2 Levers To Pull To Make Yourself Happy
Looking and feeling very happy here. At a (beautiful) micro-wedding during the pandemic.
I've been pretty miserable for certain stretches of my life. 😞 And so I've made it my life's work to be unmiserable. 😊 I want to be happy, to feel as if I'm really living my life and leaving it all out there on the field. 🥅
I have realized that when you zoom out enough, there’s a simple way to figure out why you’re either happy or not:
Happiness = Reality - Expectations
That's it. When things are going better than expected or wanted, you're pretty happy about it 😁 (even if things aren't going all that great).
The corollary is that when things are going worse than what you expected, wanted, or hoped, then you're not happy 😭. The real tragedy of this, is that this is true EVEN IF things are actually going well. 🎭
So, if we want to be happier, we have 3 options:
Pull on our reality lever to improve our reality.
Pull on our expectations lever to manage and tune our expectations.
Pull on both.
Your expectations normalize to your reality, and so pulling only on that lever can leave you in the place where you feel like a failure amidst so much success. 💰💰💀
If you only pull on the expectations lever, you're probably selling yourself short. 😬
We explore this, and more on today’s podcast.
Finally, I talk about friction on the call. Just in case I don’t describe it well enough in words, I’ve pasted the below image from the Wikipedia page on Friction:
The purple line is how much force is applied to the object. You’ll see it needs to get almost up to 6N just to get it moving, but once it’s moving you only need 2-3N to keep it moving.
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Also, just curious - do the emoticons make it easier or harder to read this page? Just deciding whether I should keep them…