I spend a lot of time thinking about my future and everything that it will entail. In the process of doing this, I sometimes forget how happy I already am in that moment. This isn’t to say that I should stop thinking about my future because I am happy in the present; it just means that I should keep doing whatever it is that I am doing and make changes where they need to be made.
While eating dinner with some friends this weekend, one of them posed the question, “If I am happy riding my bike, going to see a late afternoon movie, and eating this $13 steak, why do I have to keep trying to be ‘happy?'” It was rhetorical because the next statement he made explained his view on the difference between fulfillment and happiness. We can choose to be happy on our journey to fulfillment. And that is what we should all do–not just plan to do.
If the flowchart is too much for you, I love the simplicity of this infographic. Sometimes we run into dead ends that totally bog us down, but we don’t have to apply a mathematical formula to it to solve the problem. We just have to turn around and head a different direction.