The Happiness List

The Happiness List

I've been starting my day very early for the past two weeks, waking up at 4.00am in the morning to start work. I think I'm going to try and keep this routine as I find that the early morning hours have been very productive ones; the mind is completely fresh and you are able to clock in four hours of undistracted work.

With four hours of work in the bag, even before the day begins, I feel extremely good for the rest of the day. Nothing makes me happier than having a productive day. But hang on, life isn't all about work, is it?

Now, let me think: what else makes me feel happy? Simple things make me happy. Let me make a happiness list: a morning jog, a nice glass of teh tarik, kopi tubruk and Indomie for breakfast in Jakarta, a movie at Block M Plaza, beer with friends, a nice bottle of red wine, a Liverpool win, a train journey and of course, a good book for company. There are certainly more in my happiness list but the point I want to make is that, these are usually simple things which don't cost a lot of money.

What about money itself? Well, I do feel happy whenever I see money credited into my bank account but I try not to work consciously for it. It's more fun if money is just treated as a "by-product" of what I do. So, receiving money from work always comes as a "pleasant surprise".

Having to run my own business, I do need to be conscious of money all the time. It can be a challenge to be constantly dealing with money-related matters and yet not being a slave to it. But I try to imagine business as a sport with profit and loss merely a "score" that I keep. Of course, you must also play all out to win!

We need to give ourselves lots of reasons and excuses to be happy. The longer the list, the better. Everytime you encounter something that makes you happy, you remind yourself how blessed you are. Finishing a blog entry always makes me happy too. When I checked my Blogger statistics, I realized that over the past two years that I have blogging, I've been blessed with happiness a total of 764 times. What a wonderful way to accumulate happiness!