Tag: achieve

Every day you are bombarded by well-intentioned, "good" advice ranging from how to manage stress and cultivate a loving marriage to diet and exercise. Sorting it all out can be difficult, especially when it’s conflicting: Absence makes the heart grow fonder versus out of sight, out of mind. Some of this good advice is a mysterious secret which will be revealed if you buy the book and some of it comes in the form of meditation and visualization tapes which speak to you personally—you and millions of others listeners. And this is precisely the problem: One size does not fit all.

At one point we have all sighed, "Life isn’t fair," to those annoyingly cheerful people in our midst, lucky enough to be genetically hardwired for happiness. No matter what problems land on their doorstep, they resiliently return to their happiness with life’s currents. The joyously surprising revelation I had while cheering up my pessimistic husband—you know what they say, "Stress management begins at home"—is that even if one is born to be sad, characteristics of happy couples can be imitated to change one’s nature. This is a huge emancipation from the leg iron of depression.

What do happy people do? Basically, they are conscientious people working and achieving. They set goals and accomplish them. This is the big secret to happiness: Working towards a goal, achieving it and then moving on to the next goal like a series of small victories—sounds a lot like a well-run marriage.