THE ONE THING YOU NEED TO KNOW TO BE HAPPY

There aren’t many phrases in English more recognizable than “the pursuit of happiness.” But what could happen if we turned it around? That’s exactly what Chris Guillebeau does in his book, The Happiness of Pursuit: Finding the Quest That Will Bring Purpose to Your Life, which I have just read.

At the age of 36 - when he wrote this book - Chris had already led an amazing life. A self-starting entrepreneur since age 19, he felt depressed after the 9/11 terrorist attacks and decided to dedicate himself to something truly significant. He began working on a medical ship off the coast of West Africa. That’s where he caught the travel bug. Since then he has visited not a dozen, not two dozen, but all 193 countries in the world. Now Chris works to share that spirit of adventure with others.

Chris’s secret power is bringing people together who want to pursue a vision bigger than themselves. It’s totally inspiring, and his new book takes all that inspiration and makes it accessible and actionable to a wide audience.

The Happiness of Pursuit is a roadmap for people who want to experience significance and joy in life. That might describe you - as it definitely describes me. In the book, Chris tells compelling stories about others and self-deprecating ones about himself. The effect is not only encouraging, but also enabling because along the way Chris details several tactics for finding and pursuing a great quest.

Happiness in life usually comes by making meaningful progress toward significant goals and those goals don’t have to be traveling to every known country, completing a four-year degree in twelve months, or running fifty marathons in under three hours each. Some of the best quests happen inside the four walls of our homes.

Here are five steps I’ve pulled from Chris’s book that can help us find the right adventure and see it through.

1- Listen to your discontent - We usually think of dissatisfaction as a negative feeling, but in The Happiness of Pursuit Chris reframes it. “Properly examined,” he says, “feelings of unease can lead to a new life of purpose.”

Discontent is like an indicator light on the dashboard of our lives. If we’re paying attention, it can tell us when something is wrong. And that might be exactly what we need to redirect. But how?

2- Add inspiration - As Chris says, discontent is not enough. Lots of people are unhappy. In fact, fewer than 20 percent of workers in America and Canada are satisfied with their work, according to one study.

The important thing, Chris says, is to combine our discontent with inspiration. That fresh sense of purpose can give us new direction. What starts your motor? What gets you fired up? Inspiration turns discontent into fuel for positive change. And it’s got to be something we really believe in because the journey won’t always be fun, fast, or easy.

3- Be brave - As we contemplate new paths, fear always rears its head. It’s inevitable. And it doesn’t matter. “Embracing new things often requires us to embrace our fears,” Chris says, “however trivial they may seem. You deal with fear not by pretending it doesn’t exist, but by refusing to give it decision-making authority.”

Who’s in charge? I’ve experienced enough in life to know that nothing new, amazing, or meaningful happens when I stay huddled inside my comfort zone. Is stepping out risky? I’d be lying if I said no, but that’s where real adventure leads, and it’s totally worth it.

4- Count the cost - What will be required to achieve your goal? Chris recommends that we list our goals and make estimates on the time and money and other costs required to achieve them. He calls this “deductive reason,” and we need to be smart about the costs. But there’s often a direct correlation between how much satisfaction we gain to how much we invest. “It is precisely the arduousness of the task that makes the accomplishment an epic one.” And as he says, effort can be its own reward if you love the work.

5- Divide and conquer - Chris didn’t just launch into his world travel. He mapped it out first. He broke things down in to regions and figured out what was important for each. Nearly two hundred countries is a lot, but chunking them out gave him a place to start and a scope he could manage.

For me, the best thing about breaking goals down into a list of milestones is checking things off my list. Progress is a powerful motivator. As we face roadblocks and setbacks, this can help us pull through and make it to the end.

And what do we find at the end of our quests? If the adventure is truly meaningful, it will transform us. We’ll be more confident, mature, capable of seeing even bigger adventures, and empowered to pursue them.

This last point is important I think because, as Chris says near the end of The Happiness of Pursuit, “Quests do not always tie up well.” A quest might end better than we imagine or disastrously. Either way, the good news is that there’s always another adventure if we’re willing to pursue it.

What quest have you been dreaming of lately? What’s stopping you from getting started? Take the first step. The others will come automatically.

RETIREMENT - A WORD THAT BOTHERS

Retirement has always been used as a way for people in authority to induce behaviors in others for their own purposes.

Augustus Caesar, for instance, gave his former soldiers big pensions to prevent them from becoming disgruntled and overthrowing the government, and Chancellor Otto Von Bismark threw a wet blanket on socialist radicals in Germany by offering payouts to the elderly.

The common denominator in these and other examples is that retirement was a way of buying people off and getting them out of the picture. I think the modern idea of retirement, stemming directly from the industrialized workplace, is the same. The idea is that you can induce someone to do repetitive, soul-killing work with little emotional benefit if you promise a big enough carrot at the end of the stick. For people in my parents’ generation, it was the only way to keep the machine rolling.

This is a terrible and dehumanizing way to think of work. It assumes that workers have no real value beyond output. Once their productive years are over - however that’s determined - then we send them out to pasture. The only way to get workers to play along is to convince them that the pasture is lush and relaxing. Suck it up now because it’s going to be wonderful in a few decades.

The effect is that we’ve now raised a few generations to look for fulfillment in the pasture, not their work. Satisfaction is a future thing, not a present possibility. Joy is for later. Meaning and significance comes from checking out down the road. If you’re looking for a way to murder your heart, then congratulations. That’s it.

The cost of the trade is too high. It encourages alienation from our work. It wrongly assumes those who have lived the longest and experienced the most have the least to offer, and comes with significant health risks, including reduced mental function, heart attack, and stroke. Also, it often comes with feelings of purposelessness and loneliness and deprives our communities of the contributions we still have to give.

For those who look at life from the Christian perspective, think of people like Moses and Caleb. They were productive to the very end. Job’s best days were his last days. We would trade that? Not me.

The best answer to the culture of checking out is to think differently about our calling in midlife and beyond. Here are three steps to doing that:

1. Eliminate the word “retirement” from our vocabulary - It’s an unhealthy concept. If we chose to use late life as an opportunity to change directions in our work, great. But it’s not retirement. Staying meaningfully engaged in the world is essential for a sense of purpose.
2. Keep the door open to our own contributions - If retirement has been a way to get people out of the picture, why do that to yourself? The more you know and grow, the greater potential contribution you have to make. Stay committed to playing full out till the end. How?
3. Recommit to work we love - When Duke Ellington was asked why he didn’t retire and live off his royalties, he responded, “Retire to what?” It wasn’t that home was so empty. It was that his work was so full. He lived his art. Retiring would have been like turning off his own soul.

If you’re doing meaningful work you enjoy, why would you ever want to quit? And if you’re not doing meaningful work you enjoy, it’s probably time to reconsider what you’re doing before your only real option is hoping for some shade in the pasture.

Thankfully some polling I’ve seen shows that people are increasingly retiring retirement. It’s an idea whose time is long over.

How would it change your working life now if you stretched your productive horizon out another decade or more?