Read By Millionaires

To Allow Yourself to Be Happy is the Greatest Wisdom There Is


By Stuart Goldsmith,
Excerpt from Seven Secrets of the Millionaires

You might like to know that the secret of happiness can be explained in just eight words and is, in fact, quite mundane. It does not involve meditation, drugs or self-flagellation. Each of the eight words is worth one million dollars, but here they are, free:

Tomorrow - Today - Live - For - Better - Working - A - While

What? You can't make sense of that? I gave you the words for free, but the correct order is going to cost you plenty...

Pause, while the anagram-freaks try to work it out themselves...

Got it? No? Okay, you'll have to read on...

Now, the price for my arranging the words for you is about ten minutes of your time to read this article carefully, because it has important implications for your happiness.

The first thing I want to say is that the human psyche - your psyche - is a very delicate thing indeed - and can be badly damaged, particularly during your early years, by what would outwardly seem to be "not very much."

Put another way, your mind is an incredibly delicate and subtle mechanism - a finely tuned and highly sensitive instrument. So delicate is this wonderful apparatus, that it is flat-out impossible to grow up without some damage to its mechanism.

Moderate damage is normal and severe damage is common.

Please read that last sentence again.

I would say that 100% of people - that's everyone - has moderate damage to their psyche, and about one in three have severe damage. I am talking about damage caused by a normal upbringing, not an abused upbringing. Thankfully abuse is not the norm, but more importantly, the psyche is damaged by numerous small incidents throughout your childhood where you didn't get exactly what you needed, exactly when you needed it.

Parents are, after all, people. They are neither omniscient nor telepathic. They do their absolute best, working from the basis of their own damaged psyches.

And so the cycle continues...

Now the point here is that because everyone is damaged, this means that everyone exhibits symptoms of "mental disturbance" during, and often throughout, their lives. I'm talking 100% of people here. Such symptoms include:

Anxiety
Depression
Sleeplessness
Irrational Fear / Panic Attacks
Feelings of Worthlessness, Insecurity, Pointlessness
Suicidal Thoughts
Substance Abuse (particularly alcohol which is a wonderful anesthetic for the harshness of life)
Irrational Anger / Impatience / Irritation
Worry
Because everyone experiences some or all of these on a scale of mild to severe, everyone pretends that they don't experience these things and we all play this ridiculous game in which we pretend it's just other people who have problems, not us.

I have talked to hundreds of people from paupers to billionaires. Scratch the surface and what do you get? The same old human-being we all are. The damaged psyche resulting in some or all of the negative symptoms I have listed.

I find this immensely comforting. The real problem about feeling down on life is when you think it's only you who feels like this, and that everyone else is having a great time counting their loot. If you can really take on board what I am telling you here, that everyone is a seething mass of insecurity, angst, unfinished business and emotional turmoil, then I think that helps a great deal.

It's called "the human condition" and comes about as a result of us all having such an immensely delicate psychology. We are about as equipped psychologically to handle the "slings and arrows" of life as a butterfly is to handle a force ten storm.

Every human on the planet is brave beyond measure. Forget "bravery in the face of enemy fire." That's just one sort of bravery and anyway, most soldiers didn't have a choice about going over the top. I'm talking real bravery of the sort you show every morning. You get up and face the world again. You against the world. And it's as much a battle today as it ever was. Labor-saving devices make very little difference. Do you have lots and lots of leisure time because you own a fridge, a washing machine, and a dishwasher? No? I thought not. It's the same old struggle by the same old human beings.

There is a danger in writing (and reading) a motivational, go-get-em, kick-ass "secrets of the millionaires" book because it encourages the sort of polarization I was talking about earlier. You can easily think something like: "Yeah, it's as I suspected, everyone else is happy and making great money, it's only me who cannot achieve anything of note. I'm all alone. Everyone else is so happy and well adjusted..."

I'm telling you now, in as plain a way as I can say, that everyone on the planet is more or less screwed up because of the way we are, and the way the world is. You just cannot avoid the damage.

You have to accept it, patch up what you can and live with the rest. So what can you do to increase your chance of happiness?

Live Today

The first part of the key to happiness is to live today.

That means you must try to live in the present moment, experiencing