You don’t have to get your object of desire to be happy. You can be just as happy even if you don’t get what you want. You can manufacture your own happiness by accepting what you have and believing that what you have is the best.

When you develop the habit of voluntarily putting yourself under stress, it becomes a source of joy and even comfort. You feel happy, satisfied and relaxed after the workout. The best thing is that you lose fear of physical stress because you have started enjoying it.

If you wish to be happy, you have to choose happiness over wealth, power, success or fame. You have to accord happiness the highest priority in life.

Most people in the modern world are making their lives miserable not because they have no food, but because they eat excessively. The same goes for wealth. We must know how much wealth is needed to live a decent life and be happy.

Instead of expecting an ideal world, we must learn to live in the real world. Instead of making our life miserable for the sake of others, we must learn to make our own lives joyful. We can give only what we have. If we are unhappy, we can’t make others happy. When we have no love in our heart, we can’t love anyone. You can’t gift wealth to anyone unless you earn it yourself.

The world, however, can’t survive exclusively either by cooperation or by competition. If there is no growth without competition, there is no love and peace without cooperation either. Extremes of both are unhealthy. A happy man is one who learns to balance these two extremes. He competes with his rivals and yet does not lose compassion for them.

We often think that only money, power and comfort give us gratification. But this is partial truth. We also feel happy when we play, work out, solve a complex problem or make a child smile by our love and affection. We enjoy success and hate failure, but there is hardly any success that is not preceded by failure. It is our failures that make our successes sweeter.

A happy person does not discard anything and takes a balanced approach to life by accepting the opposites.

If you are not happy today, it is because you have not performed the right actions at the right time in the past.