Self-Mastery. Nº12
Happiness comes before success. Why?
Welcome to Self-Mastery — a timeless signal to become the architect of your mind and create yourself, starting from the inside.
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It’s very easy for us to chase happiness through our lives. And while happiness is different for each person, it’s always found in the same place. There is no need to search outside yourself. Start within, and you’ll never be without.
Hm… How can I help you be 31% more productive right now?
Well, that’s the key, isn’t it? Right now.
Ever heard of the Happiness Advantage? I hadn’t, until recently. It clarifies the idea of why happier people can compound their luck, fortune and success more easily over those who tend to be negative, stressed or even neutral.
It’s the state in which your brain performs undoubtedly better in terms of productivity. But it’s only achieved when you are happy in the present.
And the enchanted equation for this is as follows:
Get happy now = think better, work better = achieve your goal = reinforce happiness, rather than achieving your goal and feeling unsatisfied or disappointed.
Now, Think. Work. Achieve. Reinforce. It all starts with now.
Positivity is a trained skill. This might be your answer to why it’s hard to stay positive. It’s easier to be negative because pessimism once promised higher chances of survival.
And we had to be that way once. It was miles better to be risk-averse than to be eaten and go extinct. That behaviour still runs through us today, even if the risk is far less severe.
It’s hard to become a positive-in-the-present person because our early ancestors spent their centuries avoiding that. But to make this change, however, requires training. Lots of training.
What should you do every day? Well, I’m glad you asked:
Exercise.
Gratitude (criminally underrated).
Selfless kindness (very criminally underrated).
Meditation.
Exercise is the obvious one. But gratitude and selfless kindness cannot be put into words on just how beneficial they are. Gratitude is for the times you feel you’ve done nothing all year — when really, you’re ignoring all 50,000 micro and macro achievements that do matter but weren’t your biggest goal.
And selfless kindness is one skill I’ve been especially pushing for. It’s where you help others for no reason other than to benefit them. The difference between this and regular acts of kindness are in the details. I’ll quickly explain.
Every action we take for the goal of achieving a deep positive emotion; we tend to help others not only to make that person better but to make ourselves feel better as well. You grab a top-shelf item for the elderly lady not just to help her do what she can’t do easily, but to feel happy for being needed and valuable.
Helping others do something positive is always good, but doing it without a single care about personal gain is magical. If more people helped others this way, humanity would be even more extraordinary. Give it a try — help someone in a way they might not even notice. Make the world better, in silence.
Once you achieve “success”, you change goal posts — there’s always going to be a new “thing” next. If you define success by this, you hinder your ability to be happy on how successful you are. But reverse this, and you’ll supercharge your ability to feel, and be successful.
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I want this one to sink in. Please share with your friends or anyone you feel will benefit from what I write to you.
Be and stay happy this week.
—Jelani.