How to Do Everything and Be Happy: Your step-by-step, straight-talking guide to creating happiness in your life. Peter Jones
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Not having a holiday
Being stuck in the house
Fines, e.g. bank fees, parking tickets, etc
Having to go to the doctor
Paying for a coffee then finding that it’s rubbish (same goes for a sub-standard meal, or bad service)
The news
Thinking about climate change
Littering
Other people’s children
Walking past homeless people
Boredom
Mess, that I have to clean up
Procrastination (makes me guilty, then consequently blue)
Doubtless you’ll have your own items. The question is – what can you do about it? How can you reduce the power these things have over you?
Stop right there!
That way lies madness.
After Kate died one of the first things I did on my ‘quest to find happiness’ was to compile a list very similar to the one above, and then work through it, tackling each item head on with a view to eliminating my unhappiness. I even invented a misery rating so that I could re-sort it and go after the big hitters first.
I soon discovered two things:
Firstly, it didn’t matter how hard I worked, I just never seemed to make a big enough dent in that damn list. I was forever adding new items! I felt like a guy in a leaky rowing boat – going nowhere fast whilst desperately trying to get rid of the water that won’t stop coming in.
Secondly, pretty soon the list itself became something I hated. I ended up calling it my ‘Ugh List’, because that’s how it made me feel: Ugh! Every moment I spent focusing on the list was more time involved with things that made me unhappy. (We’ll be coming back to how the mind deals with focus later in the book, so keep that thought at the back of your mind.)
I’m pleased to report however that the Ugh List did teach me one, very valuable, lesson:
THE ABSENCE OF UNHAPPINESS
IS NOT HAPPINESS
The more I worked on the list the more I came to realise that even if I managed to eliminate all my Ugh items there was a very real chance that I still wouldn’t be happy. Happiness, it seems, just doesn’t work that way.
Whilst it might be mildly interesting to list the reasons for your unhappiness (and quite seductive too – there’s a part of us that wants to do that), I’ve come to suspect that the true cause of unhappiness might actually be the absence of happiness.
Which is very good news.
Because it turns out, happiness isn’t all that difficult to find.
Doing Something About It
Let’s recap.
The top three reasons for General Unhappiness (according to me anyway) are:
Lousy work/life balance
Where the things you have to do dominate your life, and the things you’d like to do just aren’t meaty enough, or you don’t have enough of them, to ‘balance’ your life.
A general lack of control
Where you find yourself bouncing around the pinball machine of life, and you’re not in control of the flippers.
External forces
Where you encounter people or situations that seem intent on taking your sunny smiley mood and crushing it into the ground.
Now, would you like to do something about it?
During the pages that follow I’ll take you through practical steps to (re)organise your life so that you increasingly find yourself doing things that make you happy, and spending less time churning through the stuff that sucks the joy out of life.
Putting the smile back on your face won’t necessarily involve identifying problem areas of your life and attempting to ‘fix’ or eliminate them. But, that said, we are going to improve your work/life balance. We’re also going to snatch back control of your life and put you back in the driving seat. And finally we will start redesigning your life so that those external influences either won’t seem so influential, or won’t be there at all.
This book’s designed to get you started right away. Seven days is really all you need. That’s the minimum time required to read the book, and to start putting some of the ideas into practice. We’ll start with the easy stuff and build on it. If you work with me as we go through the various chapters you’ll feel much happier by this time next week, and better still as the weeks go by.
The ‘Secret to Happiness’, so it turns out, is that there is no secret.
So let’s get started.
Boxing Day
Here in the UK the 26th of December – the day after Christmas Day – is called ‘Boxing Day’.
According to some sources Boxing Day was originally a day when the wealthy would give a boxed gift to their servants. Whether this still happens is something that I haven’t the time nor the inclination to find out. But I can tell you that for those of us who aren’t in servitude, it’s a public bank holiday.
For many years in my family, Boxing Day used to be a re-run of Christmas Day. Sometimes the venue would change but there was always another roast turkey dinner, more Christmas crackers, more party hats, another Christmas pud, more mince pies and once again no one would even touch the Christmas cake. When we were very, very young there even used to be a second round of present giving.
When my wife Kate came along, Boxing Day became ‘our’ day. We’d get up around midday, open a bottle of champagne, play with our presents from the day before, roast chestnuts in the oven, play silly board games, watch Christmas movies, and eat posh nibbles. It was, quite simply, a fantastic day. Our first Boxing Day together I even ended up asking Kate to marry me. That gives you some idea how good Boxing Day made me feel about life, and there hasn’t been a Boxing Day since that hasn’t given me a similar inner glow, a similar joy for life.
And I speak with some authority here because in the last five years I’ve celebrated Boxing Day at least sixty times.
That first Christmas after Kate passed away my mother, concerned for my welfare during the festive season, asked if I’d like to spend Boxing Day with them. It was a generous offer but, call me sentimental, I decided to spend it just as we always had.
I got up late, I opened a bottle of champagne, I sat in bed and browsed my collection of gifts from the previous day. Then I took the Brie from the fridge, a box of posh crackers (the edible kind) and worked my way through the whole lot whilst I sat in front of the telly and watched The Santa Clause. A little later I emailed friends I’d been meaning to catch up with, and followed that with a walk down to Old Leigh. I looked out at the boats resting in the mud, and then I went home, wrote down some thoughts, and did some planning.
By the time I went to bed I felt like I’d had a week’s holiday, and all I’d done was get out of bed and see how the day unfolded. It was such a good day that I caught myself wishing that Boxing Day happened a little more frequently than once a year, at which point I had the following crazy thought:
Why can’t it?
What was to stop me replicating the same structure – or lack of structure – on any other day of the year?
Answer: nothing.
From that day on I decided to have a ‘Boxing Day’