Happiness = Progress

Yesterday while performing guided meditation, the voice asked me to remember a moment in a day that made me smile and happy. The moment was when I parked the vehicle in the parking lot without any help or direction. Such a small thing, but it made me happy. At this moment I realized one thing again, happiness is nothing but progress.

A kid is always happy. Daily he/she learns something and progresses ahead. It keeps him/her happy. Learning a bicycle, a new form of art, a new way of pranking mother, when finally hit a six on elder’s bowling, or taking a wicket of a strong player, finally having a successful attempt for a particular dance move, able to solve a mathematical problem, solving the cube and many things. Every world is new to them and every day they are making progress. And every time they do progress, they feel happy

Whereas, as we grow, we stop that. We don’t learn many things. And thus progress also stops. Slowly everyday learning changes from every week to every month learning and ends in very little learning as we grow old. And our happiness graph also declines.

Remember, we enjoy the initial days at every new workplace and the graph is exponentially increasing for the first few days or months. But starts to decline as we stay there. I believe this is again because we stop daily progress. In the initial days, you learn new things and make progress in your own knowledge and success. Once you get to know enough things, the progress rate slows down. And thus our happiness. Then our progress is measured by position or the salary which comes once a year.

Progress means our own progress. Competing with our own self. This is true for everyone, even Ambani or Bill Gates, or Mark Zukerberg. They get happy as their company progresses in their own measures.

Just imagine the increasing happiness in the following scenarios

You see her for the first time.

Then you talk with her for the first time

Then you get friends

Then you start chatting and dating

Then you become committed

Then you get married

Then kids

Then the progress of the whole family.

All these milestones if we call them, are moments of happiness. And if you analyze it, you will get to know, these are the milestones of relationship progress. If at all we get a break in any of the milestones, we feel unhappy. And as we progress, happiness reaches cloud9.

The same is the case for professional growth. As you keep on progressing in your knowledge and work, you are happy. It must not be only monetary growth, of course, that is important too, but overall progress is what makes us happy.

If you ask about my experiences, I was happy when I learned and started implementing new formulae in excel, a new way of formatting in PPT, mail merge option from outlook to send mass emails, the first time when I drove the car in heavy traffic on my own, when I first time paid the restaurant bill instead of my elder brother, my first article on medium, and many such moments.

Also, another point to understand this thing is, let us say you have a goal to make your business successful in your town. And you achieve it with all your efforts. Once you achieve it, happiness for achieving it would be temporary for a day or two. BUT immediately you will have the goal to expand it to the State level and so on. Your progress chart will be in your eyes, which will make you happy further.

So, if you want to be happy, keep progressing and keep learning. Never say that a particular subject is not of your interest or deny learning. You must deny learning something only if you are too busy learning other things. But anyhow, you must keep on progressing from yesterday, every day in every part of your life. It will give you an eternal smile and happiness.

Happiness equals Progress