Monday Morning

Motivation    7/25/2011

THE POSITIVE PLACE. SALES MOTIVATION AND PERSONAL GROWTH

Happiness and joy

It’s so much easier to write about monetary success than joy and happiness. Achieving monetary success is largely the result of following a few rules, mixed in with a great deal of luck and a significant amount of nerve.

But finding happiness and joy is a more personal affair. It’s different to everyone, sometimes elusive, sometimes rarely realized. It’s the Holy Grail of most people’s lives.

So, what I suggest today is going to be something that won’t work for many people, but perhaps it will work for you.

1. Simplify.

I think a good many of us allow our lives to become so complicated and convoluted that finding happiness is a difficult thing. To bring overall happiness to your life, concentrate on the areas that give you joy.  Many people will find concentrating on those areas will be financially successful for them in the long run, if they use that area of focus to provide a service to someone else -- to help someone else find joy.

2. Minimize.

Minimize those areas that are of no great worth, but a whole lot of bother. Hire a maid; pay your bills online; find a financial manager; go into a different line of work; pave the front lawn (all right, maybe not that last one). Minimize or eliminate those areas which take up a lot of time, but yield pain, heartache, or boredom in return.

3. Appreciate.

Appreciate the people you love or care about. Appreciate great friendships, and apply enough effort to deepen those friendships. Appreciate the blessings that have come your way -- the earth around you and the stars above, of course; but also the job you choose to do, the friends you interact with, the chances you have to make a difference, the vacation you take, the health you have. Appreciation always deepens your happiness -- even when you only have a little to appreciate -- and it always brings on more blessings in the long run.

4. Reflect.

Reflect and ponder on the big questions in your life. Spend a little bit of time each day in reflection, and apply your experiences and learning to conquering the challenges that each life presents. Spend time and effort in contemplating life’s questions -- each of our lives will have questions, and we’ll never reach the answers until we address the questions involved. Like seeing our reflection in a mirror allows us to study ourselves, mental reflection allows us to analyze and understand our lives and the lives of those around us.

5. Take Action

Tasking yourself with a goal and then taking action to achieve that goal is a great thing -- it allows us to have a target to shoot for. Experience shows that actively working to achieve a worthy goal helps us maintain a positive self-image. Experience also shows that many people will read this piece, find it useful, and yet never put it into effect. They miss the last -- and usually most important -- step: take action.

I’ve written these five steps (and there could always be many more), in such a way that the first letter of each step forms the word “SMART.” Let’s be smart about this, and put happiness and joy into our lives and into our personal approach to life.

Warren Buffett famously said that “Anyone who says money can’t buy happiness simply hasn’t learned where to shop.”  But at the time, he was talking about See’s Candy and Dairy Queen, among other Berkshire Hathaway companies, so we’ll cut him a little bit of slack; buying companies is what gives him happiness.  For the rest of us, finding happiness is more than something that can be bought and traded -- it’s something that must be found within ourselves, nourished, and shared.

Copyright, 2011, by Daryl R. Gibson. All rights reserved. Permission is hereby granted for the non-commercial redistribution of this document as long as it remains intact with this copyright and all other lines. This license does not extend to the use of this material in a compilation, whether for profit or non-profit use. Join us at http://www.Weekdaywisdom.com.