Quotient – Definition; a result obtained by dividing one quantity by another
2024 is going to be a massive year of change for me personally. I have already pre-decided way back in November that 24′ would be the very best year of my life. Oh in previous years I said the same thing as well. I read all the popular motivation books, listened to the motivational speeches with the cool theme music and all that. I’ve probably filled out a dozen or so ‘power-charts’ on the internet. You name it, I’ve done it. Guess where it got me? That’s right. Nowhere. Well this year I’ve decided to change all of that by changing my focus. This year my focus has been what I call, the happiness quotient.
Mathematics has always been a subject I was good at. The amusing things is that growing up I hated math, but the older I became the more I liked it. What had previously seemed to be a perplexing labyrinth of problems and convoluted solutions, now was a carefully orchestrated system. I grew to realize that math was simply a puzzle, like any puzzle I just needed to find the pattern. I also grew to realize something else incredibly profound, sometimes the more complicated problems seemed, it usually meant there was a simple solution.
In the case of happiness I now have come to believe that thousands of years worth of philosophers and religious gurus have been chasing a non-existent rabbit when trying to uncover the secret of happiness. Far too long we have ignorantly been looking for a one word answer to a fairly complex issue. Generally those who have tried to answer the happiness question have fallen into two camps; 1) Wild, unabated pleasure or 2) Blind, slave-like aestheticism. I propose that neither of the two camps are accurate and that there is actually a third answer totally unrelated to the aforementioned ideas.
I believe that happiness is actually an equation. Hence this articles title. Like any algebraic problem, this is what happiness looks like for most; x + y = happiness. We know the solution, we just don’t know how to get to the solution. Allow me to help fill in the blanks for the sake of conversation
x (work) + y (passion) = happiness
This is what I refer to as the happiness quotient. Rather than treating happiness as a quantity to be calculated, I have reversed the popular understanding by treating happiness as a product of the quantity. In other words, what if happiness is a state of being, rather than simply a state of mind? If this all sounds confusing, refer again to the equation above.
Think about work for a moment. I just wrote an article about how work can be a gift, rather than something to be avoided. Somewhere we have all gotten the idea that work is something miserable and detestable. That pleasure is something we enjoy after work. In recent weeks I’ve been wondering if this isn’t a serious error. What if work is actually something integral to our enjoyment of life? I can personally attest that when I don’t do anything for days on end, I become bored and listless. Taking a break is great and all, but when I’m doing nothing at all, when I’m not expending my energy in a meaningful way, then I am not happy.
Conversely, merely expending my energy isn’t good either. I’ve spent entire days working hard, and yet still feeling unsatisfied. Not happy. Work by itself doesn’t work in our equation. We can work ourselves to the bone and not be happy. Doing no work at all also doesn’t equal happiness. So what are we missing? We are missing another crucial component, passion.
If we do not care deeply about what we are doing, we will never get anywhere. People who are passionate about their work will forgo meals and sleep (neither of which I advocate by the way) in order to each their goals. When you care deeply about what you do, you become fully engaged in whatever you are doing. Nothing else will matter and you enter what it popularly known as ‘flow state’. When everything becomes laser focused, the world seems to slow and you feel like you could go on forever.
We need to work, no one can ever be truly happy by being lazy. But we also need octane about the work we are doing, this is where passion comes into play. When we add up work and passion I believe this is what equals happiness. This is the happiness quotient.
