<ul><li>The American dream the middle class keeps chasing is dead.</li><li>You have to make yourself the only person who controls your dreams.</li><li>Choosing yourself begins with a daily practice of good habits in 4 areas:</li></ul><ol><li>Mental health</li><li>Physical health</li><li>Emotional health</li><li>Spiritual health</li></ol>

Some Key Points From This Unusual Book

In 2008 the American dream bubble abruptly burst. The world’s biggest financial crisis lead to companies ruthlessly cutting costs – mostly in the form of people.Almost everything can now either be outsourced or done by technology, which is why thousands of college graduates now find themselves unemployed or underpaid – the end of jobs is here.But what should you do if your fancy college degree now only gets you a job at McDonalds? Is it all bad? No. Here’s what to do.

The American Dream Is Dead

Remember this: You have to make yourself the only person who controls your dreams.If financial freedom is your dream, then you have to control your income, which means creating products, freelancing, making passive income from affiliate marketing, selling books, courses, teaching seminars – do any one, or even better, all of these.Why aren’t you the only one who controls your dreams already? Because you’re afraid.<ul><li>Afraid of what our family will think if we leave our “stable job”.</li><li>Afraid of what friends might say.</li><li>Afraid of our customers rejecting us.</li></ul>

The Only Person Who Controls Your Dreams

Rejection—and the fear of rejection—is the biggest impediment we face to choosing ourselves.Avoiding rejection is a powerful motivator. But it makes us miserable.As long as you choose to live with that fear, instead of acting in spite of it, you are giving others the power to make your choices for you.

We Usually Avoid Conflict And Rejection

There’s a saying, ‘The learned man aims for more. But the wise man decreases. And then decreases again’.This is about a new phase in history where art, science, business, and spirit will join together, both externally and internally, in the pursuit of true wealth.What you need to do is build the house you will live in. You build that house by laying a solid foundation: by building physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual health

A New Way Of Living

I have to count the things that are abundant in my life. Literally count them. If I don’t they will begin to disappear.

Only think about the people you enjoy. Only read the books you enjoy, that make you happy to be human. Only go to the events that actually make you laugh or fall in love. Only deal with the people who love you back, who are winners and want you to win too.The only skills you need to be an entrepreneur are the ability to fail, to have ideas, to sell those ideas, to execute on them, and to be persistent so even as you fail you learn and move onto the next adventure.

The Focus On The Joyful LIfe

Pretend everyone was sent to this planet to teach you.

The only truly safe thing you can do is to try over and over again. To go for it, to get rejected, to repeat, to strive, to wish. Without rejection there is no frontier, there is no passion, and there is no magic.Every time you say yes to something you don’t want to do, this will happen: you will resent people, you will do a bad job, you will have less energy for the things you were doing a good job on, you will make less money, and yet another small percentage of your life will be used up, burned up, a smoke signal to the future saying, “I did it again

Do What You Love To Do Even If You Get Rejected

Success comes from continually expanding your frontiers in every direction—creatively, financially, spiritually, and physically. Always ask yourself, what can I improve? Who else can I talk to? Where else can I look?Every time you say yes to something you don’t want to do, this will happen: you will resent people, you will do a bad job, you will have less energy for the things you were doing a good job on, you will make less money, and yet another small percentage of your life will be used up, burned up, a smoke signal to the future saying, “I did it again’.

Keep Digging

I don’t like the word purpose. It implies that somewhere in the future I will find something that will make me happy, and that until then, I will be unhappy

<ul><li>Rodney Dangerfield didn’t succeed in comedy until his forties.</li><li>Ray Kroc was a milkshake salesman into his fifties. Then he stumbled onto a clean restaurant that served a good hamburger run by two brothers with the last name McDonald. He bought McDonald’s when he was fifty-two.</li><li>Raymond Chandler, the most successful noir novelist of all time, wrote his first novel at age fifty-two.</li></ul>

Stories: Success Has No Age

Think of two people in your network who don’t know each other but you think can add value to each other’s lives. Introduce them. Do this every day. Get better and better at it. The more value you bring to the people in your network (even if it doesn’t directly bring value to you in an immediate way), the greater the value of your network. And then the greater value you will have

Be A Connector

<ul><li>If you have an idea, don’t focus on the money. Don’t focus on how you will make a living. Do this: Build your product. Sell it to a customer. Start shipping. Then quit your job.</li><li>Often the real reason someone buys from you is not for your product, but for you</li><li>If you want to be successful, you need to study success, not hate it or be envious of it. If you are envious, then you will distance yourself from success and make it that much harder to get there.</li><li>As yourself: What’s the lifetime value of the customer? What are the ancillary benefits of having this customer?</li></ul>

Success And Your Customers

What to do when struggling with idea topics:Search phrases on social media like: ‘I wish I had’, ‘I just paid someone to’, ‘is the worst product’, ‘is a horrible company’, ‘has a terrible website’, ‘is my favourite website’, ‘does anyone know how...' This will expand your thinking and provide you with puzzle pieces to connect.

Finding New Ideas: Mental LEGO

Honesty is the only way to make money in today’s world.

A holistic book on improving every part of your life.

The world is changing. Markets have crashed. Jobs have disappeared. Industries have been disrupted and are being remade before our eyes. Everything we aspired to for “security,” everything we thought was “safe,” no longer is: College. Employment. Retirement. Government. It's all crumbling down. In every part of society, the middlemen are being pushed out of the picture. No longer is someone coming to hire you, to invest in your company, to sign you, to pick you. It's on you to make the most important decision in your life: Choose Yourself. New tools and economic forces have emerged to make it possible for individuals to create art, make millions of dollars and change the world without “help.” More and more opportunities are rising out of the ashes of the broken system to generate real inward success (personal happiness and health) and outward success (fulfilling work and wealth). This book will teach you to do just that. With dozens of case studies, interviews and examples–including the author, investor and entrepreneur James Altucher's own heartbreaking and inspiring story–Choose Yourself illuminates your personal path to building a bright, new world out of the wreckage of the old.

personaldevelopment

Personal Development

moneyandinvestments

Money & Investments

books

Books

Choose Yourself!

Danish design is famous for its straight lines, natural materials, light tones, and uncomplicated patterns. Their living rooms are bright and de-cluttered.Because clutter equals stress.The same goes for brain clutter which we have so much of in the U.S.That’s why Danish minimalism goes beyond furniture. Both simplicity of life and simplicity of mind is important to Danes. Less of everything means more time, space, and energy to actually enjoy life.

The Danish: Minimalists By Nature

<ul><li>Denmark has some of the world’s highest taxes and prices for consumer goods and services. That’s why Danes eat home whenever possible.</li><li>This means less processed foods and a more relaxing atmosphere when consuming your meals.</li><li>A dinner with family or friends will always be more important to a Dane than a fancy meal out.</li><li>They have big dining tables at home that seat eight or even ten people.</li></ul>

More Cooking

<ul><li>Nearly 60% of people in Copenhagen commute by bicycle every day.</li><li>Danes are obsessed with bikes and often come first in the world’s most bike-friendly cities and nations lists, followed by Netherlands.</li><li>World’s-leading biking infrastructure means that in Denmark, bikes have their own roads, not just lanes, stretching along the main roads, with dedicated traffic signals and rules enforced by police.</li><li>Biking is a serious business in Denmark. And Danes are surely happier and healthier for it.</li></ul>

More Biking

Even office lunches in Denmark are often eaten with other people, strangers or not. Sharing a warm meal with proper cutlery and a proper conversation is how the Danes dine.Eating a cold sandwich alone at your desk would be considered weird and unhealthy.Because it is.Food is joy, not an afterthought.

Eating With Others

<ul><li>The city streets are filled with smokers: mothers pushing strollers, old ladies, teenagers, you name it.</li><li>No one seemed to care or notice.</li><li>Same with drinking. No one cared if you drank at home, in the street, or in the office on a Friday night.</li><li>People lived and let others live. And what a happy way to be it is.</li></ul>

Drink and Smoke if You Want To

<ul><li>Scandinavians are obsessed with fresh air.</li><li>In Denmark, it starts with birth, when babies are left to sleep outside in their prams even in colder months (and they have so many of those!).</li><li>Danish kindergartens make sure the kids spent a lot (if not most) of their day outside, rain or shine.</li><li>Children have all of their classes outside in nature.</li><li>Rain or snow, they bike to work, even if covered in special head-to-toe gear. They walk and bathe in temperatures most Americans would find unacceptable, too.</li><li>Because healthy body equals healthy mind.</li><li>And fresh air stimulates both.</li></ul>

Get Out In Fresh Air

A Dane will never cross the road at a red light, even if there are no cars in sight. Life is just more predictable that way. The key to this system though is that everyone in the country is under a silent obligation to do the same.Following the written and unwritten rules of society has a greater effect on our well-being than we ever consider.

Follow The Rules

<ul><li>Danes are obsessed with mood lighting.</li><li>It’s like the whole country agreed to wage a war on bright hospital lighting so favored in the U.S.</li><li>It all starts with hygge — a Danish word that roughly translates as coziness and is a way of life in Denmark.</li><li>There’s nothing a Dane likes more than having a “cozy” home, corner, dinner, or a “cozy time.” There’s little that can’t be described as “cozy” or “un-cozy” in Denmark. And bright lights are definitely that.</li></ul>

Dimming The Lights

<ul><li>Denmark has very little bureaucracy and almost no paperwork. Every transaction is electronic and streamlined to a minimum. The country is as efficient as it gets.</li><li>You can call it electronic minimalism and, as with regular minimalism, it declutters your life and saves your time, both things that can contribute to your happiness levels.</li><li>While cancelling bureaucracy in the U.S. seems impossible, there are ways to utilise technologies and make your life that much simpler and happier for it.</li></ul>

No Red Tape Or Slow Government Work

We can't all move to Denmark but we can learn from the Danes how to live happier. 
I did. And I returned to the U.S. with a new perspective on  life (and a Danish husband in tow).

motivationandinspiration

Motivation & Inspiration

travel

Travel

artsandculture

Society, Arts & Culture

Life Tips From the (Almost) Happiest People in the World: The Danish

Surfing is a sublimely beautiful, profoundly meaningful, indeed totally awesome thing to do with one's limited time in life, just for its own sake. It is, by itself, reason enough to be alive rather than not.
There are ways of coping with the seeming meaningless of existence, such as eating a cheeseburger. If you must be alive, why not? Surfing has the opposite existential purport.

Surfing is The Opposite of Existential Bummedness

Being open to serendipity, watching for it, celebrating it, and even bringing it about is a meaningful way of moving through the world and finding more meaning in life.The act of riding a wave, a fortunate coalescence between skill and circumstance, is a sort of serendipity. The stories surfers constantly tell - about how the swell, wind, and tide came together just so, or about how they barely exited from an impossible tube ride - are stories of the serendipitous.

Life Itself Is Meaning

Telling the story of a lottery win, one might say: 'My wife bought me a lottery ticket and, wouldn't you know it, it won.' This simple story represents two events - the ticket purchase and the ticket draw for the win - and relates them as the surprising intersection of separate chains of causation, with no interesting common cause between them.

Luck Without A Cause

<ul><li>It's also the sort of concept we use in finding a meaningful story in real events.</li><li>Random sequences of events present interesting, even predictable patterns by nothing more than chance.</li><li>Coincidences happen all the time in life and history, more than we like to believe.</li><li>What's especially interesting to us is not tales of sheer coincidence but ways in which circumstances somehow worked out or coalesced with our active plans.</li></ul>

Serendipity Is A Beautiful Kind Of Luck

What surfers call the elated state of ‘stoke’ is really a celebration of life and the meaningful serendipities it brings

What surfing says about the importance of serendipity in life | Psyche Ideas

If you make happiness your primary goal, you might miss out on the challenges that give life meaning. Pursuing happiness to the exclusion of other goals -known as psychological hedonism - is not only an exercise in futility. It may also give you a life that you find you don't want, one in which you don't reach your full potential, you're reluctant to take risks, and you choose fleeting pleasures over challenging experiences.

The paradox of happiness

Researchers found that the "most happy" college students had the best social lives but performed worse in school than those who were merely "happy." Another study found that the "most cheerful" were not the highest earners. It again went to the second-highest groups, which rated their cheerfulness as above average, but not the "most cheerful." The way to understand the studies is not to discount happiness, but to remember that a little bit of unhappiness has benefits.

A little unhappiness is beneficial

Research found that some gloom can lead us to pay appropriate attention to problems and find solutions. In other words, when we are sad about something, we are more likely to try and fix it. Too many good feelings can lead us to disregard problems. A study found that the fear of failure is positively correlated with meaning derived from romance, friendship, and family. Bringing good things into your life, such as love or career success usually involves risk. Risk doesn't make us happy and can often bring disappointment. But it can also bring better rewards than if we played it safe.

Some unhappiness can increase meaning

We should not shun good feelings or think it's foolish for wanting to be happy. However, it should not be a goal to chase after positive feelings and fight against negative ones. Happiness would lose its meaning if we were unable to contrast it with some measure of sadness. Although suffering should never be anyone's goal, we can strive for a rich life where we pursue the sunshine but fully experience the rain that inevitably will fall.

The desire for happiness is natural 

If you make happiness your primary goal, you might miss out on the challenges that give life meaning. &nbsp;

problemsolving

Problem Solving

What the Second-Happiest People Get Right

The toll that working through the global pandemic has taken on employees’ job satisfaction and emotional well-being has focused business leaders on fostering workforce happiness as never before. While many — if not most — of us are motivated by genuine caring for the people who power our organizations, we also intuitively know that employee happiness should boost job performance. Still, two nagging questions remain: Which comes first, succeeding and then being happy, or being happy and then succeeding? And just how much does initial happiness matter?

Happiness And Success

Not only do happiness and optimism matter to employee performance, but they matter a lot, and both predict how well employees will do. The research highlights the competitive advantage that employee happiness offers businesses. There are some things about employee happiness that every business leader should know and be able to apply. As we emerge from a demoralizing global pandemic, we would all do well to take stock of how to influence the happiness and optimism of those around us in the workplace.

The Long Term Research On Happiness

What really is happiness? The behavioural science literature often refers to happiness as subjective well-being because the meaning of happiness varies in different contexts. As with most concepts that emerge from psychology, definitions vary, but when it comes to happiness, they generally coalesce around three areas: a person’s own assessment of their satisfaction with life; how much positive emotion (such as enjoyment, enthusiasm, inspiration, or pride) they experience; and how little negative emotion (such as hostility, irritability, fear, or nervousness) they experience.

Defining Happiness

Some people just seem happier, and researchers have looked closely at heritability (factors we’re born with) and how our environment shapes our happiness. Research suggests that heritability accounts for about 40% while 60% is attributed to other factors, especially life experiences. Researchers found that while heritability accounted for about 30% of job satisfaction at age 21, the importance of heritability dropped to less than 20% when measured again at ages 25 and 30. Thus, environmental factors within the workplace become more important over time

The Reasons For Happiness

The relative importance of some of those environmental factors has shifted recently. The “World Happiness Report 2021” noted that within the workplace, happiness before the pandemic was largely due to employees’ sense of belonging within an organization and among coworkers, the flexibility afforded to workers, inclusivity, and a sense of purpose to their work.Things changed dramatically during the pandemic: Having a supportive manager became the largest predictor of happiness — nearly twice as important as the next ranked workplace happiness factor, purpose.

Environmental Factors Influencing Happiness

Not surprisingly, money matters to employee happiness too — but research has shown that is chiefly for those employees who indicated that money is important to them. In a recent study, the relationship between income and happiness was over four times greater for people who reported that money was important to them compared with those who cared much less about money. Thus, for employees who aren’t driven by money, income may merely be a hollow way to keep score.

The Importance Of Money

Within the workplace, we know that happier employees are more likely to emerge as leaders, earn higher scores on performance evaluations, and tend to be better teammates. We also know, based on substantial research, that happier employees are healthier, have lower rates of absenteeism, are highly motivated to succeed, are more creative, have better relationships with peers, and are less likely to leave a company. All of these correlates of happiness significantly influence a company’s bottom line.

A Happy Workplace

While happiness should be placed ahead of the knowledge, skills, or talent needed for a job, we conservatively advocate using measures of happiness and optimism as discriminators, or tiebreakers, because the risks are low and the benefits could be important.  Many organizations already use a variety of surveys to evaluate job candidates. Even if adding these questions about happiness and optimism to the applicant survey results in only a small increase in downstream productivity and profitability, most leaders would jump at this opportunity, because it costs almost nothing.

Enhancing Employee Happiness: Measure Happiness in Both Employees and Job Candidates

Beyond hiring, employee happiness should also be a consideration when measuring organizational performance. Yes, objective performance still matters greatly. But, while a high-performing division within a company may bring short-term profit, if that performance was driven by toxic leadership and management practices, then those profits could evaporate quickly if employees were to leave in response. Unwarranted attrition is expensive.

Measuring Performance

Given all the training and development requirements placed on most organizations, the thought of actively trying to develop happier employees may initially seem daunting, time-consuming, and expensive. However, the academic literature repeatedly shows that training initiatives targeting employee well-being do not require a significant time investment, are cost-effective, and carry a high ROI.For organizations willing to make a larger investment, there are of course turnkey, validated programs shown to improve employee well-being.

Enhancing Employee Happiness: 
Develop Happiness In Your Workforce

The pandemic has reminded us of some tough realities, namely that organizations can contract in turbulent times just as fast as they expand when the economy is booming.<ul><li>Organizations need happy employees because happiness is in fact contagious.</li><li>Like happiness, unhappiness is also contagious. This contagion effect places leaders in a precarious position, especially if they are presented with the difficult scenario of being able to retain only one of two employees. </li><li>With performance and other factors held constant, they should keep the one who is happiest.</li></ul>

Enhancing Employee Happiness: Retain Employees Who Are Happy

Employee well-being initiatives work best when confident leaders present the material and when senior leaders place significant emphasis on the overall effort. Leaders must be willing to invest their efforts into making the initiatives successful by not only advocating for them — for example, by securing resources for a program and promoting positive strategic messaging — but also by participating in the training and incorporating it into their own behaviours. We learn best by watching others, so let your employees learn to be happy by watching you.

The Bottom Line

Employee well-being and happiness are surprisingly powerful predictors of performance.

Understand yourself and those around you.

psychology

Psychology

leadershipandmanagement

Leadership & Management

Top Performers Have a Superpower: Happiness

The promise of a better tomorrow can replace the satisfaction of today. It's easy to take your unhappiness with your current condition and mistake it for ambition. Ambition is the drive to work towards an achievement that brings you closer to your definition of success.

The promise for tomorrow

Satisfaction is associated with the fulfilment of your desires. Happiness is the state of being happy. Or simply put - happiness is a temporary state of mind. It can quickly come and go. But satisfaction is a long-term feeling you must build through achieving goals.

Happiness ≠ satisfaction

Happiness is a state of mind. Many people think that being ambitious takes away from the present and reduces one's happiness. Ambition is not the same as aspiration. Ambition relies on character traits, while aspiration comes and goes.

Happiness and ambition

Striving for more doesn't imply that you are ungrateful or unhappy. It's hoping you can accomplish more with time.

The tightrope between satisfaction and ambition is tricky. Often, the promise of a better tomorrow overrides the satisfaction of today; it’s very easy to mistake ambition with an innate unhappiness…

The Complacency Mechanism

Flow is a state of “optimal experience” that each of us can incorporate into our everyday lives. One characterized by immense joy that makes a life worth living.In the last years, researchers have gained a vast store of knowledge about what it is like to be in flow and how experiencing it is important for our overall mental health and well-being. In short, we are completely absorbed in a highly rewarding activity – and not in our inner monologues – when we feel flow.

The state of flow

When people feel flow, they are in a state of intense concentration. <ul><li>Their thoughts are focused on an experience rather than on themselves. </li><li>They lose a sense of time and feel as if there is a merging of their actions and their awareness. That they have control over the situation. That the experience is not physically or mentally taxing.</li><li>Flow is what researchers call an autotelic experience. Autotelic experiences are things that are worth doing in and of themselves. Researchers sometimes call these intrinsically rewarding experiences. </li></ul>

What it is like to be in flow?

Flow occurs when a task’s challenge is balanced with one’s skill. In fact, both the task challenge and skill level have to be high. So long as that task’s challenge is high, and so are your skills, you should be able to achieve flow.Researchers also know that people can experience flow by using interactive media, like playing a video game. Video game developers are very familiar with the idea, and they think hard about how to design games so that players feel flow.

What causes flow?

For one thing, the experience can help people pursue their long-term goals. This is because research shows that taking a break to do something fun can help enhance one’s self-control, goal pursuit, and well-being.A recent study also shows that flow helps people stay resilient in the face of adversity. Part of this is because flow can help refocus thoughts away from something stressful to something enjoyable. In fact, studies have shown that experiencing flow can help guard against depression and burnout.

Why is it good to feel flow?

Research shows that people with more flow in their lives had a higher sense of well-being during the COVID-19 pandemic. Scientists are beginning to explore what happens in the brain during flow.

productivity

Productivity

Why does experiencing 'flow' feel so good? A communication scientist explains

We do not have any time left to stop climate change. The greenhouse gases we've released into the atmosphere will continue to warm our climate for decades. It means glaciers and permafrost will continue to melt, and oceans will warm, acidify, and lose oxygen. This sobering fact doesn't mean that our future is entirely out of our control. Our actions today could mean the difference between bad or disastrous outcomes. Businesses and policymakers can put our world on a more sustainable path.

Taking responsible action

Most of our greenhouse gases come from electricity generation, transportation, and industrial and agricultural use. <ol><li>Electricity. Some renewable energies like wind and centralised solar are cheaper to install than to run existing fossil-fuel generation. We need to invest in less expensive and more efficient long-term battery storage.</li><li>Transportation. Developing new technologies like "green hydrogen" will help.</li><li>Industry and agriculture produce the most greenhouse gases. The lack of incentives prevents companies from doing the right thing.</li></ol>

Decreasing global emissions

Moving past the technological, political and economic challenges requires a drastic move away from the status quo. <ul><li>Individuals have a small role to play (recycling and public transportation). Companies have a huge role to play as they make the bulk of decisions about carbon emissions.</li><li>Sustainability goals need to be integrated throughout organisations, not just in a department or team.</li><li>Investors can pressure companies to improve their carbon footprint, and large companies can pressure suppliers.</li></ul>

A mix of carrots and sticks

We need to dramatically reduce carbon emissions. This will require a new system of incentives.

Discover the world of business and economics.

economics

Economics

business

Business

startup

Startups

scienceandnature

Science & Nature

What Businesses Must Do to Curtail Climate Change

There is nothing wrong with you if you aren’t happy all the time. No one can be happy all the time. In fact, a temporary feeling of giddiness or being high on life is often mistaken for happiness. True happiness is more of an inner peace thing.

“There’s something wrong with me if I’m not happy all the time”

Money can buy a lot of things, but after your basic needs are taken care of, the upgrades that come with an increase in income really don’t make that much of a difference. A famous Princeton study in 2010 found that emotional well-being did not increase for people making over $75,000. In 2021, a study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found that this number had ticked upward to $85,000. But the point is the same: earning anything over that amount apparently has very little effect on your happiness quotient.

“If I have lots of money, I will be happy” 

When you start making demands and deals with yourself to allow happiness into your life, you are signing your life away. These are when-contracts: "When I get what I want, then I can be happy.” The problem is that the finish line is a moving target, as life is ever-changing and so are your desires.

“I have to be better than just OK to be happy”

This is perhaps the most common myth we tell ourselves about happiness, but nothing could be further from the truth. Love is the best thing on the planet, and it is also the most painful, so brace yourself. Be careful about what you ask for.

“When I find true love, then I will be happy"

Everything has a life cycle, and feelings of fulfillment are no different. You will need to seek different kinds of fulfillment as your life changes and your body ages. And unhappiness, like happiness, is only temporary.

“If I have a fulfilled life, then I will never be unhappy”

Instead of seeking happiness, feel the contentment in your life. It’s easier to find, and it lasts much longer.When our lives are actually out of control, we feel stress. When they are not out of control, we may create our own stress by pushing ourselves to be happy, and it is quite taxing on the soul.

“If I don’t constantly seek happiness, I will be sad”

Things can never be like they were. The entire world is traumatized, and we don’t yet know what normal is going to look like. This time is not about trying to be happy. It’s about learning to love and enjoy what we have.

“When life is normal again, then I can be happy again”

Many of us hold false beliefs about happiness.

health

Health

7 Myths About Happiness

According to the United Nations, Finland is the happiest people in the world. But, for the World Happiness Report to compare self-reports of happiness, they assume that the world defines happiness in the same way. 
Research on how people across the globe perceive happiness shows significant differences among nations. Understanding the diversity can help you understand yourself - how you differ, what you might do about it, or making peace with it.

Nations don't perceive well-being the same

At first glance, there seem to be commonalities in the ways people experience happiness. A 2016 study found that the most common definition of happiness is "an inner harmony, feeling or attitude." But inner harmony can mean different things in different places. For example, the Danes describe inner harmony in terms of hygge, which is like a comfortable friendliness. Americans usually define inner harmony in the context of work, where their skills meet their passions.

Definitions of happiness differ

Forty-nine percent of Americans mentions family relationships in their definition of happiness. In comparison, only 22 percent of Portuguese, 18 percent of Mexican, and 10 percent of Argentines consider their families in their definition of happiness. Western cultures define happiness as a high arousal state such as excitement and a sense of personal achievement, but Asia described happiness as experiencing a low arousal state such as calmness.

Other definitions of happiness

We can generally distinguish between two ways of viewing happiness: The inner or outer focus on happiness and the relation or task focus. <ol><li>Happiness arises from good relationships with people you love. It combines the outer and relation foci.</li><li>Happiness comes from a higher consciousness. It combines the inner and relation foci.</li><li>Happiness is from doing what you love. This blends outer and task foci.</li><li>Happiness comes from feeling good combines the inner and task foci.</li></ol>

Four models for well-being

Well-being is far from universal. Here are four models to help you understand the world—and your own mind.

Choose Yourself!

Life Tips From the (Almost) Happiest People in the World: The Danish

What surfing says about the importance of serendipity in life | Psyche Ideas

What the Second-Happiest People Get Right

Top Performers Have a Superpower: Happiness

Lola F.