Happiness is more about the questions we ask ourselves rather than searching for answers. Achieving a happy life can be placed in one of seven categories of success.
These seven ingredients to a happy life are considered with everything ever written or discovered on happiness, success and self-improvement. They characterize the life and accomplishments of all high-performing men and women. They include everything you could ever want.
HOW TO ACHIEVE YOUR IDEAL LIFE
Your ideal life is a blend of these seven ingredients to a happy life in exactly the combination that makes you the happiest at any particular moment.
By defining your success and happiness in terms of one or more of these seven ingredients, you create a clear target to aim at. You engage in positive thinking. You can then measure how well you’re doing. You can identify the areas where you need to make changes if you want self-improvement in your life.
1) PEACE OF MIND
The first of these seven ingredients to a happy life, and easily the most important, is peace of mind. It is the highest human good. Without it, nothing else has much value. Because of this, you strive for it all your life. You usually evaluate how well you are doing at any given time by how much inner peace you enjoy.
Peace of mind and positive thinking is essential for the optimal performance and happy life of all human groupings, from your relationships with your friends and family to the business and organizations in which you work.
2) HEALTH AND ENERGY
The second ingredient to a happy life is health and energy. Just as peace of mind is your normal and natural mental state, health and energy is your normal and natural physical state.
3) LOVING RELATIONSHIPS
The third ingredient to a happy life is loving relationships. These are relationships with people you love and care about, and the people who love and care about you. They are the real measure of how you are doing as a human being. Happiness or unhappiness in life comes from your relationships with others, and it is your relationships with others that make you truly human.
4) FINANCIAL FREEDOM
The fourth ingredient of a happy life and success is financial freedom. To be financially free means that you have enough money so that you don’t worry about it continually, as most people do. It is not money that lies at the root of all evil; it is the lack of money. Achieving your own financial freedom is one of the most important goals and responsibilities of your life. It is far too important to be left to chance.
A feeling of financial freedom is essential to your self-improvement and to the achievement of any other important goal and you cannot be truly free until and unless you have enough money that you are no longer preoccupied with it.
5) WORTHY GOALS AND IDEAS
The fifth ingredient of a happy life is setting worthy goals and ideals. Perhaps your deepest subconscious drive, according to Dr. Viktor E. Frankl, author of Man’s Search for Meaning, is the need for meaning and purpose in life. To be truly happy, you need a clear sense of direction. You need positive thinking to get there. You need a commitment to something bigger and more important than yourself. You need to feel that your life stands for something, that you are somehow making a valuable contribution to the world.
Happiness has been defined as “the progressive realization of a worthy ideal.” You can only be happy with yourself when you are working step by step toward something that is really important to YOU.
6) SELF KNOWLEDGE AND SELF-AWARENESS
The sixth ingredient to success and a happy life is self-knowledge and self-awareness. Throughout all of history, self-knowledge has gone hand in hand with inner happiness, positive thinking and outer achievement. To perform your best, you need to know who you are and why you think and feel the way you do.
7) PERSONAL FULFILLMENT
The seventh ingredient to a happy life is a sense of personal fulfillment. This is a feeling that you are becoming everything that you are moving toward. It is the realization of your full potential as a human being. Your happy life begins with self-improvement and ends with a personal fulfillment that you have accomplished all that you wanted to.
TAKE ACTION
Take the brush of your imagination and begin painting a masterpiece on the canvas of your life. It is for you to decide clearly what would make you the happiest in everything you are doing.
Decide what is right for you before you decide what is possible. Create your ideal life in every detail. Don’t be concerned about the process of getting from where you are to where you want to go. For now, just focus on positive thinking and creating a vision of your perfect future.
