My brother picked up one of Michael Hyatt’s productivity journals. He asked if I liked Hyatt’s book Your Best Year Ever. I enjoyed it but didn’t take as much action on it as I planned. (That happens a lot with books. Motivation is very high to put a Sharpshooter on someone when I’m reading Bret Hart’s autobiography, for example.)
One thing that stuck though, was the emphasis on mindset being really important. I’ve been, well, thinking about thinking a lot this year. And I’ve started noticing it coming up in other books I read.
Here’s an excerpt in The Achievement Habit:
This also means that we have the power to alter our perceptions, revising perceptions that bring us down and enhancing those that help us. Your outlook on life is deeply entwined in your propensity for success. Miserable blowhards can achieve, however they still wind up miserable. That’s not success. Success is doing what you love and being happy about it.
In the past year I’ve been trying to untangle success and happiness. It started after reading Solve for Happy where I really saw that so many things required for success (at least how it’s often defined) were almost directly opposed to happiness.
I was listening to DHH on The Unmistakable Creative podcast (Unlearn Everything You Know About Business) and he seems to genuinely find happiness in his work. He has good intrinsic motivations. And actually enjoys programming enough to make videos of himself programming.
There’s a difference between that and being a workaholic. You can be willing to put all the hours in and hard work in to succeed. But whether you’re happy or not will depend on mindset.
I’d highly recommend this Unmistakable Creative episode or his appearance on Tim Ferriss’s podcast. Particularly if you want to shift your mindset away from money being a prime motivator.
His main point about becoming a multi-millionaire: life didn’t change that much.
If your life is stressful because you struggle to put food on the table, that’s different. This is more for the knowledge worker that wants to be a very rich knowledge worker.
You should look for happiness in the day to day. Mr. Moneybags has bags of money. And bags of money contain money, not endless bliss.