by miami | May 24, 2008
For years I have been writing about happiness. What it is, where to find it, how to keep it, and how to share it.
The more time goes by, the more certain I am happiness is what we all really want.
And I also believe the more we all tie happiness to having money, the less happy we will be.
Speaking only for myself now – I feel the most alive and happy when I am super excited about a new project, goal or journey.
There is something extremely attractive in a new challenge.
When we built our first sailboat. When we built the horse farm we currently live on. When I went to sea for the first time. When I took the engineer crew position on a 165 foot mega yacht in Acapulco Mexico. When I joined the Navy and to serve on nuclear submarines. When I met my wife.
All these and many more are dreams manifested to reality. Manifested means I was so passionate I would do anything to get there!
Our newest goal is to go back to the cruising life – and share it with our two sons – Ian who is 16 and Ryan who is now 9. I want to show them there is a whole another world of people, places and cultures beyond their current experience.
With the challenge of manifesting such a dream comes work. Lots of it. We have a horse farm and business to sell (great time I picked to sell property!), 11 years of accumulated stuff to get rid of, a boat to find, purchase, and get ready for sea – and finally to move us all from a home to a small boat!
Easy.
The thing is I am so excited about it – I want to skip all the steps and just go right to sea! Why can’t it be this way?
I’ll leave that answer to you…
(But now you know what I have been up to!)
So my point is – what is it that makes you so passionate you can’t wait to get out of bed in the morning to get started? What keeps you up late at night?
Is this what you are doing?
by miami | Mar 18, 2008
If you are thinking about changing careers – or partners for that matter – this post from Seth Godin is well worth reading…
In the last few days, I’ve heard from top students at Cornell and other universities about my internship.
It must have been posted in some office or on a site, because each of the applications is just a resume. No real cover letter, no attempt at self marketing. Sort of, “here are the facts about me, please put me in the pile.”
This is controversial, but here goes: I think if you’re remarkable, amazing or just plain spectacular, you probably shouldn’t have a resume at all.
Not just for my little internship, but in general. Great people shouldn’t have a resume.
Here’s why: A resume is an excuse to reject you. Once you send me your resume, I can say, “oh, they’re missing this or they’re missing that,” and boom, you’re out.
Having a resume begs for you to go into that big machine that looks for relevant keywords, and begs for you to get a job as a cog in a giant machine. Just more fodder for the corporate behemoth. That might be fine for average folks looking for an average job, but is that what you deserve?
If you don’t have a resume, what do you have?
How about three extraordinary letters of recommendation from people the employer knows or respects?
Or a sophisticated project they can see or touch?
Or a reputation that precedes you?
Or a blog that is so compelling and insightful that they have no choice but to follow up?
Some say, “well, that’s fine, but I don’t have those.”
Yeah, that’s my point. If you don’t have those, why do you think you are remarkable, amazing or just plain spectacular? It sounds to me like if you don’t have those, you’ve been brainwashed into acting like you’re sort of ordinary.
Great jobs, world class jobs, jobs people kill for… those jobs don’t get filled by people emailing in resumes. Ever.
by miami | Jan 1, 2008
John Carlton is a very good copywriter – and has posted a great column linked here:
http://www.john-carlton.com/2007/12/27/the-dark-side-of-passion/
This is an excerpt I particularly liked.
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You can set an example, by tending your own garden and living life as well as you can. (And I’ve always believed that is part of the job of the entrepreneur… to engage life with gusto, for the sake of every feudal slave in history and every oppressed schlub today who has dreamed of the freedom to think, act and love without censorship and an authoritarian boot on his neck. You OWE it to him to make the best of your good fortune.)
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Take a look at the whole post if you like this…
by miami | Dec 28, 2007
Here is a great post from Seth Godin. Basically he is saying the same thing we all say – it is all up to you – but Seth has a great way of putting it…
http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2007/12/only-two-years.html
Here’s a question that you should clip out and tape to your bathroom mirror. It might save you some angst 15 years from now. The question is, What did you do back when interest rates were at their lowest in 50 years, crime was close to zero, great employees were looking for good jobs, computers made product development and marketing easier than ever, and there was almost no competition for good news about great ideas?
Many people will have to answer that question by saying, “I spent my time waiting, whining, worrying, and wishing.” Because that’s what seems to be going around these days. Fortunately, though, not everyone will have to confess to having made such a bad choice.
While your company has been waiting for the economy to rebound, Reebok has launched Travel Trainers, a very cool-looking lightweight sneaker for travelers. They are selling out in Japan — from vending machines in airports!
While Detroit’s car companies have been whining about gas prices and bad publicity for SUVs (SUVs are among their most profitable products), Honda has been busy building cars that look like SUVs but get twice the gas mileage. The Honda Pilot was so popular, it had a waiting list.
While Africa’s economic plight gets a fair amount of worry, a little startup called Kickstart is actually doing something about it. The new income that its products generate accounts for 0.5% of the entire GDP of Kenya. How? It manufactures a $75 device that looks a lot like a StairMaster. But it’s not for exercise. Instead, Kickstart sells the machine to subsistence farmers, who use its stair-stepping feature to irrigate their land. People who buy it can move from subsistence farming to selling the additional produce that their land yields — and triple their annual income in the first year of using the product.
While you’ve been wishing for the inspiration to start something great, thousands of entrepreneurs have used the prevailing sense of uncertainty to start truly remarkable companies. Lucrative Web businesses, successful tool catalogs, fast-growing PR firms — all have started on a shoestring, and all have been profitable ahead of schedule. The Web is dead, right? Well, try telling that to Meetup.com, a new Web site that helps organize meetings anywhere and on any topic. It has 200,000 registered users — and counting.
Maybe you already have a clipping on your mirror that asks you what you did during the 1990s. What’s your biggest regret about that decade? Do you wish that you had started, joined, invested in, or built something? Are you left wishing that you’d at least had the courage to try? In hindsight, the 1990s were the good old days. Yet so many people missed out. Why? Because it’s always possible to find a reason to stay put, to skip an opportunity, or to decline an offer. And yet, in retrospect, it’s hard to remember why we said no and easy to wish that we had said yes.
The thing is, we still live in a world that’s filled with opportunity. In fact, we have more than an opportunity — we have an obligation. An obligation to spend our time doing great things. To find ideas that matter and to share them. To push ourselves and the people around us to demonstrate gratitude, insight, and inspiration. To take risks and to make the world better by being amazing.
Are these crazy times? You bet they are. But so were the days when we were doing duck-and-cover air-raid drills in school, or going through the scares of Three Mile Island and Love Canal. There will always be crazy times.
So stop thinking about how crazy the times are, and start thinking about what the crazy times demand. There has never been a worse time for business as usual. Business as usual is sure to fail, sure to disappoint, sure to numb our dreams. That’s why there has never been a better time for the new. Your competitors are too afraid to spend money on new productivity tools. Your bankers have no idea where they can safely invest. Your potential employees are desperately looking for something exciting, something they feel passionate about, something they can genuinely engage in and engage with.
You get to make a choice. You can remake that choice every day, in fact. It’s never too late to choose optimism, to choose action, to choose excellence. The best thing is that it only takes a moment — just one second — to decide.
Before you finish this paragraph, you have the power to change everything that’s to come. And you can do that by asking yourself (and your colleagues) the one question that every organization and every individual needs to ask today: Why not be great?
by miami | Dec 17, 2007
On a scale on 1-10 (10 being deliriously happy) just how much do you feel happiness on a daily level?
We all understand happiness ebbs and flows, but some people are definitely more happy on average than others. This is fascinating and worth a look.
Another interesting question to ask is: What is the happiness level you would want to be averaging?
Once you have decided what is your optimum number, congratulations! You have now set a goal. How do you go about achieving it?
The most simple method is to look what one thing you could change that would make the most difference in your attitude. Work on that one thing. If you believe you are unhappy because of a relationship, a job, where you live, your lifestyle… then pick one area that you feel could change you most and begin to do the things you know you have to do to change it!
I know you know what to do – because if there is something in your life that affects your happiness that much most likely you have spent a lot of time thinking about it. True or true?
If you have spent so much time thinking about it – why have you not begun to change it? The reason probably is that most of us dislike change, and it always seems to be easier to maintain current condition than face the unknown world of change.
That in itself can add to your frustration – and being less happy!
A couple of things to remember about happiness:
1. Happiness is feeling ‘good’ opposite feeling ‘bad’. One way to increase happiness is to follow the ‘good’ feelings and avoid the ‘bad feelings’. This is not rocket science but many overlook this simple technique. We tend to do things based on incorrect motivations. Instead of doing what you think others want you to do – do what you feel is good or right. Learn to smile when you are angry. Learn to laugh when you are sad.
2. Happiness is a choice. Unfortunately, there are no happiness stores no matter what the advertising leads you to believe. A new car will not make you happy for very long! Learn to choose to be happy.
3. Happiness is tied very closely to gratitude. Being grateful for everything we have opens the door to joy and happiness. Funny enough it also opens the door to plenty!
4. Let it go. We all tend to hold frustrations, anger, sadness, and other anti-happiness emotions for way too long. Realize the choice to hold these emotions are destructive to your happiness and learn to let them go.
So now, on a scale of 1-10 (10 being deliriously happy) – just how happy are you?
I am happy for you!
by miami | Dec 10, 2007
“If I could only figure this out, I think I could [find happiness->]” my friend said during a recent conversation. This is not the first time, nor will it be the last that I hear this statement.
Too often people believe that finding happiness is as simple as finding something else they want. In my experience, no one has ever found long term happiness by achieving another goal. Ultimately, to find happiness is to invest the effort look within yourself.
In other words, happiness is completely an inside job. The most important piece to finding happiness is to comprehend happiness is a personal choice and not the result of an experience. If all happiness could be found as the result of an acquisition, meeting a goal, or having anything, then a person’s happiness would always be subject to something else.
Remember this: one definition of happiness is simply the absence of an opposite emotion whether it is pain, sadness or something else. If the opposite emotions are never experienced then happiness can never be experienced either. Think about it like this: bad times allow you to appreciate good times; hunger allows you to appreciate food; and sadness allows you to appreciate and experience happiness.
The dictionary defines happiness as enjoying, showing, or marked by pleasure, satisfaction or joy.
“I’ll be happy when” is statement commonly heard when discussing happiness.
- When I get a nice house, I’ll be happy.
- I’ll be happy when I retire.
- If I had more money, I’d be happy.
‘If I had’ scenarios all follow the same flawed reasoning; that is happiness is based on external circumstances.
If you base your happiness on external circumstances, you will continuously fail to find happiness. Will there not always be another external circumstance? Another dollar, another job, another house, or another partner”?
We must find our happiness somewhere else. Find happiness within yourself. We have been given everything we need to be happy.
Allow yourself to choose happiness. If life was perfect would you be happy?
Life is perfect because we create it with our choices. Since we can create life, we can create
happiness – and how much better can it get?
If you can accept that life is perfect as it is and that our lives are the sum total of everything that has happened to this instant, then you can accept the joy and happiness
you deserve and they work toward creating the life you want – and be happy in the doing of that task.
I realize that this concept is very difficult for some to accept. However, the alternative to bein g happy now is to spend the rest of our lives seeking happiness as if
happiness was an item to be bought or found.
It’s not. Just remember the famous saying: Don’t worry – be happy!
