The Meaning of Happiness - Is Anyone up??

It's 1am PST. I would normally wait until "everyone is up" but then I'm making a bad assumption that my fellow steemurians all live in the US. Steem feels like an early reddit.

Anyway. Here goes nothing. Let's talk about happiness.

Happiness is the freedom to build a successful career and live life on your terms.

The reason most ambitious, career driven people end up hating their career is because they started the job with every intention of succeeding. They had a vision for how they would flourish in their role and help their company grow. Then it all goes downhill.

Here is a timeline of how it happens:

Job starts.

Things are great.

Everything is going as planned.

Then deadlines start slipping.

Disagreements occur internally.

Disagreements turn into arguments.

Arguments turn into misery.

Misery turns into a reflection of your life and career. Longer lunch breaks. Showing up later and leaving earlier.

This is when you realize you’re not living on your terms.

You’re doing it on someone else’s time & money.

You have two decisions:

OPTION 1: Continue through the pain and suffering of showing up to work every day knowing that the work you’re doing has no meaning.

OPTION 2: Live your life and career on your terms.

Let’s be real. If you’re reading this, you want to do Option #2. But we all know, it’s financially impossible and irresponsible to quit for many of us. You have a good source of income that you can’t lose because you want to be “free and happy.”

So, now what?

Happiness is waking up every day and doing what you want to do. Happiness is going to sleep without worrying about work and bills. Happiness is being excited for the next day and not living for the weekend.

This DOESN’T mean that you have to work for yourself to be happy. I always like to say that dream jobs aren’t real. It’s about the dream situation.

The dream situation is, you guessed it: To live your life and career on your own terms. And yes, this means making enough money to support your dream situation. This could be working remote instead of being in the office every day. This might mean working hard Monday to Thursday and having Friday off. This might mean being able to work with people you learn from and appreciate you. This might mean being able to travel every week.

Everyone’s dream situation is different.

How you get there is for another post.

Just know that the dream situation is something you probably think about all the time. Don’t ignore it.