According to this TED Talk, happiness leads to success and not the other way around. Even though Shawn Anchor talks so fast you want to check to see if the video is on fast forward, his logic makes sense. For motivated people, success is a moving target and can never be pinned down. If you set your happiness to only occur after that, you’ll never reach it.
Mr. Anchor also makes one happiness suggestion that I’d like to try out today: list three things that I’m grateful for. Here we go:
- Being considered cool enough to fist bump people. I just fist pumped Kevin (a cool guy). Now I’m going to fist bump everyone.
- Hearing Justin Kan, founder of Justin.tv and Exec, speak about how he became a scrappy programmer and created whatever was on his mind
- Being healthy enough to agree to things like bike 24miles through beautiful San Francisco on a whim. I’m literally about to pay for it after learning about it an hour ago.
Actually, now that I think about it, I have so many things to be grateful for. Dev Bootcamp pays for a professional counselor and I had my first ever professional session today. Why not? I didn’t go in with anything in particular, but I also don’t go for my regular physical check up with anything in particular. I don’t back up my system because I have a problem – I do it in anticipation of problems. My mental virus scan came back clean, with suggestions for optimization. What a great result.
The worst thing that happened was probably realizing that Subway’s Febuany deals are coming to an end. I really am lucky.