4 questions that lead you to a lifetime of happiness!

Only you can decide what makes you happy!

We bumped into a young friend at a coffee shop yesterday. She is a qualified architect but is taking a gap year in her academics.

She asked us: “Is it okay to not feel like doing anything in Life? I mean, is it seriously okay? I feel everyone around me is chasing their tail and here I am…completely clueless about my future and blundering along…I am still unsure if I want to study further or if I want to practice or be a writer or just travel the world. Everyone is forcing me to decide and go do ‘something’. But I don’t want to commit to doing something that my heart isn’t agreeing to.”

Vaani, in turn, asked her this question: “What makes you happy?”

And the young lady replied: “I am still figuring out what makes me happy. But I am sure none of the things my family or friends want me to do, like do a desk job to earn an income and gain experience, or a do a Masters Program so that the tag of a graduate can be acquired, will make me happy.”

The lady, in our opinion, has her priorities clearly in place.

Even as she is figuring out what will quench her soul, what will make her intrinsically happy, she’s sure about what she does not want to do. And there’s no confusion in her mind there. Now, that’s a wonderful state to be in.

You see, the whole world is running amuck – everyone is trying to become something, become someone else that they really are not. Worse, almost everyone else seems to have an opinion about what you must do and how you must live your Life. Sometimes, this cacophony can be deafening. If you capitulate and sign up for what the world wants you to do, at the cost of your own inner peace and joy, then don’t complain about your Life being listless and meaningless. Because that’s really what Life will be when you live it for someone else’s sake! But, if you want your Life to be exciting, if you want to wake up each morning loving the opportunity to go do what you love doing, then you have to pause and reflect.

Ask yourself important, fundamental, questions: 1. What makes me happy? 2. What makes me feel grateful for this gift called Life? 3. Doing what makes me lose myself completely so that I forget all my worries and even lose track of time? 4. What do I want to keep doing again and again and again – all my Life?

Well, you know what you answered for those four questions. Now, just go do it. Simple. And if figuring this out takes a year or two, or even more, well, so be it.

Life is a precious, one-time, limited-period offer. The most intelligent way to live it is to only do what makes you happy. And no one but you can make that choice – only you can decide what makes you happy. When you do live a Life, doing what you love, everything you need arrives in your Life – at its own time and pace. If there ever is a secret to living a Life of happiness and contentment – this, absolutely, is it!

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How you too can be a Bliss Catcher

In today’s Vlog I answer a question that I am often asked: “How can one follow their bliss?”

View time: 3:54 minutes

Anchoring an edition of The Bliss Catchers at Odyssey, Adyar, Chennai – Photo Credit: Vinodh Velayudhan

 

 

Why settling down is sinful

In today’s Podcast, I champion why we must celebrate being clueless, unsettled and living dangerously! Listen here: 5:43 minutes

Carve out your own ‘Happy Hour’ – 5 minutes at a time!

It is possible, despite running the rat race, to work on switching tracks to go do what you love doing.

A reader asked me this yesterday: “How do you leave a lucrative job, that comforts you with security, gives you a societal edge and take up something you love no doubt, but is hardly likely to reward you financially?”

I feel that’s a great question. And the answer lies in the core principle of intelligent living – you start a journey of a thousand miles, by taking the first step.

And that first step is to invest just 5 minutes a day doing what you love doing. One of the reasons people don’t switch to doing what they love doing is because they are too caught up doing things all day that they loathe doing! But 5 minutes is not a bad deal. However busy you are running your rat race, you can take a 5-minute-break and that shouldn’t hurt anyone, least of all you. In those 5 minutes, do what you love doing __ reading, writing, painting, composing music, researching, cooking, whatever! You will discover a rare peace in you in those 5 precious minutes. You will want those 5 minutes to never end. So, extend the tenure of that daily activity by 5 more minutes – daily! Keep feeling joyful and keep extending the tenure as you graduate through this experience and exercise – daily! Soon, in a couple of months, despite your struggling to sustain the practice daily, you will have created a daily window of your own ‘Happy Hour’!

Imagine from being frustrated with your Life, bemoaning the lack of joy in what you were doing, you have a full ‘Happy Hour’ daily to do what you love doing! And that’s 30 ‘Happy Hours’ in a month. If you are an artist, you could complete a whole work in that time. And if you are a writer you could perhaps complete a chapter of your book in that time!

If you are smart, as all people usually are, you may look at how many ‘Happy Hours’, over how many years, will you need to make that career switch from being a highly-paid unhappy professional to being a well-earning, happy individual. And once you know how simple the math is, you go after the opportunity – 5 minutes is all it takes to carve out your ‘Happy Hour’ from the rat race you are running!!! Once you are ‘in’ your ‘Happy Hour’ you will realize that when you remove all the conditions in your Life that are making you unhappy, you can only be happy!

 

Come on, let go, and be a Zero-Anxiety Parent!

The most important role of a parent is to enable a child’s bliss.

My friend is stressed out over his 15-year-old son’s “future”. The lad has below average grades in high school and is unsure of what he wants to do in Life.

I believe this is a perfectly normal state for anyone to be in. So, I advised my friend not to be stressed out. “In fact, you must celebrate that your son does not know what he wants to do. If you are cluelessness in Life it is a great state to be in. I was clueless about what Life meant to me till I was 35, and now, I am have no clarity about how long it will take me to fix the material, professional and financial dimensions of my Life,” I told him. (Read more here to understand the context in which I made my statement: Fall Like A Rose Petal).

I am not sure my friend is convinced with my perspective. Even if he isn’t, it is fine. Life doesn’t offer any of us, any more clarity than what we think we have. The best way to move forward in Life is to go one step at a time, one moment at a time, one day at a time. This doesn’t mean you should not have a plan, that you should not have a long-term vision. You must. But if you don’t have a plan or a vision too it is perfectly okay. Over time, you will figure things out. There’s no point though getting keyed up with what’s happening around you and imagining that everyone’s getting “ahead in Life” while you are clueless. More than children, it is the parents who are keyed up over their children’s peers getting “ahead in Life”! And that’s pretty sad.

Let’s look at this from a higher plane. The truth is all of us have to end up dead – sooner or later. We are all speeding towards our deaths, but at different speeds! So, what is the sanctity about wanting to be ahead of the others? This keeda, this avoidable desire-virus, is what makes parents like my friend unnecessarily sweat over their children. The teens actually are a great time to experiment with Life – try out many things, decide which ones give joy, try these ones out more and eventually pick up that one thing that is immersive, blissful. Now, this decision about what to do in Life must not be a decision that’s based only on earning potential, career growth opportunities, reputation in society, marriage prospects and such. You must do only what makes you come alive and what you absolutely love doing – something that makes you lose yourself when you do it. And finding that something takes time – several years, in some instances. How then can parents expect their teens to attain this clarity?

But that’s exactly what parents across are demanding of their wards. Look around you. Every child out there is in line to be slaughtered on the altar of a “stable” career. Just because they have “memorized” syllabi and vomited them in exams to secure “high grades” people think their children are “brilliant”. The truth is their brilliance has been sacrificed in order for them to merely become employable. So, astronauts, musicians, sportspeople, actors, artists, chefs, designers and standup comedians end up becoming engineers, doctors, lawyers, accountants and MBAs. Generations of parents have done this to their children. And children when they become parents perpetrate the same horror, the same injustice. In the name of concern for their children’s “future”, parents are literally crucifying the happiness of their kids. And while doing all this, instead of feeling accountable, they end up being stressed out and anxious?

Vaani and I are offering a Program called Zero-Anxiety Parenting – ZAP – targeted at parents of children and young adults. And through that Program, the one fundamental principle we wish to champion among parents of teens is this: “Please do not get in between your children and their bliss.” We encourage parents to trust their children’s choices, to trust the process of Life and to let go. We are calling for a paradigm shift in parents – we are imploring them to switch from merely wanting to see their children earn-a-living to parenting them in such a manner that they can see them living, thriving and being happy! Only when parents start celebrating their children truly, they stop being anxious.

You have to do what you have to do

What causes your suffering is your choosing not to live your truth!

A young reader pinged me to say that he is confused. He is keen to be an actor. But his parents want him to be a software engineer. He is the only child. All his efforts to convince his parents have come a cropper. His father, in an effort to convince him to pursue software engineering, has threatened to throw him out of home if he does not give up his acting ambitions. “I don’t know how to convince my parents. It is not that they are wrong. My heart is just not in engineering. I would like to go to acting school. Perhaps to the National School of Drama. I don’t want to rebel. But I would much rather be out on the streets and work my way up as an actor, than toe my parents’ line and kid myself and them trying to be a lousy software engineer,” confessed the young man.

“What should you do when you are confronted with a dilemma – should I follow my heart or respect my parents’ wishes,” he asked.

I am not one who wants to advice children to be rebellious. But, whenever in doubt, follow your heart. This has been my principle. Always. Or, in other words, you have to do what you have to do.

Now, how do you decide what you have to do? Simple. Ask yourself what will make you happy and just go do it. Being an actor, in this young reader’s case, is his bliss. I sense that from his willingness to rough it out on the streets to work his way up in the entertainment business. That’s not just passion, that’s bliss. So, as Joseph Campbell championed, when you follow your bliss, doors always open. I too have experienced this so many, many, many times in Life.

Surely, following your bliss is not restricted to career choices alone. It really means that in any context in Life do what makes you happy. Do what protects your inner peace. You may perhaps want to call it living your truth. Which is, anything that makes you come alive, is your bliss, your truth. Follow it, live it. When you don’t live your truth, you agonize, you suffer.

I know a young lady who doted on her father. But she loathed his congenital tendency to lie. He had serious problems in his business and was borrowing from Peter to pay Paul. And he was always lying to everyone, including to his own family. One day the lady pinned him down and told him on his face that she had lost all respect for him as he was a liar. It was a direct hard-hitting statement. Her mother asked her how she could speak so “hurtfully” to her own father, who she loved so much. And the young lady replied: “The truth is he is a liar. In not telling him that I was living a lie. Now I am at peace.” I was witness to this event in this family and I simply loved the young lady’s clarity. She reiterated, through her behavior, to me, no matter what the context is, no matter who you are dealing with, you have to do what you have to do. If this means telling something that will make someone else feel squeamish, so be it. If it means you have to speak up to power and seniority, so be it. What matters is that you are at peace with saying what you have to say and doing what you have to do. Period.

Almost all the time we suffer only because we want things, people and situations to be different from the way they are. If following your bliss, living your truth, doing what you have to do, can help you be more peaceful, more happier, than you are, then what are you waiting for?

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You own nothing, you create nothing. Everything happens through you.

Don’t let anything possess you – it’s simply not worth it!

A friend sent me a picture of a brand called ‘Bliss’ and suggested, totally in jest, that I should perhaps sue the company that owned the brand. The allusion was to a perceived infringement of copyright since I curate the popular Bliss Catchers Event Series at Odyssey bookstore each month. I replied asking, again in jest, “Sue them, and lose my bliss?”

Indeed. I have learnt from Life that there is really no original idea. Every idea is inspired by someone or something. Always. Yes, you must patent, you must trademark your work or idea to protect it from infringement. But just protect. Don’t get into the possessor mode. When you try to possess something and someone tries to take it away from you, you always become rabid – you lose your inner peace!

To be sure, I too used to want to control what others did to me and my work. My thinking then was that I am the owner of my Life, of my work. I wanted to be the # 1 player in my space and I wanted to leave behind a legacy that people worshipped for generations. I now realize that ambition per se is not a bad thing. Without ambition, there can be no progress. But to insist that everyone around you buys into your vision for yourself and to imagine that everything you plan will turn out exactly the same way as you want it to – well, that’s surely inviting misery into your Life. When everything Vaani and I had built painstakingly – our Firm, our business model, our modest material asset base, our name – was snatched from us and smashed to smithereens 9+ years ago (read more here: Fall Like A Rose Petal ), we initially suffered a lot. Until we discovered that the key to non-suffering is detachment. It is only by remaining detached from all that you create, all that you own; it is only through being in a non-possession mode that you can be free from fear, insecurity, worry and anxiety.

Upon reflection I have realized that being perpetually inspired by Life and people is a great place to be in. Take whatever inspires you, build on it, and put it out into the world to make it a better place. As you do that, be fully aware that someone will soon come along who will be inspired by what you do and build on your idea and launch their version. And so it will go on and on and on. Such is Life. My popular Bliss Catcher Series, for instance, is inspired by Joseph Campbell’s liberating Follow Your Bliss philosophy. To imagine, even in jest, that I must control the usage of the term ‘bliss’ just because we have built the most recent body of work in that space is self-ruinous. Such possessiveness is sure to wreck our inner peace, our bliss!

The truth is also that when you possess something, eventually it starts to possess you. You need to ask yourself if such ownership serves any purpose; especially when you came with nothing and will go with nothing. Remember: You own nothing, you create nothing. Everything happens through you.

So, the simplest way to live is to be detached even as you do your bit, every single day, to leave the world a better place than you found it!

PS: If you liked this blogpost, please share it to help spread the learning it carries!