Happiness: The Ultimate Birthright

Happiness: The Ultimate Birthright. Happy New Year, Everyone. I hope you are well. In today’s post, I will be sharing The Ultimate Birthright- Happiness. If you have not yet set goals for the new year, let happiness guide you. We all want to go to bed happy and wake up in the morning feeling happy. The key to happiness is this: Dedicate yourself to developing your natural talents and abilities by doing what you love to do and doing it better and better in the service of a cause greater than yourself.

Happiness: The Ultimate Birthright

The key to happiness is both simple and complex. It is a total of more than 2,000 years of philosophy, psychology, speculation, and discussion about the meanings and sources of happiness. From Aristotle in 340 B.C. to today’s modern thinkers, speakers, and writers, this key to happiness has hardly changed. It is the same for virtually all men and women in every country and all walks of life. The key to happiness is this: Dedicate yourself to developing your natural talents and abilities by doing what you love to do and doing it better and better in the service of a cause greater than yourself.

This is a big statement and a big commitment. Being happy requires defining your life on your terms and then throwing your whole heart into living your life to the fullest. In a way, happiness requires being perfectly selfish to develop yourself to a point where you can be unselfish for the rest of your life.

Your Happiness Must Come First

In Edmond Rostand’s play Cyrano de Bergerac, Cyrano is asked why he is so intensely individualistic and unconcerned with the opinions and judgments of others. He replies with these beautiful words: “I am what I am because I decided I would please at least myself in all things early in life.”

Your happiness likewise depends upon your ability to please at least yourself. However, most people are reluctant to use their happiness as the standard to judge life events. This is primarily because we let others define or affect what brings us happiness. And we often believe it is more important to make other people happy than to make ourselves happy. This is nonsense.

Human beings are happiness-driven organisms. Everything we do in life is oriented toward maintaining and increasing our level of happiness. We are psychologically constructed so that we can’t be any other way without making ourselves mentally and emotionally ill. The fact is that you can’t give away to anyone else what you don’t have for yourself. Just as you can’t give money to the poor if you don’t have any, you can’t make someone else happy if you are miserable.

The best way to assure the happiness of others is to be happy yourself and then share your joy with them. Suffering and self-sacrifice merely depress and discourage other people. If you want to make others happy, start living and doing what makes you happy.

Let Happiness Be Your Guide

Make happiness the organizing principle of your life. That is, compare every possible action and decision against your standard of satisfaction to see whether it would make you happier or unhappier. Soon, you will discover that almost all the problems in your life come from choices you have made — or are currently making — that do not contribute to your happiness.

There will, of course, be countless times when you have to do little things that don’t make you happy in pursuit of your more considerable happiness. However, as Earl Nightingale said, “Happiness is the progressive realization of a worthy ideal.” You feel delighted only when you are moving, step-by-step, toward accomplishing clearly defined goals that you think will enhance the quality of your happiness.

Since you can’t be thrilled until you are clear about your inherent possibilities, you must regularly analyze yourself and identify your strengths and weaknesses. There is an old saying, “Success leaves tracks.” You can look back on your life and determine who you are and what you should be doing with your life. One of the best ways to do this is to ask yourself this powerful question constantly:

“What One Great Thing Would I Dare To Dream If I Knew I Could Not Fail?

Imagine that you are guaranteed success in pursuing a particular goal, big or small, short-term or long-term. Imagine that you have all the money, all the time, all the education, all the contacts, all the resources, and everything else you could need to achieve any big goal in life. What would it be? This is a crucial question because you remove the limitation from your thinking. You often get an obvious idea of what you should do with your life. Your greatest dream indicates your natural abilities and what is important to you.

All successful men and women are big dreamers. They imagine what their fortune could be, ideal in every respect, and then they work daily toward their distant vision, goal or purpose. Step-by-step realization of their ideal makes them genuinely happy.

Life’s 4 Categories

Dr Viktor Frankl, who wrote the book Man’s Search for Meaning, said that you could divide the thing you do in life into four categories.

Hard to Learn and Hard To Do

The first category consists of the things that are hard to learn and hard to do. An example for many people is mathematics. As adults, many of us struggled with math in school and still worked with bookkeeping, accounting, financial statements, and tax returns. If you find mathematics hard to learn and do, this is the sort of activity you are unsuited for. No matter how much of it you do or how good you get, you will never achieve lasting satisfaction or happiness.

Hard To Learn, but Easy To Do

The next category consists of hard-to-learn but easy-to-do. Riding a bicycle, driving a car, and tying your shoes are hard to understand but easy to do once you’ve practised enough. These are seldom activities that cause you to feel terrific about yourself when you engage in them. They do not demand your best.

Easy To Learn But Hard To Do

The third category consists of easy-to-learn but hard-to-do. Physical labour falls into this category. Digging a ditch with a shovel and chopping wood with an axe is easy to understand, but it is hard to do and never gets any easier.

Easy To Learn And Easy To Do

The fourth category is the key. These are things that are easy to learn and easy to do. You seem to have a natural propensity for them. When you are engaged in this sort of activity, time flies. The things that are easy for you to learn and do are what you should be doing with your life. They indicate where your natural talents and abilities lie. Engaging in these activities with your whole heart, and committing yourself to becoming better and better, will give you all the joy, satisfaction, and happiness you could want in life.

Happiness Is Not An Accident

Everyone has an area of excellence. Everyone has something that they can do outstandingly. It may take weeks, months, or even years for you to develop yourself in that area to perform extraordinarily. Still, you will be strongly attracted to that activity from the beginning. You will enjoy reading, talking about it, and thinking about it. You will find yourself admiring people who are outstanding in that area. And you will look longingly at that field and wonder what it would be like to be in it and succeed at it. That is very often your heart’s desire. That area of activity where you can become excellent is probably what you were put on this earth to do.

So resolve to persist until you succeed. The first part of courage is the resolve to launch in faith toward your objectives; the second part is your willingness to endure the inevitable disappointments and setbacks you will encounter on the road.

Happiness is not an accident. Happy people deliberately do the things that invariably lead to happiness. Happy people know what they want and throw their hearts into using their unique talents. And abilities to contribute to the world in the achievement of their goals.

You are put on this earth with a particular purpose, programmed with unique talents and abilities that have not yet been fully tapped and utilized. When you focus all your energies on unlocking your true potential, you can claim your ultimate birthright: happiness.

I hope you enjoyed that.

Talk soon