Self-Help Happiness Blog

From our Daily Dose of Happiness ezine yesterday:

MENTORING

When we reach a hand out to help someone else, we lift two people with that one arm.  Talk about miracles!

What do you do with your free time?  Is it productive?  I don’t mean by “productive” whether it makes money or builds something.  Here is a checklist for your downtime activity:

- Does it get your heart rate pumping?
- Does it make you think in new ways?
- Does it improve the world?
- Does it deepen friendships?

If not, maybe it’s time to rethink how you spend your free time.

Since we touched on that whole can-money-buy-happiness topic yesterday, I though I would share this very wise quote from Bernard Meltzer.

“The real measure of your wealth is how much you’d be worth if you
lost all your money.”

Related article (this is an old one of mine) : Money hunting can’t buy happiness.

More happiness quotes.

Here is a little something from Jagad Guru Chris Butler:

“In his book Small Is Beautiful, noted British economist E. F. Schumacher wrote:

Insights of wisdom … enable us to see the hollowness and fundamental unsatisfactoriness of a life devoted primarily to the pursuit of material ends, to the neglect of the spiritual. Such a life necessarily sets man against man and nation against nation, because man’s needs are infinite and infinitude can be achieved only in the spiritual realm, never in the material.*  

It is a fact that no matter how much sense gratification a person gets, he will never be satisfied. Material food, material things, material sense gratification cannot satisfy the atma (spirit soul). Just as the body needs material food, so the spirit soul needs spiritual food. To try to satisfy one’s spiritual craving with material things leads to endless consumption, greed, envy, violence, and war. Western people have as much sense gratification as one could ever want, yet they are not satisfied. Why? Because they are spiritually empty.”

Jagad Guru Chris Butler - wisdom in daily life 

© 2007 Science of Identity Foundation

* E. F. Schumacher, Small Is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered (New York: Harper and Row, 1973), p. 38

Maclean’s Magazine, November 5 - one of the cover stories is:

Why Men Are Getting Happier (and women more miserable)

The article reviews how the changing roles of women and men in western society are leading to happier men and less happy women.  Just for the record, yes I did choose to stay at home with our kids, no I did not bum around, yes I did build a business from home, and yes both my wife and I share in the joys and stresses of balancing two kids and two careers.

*  Maclean’s is Canada’s national news magazine, and should be available at pretty much any major library in the world.

This was in A Daily Dose of Happiness a couple days ago.  I like it enough to repeat it here…

Here is a game you can play with your family: Academy Awards.  Decide what each person in your household has done that week that is deserving of praise.  Make the announcement.  Everybody applaud.  Have the person make a speech thanking everyone else for helping.  What a way to create a team atmosphere…and if a family is not a team, what is it?

“Be of good cheer. Do not think of today’s failures, but of the
success that may come tomorrow. You have set yourselves a difficult
task, but you will succeed if you persevere; and you will find a joy
in overcoming obstacles.”

Doesn’t that make you feel happy?  Or happier? 

 

“There is no key to happiness, only a ladder.”

Saa-aay, was Hector Lara Lahoz reading my book when he said that.  My book uses the analogy of the Great Wall of Misery and building a Stairway To Heaven to climb over it.

The fact is that happiness is what we make of it.  Some people have a little of it, some have a lot.  Every one of us can create more than we have now.  It’s just a matter of climbing that ladder. Make the decision to climb your ladder, or stairway, to happiness today.

See also my happiness self-help book and these additional happiness quotes.

Why do you do what you do?   

I just returned from church.  Yes, it’s almost noon on a Wednesday, but my daughter’s class was singing the opening song, so I played hookie.  I can do this because I am my own boss as an SEO consultant and running a freelance writer agency. 

Which brings me to my original point.  I chose to work for myself and to work from home in order to be avaialble to do the things I want to do most during this phase of life, while my young kids are getting less young at what seems like the speed of light.  That will not be my priority in ten years, but it is now.

Think about your life and your career.  Are they in sync?  If not, maybe you can align them better. 

Those Maclean’s Interviews certainly can be enlightening.  Here is an excerpt from a recent interview with the famous investment guru, Warren Buffet.

Q: And personal relationships, you’ve had great ones in your life. 

A: Yeah, I’ve been very lucky. 

Q: …your family, your kids, closest associates.  Is that, again, something that you’ve had to work especially hard on, or have you been just lucky. 

A: No, that flows, basically, and you’re lucky.  And of course I’ve got 77 years so you make more friends as life goes along.  I was just at a group of 41 of them last week; we meet every couple of years.  If you’ve got great friends you’re not going to be an unhappy guy. 

Friendship is indeed a key ingredient to happiness.  Support, social interaction, a sense of belonging. 

Read our friendhip poem here.