It has been demonstrated that happiness is a good predictor of favorable results in a variety of different aspects of life. Feelings of happiness and contentment contribute to increased enjoyment of life.

People are better able to create stronger coping abilities and emotional resources when they are happy. The experience of positive emotions is associated with improved physical health and increased lifespan.

Well, I really don’t care if people listen to me that much. I used to imagine happiness, once as a young man, that I would make a name for myself, do something big and amazing, and change the world, and all those things. I don’t care about it anymore.

Now, I don’t want to be famous. The more I’ve learned, the more I’ve come to the conclusion that the best thing in the world is for the world to leave you alone.

At the end of the day, nothing can be achieved in life. Understand that you don’t need to be rich or well-loved or of a prestigious social standing. You don’t need much to be content with anything. You just need to focus on being happy, because you can only do one thing at a time in your life.

If you try to do more than that, nothing is done because your intentions are at odds with each other, one hand pushes against the other. You’ve got to choose. Career or family, money or love, success or happiness. As you can’t have it all. Furthermore, you can have only one thing in your life, and you’d best pick carefully.

Moreover, you can choose money, spend all your days in gradually expanding offices, and finally die of a heart attack at a board meeting, while your gold-plated Ferrari sits quietly in the garage of your fifty-room mansion in the most exclusive neighborhood in the state.

Likewise, you can choose a name, be buried in a 2-for-1 discount plot with your children crying over your headstone, and be as lost as a dead squirrel in the forest for generations to come.

As you know we can choose whatever we want in our lives and probably get it, but you can only do one thing completely. If you split your priorities, you will also achieve split results. You can have a little bit of money, a little reputation, a little family, and a little bit of everything else, but none of them is going to be full for you.

If you want 100 percent success with anything, that must be 100 percent of your priorities. Every goal you set for yourself takes away all of your other goals because circumstances will always force you to continue one at the expense of another and to choose between them every day.

My advice to you is to focus on happiness and enjoy life. You really don’t want to know this, but that means you’re not going to have money or status or anything else. Conversely, focusing on money, status or anything else means that you’re not going to achieve happiness. Happiness isn’t a success. Happiness is the reverse of conventional performance.

It doesn’t have things, it stops wanting things. When you stop caring for everything that could be, and you’re totally focused on enjoying what it is, you’re happy.

You’re unhappy that you don’t think your life is the way it should be, that you need to change X and Y, and then your life can really begin. It’s not working like that, though. This is your life, RIGHT NOW, that’s it! Are you sure about that?

That’s the truth right there, but I don’t suspect that a lot of readers want the truth. I noticed that the more truthfully I write, the fewer people like it, and the more I write about what people want to hear, the more they like it.

That’s why you can’t really build a business on the facts. The truth is, the price of happiness is everything else, but in the commercial version, the price of happiness is whatever you can afford. It’s something like that. Something that doesn’t require you to give up anything you really want.

Because most of the population doesn’t want pleasure. They want something else, something like money or popularity or reputation or recognition, a beautiful wife, or a Wikipedia entry that says they’re important. They want other people to think they’re happy more than they want to be happy.

If you want to be successful, even if it implies that everyone you’ve ever known and everyone you’ve ever met would think you’re a pitiful failure, that’s when you’re going to be happy. Not before that. It’s the simplest thing in the world to be healthy. Just do something that needs your time completely.

That’s why people pursue extreme sports – the risk demands their full attention, so there’s space for nothing else in their minds, so their internal monolog is mute about everything they think is wrong with their lives.

Happiness is your natural state of default. Did you believe the lions lying in the sun berate what the ex-girlfriend wrote about them on Facebook?

Apart from that, I think we’re going to see the future when we get there.

No one can know the future, and no one can ever convince you that they can. Those people on TV and on the internet trying to tell you what “is going to happen” in the next ten or twenty years are full of shit. All of them, man. The experts in particular.

The problem with anyone trying to predict anything is that they can’t understand that the specialty area they think they know about is always affected by a million external factors that they don’t know about.

Every empirical attempt to link what you think is a trigger to what you think is a result is already at least 50 percent anyway, so attempting to predict the future is like voodoo combined, it’s a whole different level of inaccuracy.

Don’t listen to anyone about the future who isn’t an authority on everything and all the aspects that everything impacts everything else.