The Pursuit of Happiness

My dearest readers,

as my blog is primarily concerned with success and what everyone has to contribute in order to be successful and follow his or her dreams I spent a good deal of time thinking about happiness and how success is—or can be—tied to happiness, especially after a good friend told me about positive psychology, which will be the textual foundation for this post. After looking into this rather new branch of psychological epistemology I found it quite reasonable to have success (and all its facets and foundations) and happiness move along in symbiosis; and since my blog has ever since focused on overcoming discouragement and finding delight in work and ambition it was—in my eyes—necessary to enlighten the ambiguous and undefined, abstract concept of happiness.

According to Mark Berber’s graphic we bear a big amount of pre-existing happiness already, which is just slightly influenced by the circumstances of life; meaning: let us focus on the depicted 40% we can control. If there is so much scope we actually and actively have control over, why don’t we make use of it and shape our own happiness? Well, it is time to do so; but first let’s identify what happiness really is. As your perception of happiness may vastly differ from mine, the matter of happiness is, after all, a question you have to answer for yourself. Look at your life, and deep inside your heart, and then you can personally define what happiness really is: what it means to you! There is one common ground of happiness, however, to unite us all: the need and striving for happiness we all have! We need it, and want it, let’s take on the 40% we can control and let’s control it: let’s create happiness in our lives!

No matter how people define ‘happiness’ for themselves, let it be the perfect partner, the perfect job, success, monetary gain and wealth (or a combination of the above), happiness does not depend primarily on those factors; it depends on what you have in your heart and mind. Marcus Aurelius once said that “[t]he happiness of your life depends upon the quality of your thoughts.” Think about it, re-read it, and think again; and let your thoughts, what is in your heart and on your mind gain and bear quality, because it is a heart full of life and love and devotion and ambition and beauty that will shape your life toward happiness. Your happiness depends on the way you think and feel; it is, in that sense, our obligation and our responsibility to look at the 40% and make things happen. Look inside your heart and shape your happiness as if it was clay the potter’s to give a shape.

In that sense I further want to encourage you to get to know yourself better, because if you know yourself and are aware of your own perception of happiness, then you have the perfect conditions to roam and scrabble in the 40% that can lead you toward happiness; no one knows you as good as you do yourself, therefore take lead yourself! And don’t look at others, for they may pursue entirely different entities of happiness, they have no idea what happiness means to you, just as you have no clue what kind of perception and conviction they have. Do your job, not someone else’s, find your happiness, not someone else’s, and lead, and guide yourself! But most of all: be honest with yourself, which is the same when it comes to success and being successful, be true to yourself, be of great heart, then happiness and success become one within you after all, two forces not to be quaked and shaken by a world that wants to convince you that you don’t exist, that you’re a nobody, one of billions wandering our world blindly…because you know you’re somebody, somebody wandering in strength of mind, and peace of mind, in happiness coated with the garments of ambition, radiating passion and reverberating perseverance with a heart so full of life beating underneath that no one can condemn and sentence to decay; a heart…incorruptible, indivisible, with happiness and success for all.

Be true to yourself, remain strong in courage and heart, and then you will find yourself on the path to the greatest state of all, a thing everybody wants, but also a thing that is yet so hard to find: happiness!