Why it’s Rewarding to Choose Happiness Before Success

Dale Carnegie told us: It isn’t what you have, or who you are, or where you are, or what you are doing that makes you happy or unhappy. It is what you think about.

If you pay close attention to your environment, you’ll notice that most people are simply seeking success and as much as they like to think of themselves as a successful person, they are not happy.

Most people even program their subconscious mind not to be happy until they achieve a certain goal or certain thing happens in their life.

Sound familiar? Welcome to the modern world.

We often find ourselves delaying the one single thing we want most. Happiness.

Sure, there’s nothing wrong with being ambitious or having the desire to achieve a certain goal. It’s only a problem when we tell our mind that we won’t be happy until that does happen or we achieve such goals.

So, if happiness is often the emotion we want to experience and the motivation that drives us to take action on the things that we think will create such experience in us, wouldn’t it be amazing if we could simply learn how to be happy when those things are not present or when we just don’t have them yet?

“You can look in the mirror and find a million things wrong with yourself. Or you can look in the mirror and think, ‘I feel good, I have my health, and I’m so blessed.’ That’s the way I choose to look at it.” Isla Fisher.

Here are some reasons why life becomes more amazing when you decide to choose happiness before success.

There will always be more to get done

Most people who don’t know this sabotage themselves and miss out on a lot of joy and happiness during their present moments simply because they don’t celebrate when they achieve little goals.

We always want to move to the next thing, thinking we will be happy once we arrive there. The problem, though, is that once we hit ‘there’ we always want more.

A few years ago, my most exciting goal was to write for a big magazine like Huffington Post and being addicted to success, I thought it would give me all the connections I needed to be successful in blogging.

But when I achieved this goal, I realized that there’s more to be done. Sure, there’s a feel-good moment when I hit that goal but it quickly disappeared when new challenges arose.

My lesson here is that there’s always more to be done.

More goals, more challenges, more money, everything in life is in stages, and some stages don’t last very long before there’s a need to step up.

So it might be worthwhile to simply celebrate every moment as it comes, even if there’s more we’d like to enjoy in the future.

Your success is often defined by how happy you are

You can easily get anything done if you feel good about doing it.

Your mood is a key thing here. Good moods produces good results. But a bad mood, if not carefully dealt with, will produce bad results.

So it might be worth it to forget the assumption that we will only be happy if we have success in certain ways and start thinking about how we can easily become successful once we’re happy.

So I won’t deprive myself of enjoying the goodness these moments bring simply because I haven’t achieved a certain goal.

I’m able to dance to the music right now, take a walk, and impact my environment the best way I can. That, I think, is a success on its own.

Every little thing counts

It’s not about the quantity, but the quality that you bring into every moment… Sometimes we don’t feel successful and this feeling makes us unhappy if we think we’re not making enough progress.

Perhaps it’s time to evaluate those feelings by simply learning how to make every little thing count.

Have fun in the present moment, take a walk in the forest, appreciate your health, and appreciate every little thing you do. If you do that, it becomes easier to do big things.

Because, at the end of the day, it’s not success we’re after, it is happiness and we can best experience that by simply choosing happiness now.