The Pursuit of Happiness

Here’s how you catch it…

As you may already know, I love The Do Lectures.

I had planned on attending one right before Covid whacked the world silly.

But that hasn’t stopped their team from communicating with those of us who love how they think.

Like this recent post: “Angus Campbell wanted to know what made people happy. So, he wrote a book called ‘The Sense of Well-being in America.”

The most powerful common denominator of happiness was simple.Having a strong sense of controlling one’s life is a more dependable predictor of positive feelings of well-being, than any of the objective conditions of life we have considered’. (That certainly helps explain our moods since Covid.)

More than salary. More than the size of your house. More than the prestige of your job.”

Now, if you’re unhappy, consider this: “There is no happy destination without a happy journey.’

In Karl Pillemer’s book ’30 Lessons for Living’, he interviewed a thousand elderly Americans looking for the most important lessons they had learned from decades of life experience.

He wrote:

No one – not a single person out of a thousand – said that to be happy you should try to work as hard as you can to make money to buy the things you want.

No one – not a single person – said it’s important to be as least as wealthy as the people around you, and if you have more than they do it’s real success.”

No one – not a single person – said you should choose your work based on your desired future earning power.”

What they did value was quality friendships, being part of something bigger than themselves, and spending unstructured time with their children.

Your time is the most valuable part of your life on this planet. So, it shouldn’t surprise anyone that you need to invest your time doing work that matters, even if only to one person.

We all hope to be part of something larger than ourselves. We all aspire to help change our world into something better we can leave to our children.

The brands we love working for change things. And, as it turns out, change is something we are happy to give our time to. Who knew?

‘Stress is doing something you don’t care about with time that you do.’

Is it time for a change in the way you spend your time?

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