A close friend of mine told me once “To be happy now, start living in the present”. I took me 5 years to understand what he meant and start applying this simple, yet powerful principle in my daily life.
It all started in a Saturday night when my friend and I were hanging out as we sometimes do, having all sort of talks, debates, ideas about how things are in this world compared to how we’d like them to be.
Interesting how people may search for the same thing but call it differently or have opposite lifestyles but still crave for common values and feelings. We are in the same case, my friend and I, different worlds and separate lifestyles. But we’ve been always amazed how that something, that we were looking for, sometimes easy to achieve, sometimes harder, is always passing away quite fast – happiness.
We’re walking in the night breathing the fresh air and enjoying the evening’s subtle music coming from a near coffee shop, when I suddenly stop and turn to him asking – “Why am I so insatiable for doing more?”
He stops and stares at me as if I’ve gone crazy – at that time I was starting my second business, moved to a luxury office space with and awesome city-view and just got my first investment in one of the companies. I was doing pretty good for a 25-year old. After a couple of seconds he calmly replies – “Why do you ask?”
We start walking again and I continue – “I can’t believe that I have to work and sweat for weeks, months or even years to achieve something just to be happy about it for a bit and then move forward to a newer, bigger, better challenge making plans, dreaming about it, thinking that it will bring me so much happiness...”
I remembered the cartoons with Dexter’s Laboratory when Dexter has gone to a forgotten place of his lab with tons of his previous inventions. The old-inventions turn against him because he neglected them, but Dee-Dee saves Dexter while also pointing out the hard truth “By the time you’re finished with one invention, you’re preoccupied with your next.”
Oddly enough this seems to happen all around – peers, friends, clients, employees. Everybody is running for something again and again faster, harder, bigger – breaking rules, stepping on values, crushing principles, neglecting families, ignoring children, spending on credit, evaluating billion-dollar companies that have no revenue… – while media is pouring gas on fire – he did that, she bought this, sales on these, Black Friday, Cyber Monday, exclusive offers, quite your job and start a business – even your neighbour has now his own ecommerce business…So what are you waiting for? Go and sacrifice it all for the future happiness as a result of today’s hard work, right?
“Wrong. Perhaps you got it wrong”, my friend says, and I snap from my day-dreaming and all the fuzz that was going trough my head – “..What?”. he continues – “Happiness shouldn’t be about tomorrow, it should be about today. The past is gone and the future you can’t control. So if you want to be happy now, start living in the present.”
Five years I’ve been struggling to understand and accept that. It was hard to even think about unplugging from a 24/7 brain-focus on my work, rather to actually do it. But slowly I got a grasp of it and wanted to share a few things that helped me out:
Set tangible priorities
First thing that helped me was cleaning-up my priorities. I did both personal and professional in the same list. That way it was much easier to actually see which get in front. I set 6-12 annual priorities and pinned a deadline for each one of them. I also do a daily journal where I set one important goal for that day and start with it right in the morning, keeping other things from getting in it’s way. At the end of the day I write what went bad and good and how can I learn and improve from it.
Accept the hard-truth
Second thing was to accept myself in this new role, a more focused and interdependent role. The simple truth is that you can’t do everything by yourself. You need other people’s help and they need yours. The key to it is to achieve 10x results by working together. If you could still do it in half of the time, but spend 80-hours workweeks, that’s turns out not being productive but burnout. You might also end-up alone. I was lucky enough not to, having an amazing wife with great patience.
Deal with my fears
I used to take in more work that I could bear. Isn’t that normal if you want to do and earn more? For me it was more feeding my inner-self ego that I could handle it. But this also comes out from fearing not to miss out on any opportunity. How could I say no to a new project or client?
It happens that with a more focused and qualitative approach you advance faster and better than you might think. Actually lack of focus is one of the most common failures in startups.
Now it feels much easy and natural to simply enjoy small things around me like watching snow fall or listening to my child explaining why dessert comes before meal…for the 7th time. This becomes truly effective by consciously allowing myself to be happy about it and living up the moment.
I’m only at the beginning of this journey and learning more as I travel. It took time and had much to deal with myself to get here but I know one thing – There’s nothing sure in the future or reversible in the past, that can stand in front of your daily happiness.
There’s nothing sure in the future or reversible in the past, that can stand in front of your daily happiness.
The hardest thing is to get away from your thoughts, which transform into actions. Thoughts are most of the time about what happened or about what you plan on doing, and less times about what is happening now and how you need to live the moment fully.
I think it is perfectly fine to think about the future, and learn from the past, but our focus should be on the present. So this is always a work in progress as it is difficult to achieve.
I also think that we are less and less happy for others as well. We should be happy for a colleague when they get a praise from the team they are working in, and for a friend that got a raise or bought something new in their house, and not envious and think about how we should be in their place.
P.S.: I also think desert should come before the meal! That is what happiness is about!