There is an old riddle that asks, “What do you get more of, the more you give it away?” There are many fitting answers to this query—love, gratitude, peace—but the answer that might have the most immediate and noticeable impact on your life is happiness.
For the last couple months, we’ve been challenging our followers to make 2024 a happy year—to practice finding little pieces of happiness every day to help shift your overall mindset toward gratitude, positivity, and joy. We hope the practice is going well, and that you’re beginning to see the transformative power of happiness when you choose to seek it out.
Regardless of whether you’ve just started in your 2024 Happiness Journey, or if you’ve been pursuing this path since the start of the year, we’d like to encourage you to take another step forward.
There is no doubt that finding and holding onto happiness can improve your life. But the true magic of happiness comes when you give it away. This doesn’t mean you sacrifice your happiness to help someone else find their happiness. Joy isn’t a finite commodity. It’s a limitless resource that multiplies as it’s given away.
When you take your joy and share it with others, not only can you help bring a little happiness to their lives, but you increase your own happiness as well. And this effect is even more profound when the person you share your joy with is someone who obviously needs it.
The catch is, those individuals who really need your happiness are often the ones who are the most challenging to share it with, and the ones who are least likely to be receptive to it. But don’t let that discourage you.
If someone isn’t paying attention and bumps into you in the street, instead of getting defensive try to pay them a compliment. If someone honks and yells at you in traffic, don’t return their anger, simply smile and wave. If your kids come home from school and are especially grumpy and defiant, give them a hug and ask them about their day.
These simple acts, and countless others, don’t allow others to walk over you, take advantage of you, or even cast shadows upon your happiness, which no one ever has the right to do. They simply offer you an opportunity to possibly change the course of someone’s day, and maybe even help create a slight shift in their perspective so that the next time they’re faced with a similar situation, they might choose to react with a little less anger and a little more happiness.
Choosing to share happiness when it’s so much easier (and often seems justified) to match anger blow for blow can be one of the most challenging practices any of us can implement. This is especially true because sharing happiness means that we must allow ourselves to be vulnerable. Or at least it feels that way. When faced with that choice, so many of us ask ourselves, “What’s the worst that could happen?”
The next time you’re faced with that difficult decision, though, try asking yourself instead, “What’s the best that could happen?”
You likely will never know the answer to that question, but the answer doesn’t really matter, does it? What matters is the overwhelming happiness you feel when you hope for the best.
