Three Ingredients of HappinessBy Floyd Wickman, founder of The Floyd Wickman Program 2.0 

If you have something to do that you love doing – and you have someone to love – and you have something to look forward to – you have the three ingredients for happiness. 

Linda gets the credit for her famous saying, “The greatest gift you can give to the people who love you is to be happy.” At least I hope it’s rapidly becoming famous, because it deserves to be.

It has been our theme this year at both the Winter and Summer FORUM. Happiness. Most of us are working harder than ever, and some of us are so busy it’s easy to forget why we do what we do – the big What For – and easy to become exhausted and overwhelmed. That’s when we forget to remember that we have to work on our happiness. 

For many people, happiness is not a natural state. I’m not saying they are grumpy or cranky by nature, just that not everyone is blessed with an automatically positive outlook. You know, the type who looks for the pony even when they are standing in a pile of manure.

When the busy-ness of this business starts to wear you down, do a quick check up from the neck up, and make sure all three ingredients are in place – make sure you have something to do, someone to love and something to look forward to.

What’s interesting is that when one or more of the three ingredients is missing, more often than not it is replaced by its opposite.  

If you don’t love what you do and do what you love, more often than not what you do turns into drudgery, and drudgery leads to resentment.

If you don’t have something to look forward to, more often than not you will find the future looking bleak and hopeless. Like there’s no end in sight and no light at the end of the tunnel.

And if you don’t have someone to love, more often than not you will find the opposite of love in your relationships – and I don’t mean hate. Something far worse. Indifference.

There’s an old saying, nature abhors a vacuum. To me that means when one of those three ingredients is missing, nature finds a way to fill the void. 

Be on the lookout for the symptoms of losing that connection to loving what you do – overwhelm, exhaustion and even resentment. And as you work toward your goals for the balance of this year – remember to keep your goals connected to your Purpose, and your Purpose connected to your goals.  

As hard as we work, we all deserve to be happy. Making sure that all the ingredients to be happy are in your life is the way to guarantee that happiness.