The Importance of Defining Happiness For Yourself
I spent many years trying to figure out what happiness really was. It kicked off the journey that led me to be writing this newsletter to you today.
When I was younger, I believed that happiness alights upon you when you accumulate all of the external trappings of success: the perfect job, the perfect home, the perfect partner, the perfect hobbies, the perfect friends, the perfect hobbies, and most importantly, the perfect self. Now, I call this Old Happy; but back then, it was impossible to see, as it was a fundamental belief that underpinned my every action.
I valiantly strived towards this ideal for most of my life. I picked up on this misguided belief from… oh, absolutely every message we receive from our society and world. We are told, over and over again, that in order to be happy, we need to surround ourselves with the best and the most stuff, and to drape ourselves in the most prestigious accomplishments. Then we will be happy.
That all blew up for me when I was 23, when I realized that despite putting every ounce of energy I had into this pursuit, I was actually depressed, hopeless and unfulfilled. Further away from happiness than ever before. I learned that there is something that nobody teaches you: the way that you think about happiness has an enormous downstream impact on your choices, your decisions, your relationships, and the way you treat yourself.
Human beings are quite remarkable. We will willingly invest our dearest resources - our energy, time and passion - into a goal that we think will make us happier. But if we're not wise about that goal, we're handing over our treasures into something that might end up taking us in the opposite direction.
There are a ton of structural, systemic and societal issues that contribute to this misguided belief that so many of us shared. I hope to work alongside you to change those over the coming years, but that is going to take a while, and you want to be happy now. So let's talk about what you can do to fight the default and move towards New Happiness: my shorthand for my new definition, and obviously, the name of our community.
My Definition of Happiness
After that crisis, I changed my entire life. I changed my life goals. I changed my decision-making model. I changed my job. I changed where I lived. I changed my friends. I changed my hobbies. I changed my habits. All with the hope of inclining towards true happiness.
And then I went back to get a Masters degree to study happiness, which eventually led to my coaching, teaching, and writing.
My definition of happiness will likely be somewhat different from your own. I share it in hopes of inspiring you to think critically about your definition of happiness - both at a conscious and subconscious level - before you hit a wall, the way I did.
After these years of study and practice, I have come to believe that true happiness is not an outcome. It is not something that comes from getting promoted, or getting engaged, or making a million dollars. True happiness is, instead, a way of being in the world founded on love and wisdom. It is a deliberate choice that you make to be a certain way; and it is the millions of decisions that you make on a daily basis to achieve that decision, with a commitment to continually reorient yourself towards that goal. Choosing to embody happiness as a way of being is to seek, at every moment, to embody the state of love and wisdom, and when you fail to live that in a certain moment, to recommit again and try again, over and over again.
Love and wisdom, the heart and the head, are the secrets to true happiness. If you decide every day to do your best to love everyone and everything, and if you decide to try to learn as much as you can and cultivate wisdom from that learning, there is absolutely no way you won’t experience joy, fulfillment, and satisfaction with your life. That’s about as much of a fail-safe promise as I can make you.
When I discovered this ancient truth about happiness - for it is one that has been independently arrived at across the years by many brilliant minds - I made the promise to myself that I would constantly seek to live happiness as an optimal way of being, by choosing love and wisdom every day.
This new definition of happiness led me to daily joy, fulfillment, and impact that I didn't even know was possible when I was 23 and hit that achievement wall. It's a type of happiness that permeates every single moment of my day. It has changed me as a person. And it gives me a goal to pursue for the rest of my life, for love and wisdom are infinitely extensible.
And, most importantly, as you cultivate love and wisdom, you fill yourself up with things to give to the world - and our world desperately needs your unique treasures to make it a better place for everyone. Your life becomes a venue for translating your love and your wisdom to others to help them. For happiness that just serves you is incomplete.
To Sum It Up
1. Cultivate love and wisdom within yourself.
2. Find ways to give that love and wisdom to the world.
3. Experience transcendence from giving. Which makes cultivating love and wisdom easier. And thus the cycle continues...
(There is a lot more here to share, for this is the topic of the book I’m writing! But this message is the heart of it. Does it make sense to you? Any suggestions about how to communicate are very welcomed!)
Living Your Definition
Holding to your definition of happiness can be really hard. I’ve been going through a pretty challenging time over the last year, a time that has tested me beyond anything I’ve ever experienced.
The other day, during a vigorous workout (the part of my day where I often have my most important breakthroughs) I realized something: that I had let someone tell me that I couldn’t be happy during this challenging time, and worse, that I had BELIEVED them.
After all those years of studying and working on myself and being so intentional about my life, I still let someone else tell me what I should believe about happiness. And that was the whole origin of my crisis in the first place - listening to the voices of others instead of my own!
So I'm here to tell you not to beat yourself up if that happens and to empathize with how hard it can be to forge your own path.
It’s so easy to forget. Because our society is beating their achievement drumbeat into our heads constantly, and then people everywhere start to believe it, and well-meaning loved ones and strangers and helpers can’t see your definition, which makes it hard for them to understand.
But even in the hardest times, it is still possible to hold on to our own definitions of happiness. Because my definition is what it is, I can always choose to embody happiness as an optimal way of being. In fact - and this was the really big realization during that workout - I probably have even more love and wisdom to cultivate and learn during this time, precisely due to its challenging characteristics.
I made such a big mistake in slowly moving away from my own definition of happiness.
I’m so grateful that I was able to see this, and I’m sharing this realization with you to hold myself accountable to continue walking the path that I have chosen. To be perfectly honest, I thought that I was beyond this: I thought that I had a strong enough 'inner scorecard’ that this wouldn’t happen to me (again).
The inner scorecard concept comes from Warren Buffett:
"I feel like I’m on my back, and there’s the Sistine Chapel, and I’m painting away. I like it when people say, ‘Gee, that’s a pretty good-looking painting.’ But it’s my painting, and when somebody says, ‘Why don’t you use more red instead of blue?’ Good-bye. It’s my painting. And I don’t care what they sell it for. The painting itself will never be finished. That’s one of the great things about it.
The big question about how people behave is whether they’ve got an Inner Scorecard or an Outer Scorecard. It helps if you can be satisfied with an Inner Scorecard. I always pose it this way. I say: ‘Lookit. Would you rather be the world’s greatest lover, but have everyone think you’re the world’s worst lover? Or would you rather be the world’s worst lover but have everyone think you’re the world’s greatest lover?’ Now, that’s an interesting question.
If all the emphasis is on what the world’s going to think about you, forgetting about how you really behave, you’ll wind up with an Outer Scorecard."
Social influence - an outer scorecard - impacts us in ways that we can't begin to see. Two quick stats that I used this week to remind myself of this truth:
One study found that people ate 31.6% more pasta and 43.5% less salad when in the company of an overweight person, irrespective of how healthy the overweight person’s food servings were.
The study also found that when we eat with other people, we consume on average 44% more food than we do when dining alone.
Social influence is pretty much inescapable, and it’s not always a bad thing: it is through these relationships that we make decisions, gather information, and feel a part of a community. However, there can be a clear downside.
For Those Charting Their Own Path
What if we don’t want to be like the people we are around?
What if we want to chart our own path even if we love those around us?
What if finding and expressing our very personal internal values is something that we believe is deeply important?
What if we want to change the world's understanding of happiness by being a beacon of what is possible?
I am thinking here of the Top Five Regrets of the Dying, a viral blog post written by an Australian nurse, Bronnie Ware. Most of those top five regrets were about sacrificing what an individual truly wanted or needed in favor of conforming to society:
I wish I'd had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me.
I wish I hadn't worked so hard.
I wish I'd had the courage to express my feelings.
I wish I had stayed in touch with my friends.
I wish that I had let myself be happier.
This week, I am reminded of how easy it can be to conform. Those of us who wish to chart our own path will be swimming upstream each and every day. However, the benefits are so vast, and to me, so worth it: self-confidence, self-efficacy, confidence, clarity, a sense that you are living your life according to your own values, and a passion for your life.
This whole experience has reminded me that we can’t rest on our laurels, and we need to be surrounded by a community who share similar beliefs in happiness, to support us in our goal of bringing happiness to all beings. The charge is vast and the journey long, but I hope that we are building a group of people here on The New Happy who share similar definitions of happiness, and we can support one another in our pursuits. Thank you for being next to me on this journey. I am grateful to you.
I'd love to hear from you: what is your definition of happiness? How do you hold to it? What do you need from us to make it easier?