“How are you going to write a book about being happy when you’re miserable all the time?”, my wife asked me one day in the midst of one of my being a dick episodes. “I’m not miserable”, I said.  “Well, you’re awfully grumpy a lot of the time”. “Yeah, but that doesn’t mean I’m not happy”. “Doesn’t it?”

Boy, I hate when she does that. Calls me out on my bullshit.

So I’ve been thinking about writing a book on happiness for a long time and here’s why:

I am one of the 1%. No, not THAT 1%, I’m still working on my second million, I gave up on my first (dad joke). Of all of the x billion of humans who exist and have existed, I am in the top 1% in regards to comfort, health and affluence. Examples. White male American upper middle class. 2020 Antibiotics, running clean water, ac heat all of the knowledge in the world in my pocket.

So why am I surrounded by people who are unhappy. So many people i know seem to be unhappy and I feel like I am happy and wanted to share some reasons why that is. How I can share some of my wisdom on happiness.

But then my wife threw a wet blanket on THAT idea.

So I thought, damn I’m not as happy as I thought I was, now I can’t write my book, make my second million and retire and now I have to keep working like a dog and hope to retire before I die.

But I don’t roll like that, I decided I’m working my book and retiring early anyway. Just need to do what people who are happy do. Become resilience (research) and decode a different way to do this.

I did an inventory of the things that made me unhappy and when I was done, happily discovered that almost all of the things that made me unhappy were internal, and the good news about internal issues is, they can be fixed. External issues are more difficult to fix although one’s reaction to external issues can be fixed. So armed with these issues, I decided “why not address these issues on a daily basis for a year straight.” Make the list, start working on it, make a goal for each issue and work hard for a year. And THEN, I’ll do a daily blog, write a book about my happiness journey while sprinkling it with my pearls of wisdom about happiness.

So, I’ll start this immediately, I said on Jan 15. You’ll notice the date of this post is March 15. Lesson number one or happiness issue number 1 – procrastination can make you give up.

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