Happiness, like other emotions, is not something you acquire. It is something you are. This implies that happiness is not a goal that you can reach. It is a side effect of a particular set of ongoing life experiences.

Happiness

Failing to meet your own expectations is not the opposite of happiness. Your ability to fail and still appreciate the experience is key to happiness.
The joy is not in getting what you want, but the process of working towards it, then raising the bar, and doing it again. If you fail, learn from it.

Lowering one’s expectations

Raising a child makes us happier than beating a video game. Completing a marathon makes us happier than eating chocolate. These activities involve pain, struggle, even anger, and despair. But once you have completed them, you look back and feel happy because these kinds of events allow us to become our ideal selves.

Happiness is a process

Achieving a difficult long-term goal makes us happy. But once you reach the goal, there will be another thing to pursue to make you happy.That is because our ideal self is always a few steps away from us. What matters is not that we achieve the plateaus of success, but that we're continually moving towards them.

Happiness is fleeting

While pleasure is correlated with happiness, pursuing pleasure does not cause happiness.
People who focus their energy on materialistic and superficial pleasures end up more anxious and less happy in the long run. Pleasure is necessary, but it's insufficient.

Happiness is not the same as pleasure

We don't always need to be positive, even if that is constantly marketed to us. We will have trouble. Things go wrong. People upset us. Mistakes are made that make us negative. It's all part of life. 
Negative emotions are necessary, but we need to learn to express them in a socially acceptable way that aligns with our values.

Happiness is not the same as positivity

Happiness, like other emotions, is not something you obtain, but rather something you inhabit. When you're raging pissed and throwing a socket wrench at the neighbor's kids, you are not self-conscious about your state of anger. You are not thinking to yourself, "Am I finally angry? Am I doing this right?"

Happiness is not the same as pleasure

Stop Trying To Be Happy

It's time to

READ

LIKE

A PRO!

Why You Shouldn't 'Go With Your Gut'

Why You Need to Be Good at Reading Your Emotions

Good mental health isn't about being happy all the time