Don't Waste Your Life (A Warning)

I remember listening to this monologue on happiness by Ben Stein. Why are some happy and other not? Why are some living in a default state of joy and others wishing “if only”.

The answer was brilliantly simple.

The ones that are unhappy are people who let their parents or their family talk them into doing something for a career that wasn’t really them. They are people who wanted to be writers, actors, entertainers, performers, world travelers,  but decided instead to take the cautious route and go into accountancy, law school or dental school.

Now these same people find themselves trapped in a career that is not them. Trapped in a life they did not want. Making a decent living and too scared to take the necessary risks to change.

So what about the happy ones? Easy, they made a decision to live. They decided to do what their hearts told them to do. They developed the inner strength and the courage to break free and go against the grain, go against the wishes of their peers, parents, or friends to pursue what they want for themselves.

They took risks, they took chances, and they tried a lot of different things until they got to where they wanted to be.

This very often meant working incredibly hard and living on the edge. But if it gets you to where you want to be, you can look back on your life and see those moments of struggle and weakness as some of your finest moments.

You can look back on your life and know it was not wasted.