The Happiness Equation: Want Nothing + Do Anything = Have Everything

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How much can we control?

Aristotle says, “Happiness depends upon ourselves.”

Viktor Frankl says, “Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.”

Walt Whitman writes, “Keep your face always toward the sunshine—and shadows will fall behind you.”

I love what Artistotle, Viktor Frankl, and Walt Whitman say. But how do you get there?

Well, we now have scientific evidence of the importance of attitude and specific proven actions we can take to manage our attitude.

When my wife Leslie turned sixteen, her grandmother gave her a brass-framed quote for her birthday. She hung it on her bedroom wall. She looked at it in the mornings before school, and it is still hanging in her old bedroom today. I have stopped to read it several times, and I took a picture to show you.

Pay special attention to the second last sentence:

I know it says Sam Walton on the poster! But this is an artifact of the old days when email forwards and chain letters had misattributions that lasted for years. This quote was actually said by Charles Swindoll, a Texas preacher who broadcasts a show to more than two thousand radio stations.

Do you know what’s amazing about this quote?

The second last sentence!

“I am convinced that life is 10% what happens and 90% how I react to it.”

Well, new research published in The How of Happiness by University of California psychology professor Sonja Lyubomirsky tells us exactly how much of our happiness is based on our life circumstances.

And it is 10%!

10% of our happiness is what happens to us.

So 90% of our happiness isn’t based on what’s happening in the world! It’s based on how we see the world. What’s included in the 90%? Our genetic predisposition and our intentional activities. Yes, intentional activities. This is big. Those are specific things we can do to improve our happiness. And they alone have four times the effect on our happiness than anything happening in our life.

Let me put it another way:

If I knew everything about your life circumstances—your job, your health, your marital status, your income—I could predict only 10% of your happiness. That’s it! The remaining amount is not determined by your external world but by the way your brain processes it.