Tag: Work

Happiness is a state of mind

Like a lot of people, I used to think that happiness was a destination, that someday, after working a lot on it, I would reach it. But I now think that it is more of a state of mind than anything else. The difference between those two is pretty subtile, because even if happiness is a state of mind, you will need to work on it for some time before reaching it. Society wants us to think that happiness will be reached at the end of our life after working our asses off for like 50 years and being all worn out if not already dead. I prefer to think that happiness can be reached in a matter of a few years (maybe less) no matter how old we are. It will require that you make big changes in your life, and the time it will take for you to become happy will mostly depend on how long it takes to make those changes. You would probably also need to not be satisfied by being average or else you won’t really care about bettering yourself anyway.

For me, the need for change towards happiness and an overall better life was first triggered by the lost of a girlfriend and later by the loss of a job I hated. So I finally had to face the fact that my life really sucked to decide that I was worth more.

I’ll talk a little bit about my own experience here as a guy on his way to happiness, I’m not there yet, but I can already see that I’m heading in the right direction. A few years ago, I was working as a website programmer, living an ordinary boring life. At some point I had a girlfriend, who left me for a bunch of reasons that are out of the scope of this article, and now that I think about it, my lifestyle was so miserable that there’s no wonder why I was being such an asshole to her. I remember how I used to say to her every morning how much I hated my job (and just working in general). At that time, I was always thinking about earning more money even if I was already earning more than I really needed. My life was basically only revolving around work and money. When my girlfriend left, I finally realized that I was missing something, so I began working on myself to become a better person. But I was still working a job I hated and couldn’t get away from it by myself. About a year later, I was still working that same job, when my boss asked me to have a talk with him to finally hear him say that I was fired. Ok, most people don’t take it really well when they get fired, but for me, it was so much of a release that I literally had difficulties holding my face from smiling in front of my (now former) boss. That is where I really began “living” for real.

From the moment I was free, there was still some work to do, as much as losing that awful job was nice, I wasn’t ready to be happy yet.

I think that there is two sides to happiness, there are things that lower it, and things that increase it. So the solution is pretty simple, eliminate as much as possible of what lowers your happiness, and add as much as you can of what increases it. Simple in theory, hard and long to actually apply, but still workable.

So if you want to be happier, you need to let go of the things that prevent you from reaching it. So maybe it’s your soul-sucking job that takes all of your energy, maybe it’s a bad relationship or bad friends, maybe the place where you’re living keeps you from doing what you really want. It will be hard, but it will be worth it. As an example, I used to work as a programmer, but I found out that it was ruining my life, so I decided to stop doing it. I obviously make less money because I’m not specialized in any other field, but I feel way better about myself now. Sometimes I think about how I could go back to this old way of living and earn much more money to buy more things, but right after I also remember how I felt trapped in a routine leading to nowhere and I know I made the right choice. What I’m personally trying to do is to cut out everything that isn’t essential so I have more time for the fun part. It means to do some sacrifices, I decided to stop working full time, so I find seasonal, temporary and/or part time jobs so I have more free time than the standard (at least here in Quebec) 2 weeks in summer and 2 weeks in winter. But on the downside I need to have an older car (and less fashionable) (I still think that I need a car but I could also decide to get rid of it to become less reliant on money), I have to take better care of what I have so I won’t waste/break what I own so I don’t need to buy more things. I have to live with roommates to make the rent cheaper. I also try to buy food that doesn’t cost too much but this one is hard because I also like weight training which kinds of requires that I eat good food (which is expensive by definition). Some of these things can be annoying, but they allow me the live an overall better and happier life.

The other thing you have to do is to start doing what you like (or more of it), it seems easy but it isn’t that much for most of us, we still have to work, eat, sleep and do tons of others things before even thinking of having fun. I’m passionate about music, and I hardly play more than 30 minutes a week on my bass guitar. I need to make place for it in my life. Like I often say, “you don’t need to have the time, you have to take the time”, in others words, if you wait for the day you’ll have free time to do something, you’ll never do it, so just take the time you need and do what you really want with it. My happiness level is directly proportional to how much I have been working on things that I’m passionate about in the last few days. For instance, in the last three weeks before when I started writing this article, the first one was depressing because I had a really busy work week. I didn’t have much time to do anything else other than working and I was feeling down. The other two weeks I was on vacation, so I did some weight training, wrote a few things, played music and did other fun things, and I also was in a much better mood.

You probably have already heard somewhere that happiness is living the present moment, not the past or the future. And I’m also convinced that it is true, but what it doesn’t say is that if you live the ordinary life, you won’t be able to do it because the present will be awful. If you’re not already a happy person, you’ll have to change your life to make the present enjoyable. It’s up to you to find what lowers and what increases your happiness, once it’s done, you’ll need to grow some balls and make the necessary changes. Another thing worth saying is that if you really go towards a better life, most people won’t be able to understand what you do, so if you are the kind of person that needs to “fit in” and be accepted, happiness is probably not for you.

I really like the next phrase and I think it sums up most of the article: “If you want something you’ve never had, you’ve got to do something you’ve never done.”. Of course if you’re not satisfied with your life now, there’s got to be things to add and/or to remove or else you’ll keep the same boring routine that you hate.

Perfectionism

Perfectionism, as I would say, is the act of putting efforts into a work until all defects are gone, or to get it as close to perfection as it can be. By itself, it can be nice, meaning that you are able to do high quality work, but it tends towards being a problem when you don’t set limits. In a perfect world, we would have unlimited time to do everything we want and people would appreciate the efforts we put into our work, but we don’t live in this kind of world. In this world, we all have thousands of things to do and people expect results (fast).

You have to be able to see what won’t add value to what you’re doing (not only $$$, but what won’t be worth the time and efforts). It’s better to get something done, even if it has some flaws, than having something perfect but incomplete because you lost interest and hope in finishing the project someday. The imperfect work will most of the time be of better value than the incomplete one. Would you rather have a complete car that you have to bring to the garage from time to time or have a perfect half that you can’t drive?

I used to be a perfectionist, in my case, so I was putting so much time in my projects that I would lose interest before getting things done almost everytime. My mindset was: If I do something, I better do it well. At some point, I came to realize that I hadn’t accomplished much interesting things in my life, it was time for me to change my lifestyle. I felt like it was time to start doing things and getting them done. The mindset became more of an incremental one: I’ll do the best I can now, see the results, and do better next time. In other words, I’ll do things the best way I can at that moment, finish the project, learn from it, and in the next project I’ll have more experience and I will deliver a better work.

I’ll give you an example, since I was a kid, I always dreamed about making music, I play guitar, bass, and I’m currently “learning” piano, but I never really made any song. The reason? Everytime I play one of my instruments, what comes out of it never satisfies me, it never sounds as good as the bands I like. So I ended up thinking that I was a bad musician and nearly stopped playing music altogether. But have you ever listened to your favorite band’s first album or demo songs? They sound really different from their later work but they still have that appeal that makes you like them. Of course I’ll feel bad about myself if I compare what I do to the work of someone with years of experience ahead of me. But if I choose to do it anyway no matter how bad it seems to sound, I’ll build experience, and the more I fight this feeling, the more I’ll get experience and the better it will sound. And maybe someday I’ll listen to my favorite band and say to myself “I can do that too” and actually do it.

But don’t go thinking that I encourage people to do bad work just for getting it done, I’m saying that we have to know our limits and work according to them, always push them a little further everytime without getting too far. If we take back my music creation as an example, I know I will probably not be able to write a symphony in the first few months, but I for sure can write some more simple music that sounds good. And little by little I’ll get better at it and someday I’ll be able to create something as good as my expectations of it.