what makes me happy.

Yep. You should be paying me the big bucks. In the next few lines, I’m going to tell you the secret to being happy.

At the end of the day, every feeling boils down to happiness (or unhappiness) and every single thing we do is to either to gain happiness or lessen the unhappiness. Some people think that money is behind everything we do but I would argue that money is a tool to ultimately gain happiness.

So, as the face of my page says: my goal in life is to be genuinely happy, while also finding a way to finance my happiness.

My own personal hang up is that so many people fill 40-80 hours of their week with an unfulfilling job/career, then waste their free time being less than their maximum happy because of exhaustion/stress/etc.

So, most of my posts detail what my real estate hustle is and how it’s progressing and sharing the information I think could be useful to hosts, landlords, lenders, consumers, etc.

But right now, I want to share some of the insights I learned from this book, Lucky Go Happy by Paul van der Merwe.

• Attitude: every single thing in life that comes at you, should be approached as an opportunity (rather than a crisis). You have the power over how you choose to view the things that happen in your life. Your mindset often dictates how you view the obstacles that come your way.
• Count your blessings: small wonderful things happen every single day. Even on a terrible day.
  • This is actually one of the most profound things that you can do that can have an insane impact on your happiness. If you don’t already see positive things in your life, challenge yourself to write down 5 good things that happen each day. If you wouldn’t label yourself as an optimistic/positive person right now, this will be hard when you start. But, if you make yourself do it each day, your brain starts looking for positive things throughout the day (because it knows you’ve got to have 5!).
  • Give when nothing is expected in return. Nothing feels better than knowing you impacted someone’s life. Even if you think it’s insignificant.
  • There is good in the bad. Sometimes, we generalize a day, or a specific part of our life as “bad.” Maybe, we had a lot of unhappy times during that part of our life. But, it was definitely not ALL bad.
    • My very basic example so that you can get the gist of what point I’m trying to make: you had a long day at work and want to go home. You get in your car, start driving, and come to a stop on the freeway. This just adds to your bad day, and adds 20 minutes to your trip home. But, while you were stopped, waiting, one of your favorite songs comes on the radio! You bust out in song for 4 minutes. Maybe, yeah, the 20 minutes were bad… but there was SOME good in there.
• Event: don’t place your happiness on something happening. For instance, I’ll be happy when x happens. You are setting yourself up for failure. You’ll have wasted precious time being less happy than you could have been before x has happened-and you won’t gain a long lasting happiness afterwards, like you thought you would.
  • Planning: don’t wait to be happy until the weekend. Plan things-DURING the week to break up the mundane. Also, make sure you actually PLAN some fun things in advance-part of the happiness you get comes from the anticipation.

There were a ton of great lessons in that short and simple book-but what I’ve written above is what I feel like are some of the most important tenets of actualizing happiness.

Happiness is all around you- RIGHT NOW. Put this down and enjoy your life!