Everyone (says) that they want to find happiness, but very few people intentionally pursue happiness every day. Most people randomly bump into happiness (and unfortunately sadness) throughout the day. Each of us needs to intentionally seek happiness each day.
Haiku:
we want happiness
but we don’t seek it daily
how will we find it
We all want to find Happiness -- so go out and DO IT!
Hello -- Marc with the Gunnar Project. Again, the mission of the Gunnar Project is to inspire and teach people how to pursue happiness every day.
Another interesting thing that I want to address here a little bit is this idea that everybody wants to be happy, right?
Over the past year, we’ve spoken to almost 3,000 people in different groups and in different settings, and a pretty wide range of ages, although most of the people who we’ve spoken to have been young adults. In every group that I talk to, in fact, that every person that I talk to on the street, or through the course of my work or whatever I do, I ask them, “Tomorrow, if you had your choice, would you rather be happy, or would you rather have a crappy day?” And everybody wants to be happy.
In fact -- I read something the other day that says -- that this reminded me that -- you know life is really a series of decisions and every couple of moments we have another decision. We can decide to make another phone call, or not -- or we can decide to call our mom, or not. Or we can decide to eat this or eat that, right? It’s a whole series of decisions and pretty much every decision that we make through the course of the day is to drive us toward that state of happiness -- to drive us towards something that is happy versus crabby, right? We just don’t make decisions through the course of the day that are going to -- that we think are going to bring us distress, and make our day kind of a crappy day. So everybody wants to be happy.
The interesting thing is the second question I always ask when I’m talking to people is: “what did you do today, what did you do this morning, what are you doing through the course of the day today that’s going to guarantee that you’re going to run into happiness? You’re going to create happiness in your day.” And most of the people, they don’t have a plan -- most of the people do this sort of like Plinko ball, and they wake up and they do their deal, and they run into something that makes them happy and “yay!” and they’re happy for a little bit… and then they run into somebody at the office and oooh, this person always makes them crabby, and so they’re crabby… And then they go out to eat and they know that if they eat salad, that’s going to make them feel really good for the rest of the day but instead they decide to go to a Chinese buffet and a half an hour after going to the Chinese buffet, they just feel terrible. They just kind of run through the day and they run into a few things that generate some happiness, and they run into a few things that kind of create some discord or some distress, and at the end of the day they look back on their day and they say “Hmmm, that day was actually kind of a crappy day… I did this and I did that…” or they look back on their day and they say “Huh -- look at this! That day was actually a pretty good day!”
The point of it is, if you wake up in the morning and you have an intentional feeling for driving yourself toward happiness, you can really direct your day and you can just make yourself run into these things that make you happy, right? You can get in a good workout, you can get a good night’s sleep, you can eat really well so that you feel energized, you can run into those people in your life that just make you happy and are inspiring! And if you do that, you’ll look back on your day, and you’ll say “Wow! That was really a pretty cool day!” And you’ll really be able to avoid those days where you look back on your day and say “Oh man! What a buzzkill! What a terrible day!”
Does that mean that every single thing you do through the course of the day is going to be awesome? No! That’s just not the way that life is. But if you set out during the beginning of your day and you truly wanted to be happy, which everybody says they do, you could actually drive yourself into a position or place of happiness, I think pretty much at the end of every day.
So again, something to ponder, as you think about pursuing happiness -- again this is the mission of the Gunnar Project -- to get everybody to really start thinking about actively pursuing their own happiness each and every day.
Again, Marc with the Gunnar Project, thanks for listening and I look forward to talking to you soon. Bye.