A road towards happiness
If you’re reading this at the time it is published then happy new year to you ! 🎉🥂 I thought I would publish something a bit different from the usual stuff, so let’s talk about happiness :)
Last year, I stumbled upon an old Instagram story from Will Smith where he talks about happiness. He said that your happiness is your responsibility. I found this idea interesting and I started thinking about it.
Your Happiness
Regardless of the time or place you live in, regardless of your gender, regardless of your age, your religion, and beliefs, no matter who you are, the end goal of every action you ever take is your happiness.
As humans living in the 21st century, we get happy or fulfilled through two major aspects of our lives. Snapchat and Instagram. Just kidding… Personal life (family, friends, partners…) and professional life (work).
Unfortunately, rare are the persons who are fulfilled by these two aspects simultaneously, and the truth is you really need both of them to be happy. Since we spend most of our time at work, it seems reasonable to assume that we need to be fulfilled by our professional life; having a good personal life is not enough. In this post I’d like to focus on the work aspect.
Why some people get fulfilled by their work ?
Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. — Steve Jobs
Passion, gives us a sense of purpose, a mission, a reason to never settle and to always improve ourselves. Passion unlocks our potential, it gives us strength and makes us proud of who we are becoming, satisfied, because we are actually moving forward.
Passion comes within the right environment
While some people can have predispositions to be better at something and hence like it, passion can only be brought to life within the right environment : what surrounds us in our everyday life. As we grow up, as children or students, our environment is essentially composed from family and friends, and schools. For now let’s focus on family.
Why family is so important in the process of finding your passion ?
I like to think of it, like Simon Sinek thinks of employees in a company.
If we trust each other we will turn our backs, we will take risks, we will innovate, we will do things that will change the course of our world. If I don’t trust you, I can’t do that. — Simon Sinek
In this talk, he is saying that leaders should expand the “circle of trust” of their companies from the high hierarchy employees to the most junior ones, so that everyone feel like they belong to the company and use their time and energy to actually innovate and be productive, not protecting themselves.
It is essentially the same thing in families.
I had the chance to grow in a family where for example, of course it doesn’t simply boil down to that, “my money is your money, and your money is my money”. I realized later looking at friends around me that it isn’t always the case (something more like “my money is my money, and your money is your money”).
While I had the time to keep practicing and learning the things I love (programming), some of my friends had to figure out a way to “repay” their parents for money they’ve spent. They had to find irrelevant jobs to get money while I was investing time in my own future, practicing.
Today, because of all the time I’ve spent learning and improving myself in the areas I like, I can easily find internships when I need to, and I have a lot of experience in programming. But all this wouldn’t have been possible, if the environment I grew up in wasn’t suited for that. Of course it is not simply about money, my parents taught me to always be eager to discover new things, and supported me no matter what.
A side note about money…
Money isn’t important, you can always manage to get some. You spend it today, you’ll make more tomorrow. Whereas if you spend your time, you’ll never get it back; and this time is even more valuable when you’re young, don’t waste it.
So if you’re a parent and you want the best thing for your kids, teach them to enjoy learning and allow them to use their time. The more time they have, the more they can discover new fields, the more likely they are to find something they love.
Passion comes within the right environment.
What about schools ?
As I said earlier, as we grow up, the two major components of our environment are family and schools.
Since, as children (or students) we spend most of our time in schools (just like work when we grow up), we could easily argue that they are at least as important as families in the process of education. That’s why we refer to schools as education ! Because schools are not simply supposed to give knowledge, they’re supposed to educate !
Therefore, and this is actually why I’ve been writing this whole post, I would like you to think about that :
