The Secret to Happiness

“If you are unhappy, get busy doing something for someone else. If you concentrate on yourself you will be unhappy, but if you focus on helping others you will find happiness. Happiness comes from serving and loving.”
John Izzo

What helps people to be happy in life? The answer is simple really—but requires great discipline and commitment to carry it out. Plainly stated, to obtain happiness, we must forget about our own wants and needs and serve and help others obtain their wants and needs. That’s it. Simple right, yet tremendously difficult.

Each of us has a natural tendency to look out for our own by doing what is in our own best interest. Thus focusing on serving and helping others more than ourselves is counterintuitive to human nature. For this reason it takes great discipline and desire to truly put others before ourselves. When we learn to do this however, life becomes richly rewarding.

Besides our natural instincts to put our own interest over any others, we are also challenged with living in the “me” generation, where our surroundings encourage us to be only interested in satisfying our own needs with little care for others. Indeed, our society is bursting with self-centered messages and ego-centric role models that feed our self-centered natures. This only complicates matters making it even more difficult to find happiness and satisfaction.

To add one more hurdle to keep us from happiness, our society has begun to embrace a destructive entitlement mentality where people do not even attempt to obtain their own desires, but rather they expect it to be provided to them--making it nearly impossible for anyone to want to serve and help others before themselves. As a result of all this, more and more people are unhappy and dissatisfied with life.

There is a universal law that is being ignored if we expect to be happy without serving others. This law is called the law of the harvest, meaning we reap what we sow. As such, if we work hard, we receive the fruits of our labor. Likewise, if we serve others, we find satisfaction and fulfillment in life. This is a universal truth that cannot be altered no matter our efforts to delay or mask the ultimate end results of our actions.

Likewise, it has been proven over time that those who serve others are successful in life and leave a lasting legacy that impacts the lives of many others. ‘Servant leadership’ produces results and creates fulfillment.

So, those who are truly happy are those who serve others. Whether it is family members, friends, or even strangers--those who spend their time helping others gain their interests and desires before their own will find joy and fulfillment in life. Indeed giving, not getting truly is the secret to happiness.