You’ve probably heard of your “Intelligence Quotient”, right? An assessment you might take which measures your overall knowledge. You know the dipstick we use to measure the oil level in our vehicles? What if there were some sort of dipstick we could use to measure our overall happiness? Let’s use this question as our virtual dipstick:
“How much would the quality of your life improve if every day of the week was as good as your best day of the week?”
I’ve seen studies that say the average working adult (or student) actually enjoys 2 out of the 7 days of the week or expressed as a percentage, about 29% of the week. If you add in some vacations and personal days, you might be able to get that percentage up to 35% of the week, which leaves 65% of our days doing things we don’t enjoy! How depressing!
I call this the “Happiness Quotient”.
Passion breeds success and success comes from doing things you enjoy. The more passionate you are, the easier success will be. Many people work their tails off in a job they hate so they can spend time with a hobby they love. Sometimes, quite often, their talents are in the hobby, not the job.
One obvious strategy would be to change what you do for a living.
Unless you really hate what you do and you’ve considered all the ramifications, consider these:
Do your job better-How much time are you putting into “practice before the game”? Success is about targeted effort and doing your best consistently and going the extra mile.
Learn more about your job-One of the reasons people don’t enjoy what they do is they don’t fully understand it or have clarity on how to make it better.
Learn why things are done the way they are-rules, policies, procedures are all there for a reason. Have dialog with people who can influence policy or make policy. Do not spend time talking with people who can do nothing. This is stupid.
Look at the big picture-How is your effort connected to others’ efforts?
Solve or manage your problems-Make a list of them. Strategize, discuss and implement. (make sure you do the above in conjunction with this one)
See yourself successful-What skills in your current situation will help you achieve greater things later. Every successful person has leveraged learned capacities from previous experiences. Consider yourself doing the same. It’s a great time to learn what you’ll need later!
You need to be happy, if you are not happy, success is not possible. Don’t settle for one day a week of happiness out of five possibilities.
Change your viewpoint & thinking and you will change your happiness quotient.
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