re going to go and what you really want to accomplish.
Study, pay attention, learn from the best and model the most intelligent, smart, successful people you can in any given area that you want to succeed in, in your life before you get into it. Then develop competency by doing it over and over and over again.
Everything that has made humanity great was setting high standards and having high visions for ourselves. There is nothing wrong with expecting a lot of ourselves.
But understand that it’s not going to be perfect or ever have any sense of perfection along the way.
If I know whatever I’m going to put out there is not exactly perfectly, cool. If I know whatever I put out there is going to be part of my learning journey. I’m going to study it. I’m going to be attentive to it. I know it’s never going to be my best yet. Perfect doesn’t happen ever!
Humanity only has two recurring characters in its narrative and that’s struggle and progress, and a lot of us don’t want the struggle, but if we want to throw out the struggle we’ll never have the progress and we have to be okay.
When you knock on the door of opportunity, never be surprised that it’s work who answers.
Sometimes it’s just that hard work that keeps us going. Sometimes, even if we aren’t perfect and we don’t have it all together, but we just believe and we struggle through and will ourselves forward every single day, then not only do we survive but we thrive when others don’t. Not only do we thrive, but we start to feel something better. We start to grow. We start to have something more magnificent in our lives than we ever imagined.
We have to set an intention to make an action, and that intention is to do something often more. That’s ambition.
So we have to think in our lives… What is it I am ambitious about? What do I want to accomplish? What things need to change?
Everything starts with ambition, and if we don’t have clarity about what it is that we want, we can’t change. No goals, no growth. No clarity, no change.
Also never limit your ambitions based on your current competencies. Never limit yourself today based on your current inadequacies, because those can be irrelevant tomorrow. The main thing is to have aim in life, to have your own aim, your own ambitions, not the ambitions somebody told you that you should have or someone told you that you’re supposed to be after.
I think most of our life — and where we’re going to end up in our lives — really comes down to three simple things.
Who we become is not an accident, but a purposeful intent. That our days and how we approach our days are literally driven by the intention of who we’re going to be. That we bring our character into each of the circumstances of our lives, and by doing that, maybe we can’t always direct every circumstance of our life and can’t control everything, but we can certainly control our responses to them.