True Happiness

Question: 

What is true happiness?

Gary's Answer: 

The knowledge that you are making progress toward your goals every day. This is the only true happiness because it is universal and realistic.

It doesn’t matter what your goals are. They can include anything: falling in love, writing a book, making a million dollars. Happiness does not judge goals. It only requires movement toward those goals. Since you choose your goals, you are free to choose goals that improve your life. No one chooses future unhappiness. Unhappiness results from making choices that do not move you toward your goals.

This is happiness that everyone can attain no matter what their situation or resources. Some might say that the worse your situation, the easier it is to make progress in bettering it. Even if your only resources is your own time, if you are using that time in ways that you can see are making progress, you will be happy.

This is not a happiness that depends on events you cannot control or what others do or do not do for you. Sure, events may set you back, but you choose which events you utilize. If you choose to swim against the tide of change, you won’t make progress and you won’t be happy. However, change creates opportunities, openings, that let you move toward your goal. 

This is a happiness that depends solely on your own choices and decisions. You can make choices that move you toward your goals, or you can make choices that make your goals impossible to attain. Even a person who is in jail has the freedom necessary to make these types of choices with how they choose to spend their time every day.

This is a happiness that many people do not attain very often only because they do not understand the methods of making progress every day. They do not know what actions they need to take to create small victories every day. The rules for doing this were written down 2,500 years about, but I have tried to make them easier for people to understand today in my award-winning book: The Golden Key to Strategy: 101 Lessons in Winning Small Victories Every Day.