Books on Happiness / HarperCollins,.It's All in Your Head - Thinking Your Way to Happiness.[2006.ISBN0060759992]
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Y O U R H E A D
The search for happiness is one of the chief sources of unhappiness.
—Eric Hoffer
Are there times you feel you’re missing the one or two crucial ingredients you need to be happy? Maybe it’s a new,
better-paying job with a boss who treats you with more
respect or one that gives you more of a chance to make a difference. It could be you’re searching for the right person to marry or are struggling to drop those extra twenty pounds you feel are holding you back.
I’m going to let you in on a secret: You’ve already got everything you need to be happy.
You don’t need to land a new job or change your career. You don’t need to find a mate or lose weight. You don’t need to buy a car or move to the country. Being happy requires no change in your personal, work, or financial life. You can find happiness
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without going to a gym, church, or bank. You don’t need anyone else’s help to feel fulfilled. There’s no need to talk to a plastic surgeon, stockbroker, or career counselor to feel better about yourself and your life.
Right now, you have within you all you need to find fulfillment and lead a happy, satisfying life. It doesn’t matter how old you are or how much you earn. It doesn’t matter if you’re married or single, gay or straight. It doesn’t matter where you live or how you look. It doesn’t matter if you’ve just finished a marathon or you’ve been diagnosed with cancer. Happiness is within your grasp.
That’s because the secrets to happiness are all in your head. Usually the phrase “it’s all in your head” is intended as a condescending comment: that whatever it is you’re feeling isn’t real, that it’s a figment of your imagination. But I mean it literally. The keys to a fulfilled, joyous life are all in your head because they’re attitudes, not actions. They’re ways you need to think, not steps you need to take. True happiness comes not from material, or external, factors, but from psychological, or internal, factors. Happiness is a mental, not a physical, state.
(True happiness comes not from material, or external, factors, but from psychological, or internal, factors. Happiness is a
mental, not a physical, state.
The good news is this means each and every one one of us has the potential to be happy. The bad news is your happiness is your own responsibility. You’re the only one who can make yourself happy. No one and nothing else can do it for you. Not even me or this book.
What makes it even tougher is there are lots of forces out there preaching you’re not responsible. Our consumption-
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based economy and perfection-obsessed mass culture offer countless keys to happiness. Slim down following the latest diet and bulk up using the newest fitness regime or piece of equipment and you’ll be happy. If those don’t work, have plastic surgery or take steroids. After all, the stars do it and they’re happy. You’ll feel good about yourself if you read the right books and, better yet, read them as part of the right reading group. You’ve got to see the hit play or have front-row seats to the hot concert tour to be happy. If your kids go the right preschool, then the right private school, and finally the right Ivy League university, you’ll be happy. To feel good, you need to make a great salary . . . but only by doing a job that offers spiritual rewards. Then use that money to buy the smallest MP3 player and the largest flat-screen television, both of which can be controlled by the remote on the dashboard of that car you need to have. If you’re single, that car has to be a quirky import that fits your originality . . . as well as everyone else’s individuality. If you’re married with kids, it needs to be an armored leviathan capable of transporting a junior high soccer team through Baghdad in safety. That will bring you joy. The right shoes, the right haircut, the right scent, will make you happy. And after buying all that, make sure you’ve invested all the rest in hedge funds so you can retire at fifty to become a social worker in a developing country.
It’s not just the media and commerce that are telling up happiness will come from what we do. Clergy preach you’ve got to come back to the church to find God. Parents tell us we need to go to a certain college. Our friends who are married tell us we too need to get married. Our siblings who start families tell us we have to do the same, or else we’ll never learn what really matters. Every day, in hundreds if not thousands of ways, we’re told happiness is available out there, if we just buy or do something.
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what may succeed,” wrote the author Frances Burney, “certainly are more liable to disappointment, misfortune and unhappiness, than those who give up their fate to chance and take the goods and evils of fortune as they come, without making happiness their study, or misery their foresight.” In other words, the more we devote ourselves to the pursuit of happiness, the more unhappy we get.
A wonderful example of the futility of the pursuit comes from the film Chariots of Fire,* based on the true stories of British track athletes competing in the 1924 Summer Olympics. One of its major plot lines involves Harold Abrahams, a Jewish student at Cambridge University. Abrahams, played by Ben Cross, is determined not only to triumph in his race—the 100-meter dash—but to triumph over anti-Semitism and class prejudice in the process. He seems to feel that only by being victorious over external obstacles will he be happy. After winning the race and becoming the fastest man alive, Abrahams explains to a teammate who didn’t win a race that despite all Abrahams’s external victories, he’s still feeling empty: “You, Aubrey, are my most complete man. You’re a brave, compassionate, kind, and content man. That’s your secret—contentment. I’m forever in pursuit, and I don’t even know what it is I’m chasing.”
Part of our problem today, one reason we so readily look for happiness through materialism, is that we confuse pleasure with happiness. The former is a sensual feeling, the latter is spiritual. The British broadcaster Malcom Muggeridge once noted, “The pursuit of happiness in any case soon resolved itself into the pursuit of pleasure—something quite different. Pleasure is but a mirage of happiness—a false vision of shade and refreshment seen across parched sand.” Pleasure, whether it comes from eating a fine meal or listening to a brilliantly per-
*Written by Colin Welland and directed by Hugh Hudson.
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formed symphony, is a physical sensation. Happiness, on the other hand, is a psychological sensation of fulfillment and satisfaction. As the author Franz Kafka wrote, perfect happiness is “to believe in the indestructible element within one.” Pleasure, by its very nature, is transitory, while happiness can be permanent.
(Part of our problem today, one reason we so readily look for happiness through materialism, is that we confuse pleasure
with happiness. The former is a sensual feeling, the latter is spiritual.
Now, don’t get me wrong. I’m all for pleasure. In fact, I suggest you get as much of it as you can. I certainly do. I had some fun earlier in this chapter joking about excessive materialism, but truth be told, I’m as guilty as most. I love dining out at fine restaurants. My wife and I regularly go to performances of the New York Philharmonic Orchestra. We have a beautiful apartment in Manhattan, a weekend house in the country, and a summer house on Martha’s Vineyard. In no way am I suggesting you give up the things that bring you pleasure. I haven’t and don’t intend do. There’s nothing wrong with buying a new pair of skis because they tickle your fancy or ordering the lobster if you’re in the mood. Life is short, so if you can afford to indulge a bit now and then, go for it. What matters is you realize these indulgences won’t bring happiness.
Instead of looking for happiness, you need to start listening for it. Close your eyes and open your ears. The simple truth is, nothing external will make you happy. Harold Abrahams learned that even after winning an Olympic gold medal and triumphing over bigotry and prejudice. Nothing you can see will bring fulfillment to your life. You can lose all the weight you
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want, find a wonderful life partner, get a fabulous job that pays you an incredible salary, buy a magnificent home and furnish it with everything you’ve dreamed, and you’ll still be unhappy. You can have none of these things and be happy. You can get pleasure from external factors, but happiness is an inside job. It requires listening to your heart and soul. It has nothing to do with the physical facts of your life and everything to do with your attitude toward life. “Does not happiness come from the soul within?” asked the novelist Honoré de Balzac. The poet Nathaniel Cotton agreed, writing: “If solid happiness we prize, / Within our breast this jewel lies, / And they are fools who roam. / The world has nothing to bestow; / From our own selves our joys must flow, / And that dear hut, our home.” Putting a lighter, more modern spin on this notion, the novelist Robertson Davies wrote, “Happiness is always a by-product. It is probably a matter of temperament, and for anything I know it may be glandular.”
Happiness is always a by-product. It is probably a matter of temperament, and for anything I know it may be glandular.
—Robertson Davies
(
All Unhappiness Is Bad
I certainly don’t mean to make light of unhappiness by quoting Davies or by saying happiness is so readily available to us all. There’s real suffering in the world. There’s pain and sorrow and misery and guilt and grief. Lots of it. There’s an old Jewish folktale of a woman who, distraught over the death of her only son, asks her rabbi to give her a prayer that will bring him back from the dead. The rabbi tells her that to perform the ritual, she
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needs to bring him back a mustard seed from a house where there’s no sorrow. The woman begins searching her town. She goes to every house, from the largest mansion to the smallest shack, searching for a house without sorrow from which to take a mustard seed. But she finds that every person has, in one way or another, experienced pain and unhappiness.
Your realizing happiness is all in your head and adopting a different approach to life isn’t like finding a magic mustard seed. It won’t add a single day to the life of a child suffering from leukemia or erase the pain of a Holocaust survivor. And it certainly won’t bring back the dead. But it can bring joy to your life right here and now. A new attitude may not be able to change the world, but it can change your world. And that’s nothing to sneeze at. The world is changed one person at a time.
(A new attitude may not be able to change the world, but it can change your world.
Let’s face it, if you’re like many us, your unhappiness isn’t anywhere near as profound as the agony experienced by someone who saw a loved one die or has suffered some other terrible trauma. Some of you may be feeling that kind of pain, but for most of us, feelings of unhappiness stem from a dissatisfaction with the circumstances of our lives. Still, psychological and emotional pain can be as debilitating as physical pain; battered self-esteem can be as incapacitating as a broken leg. As Neil Young sang, “Though my problems are meaningless, that don’t make them go away.”*
Unhappiness is never good. Whether you’re feeling miserable
*From the song “On the Beach.”
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because of some type of actual physical trauma to you or loved ones, or you’re depressed because you feel somehow inadequate, it’s essential you free yourself from the grip of unhappiness. The philosopher William James wrote, “The attitude of unhappiness is not only painful, it is mean and ugly. What can be more base and unworthy than the pining, puling, mumping mood, no matter by what outward ills it may have been engendered? What is more injurious to others? What less helpful as a way out of the difficulty? It but fastens and perpetuates the trouble which occasioned it, and increases the total evil of the situation. At all costs, then, we ought to reduce the sway of that mood; we ought to scout it in ourselves and others, and never show it tolerance.”
There is a way to make your unhappiness go away, to show it no tolerance. Whether you’re unhappy about how your life isn’t measuring up to expectations, or you’re depressed because you received a frightening medical diagnosis, you can be happy right now. You already have all the tools you need inside your head, and it’s never too late to find fulfillment. Gustave Flaubert wrote, “Happiness is like smallpox: If you catch it too soon, it can completely ruin your constitution.” I guess I’ve got a great constitution, because it took me more than seventy years to figure all this out. Well, better late than never.
Confessions of a Serial Problem Solver
My name is Stephen M. Pollan. I’m a life strategist working in New York City. Although I’m an attorney, I began my working life as a real estate entrepreneur on Long Island. I then became president of an American Stock Exchange–listed venture capital firm and next moved into banking. During my time as a Wall Street banker, I suffered a serious illness that caused me
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to lose my job at age forty-eight and change career directions. (I’ll tell you all about it in a subsequent chapter.) After recovering, I launched a private legal practice. That was almost thirty years ago.
From day one of my private practice, I focused on solving the problems of my clients. Early on, most of those problems revolved around credit and real estate issues, so my practice centered on offering home-buying advice and help. Then, many of my clients began exploring business opportunities, so I began to work on solving their entrepreneurial problems. Next, as my nonentrepreneurial clients moved up corporate ladders, I began helping them solve their employment problems. Most recently I’ve been working with clients who, as they start to reach middle age, want to reinvent their personal and work lives.
Throughout this evolution, I was always in touch with the entire mosaic of problems clients were experiencing, both personal and professional, emotional as well as financial and legal. That’s because I take an intimate and holistic approach to my consultations. You see, I believe it’s a mistake to see our lives as a set of distinct and separate threads. I feel you need to factor your entire life into decisions and problem solving in order to create unified life strategies. For instance, how much money you have in the bank, your health, your desire to start a family, your spouse’s desire for a garden, and your status at work should all factor into your home-buying decisions. Because I’m just as likely to discuss birthing as investing with a client, I’ve become deeply involved in people’s lives.
As my life strategy practice evolved, I sometimes wondered what problematic area of life I’d be dealing with next. I saw the lives of my clients as journeys down life paths that had, along with them, an undetermined number of hurdles. I felt my job was to help my clients come up with tactics to overcome the specific obstacle they were facing at that moment, and then,