Are you happy with your current life situation? Are you content with your income, lifestyle, health, relationships, professional life etc? If not, why? It is your life and you are totally responsible for your own happiness. No one else is responsible for your happiness – not your spouse, not your boss, not your job, not your friends, no one. “Happiness and success” says Rich DeVos, one of the co-founders of Amway, “is an inside job”.
If you want to be happy in life you have to start by accepting that you have total control over your own happiness and are responsible for creating your own happiness. This acceptance does not come without a price. To accept control and responsibility for one’s own life means giving up any excuse for your lack of happiness. It also means giving up the idea that your happiness is outside of your own control. That means that you cannot blame the economy, your parents, teachers, employers, spouse, relatives, education or lack of education or any other external locus of control.
Truly happy and successful people have a very high ‘Locus of Control’ which means that they score very high on accepting personal responsibility for their life. Losers, whiners and pissers and moaners by contrast have a very low ‘Locus of Control’ and blame everyone and everything for their lack of happiness and success.
If you are to ascend to the ranks of the elite and the affluent you must be ruthlessly honest with yourself and quit making excuses for your lack of results. You must also have enough self honesty and guts to admit that if you are not happy or as successful as you would like to be then it is your own fault. Only when you do this will you be on the path to happiness.
The Narcotics Anonymous handbook says it this way, “If you want what we have to offer, and are willing to make the effort to get it, then you are ready to take certain steps. These are the principles that make our recovery possible”.
Step 1 of the 12 Step process says. “We admit that we are powerless over our addiction and that our lives have become unmanageable”. Admitting our shortcomings, failures, weaknesses and being self honest is the first step to changing any aspect of our life.
Addiction is addiction whether it is addiction to drugs, alcohol, sex, mediocrity or excellence. If you are addicted to mediocrity and are happy there then stay there and reap the rewards of an average, mundane and boring life.
If you are disgusted with your mundane boring life then get off your butt, quit blaming others and go to work to design and create the life of your dreams. It will be hard but it will be worth it.