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

7

How to use the three words on your very worst days

The Mexican fisherman already had enough. He didn’t need to remember the lottery. He knew he’d already won!

You and I aren’t so lucky. I used to feel stress several times a week. When the car in front of me didn’t move on a green, when I dropped and shattered a glass on the kitchen floor, when I had a deadline coming up next week. I felt like my life was on the line. I felt frustrated if everything wasn’t going right.

What did I do?

Remember the lottery.

In these moments I moved my head to a zoomed out state.

When I was a kid I lay in bed picturing my body slowly floating up and up and up over my bed and my room and my house. Then I’d picture floating even higher, above the neighborhood and the city and the clouds into low-orbit outer space. I would gaze down at the distant flickering lights of my hometown. And I’d imagine my problems way down there. And nothing felt as serious.

Remember the lottery.

So let’s try this together. How small does Earth look next to Uranus and Neptune and Saturn and Jupiter? Well, if we are a golf ball, they are tennis balls and bowling balls. And how big is the sun compared to our golf ball? It’s larger than a house!

And as we keep zooming out there are hundreds of thousands of stars just like our sun filling up our Milky Way galaxy. What’s a galaxy? A clump of stars, gas, and dust held together by gravity. We live in one, and scientists estimate there are six hundred thousand stars in our galaxy alone.

Yes, our sun is just one of six hundred thousand stars in our galaxy. We are all spinning out there! But it goes much farther. How much farther? Well, have you seen this before?

It’s the Hubble Space Telescope. Basically the world’s biggest camera. It was invented to take pictures of outer space from outer space. We blasted it off more than twenty years ago, pointed it into the deepest darkest corner of the universe, and opened the shutter for a few months. Then we closed the shutter, pulled the camera back to Earth, got the picture developed, and guess what came back?

I think it’s the most beautiful photo ever taken.

Every single one of those bright specks in the picture following is an entire galaxy. Every single one of those specks is another collection of hundreds of thousands of stars.

And there is nowhere else in the deep distant universe where our species exists. Nowhere else we can breathe air, drink water, eat plants. Nowhere else we can find people to meet, fall in love, and make babies.

We live on the only place that can possibly support life.

Carl Sagan said, “It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known.”

We live on the pale blue dot. And it’s a beautiful dot. So on this planet, on the only planet in the universe where we can live, we get to be alive. You have to remember that most people who have ever lived on Earth are dead.

There are about 7 billion people on Earth today and 115 billion people who have ever lived in the history of the world. That means 108 billion people are dead. Most people have already lived their lives. Put another way: Fourteen out of every fifteen people who have ever lived will never see another sunset again, have a bowl of chocolate ice cream, or kiss their kids good night. Fourteen out of every fifteen people will never stroll by the smell of their neighbor barbecuing, flip to the cold side of the pillow before sleeping in on a Sunday, or blow out the flickering candles of a birthday cake in a dark kitchen surrounded by their closest friends.

Being alive means you’ve already won the lottery.

You are among the wealthiest people in the entire world. The average world income is five thousand dollars. Are you higher than that? Then you’re in the top 50%. And if you’re higher than fifty thousand dollars you’re in the top 0.5%. Do you need much more than 99.5% of people alive? You either have the money to buy this book or you have the time to read it. Either way, you have it good!

You already have more than almost everybody on the planet.

On your very worst days, you have to push your negative thoughts. You have to take a step back. You have to remember the lottery.

Because you’ve already won.