We all want to be happy. It’s certainly what I spend most of my time pondering. Did a new car do it for me? Nope. A new wardrobe? Nope. It’s hard work to find happiness buddy. Seek happiness, and you shall eventually find it.

Here are some simple steps that will lead you to the almighty place of happiness:

A) Forget about time

Worrying about time makes you miserable. When you get married, and when you have kids, is not what you should be focusing on. Focus on being a good person, and those two life events will take care of themselves.

Things to focus on instead:

– People who inspire you

– What you can do to make a difference in the world

– Time with your loved ones

– Reading. That’s right books make you happy and relax your mind

B) Focus on what you love

There are a bunch of apps you can download that will allow you to track everything you do. What you think you do every day, and what you really do are very different. Spend a week mapping out every task you do, even activities like going to the toilet.

“You’ll notice that you waste most of your time on things you hate, or that don’t make you happy”

Stack the odds back in your favor I say. Delete all those meaningless tasks you engage in with what you love. For me, I do less useless coffee catch-ups and more blogging.

When there’s a decision to be made between stuffing my face with junk food, which lowers my energy, and staying home to blog, I do the later. If a good movie comes out that everyone is raving about, I choose to blog and defer the cinemas until I need a break.

While everyone is living a distracted life full of annoyances, I want you to consciously choose activities you love. Treat what you love like your child. If anyone threatens the well-being of things you love, then defend yourself like you would defend your child.

C)Find a significant other

You cannot be happy for the rest of your life alone. At some point, it will catch up with you and you’ll get depressed, do no exercise, eat rubbish food, say things that are horrible and develop a negative mindset.

As mammals, we are here to love and reproduce. That’s it. Stop ignoring love. Improve yourself, do some personal development, stand up straight and be confident in your ability to grow into someone who is inspiring.

Loving someone will teach you more about happiness than anything else. Love is the lifeblood of our human existence and it doesn’t just make us happy, it makes us ecstatic. If you suck at socializing, then jump on a dating app. These apps used to be for weirdos, but now they’re mainstream.

You have no excuse to be single anymore. Put all your energy into finding that significant other and loving them with all your heart. Open the door for them. Take them on incredible experiences. Be yourself. Realize you are very special and you are capable, and willing to find love.

If you’ve already found your special someone then do the following:

– Tell them how special they are at least once a day

– Add a weekly date night to your schedule if you haven’t already

– Share in a romantic holiday together at least twice a year

– Look them in the eye regularly, smile and don’t say anything. Your stare means more than words.

D) Discover nature

Instead of driving in your box car, to the box supermarket, to buy a box of manufactured food, discover nature. Nature’s beauty will make you happy without you realizing. It’s the animal in us that loves to go and breathe fresh air out in our natural habitat.

“The sun on our skin, and the fresh air in our lungs, transports us away from the battle that’s been undertaken in our head”

We all have way too much noise in our heads, even me. Silence the noise and go to a garden, mountain, rainforest or beach.

Bring your camera with you and take some photos. Zoom right into a flower and every detail of the bee that is resting on it. Use technology to bring you back to the present through nature, rather than using it to become even more disconnected from your true happiness.

E) Sell your things

Your stuff is making you sad. It’s taking up space in your head, which could be used to focus on your happiness goal. Start with throwing away some small items. Then focus on items you can give to those who have nothing.

Complete the process by disposing of your biggest items like unused or overpriced cars, technology that never get’s used and property that ties you to a mortgage that stops you traveling the world. These items will bring in the money you need to start your happiness fund.

Imagine having a fund that’s designed to make you happy that you could withdraw from whenever you needed to.

F) Turn tragedy into triumph

In the presence of tragedy, find a way to create a triumph. I recently witnessed a devastating event in my hometown that left several people dead. Rather than focus on the criminal suspect, I focused on how it brought us all together.

I saw people in the community give so much to people who had lost loved ones. These people thought they had nothing. Little did they know, they had so much. Happiness is often found in the darkest of places. Sometimes you need a tragedy to wake you the hell up from the nightmare that your life has become.

We become complacent, arrogant, egotistical little assholes a lot of the time and we don’t even realize it. I’m certainly guilty Your Honour of being a prime example of one of these assholes!

Pull apart tragedy into little pieces in your mind. Make it a must for you to find something that can be amazing in these seemingly horrible situations.

If you do this, you will become the hero of your own happiness story. You won’t just make yourself happy, but you’ll make others happy. That’s actually the secret sauce to your happiness if you haven’t understood this universal law yet. Trust me on that one.

G) Start again (rebuild your life)

Sometimes the only way to find happiness is to start again. It sounds hard, and that’s because it is. A blank canvas is often the only way to undo the damage of your prior actions. Starting again means going through a transformation. This usually involves one or all of these actions:

– Coming up with a vision for how you want your life to be. Write it down and get freaking clear

– Starting again with a new set of friends and work colleagues

– Reading Think and Grow Rich

– Doing some personal development

– Getting advice from someone like Tony Robbins

– Changing your energy levels through a new diet and loads of exercise

– Committing to lifelong giving (this one’s a must for happiness)

I undertook all of these actions, as well as many more, to turn my life around. It was hard to come back from rock bottom, and I’ve since landed right back in this position several times. The latest rock bottom period of my life has only recently occurred. I’m certainly not perfect and neither are you.

Things will go wrong, and they must for you to find happiness. Faith in the long term and acceptance of the tough short-term decisions will get you where you want to go. Happiness is a choice and even in the worst of times, you can still choose to be happy. Be you. Do you. Change the world.

If you want to increase your productivity and learn some more valuable life hacks, then join my private mailing list on timdenning.net