Editor’s note: This article was first published in January 2015. Its Barack Obama example assumes he is the sitting US president, as he was in 2015.
Whether we are talking about your own happiness, business or financial success, we would find a very common pattern based on a few decisions we have to make; more than decisions, I would call them choices.
We keep learning every day and we try to improve. After some interesting meetings I had last week with people who have a lot to teach, they gave me a few pieces of advice and lessons that I think show the key (we won’t call it a secret) to feeling fulfilled in life.
We live in an unbalanced world. Most people, and young people above all, wander around like zombies without knowing exactly what to do or where to go. Everything is wrong, everything is terrible and there is no way out. Meanwhile, the most enterprising and hard-working people aim at any moving target. That way they satisfy their most immediate needs. To use a chess analogy, many “sacrifice the queen to take a pawn”.
Which decisions could really improve or change the course of your life?
Step 0
You have to avoid being carried along by your unconscious, which unfortunately is what guides most people. Personally, even though I like to analyse situations coolly, I have at times handed control over to my subconscious. The result is that what seems most comfortable is what ends up exhausting you physically, mentally and emotionally.
It is in this vicious circle that you can end up like those people who look like what, where I’m from, we call “un alma en pena”, a soul in torment. If, on the other hand, we break out of that circle, we can literally change the course of our lives, and therefore our future. Best of all, we can appreciate and enjoy the greatest gift life gives you: the present.
Step 1: Choose consciously and carefully what you want to concentrate on and where to focus your energy
Every day, every week, every year, thousands of things are put in front of us, calling for our attention.
The most unfortunate people (and I don’t say it disparagingly) focus their energy on the past. I call them unfortunate because, as we know, you will never be able to change the past. So you should choose to focus on “the here and now”, but always making sure your actions bring you closer to where you want to be in the future.
You need to visualise that target, take aim and start shooting, again and again. You need to avoid distractions and concentrate on that one thing.
Most happy and successful people are probably those who focus on what really matters and don’t allow distractions that aren’t worth it.
It may sound repetitive, but instead of focusing your energy on what you don’t have and would like to have, put your focus on what you do have and how you are going to use it to get what you want.
Step 2: Develop the habit of being grateful and appreciating what you have
Although our goals tend to be about professional or financial success, you will rarely reach them if you are not able to be grateful for and enjoy what you have.
One of these people told me something I had read before, but had never heard from someone like him:
“I have known rich people who live bitter lives, because they focused only on money and forgot to be grateful for having friends, a family, employees who admire and respect them, or a wife who loves them for who they are and not for what they have. They pinned their happiness on their bank account, and they have discovered that they are poor, unhappy souls for whom life has no meaning. They have no motivation at all.”
The thing is, financial success is worth nothing if you haven’t sorted out everything else that truly makes your life happy and has nothing to do with money.
“I could lose all my money and my company tomorrow, and when I walked into my house and saw my wife and my children, to me it would be no worse than catching a cold,” this man went on, in one of the most moving and sincere speeches I have heard in a long time.
And he said it with complete sincerity, and with an added calm, knowing that he already knows how to succeed and would therefore do it again and again. For him, money comes and goes; success is something you achieve or lose, but as long as he stays grateful for what he has left once everything material is gone, he will still have a powerful motivation to enjoy life.
Basically, he was saying that you can fail and still feel fulfilled, because you have achieved some things that failure can’t take away from you.
Step 3: Concentrate only on what you can control
If you focus on what you can’t control, your life will be a constant, stressful struggle. And it is precisely the things you can’t control that cause a great deal of unhappiness and end up damaging even the things we can control.
Fortunately, there are very few things you can’t control. Most people obsess over the future and see it as something they can’t control when, in a way, you control the future from the controls of the present.
Of course, life also brings the other kind of things, the ones that are beyond anyone’s control.
The most serious would be an illness (your own or a loved one’s) or an unexpected accident that leaves you in a wheelchair. Clearly, circumstances like these can wreck the life of even the mentally strongest people, at least for a while.
But when it isn’t that kind of circumstance, people perhaps tend to focus on other circumstances they don’t control either, but where, fortunately, they can control their attitude and thinking in the face of what has happened.
For example, you can’t control being fired from the company you have worked for for years. Nor can you control the woman or man you love deciding to leave you.
And in a case like this, where you can’t control the situation, you can control how you look at the new scenario in front of you.
You can see it as the end, or you can see it as a beautiful beginning
Let me explain this point.
It may sound like cheap self-help motivation, but today we enjoy many products, and multimillion-dollar corporations have been created, because at some point someone was fired from a company.
You can see losing your job as the greatest misfortune of your life, or you can see it as the chance to start your own personal projects. And believe me, however you see it, you are not getting back the job you were fired from. It is your attitude that will shape your future from then on. You sink or you get back up. How you act depends only on you.
The same goes for heartbreak. I suppose most of us know, to a greater or lesser extent, what it’s like to feel rejected by someone you love. Some decide to keep fighting for the love of someone who doesn’t want to be with them.
Others see it as the chance to meet someone new and be happy with a person who does want to be with them.
When problems like these arrive, beyond our control, it is our own attitude that can take back control and see a beginning where others see only an end.
As you get older, you understand better and better the saying that problems, setbacks and disappointments make you stronger and smarter; a minority are simply made more miserable by them, because they lacked the courage or the right attitude to keep moving forward. Perhaps nobody told them how.
If you focus only on the things you can’t control, you could come to the conclusion that life has no meaning, because nobody wants to live a life in which God (or whatever it may be) devotes all of his attention to screwing up your life.
That is why our society today is breaking records in the consumption of antidepressants, which, ironically, have possible “suicidal thoughts” as a side effect.
It may seem complicated, but in reality it isn’t that hard to get into the habit of thinking wisely and calmly about how to face certain situations.
Step 4: Make decisions from a neutral corner
Many people make decisions according to their emotional state of the moment. In our 12 universal tips, we said that you should never make a decision based on a temporary desire that could bring permanent negative consequences.
As a rule, people who make a decision in a state of euphoria get it wrong as often as those who make a decision while angry or sad.
It’s as if Barack Obama had an argument with his wife and, right at that moment, someone asked him whether he wanted to invade a country that was getting on his nerves. If Obama made a decision based on his emotional state at that moment, it would be every man for himself.
How many times have you made decisions you shouldn’t have made without calmly thinking them over? What was the result of those decisions?
Channel your emotions and turn them into allies
If you are very angry, use that extra energy to exercise, the exercise you didn’t do before because you were too tired. At least when I am very angry, I hit the punching bag much harder.
Many great works of art have been made thanks to their creator’s extreme sadness, many great works of literature have been written after a great heartbreak, and great song lyrics have been written after a tragedy.
Life brings you good things, and you can make the most of them. Life brings you not-so-good things, and you can also channel them into creating something positive.
But when it comes to making decisions that affect your future, make sure you are in what I call a neutral emotional state, or at least be aware that you are analysing a situation without your emotions interfering.
And finally, as we have said on several occasions, it is important to choose the attitude you want to have towards life. Being happy or unhappy is a decision you make, just as you make the decision to surround yourself with people who in turn make you more or less happy. But remember that, whatever your state of happiness turns out to be, it is exactly the one you have chosen.
Further reading
Featured image: Bernd Thaller, CC BY 2.0, via Flickr.
