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

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The only goal you set that matters

Blog Stats: 50,017 hits.

Heart thumping, palms sweating, I sit back on my creaky wooden chair, stare at my blog, and grimace. Is this real? I click Refresh, scrunch my face, and look at the screen again.

Blog Stats: 50,792 hits.

Seven hundred people visited my blog in the last thirty seconds, I think to myself.

Only four weeks ago I’d started writing 1000 Awesome Things, and after a few hundred visits it looks like that day’s post—#980 Old, dangerous playground equipment—went viral while I was at work.

My heart beats faster.

I had one simple goal when I started writing 1000 Awesome Things.

I wanted to try to write 1000 awesome things for 1000 days in a row.

But after the first couple weeks writing about broccoflower and potato chip crumbs, I started noticing the stats counter on the side of my page.

It showed how many people had visited. Seven then twenty then dozens then hundreds. I got hooked on watching the number climb. So I set a different goal for myself. I decided I wanted fifty thousand hits.

When #980 Old, dangerous playground equipment went viral a few weeks later, I had accomplished my goal.

But then I told myself fifty thousand was too small. Too easy. It didn’t mean much getting fifty thousand hits. The big sites had a million. So that became my new goal. One million hits.

I kept writing every day, adding links to email signatures and blog comments I left around the Web. I got stickers printed and started handing them out. I wrote #951 Hearing a stranger fart in public, #933 The first scoop out of a jar of peanut butter, and #909 Bakery air.

Flash-forward a few months later and . . . I got to one million hits!

I enjoyed the feeling for a couple days before realizing the best blogs don’t just get a million hits. They get ten million hits and get turned into books and movies. I had set my goal too low. One million hits wasn’t worth anything. Nothing happened when you got a million hits. I needed to go big to get some real action.

So I set a new goal.

Ten million hits.

For six months, I kept writing. After work every day, I got takeout and sat at my computer well into the night. I wrote the next post, responded to email, and started getting interviews with local radio and TV stations. I was featured on the front page of the Toronto Star! I wrote #874 The Five Second Rule, #858 The other side of the pillow, and #824 Finding the TV remote after looking forever. Nine months after I had started my blog, I suddenly reached ten million hits, won two awards for Best Blog in the World, and was approached by literary agents to turn my blog into a book.

Once I had a literary agent I started researching the book industry. I learned that more than three hundred thousand books are published in the United States every single year. And well over a million a year are published around the world. Suddenly it dawned on me: Getting a book published was not very special. A million people did it every year!

I looked at bestseller lists and they had only ten or twenty books on them. I calculated that only a few hundred books make bestseller lists each year. Less than 0.01%.

So I set a new goal.

I wanted my book to be a bestseller.

I wanted to be one of the 0.01%.

The Globe and Mail published a bestseller list every weekend and I started checking it. What did these books have in common, what made them great, what made them sell?

So for the next year I kept writing my blog every day, writing my book, and working on a book launch plan. My plan was to work with bloggers to prepare interviews and articles about my book while working with my publisher to line up radio, newspaper, and TV interviews—all to come out when the book hit shelves.

Basically, the entire year after winning the awards, I was consumed with The Book of Awesome hitting the bestseller list. It was all I wanted, thought about, talked about. Then the big day of publication finally came!

I woke up early and started interview after interview. I posted a special entry called #526 When dreams come true. My voice turned scratchy, bags under my eyes turned black, and I was sleeping three or four hours a night. And then, finally, the next Saturday morning the newspaper came out and . . .

I hit #2 on the bestseller list!

It was a dream come true. I went to bed happy. I had achieved my goal. My publishers were excited, too! Their joy said to keep pushing.

I woke up the next morning and took a closer look at the bestseller list.

My book was listed with a 1 beside it because it had been on the bestseller list for one week. I noticed other books were on the list for twenty or thirty weeks. Staying power. That was more important than being a one-hit wonder. I didn’t want to go the rest of my life telling people my book was a bestseller for only one week.

I suddenly realized that popping on the bestseller list was nice . . . but it was nowhere near my true goal. I wanted this book to be bigger. The New York Times bestseller list. A #1 beside my name.

Eventually The Book of Awesome hit #1 on the bestseller list and stayed there for five weeks then ten weeks then fifty weeks then one hundred weeks. Foreign publishers translated the book into German, Korean, French, Dutch, and Portuguese. The Book of Awesome hit The New York Times bestseller list, too. I was on the Today show, The Early Show, CNN, and the BBC. The producers of The Office optioned TV rights to the book and some big film producers optioned the movie rights, too. I got another book deal, then another, then another . . .

And I had done it!

I had finally reached my goal.

I started smiling. Tried to relax. A few days later, after working so hard for three years straight, lying in bed alone in my tiny apartment, getting three or four hours of sleep, eating takeout for every meal, developing black bags under my eyes, and losing touch with friends . . . I suddenly had a realization.

No matter how many external goals I achieved . . . I just kept setting more.

I started realizing that external goals didn’t help me become a better person.

Only internal goals did.