Tag Archives: happiness

You Don’t HAVE To – You GET To.

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Three words that dismay the most productive and professional among us represent the death knell to a positive mindset. Stephen Covey mentioned them as part of his treatise on Habit One: Be Proactive, and just lately I’ve been feeling their proverbial pinch. The three words are:

“I have to.”

That expression is usually attached to an unwanted imposition or commitment, is it not? If you don’t believe me, ask yourself if, when you are looking forward to executing on any commitment, you use them – or if you use expressions like “I want to”, “I am going to”, or “I have promised that I will…”. In truth, I’d gamble that you only use the expression “I have to…” when what you are about to do is NOT something you want to do, at all.

Well, it’s certainly true in my case.

Until last night. I was reading a book called ‘Best Year Yet’ by Michael Hyatt. He was writing about how barriers present opportunities in the sense that if what we truly want is the other side of such an obstacle, we will do anything we can to go over, under, around or through it. Alternatively, if we aren’t really all that interested in what’s waiting ‘over there’, then there is no way on Earth that we will even try.

Now, I’m not sure if what occurred to me is what he meant, but my brain went, “You don’t have to – you get to.” My brain dropped its mic as it said that. Boom!

And my mind raced.

I get to hold my wife’s hand. I get to ride a road bike because and so that I am fit and active. I get to write because the information technology exists to make that possible. I get to drive a fast car because I earned and inherited money from loving parents that enable it. I get to drive well because people with charitable intent provided the training I needed, and as a result I get to pass on what I learned from them.

I also get to make proactive choices because life gave me the intellect to know that I can, and life did not mar my life with insurmountable challenges. I get to live in a relatively free country (damn that Covid and its excuse for authoritarianism) and am not subject to an unwanted war. I get to hug five gorgeous grandchildren because I got to bring four loving children into the world, and I get their love, too.

I don’t ‘have to’ do anything special to get any of those things. They came naturally, or I sought them out and got lucky that way. I didn’t ‘have to’ have children, I wanted and got to. Some never have that blessing and some don’t seek it – that is up to them.

There’s no doubt about it. I am living a great life because of what I got and get to do,

So from now on, I don’t have to rise out of bed in the morning – I get to.

I don’t have to write a blog that is available to millions (if they want it) – I get to.

I don’t have to walk that bloody dog – I get to.

And it’s quite surprising how that simple change of expression turns an imposition into a benefit,

Try it – from now on, instead of ‘having to’ do something you don’t want do, consider that you ‘get to’ do it because something good happened, first.

Maximise the ERM – the Emotional One.

12 Tuesday Nov 2019

Posted by in Time Management, Uncategorized

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“ Income appears to buy happiness, but the exchange rate isn’t great.” Ed Diener and Robert Biswas-Diener

Let’s gloss over the standard personal development book example of the multi-millionaire who isn’t happy despite his riches. That’s a bit cliché these days. Particularly if you conclude that it’s nice to arrive at your depression in a nicer car.

I am in many respects a lucky man. I’m not ‘rich’ in financial terms. But I have a paid-for home, and I have enough money, insurance and income to cover most potential challenges, along with a complete psychological resistance to spending any of it. (That’s probably the result of not having any for such a long time.) I also have a lovely family.

(Which is not to say that sponsorship so that I can take up motor-racing would not be gratefully received and wisely invested. 🙂 )

The challenge is that we all, I suggest, want more. That is a ‘good thing’. That is a ‘good thing’ because if we didn’t, many businesses would grind to a halt, people would starve because we weren’t paying them for those things we want.

Imagine Apple if no-one wanted the new iPad-that-looks-just-like-the-old-iPad 6 months after we got that old iPad? (And isn’t it interesting how spellcheckers recognise iPad?)

We all want more for another reason, and that is because we are, as a species, goal-oriented. Unlike my dog, who will sit there all day until I say ‘Tatters’ or move towards the cupboard where we keep her lead, we all want to do something. We want to get somewhere or something, or we want to be doing what floats our boat. Unfortunately, for many of us, that can only be achieved through getting the money to pay for it.

Which demonstrates that having money is not the objective. The objective is what we can get with that money. And it is completion of that objective that makes us happy – not the money, nor the work we do to get it.

Which in turn means that finding ways to be happy that don’t cost money is as valid and valuable a pastime as any other. (And such happiness, ironically, saves us the money we can spend on other things. Mind-numbing.)

Therefore ‘Being happy’ is the Ultimate Objective for our management of time and everything we do, we do towards that end. So it means that in order to spend as much of our time doing the things that make us happy, we need to minimise the time we spend on the support functions to happiness.

Which means maximising the productivity we are capable of in that minimum time spent being productive, so that we can maximise happy time.

(Read that again, or maybe three times – I had to.)

Time costs nothing. We all have exactly the same number of hours in a day. Bill Gates can’t buy any more than I have.

But he spends his time better than most of us, doesn’t he?

There’s the lesson for today.

Maximise the value of the time you have ‘making money’, so that the things that don’t cost money – love and happiness – can have lots of time spent on them.

Back to Basics. Best cure possible.

01 Monday Aug 2016

Posted by in Purpose and Service

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Please pardon my absence – been hard at it and just completed two weekends away, hence no meaningful opportunity to give lots of thought to this blog. While I was away, however, something happened which I felt worth a good chroniclin’.

I was out with my family, on the first of the two-in-a-row weekend break opportunities that had serendipitously opened up. (The second was a 35th anniversary weekend away that coincidentally happened both temporally and geographically coterminous with some top-level motor-racing, but that was a genuine accident even though my wife doesn’t believe me.)

We had gone out for an evening meal in a busy restaurant and I suddenly felt absolutely miserable. Not wishing to demean ‘real’ depression, but I felt so absolutely and irrationally fed up, all of a sudden, that I could imagine that feeling that way all of the time must be hell. I didn’t like it.

All kinds of emotions welled up, and I decided in a moment of utter pain that I would delete each and every mission statement and values list I had ever written and stored on my computer – and start again. That, I thought, should sort me out.

Well, it didn’t. I did delete all those records, and I did reconsider my values, principles and mission statement. And guess what happened?

Yup, exactly what I should have expected.

Anything I wrote reflected what I had always written. My vales were still what they have been for a long time; my objectives stayed the same; the words got jiggled about but the meaning remained constant.

My discovery?

When you feel down, it isn’t necessarily changing external things that will solve your problem.

Your emotional problems are often solved by reflecting on and returning to a focus upon what you should have been doing in the first place.

My problem wasn’t that my mission statement was wrong; my problem was that I wasn’t properly living it. I wasn’t exercising (hadn’t for a week); my writing wasn’t getting done (too ‘busy’, apparently); some short term plans hadn’t come to fruition and I’d allowed an empty space to develop. But through reviewing my PMS I rediscovered what I am for. The PMS is a reminder of what you/I can be when I/we are at our best. It is a constant that we can rely on.

All that said, there is something I am going to do to my Three Resolutions PMS. And that is I am going to turn it upside down. While development of your compliance with the Three Resolutions starts with self-discipline and develops towards purpose and service, execution of the Three Resolutions should start with Purpose and Service.

Nobly serving others with excellence, in the field you have chosen, or ‘just’ your family and friends.

That’s what’ll make you happy.

Value your Values, Value Your SELF.

15 Sunday Nov 2015

Posted by in Character and Competence

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“The time is always right to do what is right.” Martin Luther King

“Values have been carved on monuments and spelled out in illuminated manuscripts. We do not need more of that. They must be made to live in the acts of me.” John W. Gardner

Actually, that last quote should have read ‘acts of men’. I was about to correct it when I recognised the existence of a Freudian typo – the values with which I profess to be congruent need to be lived within ME.

I was on a train this week and it is my routine when I do so to listen to music and read. I like being left to my reverie and to reinforce my understanding of the material I teach. It is a shame that I am societally prevented from belting out ‘It’s All Coming Back To Me’ (Meatloaf, best version), but maybe the other passengers would find that a blessing.

This week I was looking at a netbook I’m pretty sure I haven’t used in YEARS, and I discovered an old mission statement from, I believe, the mid-noughties. It spoke to me. It contained a list of values and behaviours and they all shouted, “Well?”

The list included things like discipline, effort, focus, temperance and so on. I reflected on what I read and like most of you reading this I concluded – “Making a good start, could be a LOT better, about time I tried harder.”

But it’s oh so haaaaaaard. As King alludes to, this means every drive-by of the fridge means exercising restraint. It means every time I see a car with fog lamps on in broad daylight I must not aim at them. It means – it means exercising integrity, and conscience, in every single moment of choice. In a way, it implies a need to live like a saint.

Except so few of us will ever be saints. Especially me. But we can do two things.

First, in recognising that we are fallible we can excuse the odd straying from the path provided we acknowledge that error, learn from it, and try not to repeat it. Even though we know we probably will transgress we can at least try not to.

Secondly, in recognising that we are fallible we can recognise that others are fallible, too. Which means not going ‘AHA!’ when they fail, realising that what we think is going on in their heads isn’t in fact the case, or that what is going on in their heads means that when they have made their error it is because they were distracted, or (and here’s one I thought of this week) that what we think is going on is, in fact, better for us than what we thought we wanted to happen. That it is not a transgression of integrity, it is in fact exercise of integrity and we just didn’t realise straight away.

Back to ‘us’. If we have values, we have them because we believe in them. Happiness comes from total compliance, misery comes from total non-compliance. Most of us live somewhere in between, most of the time. Try and have a holiday somewhere towards the former, now and then.

It’ll be worth it.

My thoughts this week are with those affected by the terrorist atrocity committed in Paris on the night of the 13th of November 2015.

VIVE LA FRANCE.