The Secret to Happiness

Today, I am receiving a blessing. 

If you were seeing the world through my eyes right now, crammed in the back of an airplane on a nine-hour flight, having just climbed over the napping 8-year-old after having to convince her mother that after six hours I should be able to use the restroom, angling my iPad under the reclined seat in front of me, and facing two more connections with almost six hours of layovers coming up, you may challenge that statement. But to me, this actually is a blessing. This is a time for me to work on the secret to happiness.

And right now, I am being extremely challenged to find happiness.

We all know a simple, but extraordinarily challenging truth: your happiness is within your control. It is something that you can actually control. That is hard to grasp when your circumstances are unpleasant.

But it is absolutely true.

Read more: The Secret to Happiness

In every situation, your happiness is determined by the distance between your expectations and your actual experience, or your reality.

For example: when you go to an expensive restaurant, you expect the food and the service to be in line with the price, whether that be good, amazing, incredible, or life-changing (depending on how expensive it is). When the food is “okay” or “good, but not AMAZING”, your assessment of the restaurant – your happiness at having gone to the restaurant – is negatively impacted. 

But if the food meets or (hopefully) exceeds your expectations, then your experience – your happiness at the choice – is positively affected.

This is one of the reasons why I am much more adventurous with my food choices when I eat at an expensive restaurant. It almost always gives me great happiness (my minimal, or non-existent, expectations are exceeded), and if not, then I can correctly blame my food choice and not the restaurant.

So back to my day today, and most importantly: why should my expectations be high for this travel day?

After all, I bought this ticket. I knew I was in economy – so I should not complain that there was not an open seat next to me or that there is not much legroom. I also could have picked a flight with a shorter duration – for almost $1000 more. Definitely not worth it in my book. But that is a choice I made.

I knew this was a code-share partner flight. That means my chance for an upgrade, or special consideration as a high-status frequent flyer carries no weight here.

I have an insanely energetic 8-year-old who keeps bouncing off of me in the middle seat. In contrast, the last flight I flew coach I was in the middle between two men, each north of 250 pounds. That’s a lot of shoulders and arm touching. At least this small girl has gone to sleep.

I selected a window seat. I did that intentionally because I do not like to get up every time someone else wants to leave. I also hate being accosted by the cart and everyone who walks up and down the aisles because my shoulders do not fit in the seat. So negotiating my way to the restroom could have been avoided.

I knew about my layovers. I also know that there is a direct flight that I may be able to fly standby on, but the connection is very tight. I already ruined my easy and uneventful morning by spending more than an hour trying to figure out how to get on the standby list for that flight. I expected (foreshadowing!) that should not have been hard. It was impossible and so I am not on the list. Those interactions put me in a bad mood all morning.

And right now, I am focusing a lot of energy on what I need to do to get off this plane quickly, clear customs, get through US security, find the gate, and see if I can fly standby on that earlier flight. I could easily work myself into a frenzy even before we land. But there are so many things outside of my control that it would take a miracle for me to get on the flight – even if we manage to actually land on time. 

Right now I am facing a choice: if I miss that flight, I can ruin my whole day, or if I make that flight, I can be insanely grateful. It’s up to me to decide and I have to decide now or it will be too late when I get the bad news.

So this is the moment for me to make a decision to not let this day get away from me. It is a chance for me to practice the secret to happiness: acknowledging that the decisions that I have made have inevitable consequences, and not to create idealized potential outcomes that are destined to be disappointed. 

Make no mistake: managing your happiness is not about always expecting the worst. That would be a sad and horrible way to live. Sometimes you will be disappointed. Sometimes I my reality does not meet my reasonable expectations and I get angry. This is natural, and quite honestly to be expected in this often disappointing reality that we all experience. 

Sometimes it rains on your wedding day. The secret to happiness is to realize that it is always your choice whether to wallow in self-pity or reassess your expectations in the moment and decide to dance the rain and the night away. 

And in that, you just might find that embracing the moments of your life that absolutely suck is the secret to experiencing some of your happiest moments.

My Birthday Message

Today is my birthday. No, I am not fifty – I left that birthday astern a few years ago, but this was the best “birthday picture” I had…

On your birthday, you get to pretty much do what you want. You pick the food, no one complains if you have a drink or two, people buy you stuff that you like, and you usually get to decide what you do for the day.

But I have always had a complicated relationship with birthdays. I enjoy being in the center of the action, but not having all the attention directed at me. I know that may not make sense, but it is my birthday, so you have to blindly accept what I say. Having the attention directed at me makes me uncomfortable – it makes me uneasy. I often hide away on my birthday.

But this year I am going to do something different. This year, I am going to take the opportunity of my birthday to pass along my core mantra for the upcoming year:

Creed

As I went back to my roots in 2023, one of the things I was very intentional about was attending church. I grew up Catholic but attend a non-denominational church now – more on that in a later post.  When I travel, I choose to attend Catholic Mass. There is something incredibly moving about sitting in a church, halfway around the world, and experiencing the same mass you would have at home. It feels like a touchstone.

One daunting thing about Catholic mass for outsiders is that it is filled with rituals. As a former altar boy, those rituals are some of my most ingrained habits. The times to stand, sit, or kneel, the prayers, and the response for each prompt given from the priest – each of these are unconscious habits built on years of Catechism, teaching, and attending mass.

Which was great, except thirteen years ago they changed a lot of these rituals. And if, like me, you have not been faithfully attending a Catholic mass for the last thirteen years, you have a whole slew of automatic responses that your mind automatically blurts out, clearly identifying you as “not a practicing Catholic.”

One of these changes inspired me.

Getting Back to Basics

Happy 2024, Everyone!

It has been a while since we spoke – longer than I expected. And for that, I owe you an explanation.

When 2022 dawned, I have to admit that I was both mentally and emotionally exhausted. And that was not a great way to start a year charged with a lot of family upheaval, professional challenges, and – if I am completely honest – a lot of feelings of personal loneliness.

My default mode when facing those types of challenges is to close up and hide from the world. Most of you know I am upbeat and when I do not have something nice to say, I just clam up. Intellectually, I know that when you are struggling, you need community. In fact, my least favorite expression is “God doesn’t give you more than you can handle.” I believe that God very intentionally gives you more than you can handle to force you into community. You can always handle more in community than you can on your own. But in 2022, I just soldiered on.

As I soldiered on, I never felt like I had anything to write about. So I didn’t. And at the end of a long year of soldiering, I found myself at many different crossroads – each of which was exciting and hopeful, but I still felt strangely lost. Like a sailor lost at sea – able to see islands around me but not knowing which were inhabited and unable to make way against a current that seemed to be pushing me between all of the areas of safe refuge.

So I did what any good sailor does in that situation: I turned course and headed with the current to see where the ocean was taking me.

One of the ways that I turned into the current was in my New Year’s Resolution for 2023 which was not to read anything new. Instead of consuming new books and knowledge, I decided to only re-read things I had read before. My 2022 reading list had been all about advancing my knowledge – in 2023 it was time to take a step backward and re-evaluate what I already knew.

My reasoning was that the great thinkers of history did not have a lot of books. Instead, they read the books that they had over and over and each time learned something new. They deepened their knowledge and wisdom instead of adding to their general awareness. I thought that maybe general awareness was a blanket of noise covering up the wisdom that I already had.

So I started re-reading. I re-read the Bible, all seven books of Stephen King’s Dark Tower Series, Illusions by Richard Bach, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert Pirsig, The Screwtape Letters by C.S. Lewis, The Secret by Rhonda Byrne, The Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg, Tuesdays with Morrie by Mitch Albom, Shop Girl by Steve Martin, Peace is Every Step by Thich Nhat Hanh, The Shack by W.M. Paul Young, the Seneca Six Pack (On the Happy Life, Letters from a Stoic Volume 1, Medea, On Leisure, The Daughters of Troy and the Stoic) by Seneca, American Sniper by Chris Kyle, All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten by Robert Fulghum, Living the Simple Life by Elaine St. James, Shop Class as Soulcraft by Matthew Crawford, and The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho. I am finishing up my reading with A Pirate Looks at Fifty by Jimmy Buffett. Twenty-nine books that I had read before.

In doing so, I learned some very interesting things:

1. I already know more than enough to happily and successfully navigate this world.
2. We are in control of our own happiness – we are also the source of our own stress, dissatisfaction, and disappointment.
3. Some books are not worth reading – let alone reading again. Some books I started did not make the list because I did not finish them. Two books I should have stopped still did because I needed to learn how to put a bad book down.
4. I also learned a lot about how and where I picked up some of my habits.

Mostly, though, I rebuilt the foundation of my beliefs, my confidence, and my own personal happiness.

Which brings me to 2024.

One of the biggest lessons I learned from all of that study was the power of mentorship and the sharing of knowledge. Real wisdom does not come from reading a book and trying to implement the facts and concepts in your life. It comes from discussing your knowledge within your circles and your community and then refining those facts and concepts into actual wisdom by sharpening them against the experience, knowledge, and wisdom of those around you.

If you keep everything bottled inside, you never gain wisdom. If you are not learning from the community that the universe built around you, then you will never find real wisdom. And the only way to learn from others is to share what you already have.

For me, you are that community. And this year I am making a pledge to be more faithful and more present to you. To do that, I am pledging to be more intentional in my life, more intentional in my relationships, and more intentional in curating my own personal happiness and success.

I am making a pledge to take responsibility for who I am in this world. I pledge to be intentional in maintaining my happiness, curating my success, building relationships, and navigating my spiritual journey. And I pledge to share what I discover with you along the way.

I hope you will pledge to share your journies, your experiences, your wisdom, and your feedback with me. For better or worse. That is the only way we will all grow as a community.

I hope you will continue to faithfully join me on what promises to be an epic journey.

Savor This Moment

Savor every moment. Remain present to the present. Experience life. Lean in to now. Be mindful.

These are all great statements we have heard in some form or another a thousand times. They even look nice written in a loose cursive, framed in distressed wood, and hung on a wall where you can see them every day. They are great statements because they are true. And we all know that they are true but…

How do you really “savor every moment?”

Last week I had the opportunity to attend the last home game of the Pittsburgh Steelers’ 2021/2022 season. I have been fortunate enough to attend four of the nine home games they played this year. This one was particularly special as our quarterback of the past eighteen seasons is likely to retire and this would be his last game in front of the home crowd.

One Bite at a Time

I want to impact the world. I want to leave the world better than it was when I showed up. Of course, that is a pretty daunting task when you think about it. I have a hard enough time getting my kids to clean their rooms let alone change the entire world. But the fact remains that I want to impact this world in a positive way.

Changing anything is difficult. I have worked inside companies to try and improve them. I have mentored and taught to try and educate the next generation of leaders. I have even done a pretty good job at having a global impact by helping to form an industry trade association dedicated to implementing global regulations designed to protect the biodiversity of the oceans. I have readers of this blog from more than a dozen countries. I helped protect countless seafarers over the years by ensuring their ships and equipment are safe.

But maybe the scope of my goal has always been a little too big.

Ode to a Box of Q-Tips,

We shop at Costco. As such, we buy silly things in bulk because “they are sooo cheap!” And we often buy silly things in bulk before we need them because they may not be there the next time we are at Costco, or we might need them before the next time we go.

One of those things is Q-tips. We buy them in a 3-pack of 625-count boxes (yes, we purchase 1875 Q-tips at a time). I was curious when my wife asked during a Costco trip ‘do we need Q-tips’ just how often I actually go through a box. So when I opened the last box, I put a date on it.

A couple of days ago, the box was almost empty (never fear, we have FOUR more boxes in the cupboard) and I saw the date I wrote when I opened it: January 24, 2020. Think about it:

Pulling at Threads Part 6 – Know Yourself

There is no better way to land this plane than to tackle the topic at the root of it all: knowing yourself.

‘Easy,’ you say. ‘I know who I am and I know what I like.’

Are you sure? At no other time in our existence has there been a better way to highlight what I am talking about than right now. Do you know yourself as well as Facebook knows you? How about Amazon?

Does that feel uncomfortable? It should.

There is a complacency that we feel, particularly those of us in the United States, as we sit in the sheltered confines of the tent that we have placed around ourselves. This tent has been fabricated by our expectations, pleasures, commercialism, information, education, obligations, sensory perception, and popularity, among other things.

Pulling at Threads 5: Know Your Joy

When was the last time you were happy?

I have had a pretty good summer, so that is not a very difficult question for me. I am not going to recount my summer and try to make you jealous with all the cool things we did – I save that for my wife’s Facebook. Suffice it to say that I had plenty of opportunities to feel happy over the summer.

But when was the last time you really felt joy? You know, that Christmas morning when you were six feeling that you got seeing a tree packed with presents and feeling the unbridled anticipation of what could be inside. Or that feeling when you were a kid right after a big event when your parents took you to an ice cream parlor for a double-scoop waffle cone of your favorite ice cream flavor.

Joy – pure, unfiltered, O.M.G. joy.

I bet it has been a while.

Pulling at Threads 4 – Know Your Beliefs

Growing up Catholic, you learn a lot of rote prayers. There is the Lord’s Prayer, the Hail Mary, and if you grew up in our family, you even learned a rote prayer for the evening meal.

Memorized prayers are important, because they help make sure you cover all of the bases.

There was one rote prayer that I always liked: the Nicene Creed. Catholics say this prayer during each Mass as a profession of their unified beliefs. This is done right at the juncture of the Liturgy of the Word (the readings) and the Liturgy of the Eucharist (communion) as a profession and affirmation of the common beliefs of the congregation before entering the holy part of the Mass.