Newsletter Archives
Most people in the US are entering their third month of quarantine right now. Since I’m about two months ahead of everyone else on the timetable, I started thinking: what did I learn in the painful third and fourth month that might help you to avoid that pain in your own life? Maybe it’s a blessing that I went through this earlier, so I can be a sort of time-traveler sharing what’s coming if you follow my blunders?!
This pandemic has exposed a hard truth to us and delivered it in an incredibly harsh way. It has made it unequivocally clear that we are, in fact, not in control. Our collective worst nightmare. We are not in control of the world, we never really were, and all of the ways we tried to pretend we were have been exposed as flimsy delusions that can be ripped away within a moment, without a thought or care for our opinion on the matter.
While playing in tournaments, professional golfers bring along another very important person as a part of their team, who in the game of golf is called a caddy. The caddy accompanies the pro along the course throughout the game, playing a number of roles. Utility-wise, they carry the golf bags and help hand over, clean, and store the clubs after usage; but more importantly, and most significantly, they are also there to offer advice, support, and their perspective on how to navigate each step of the long golf game. For the pros, their caddy is like their secret weapon to help them win when the stakes are high.
My dad, one of our few golf-loving-New-Happiers, posed this question to me the other day: are there other types of caddies, ones that aren’t for the golf course, but for the hard-for-us moments in our life?
Have you ever noticed that when you’re in a good groove in life, things start to magically become easier, and life transforms into something better? Things seem to flow more smoothly. You are more active. You’re more connected to people. You eat healthier. You’re kinder to others. Life is just good!
And then, when the opposite happens, when you’re in a rut, and it feels like you’re sliding down a slippery mountain of frustration? Maybe you eat a bit too much cake, and then feel bad about yourself, so you skip your regular workout, and then you sleep in, and then you don’t fall asleep as normal the next night, and then you eat unhealthy because you’re tired, and all of a sudden, you’re looking around, wondering how you got into this massive rut?
The wild thing about these upward spirals or downward spirals is that they 1) are real, and 2) really do change your life, because they impact your choices and behavior, your relationships, your sense of self, and how you engage in the world. 40% of all premature deaths could have been prevented through behavioral changes, which very often start with a downward spiral that isn’t halted in time.
My partner is an inventor. He creates magical things that have never existed before. Through years of grit and courage, and the persistent application of his talents to a specific question or problem, he turns what was once a scribbled wisp of an idea into something real, something that people can hold and touch and play with and make their own.
He received a few new patents this week (so incredibly proud of him!) and I started to think about how aligned the idea of being an inventor is to what we are trying to do here with The New Happy community.
Our mission here is to create happiness for all beings everywhere. To make that mission a reality, we all need to become inventors, too, but of a different type: we need to become happiness inventors.
One absolutely mind-bending thing is that, so often, the way that we think about happiness is actually what's keeping us from being happy.
Most of us live our lives according to incorrect, outdated or even harmful ideas about happiness. Some of them come with a body (like that your brain is designed to keep you focused on what’s going wrong.) Some of them come from our culture (like that following your passion is the key to happiness at work.) And some of them come from well-meaning friends and family or school, who think that they are teaching us something helpful about happiness, but often end up leading us in the wrong direction.
To live a life aligned with our goals - where we are both happy and positively contributing to others - it’s essential that we learn, first, how to be aware of those myths, and second, how to replace them with the truth.
There’s one really big lie that I so often see getting in the way of people’s pursuit of a good life.
I call it The Getting Lie: the story we tell ourselves about how our happiness is dependent upon what we get.
Today, I want you to reclaim your freedom from this lie by learning the truth that, in fact, pinning your hopes for happiness upon what you get is not a good strategy, and instead, that happiness reliably ensues from the intentional choices we make about how to be, how we see, and how we connect.
Today, I want to share something from my diary: a list of the things I’ve learned in my life thus far, that I reread whenever I’m going through a hard moment, or just need to be re-centered.
Many of the items on this list come directly from one of you in this community, who have taught me something incredibly important - I hope you know how much that means to me, and my gratitude for you and your wisdom.
What have you learned so far?
“I had an argument this week with my boyfriend about scheduling and making plans. I’ve been reflecting on it, and I realized that when I’m not looking about life through a compassionate filter, I’m incredibly quick to make everything about me, and that leads to me feeling hurt, annoyed, or defensive. But when I am able to look at things compassionately, I have this amazingly wise inner dialogue that says, “Okay, sometimes Boyfriend gets anxious about scheduling, and he is also natural people-pleaser – how can you approach this situation in a way that is fair to both of you?”
Unfortunately, though, in most conflicts, I find myself being reactive or defensive. I’d like to be more compassionate instead, especially in these charged moments. What can I do?”
One of the inescapable facts of life is that voluntarily doing hard things leads to highly valuable outcomes.
In a prior newsletter about how to make habits for happiness, I wrote:
“All the things that are good in life - great relationships, thriving health, exceptional performance, happiness - are founded on what my professor Angela Duckworth called “the accretion of mundane acts.”
Eating your vegetables. Practicing kindness. Building the tiny components of a skill. Cultivating your mind to be resilient and optimistic.
Day in, day out. The accretion of mundane acts.”
These mundane acts are also the hard acts.
“Be yourself.”
“Get in touch with your true self.”
“Follow your heart.”
How many times have you heard this advice? It’s so central to the way that we talk about happiness in the West that you probably take it for granted. Of course it’s right and good to find your truest, most authentic self. How could it be anything but?!