This is Optimal Living Daily Episode 38, Happiness First, Then Everything Else, by Steve Pablina of StevePablina.com. Get ready to maximize your potential with Optimal Living Daily, the podcast that brings you the best in personal development and productivity every day of the week. Your Optimal Life awaits. Now here's your host, Justin Mullick.
Hello, hello, fellow optimizers. This is Optimal Living Daily, and I'm Justin Mullick, searching and finding the best personal development content for you and reading it to you, as if I'm a professional storyteller. I'm actually quite the opposite. I'm a socially anxious introvert that avoids telling stories at all costs.
But that's one of the reasons I'm doing this. Anyway, enough about me. Let's talk about you. Are you happy?
Did you win the $1.5 billion Powerball Lottery? Will that bring you happiness? Maybe, maybe not. Maybe I have a better idea after listening to this podcast today.
This one comes from Steve Pablina, who is one of the most successful personal development bloggers on the planet. He's written Amazon best-selling books on personal development and has had over 100 million visits to his site. He also does some crazy experiments on himself, like when he slept for only two hours a day for five and a half months. So yeah, this is one interesting guy that you should check out.
And his post today is about happiness. I can tell you one thing. If I only slept for two hours just for one day, I'd be a very unhappy man. I need like 10 hours a night.
So I'm going to read you that today. And if you want help keep this podcast alive, the best thing you can do right now is visit my site at oldpodcast.com and join the weekly newsletter. It's a short and sweet email. And let's me know that you're enjoying the show.
Plus it's extra benefit for you because I give away at least one gift per month to my email subscribers. All you have to do is enter your email over at oldpodcast.com. Now let's get on with the show and start optimizing your life. Happiness First, then everything else by Steve Pablina of StevePablina.com.
If you accept a job or relationship or lifestyle that you merely tolerate but don't appreciate, you're putting other concerns ahead of your own happiness. Social conditioning may have convinced you that sacrificing your happiness to maintain a certain bank balance, to send timely payments to corporations to which you're indebted, or to pay for someone else's needs and expenses is the proper way to live. Perhaps your parents played a role in this conditioning as well, teaching you the importance of being responsible and holding down stable employment. If you do these things well, then according to this conditioning, you are successful.
You're doing what's expected of you and no one could fault you for that. But sooner or later, you'll come to realize that successfully paying the bills and satisfying other people's needs while depriving yourself of a happy life you're truly passionate about isn't no success at all. In fact, it is complete and utter failure. If you found yourself in this situation, then you've terribly misunderstood the game of life.
While you may have been convinced that these duties are important, the truth is that there are no particular importance to people with high self-esteem and a positive sense of self-worth. Such people do not care how much money you make, what kind of provider you are, or how long you've been married to the same person. They're much more curious about something else, how you feel about yourself and the path you're walking. I have many friends who earn very little money, can't or won't hold down stable jobs, and have constantly churning relationship lives.
And yet, if they are happy with themselves, I typically find them fascinating and valuable people to have in my life. I also have friends who've been blessed by tremendous financial success, with brilliant, decade-spanning careers and deeply loving committed relationships. If they too are happy with themselves, I find them just as fascinating and rewarding to connect with. When, however, I connect with people who are responsibly doing their duty, but who haven't yet cultivated life of happiness, I can't help but notice the style of desperation in their eyes, the numbness with which they speak, and the damned if I do, damned if I don't game of self-deception they play each day.
They feel trapped and lost, to the point where they label feelings like depression and frustration with words like fine and okay. If you find yourself in such a situation, there is a way out, and it begins with finally acknowledging the truth to yourself and diving into the dark places where you think it may lead. Accept your situation as it is, and most importantly, accept how you feel about it. The reality is that the darkness you fear is really nothing to fear at all.
Yes, you may face some challenges, but that is how you'll grow. Do you love and appreciate your work? Do you love and appreciate your relationships? Do you love and appreciate your lifestyle?
What is the truth? You cannot get unstuck so long as you remain in a perpetual denial. No external rescue will appear. But there is indeed a path to freedom, and it lies on the other side of denial and self-deception, on the side of truth and acceptance.
What does happiness look like? Happiness is waking up feeling optimistic and expected about the day you get to live. Happiness makes it hard to stay in bed once you awaken. A rich day full of new experiences and creative expression awaits you.
It is an exciting thing to behold. Happiness is the stillness that exists within energy and movement. When you are happy, you can still pay your bills on time, but you'll make better choices about what bills are worth incurring. Some of your current bills and expenses might never have been created, as you've been living a happy and inspired life to begin with.
When you are happy, you can still support others if you wish, but this will be done because you truly want to do it, not because you feel obligated to do so. When you are happy, you can still enjoy a stable career, but you'll produce significantly more value and less time because happiness inspires creativity and action, and creative action is a wellspring of opportunity. A wellspring which can, if so desired, produce abundant income for you. Rest assured, your world will not explode simply because you've decided to make your own happiness a real priority.
More likely, the response from the universe will be akin to assigning what took you so long. When I made decisions that were aligned with my own happiness first, I've heard the occasional, sometimes frequent, outcry of those objecting to my choices. But these objections invariably come from those who weren't happy with their own choices. My decision was a painful reminder of that, and hence I can understand, empathize with, and forgive the momentary insanity on their part.
The insanity which presumes that their wallowing and unhappiness could possibly persuade me to join them under any circumstances. But far worse than the vocal objections of others are the simulated objections that exist only within your mind, the simulated fear of disapproval. In all honesty, which is more important to you, the approval of others or your own happiness? If you aren't happy, you don't approve of yourself, and hence no one of consequence can approve of you anyway.
They'll recognize plain as day that your priorities have produced a dismal and wretched failure of a life. If you place approval above your own happiness, you ultimately end up with neither. You'll be unhappy, and you cannot expect anyone to show the approval of you for that. Whatever approval you do receive will be as fake as a contentment you pretend to harbor.
The approval of others is inconsequential, but if you successfully create a happy life for yourself, you'll have your own self-approval, and that is worth something. This self-approval will in turn appear to unlock the approval mechanisms of the universe itself, and will flood your reality with plenty of validating evidence. When your happiness becomes a true priority, you'll soon notice a conspiracy of ridiculous abundance, including happy relationships with other happy and attractive people, strong motivation to express yourself creatively, and a lifestyle that yanks you out of bed with a wow. You just listened to the post titled Happiness First, Then Everything Else, by Steve Pavlina of StevePavlina.com.
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