Most of our lives, we are looking for happiness. Sometimes consciously and most other times we have just developed an instinct over the years that leads us to try to become happier than we are.

Happiness comes in all shapes and forms. Sometimes seeing others happy can make you happy. Happiness is contagious, in those cases. In others increasing your worldly belongings does the trick. Every human in the world comes with their set of desires. Achieving desires will make you happy.

Sometimes it’s the company you’re with. A partner. So what is it about that partner that makes you so happy? Is it the way they look after you or is it the way they look at you and smile? Like you just made their day by merely existing in it. Great feeling. This kind of happiness is also contagious and by far the best happiness around.

But then again, a grouchy person would say otherwise. Maybe seeing others happy doesn’t really do it for them. Yes, people like those do exist.

It’s almost like every person has that side to them. You will only be happy by seeing a group of people happy. Seeing another set of people happy wont necessarily do that for you. Why not? Because humans develop preferences as they age. The good people and not the not so good people. Seeing both of them happy, doesn’t really cut it for us.

Is it how we make friends? maybe. We pick the people we like. Seeing them happy makes us happy. Being with them makes us happy. A man(or woman) is known by their company, and it stems from knowing whats making them happy. If the wrong kind of people are making you happy, then that does make a statement about you.

Pick your people wisely, it is something that will stay with you, influence you and possibly change you in ways which you wont see coming.

Everything in life is subjective, and wining, like everything else isn’t any different. A win for you means that you ‘think’ you actually won something. Someone can easily interpret that to be a loss. It’s a case that can be argued either way. This is where an objective in life is important. What were you really going for? How much of that did you achieve? And from there, you determine if it’s a win for you.

It’s easier when the rules are set before hand. Like sport. You know what you need to do to win. It’s a playbook. So if you know the ‘how’ you can eventually get there. Life’s small wins are also like that. If you follow a playbook, you will ‘know’ the ‘how’.

So where does the playbook come from? It comes from you; You decide whats the win. It’s YOUR game and no one out there can tell you otherwise. You are the player, so play hard !

Someone looking at your situation will tell you that you in fact loss. The only thing that they are doing is trying to convince you that your objectives / playbook in life is wrong. That things important to you don’t really mean anything. Dont let anyone tell you that! The sick nature of humans always pushes them to prove themselves right. And in order to do that, they will try to convince others that they are wrong.

Always stick to your goals. Having goals is important, they may be the wrong goals, but a winner only comes from having clear goals. If you don’t know your goals, you can’t win. You will always chase a moving target where someone in your circle is telling you what a win is, and guess what, there’s always that other someone who is telling you otherwise. Don’t chase something on a hamster wheel, you will never catch it.

Success is achieved by people who know what they want. Once you know for certain, you can’t lose. You will win, eventually.

Of all the man-made worldly things, money possibly stands out as the single most powerful one. In a matter of seconds money can make your world turn around. It’s hard to quantify its impact. Ironic how the impact of a quantity cannot be quantified. What humans have created among themselves are social classes in their societies all stemming from the quantity of money.

A philosopher will tell you all he can about how there are bigger things in life than money. There are emotions that supersede everything. That’s quite frankly his way of selling his ideas. There is no such things. At the end of the day, to get fed, you need to get paid.

Ever since you come to this world, your life has been revolving around the existence (or non-existence) of money. If you have it life is supposedly great, if not, well sucks for you. The worse part is you don’t really care where it comes from. As long as its coming from somewhere, it works.

Very quickly you start putting price tags on happiness, on love on pretty much everything out there. This doesn’t necessarily mean that you are materialistic and an insensitive person. This only implies that your circumstances have led you to quantify things around you.

This leads you to understand that nothing in life is free. There is a cost associated with every single thing you will encounter in life. And most of this price equates to money. A cold hard fact in life is that to have a decent living standard, you always need money. And when you work your ass off to get it, you want to know what is the cost of things in your life.

Very often money leads to conflicts. The basic human instinct of wanting to be ahead of the other will lead them to do silly things. Given money brings power a dirty human instinct is aroused by the presence of money.

Maybe the world would be a better place without its existence. But perhaps humans would come up with other ways to put a price tag on things. Money is just a mere instrument of human greed and thirst for power. The daemon inside needs to be tamed. And the only instrument of taming it, is money. Throw some money at it, and sanity prevails.

Growing up is over rated. As a kid you are mostly made to feel that life starts when you are an adult, and right now your life revolves around what your parents/elders pick for you. The biggest lie you are ever told is when you grow up life will be easier. It’s not. The best life you could have is when you’re 5 and mummy is taking care of all you will ever need in life.

As you grow up, a weird sense of responsibility is added on your shoulders. You are expected to conform to a social norm. Some things all of a sudden go off limits. Why should you need to dress in a particular way? A kid dressed in an odd way is adored where as an adult doing the same thing is probably going to be frowned upon.

It slowly gets worse every year till you’re a fully grown adult. That’s when you are not only responsible for yourself, but also for people around you. This is when you realize this is a trap.

To make themselves feel better, adults will tell themselves that ‘you are as old as you feel’. This is only when they have come to the realization that happiness is really a state of mind. Train your brain to feel happy and it will tell the rest of you, that you are indeed very happy. This only lasts till your body retaliates and tells you that although you feel 16, but you can’t eat / sleep / drink like a 16 year old any more. That’s when the philosophy of brain training starts falling apart.

The next step is distractions. Distract the brain so much, that it ignores the bodies cry of saying ‘you are now 30 and not 16’. A lot of adults will find this to be very effective. In fact in most cases, this will lead to very desirable results. This only leads to the next issue of the brain being too pre occupied in keeping itself distracted that you start falling behind other things in life.

This is when you realize the brain is slowing down. A lot of adults interpret that as laziness but in reality its just a tired old brain that just needs more rest. Like older model of a car, that needs more tune ups. This is when adults reach a stage and look back at their energetic times and come to the realization that they did have it better in the past. It is a beginning towards an end, but isn’t that what life really is?

Life is a string of decisions. Each decisions leads to another point in life. Its directional, you can only go one way. No two points look the same. When you realize that you tend to get to a conclusion where how every moment in life needs to lived to its fullest. Coming back to the same point will not only be a complicated twist on events, but also that point in life will never be the same again.

Sometimes these decisions aren’t the best. They make you end up in places where you’d rather not be. But now that you made that decision, you need to live through it. Survive through it.

It is then you realize how important those decisions in life are. But is spending a lot of time thinking about making the best decisions the optimal option? Maybe not. But it is most certainly something you will ponder over if the decision made you end up in an undesirable place.

Is life really going with the flow? Is this all about watching a long movie where all that is under your control is when you shut your eyes and pretend this is not real. But when you open your eyes up, it’s the same story. You just missed some important details and now you’re just playing catch up.

Life is cruel when it comes to pacing; it runs at its own pace. You either keep up, or you catch up. There’s nothing in the middle. There’s no real thing as a break in life. Life moves on, and so should you. Because the less you do that, the more you are falling behind. Like a movie and the remote you don’t have. It will go, and keep on going.

Sometimes you don’t have to understand all the decisions that you make. You don’t know why you made certain decisions. You don’t realize why you ended up on a node of life when you really shouldn’t have been there. For whatever reason you may think of it as an unfortunate turn of events. But when you look back and see where else you could have ended up, you realize that if life were to be on a replay, you would have done the same exact thing all over again. And at that point you learn to trust your decisions!

Most decisions you made were not a spark of insanity, it was a test of character. There’s no failing in this test, there’s only learning and growing. Every moment of life makes you grow more. It brings you closer to your own character. In reality you are building your character without knowing it. You understand what your character is, who you are as a person and where you need to go.

Life is constant learning experience. The quality of life changes as your level of learning changes. When a kid falls off a swing, he goes back learns to ride it better. As he keeps falling he eventually finds a way to not fall. Not everyone is good at learning. People who don’t learn from their decisions end up with downward graph on life where each bad decisions is followed by another one. And this is what distinguishes people from each other. How they made decisions. How they dealt with things that came their way and how well they learned from each failure.