Happiness is hard, but not difficult. It is hard because it has many elements. It is not difficult because it has a finite number of elements, meaning that you can learn it!
If you know the happiness formula, you can’t help but avoid being happy. Certainly, you can say goodbye to your negative emotions. You don’t need them anymore.
Sure, you may have tried to become happy before (as much as everyone else did), but the vast majority of people reach a point where they get stuck. This point can create a lot of discomfort for you since who wants to be unhappy?
In my book Optimal Happiness, I stated we want to be as happy as we can be and we don’t want a single negative emotion. Yes, this sounds very unrealistic, but most people want exactly that. This is when economists start saying that we can’t match the infinite level of desires with finite worldly resources.
Obviously, few economists may point out that we are trying to satisfy an infinite level of desires with finite resources, which is unrealistic and does lead to a lot of unhappiness. Still, be happy. You can still be as happy as you want to be. You don’t need to own the world, but you may just need some help to reach Optimal Happiness.
So here we finally find the last excuse for happiness. It is last, not because it is the last barrier to one’s happiness. Rather, it is the point where people say “I draw the line here”. They:
- may do a few things correctly towards being happy, but
- they are also not doing the other things that contribute to happiness, while
- at the same time making unhappiness moves.
Overall, if you feel unhappy today, even if it is a little bit unhappy, that is where you draw the line. This is your last excuse for being unhappy or the first excuse that prevents you from being happy. Until you resolve this issue, you will continue to be unhappy.
Surprisingly, most people I work with want to be happy. They say that they will do whatever it takes to be happy. However, once I go through different elements of happiness, eventually, but predictably certainly, there will be a point when they will say: “I draw the line here”.
And yet, that specific point is what exactly prevents them from being happy!
So quit with your last excuses for why you can’t be happy and become the happy bunny you always wanted to be!
