A January 2008 study on 973 pairs of adult twins, many of whom were identical, found that 50% of happiness was genetic. The remaining 50% was dictated by your behaviors, environment, associations, finances and other factors.

In this study, the researchers established six components that were indicators of happiness:

#1 Self-Acceptance – Essentially, this is about liking who you are.

#2 Life Control – Having control over the direction of your life.

#3 Personal Growth – The daily pursuit of self-improvement and growth as a human being.

#4 Positive Relationships – Surrounding yourself with upbeat, optimistic, loving, happy people.

#5 Pursuit of Goals – Regularly creating and pursuing goals that are important to you.

#6 Autonomy/Independence – Being self-reliant and not dependent on others for maintaining your standard of living.

These six factors are influenced by your behaviors, actions, habits and the relationships you decide to surround yourself with.

Is it possible to increase each of these six factors?

The answer is yes. In my book, Change Your Habits Change Your Life, I devote a great deal of content to Happiness Habits – daily habits which boost these six factors. Here’s some of that content:

• Daily Exercise
• Daily Learning
• Rich Relationships – Eliminating or minimizing exposure to toxic people and forging relationships with upbeat, positive, enthusiastic individuals.
• Practiced Positivity – Read upbeat content, meditate, listen to inspirational music, watch inspirational videos meditate, looking for things to be grateful for, etc.
• Pursuing Dreams and the Goals Behind Your Dreams.
• Saving Money and Investing Those Savings Prudently – Saving 20% or more of your income and investing it prudently will eventually make you financially independent.

When you have Happiness Habits, you automate happiness. Make happiness a habit!

There’s a path that leads from the street to my front yard. I put it there many years ago, right before the college graduation party we were throwing for my middle child, Kirsten. I wanted a place for some of the party people to walk after parking their cars in our cul-de-sac. There are about twenty 12 x 12 paver stones. Really nice looking stones.

Well, I was sitting on my front stoop the other night. I looked at each one of those stones and thought how they very much seemed to me to represent the chapters in my life.

The first stone, working my way through college. The next stone for meeting my future wife. Another for marriage. The following stone, getting that big job at Arthur Andersen. Right after that was the stone that represented going to graduate school at night. Another for starting our family. There was a stone for our first main home. One for my relocation to Rhode Island. There was also the stone for the failed start-up that almost put me into bankruptcy and divorce.

There were three subsequent stones for each one of my kids graduating college. I am very proud of those stones.

Their were happy stones and sad stones.

The last stone on my path is the one I love the most. It’s the stone that represents the dream I decided to pursue so many years ago – to become a successful writer. What a beautiful stone!

We are all walking a path in life. Each step, a new chapter. Some chapters are good and some not so good.

But, the chapters we will remember most are the ones that represent the dreams we decide to pursue.

The pursuit of happiness is the one common denominator of all human beings. People will spend their entire lives in the pursuit of happiness.

But, if you don’t know the true path towards long-term happiness, you can get lost along the way and pursue false paths to happiness.

Recreational drugs, alcohol, sex, excessive recreation/entertainment, and other similar pursuits can offer a temporary boost in certain neurochemicals (dopamine and oxytocin) which create a short-lived euphoria often misinterpreted as happiness.

Those chemically-induced false happiness activities always return individuals to their geneticly-predetermined happiness baseline. That return to baseline happiness, that crash, that reversal of euphoria, drives many individuals to return to those activities which caused the artificial spike in happiness. Unless intentionally controlled, this pursuit of false happiness becomes a habit and a cycle of happiness-unhappiness that can lead to addiction.

There’s a better way. In my study of the rich and poor, I discovered that there are five activities that lead to true, long-term happiness:

1. Doing Something That You Love – This could be the pursuit of a dream, sports activities, a hobby, exercise, music, art, etc. When you engage in activities that make your heart sing, happiness follows.
2. Adding Value to the Lives of Others – When you engage in activities that improve the lives of others, that satisfaction, that happiness, sticks. Even better, when those activities can be monetized, you are able to build a career out of helping others and enjoy a lifetime of happiness.
3. Spending Time With Those You Love – Spending time with our closest relationships give us great satisfaction, or happiness. The more time we spend with our loved ones, the happier we are.
4. Happiness Events – Weekends with family/friends, spending time with family/friends at your vacation home, a cruise, a trip to Europe, a night out with loved ones – all of these things represent happiness activities. The more happiness activities you can fill your life with, the happier you will be.
5. Removing Worry From Your Life – Worry makes you unhappy. Removing worries, makes you feel happy. Example #1 – Financial Struggle: If your job does not generate enough income, you will struggle to pay your bills. That struggle creates unhappiness. So, you go to school at night and after several years get a degree or some certification which allows you to get a higher paying job, ending your financial struggles. That creates happiness. Example #2 Obesity – Your obesity has resulted in Type II Diabetes. So, you decide to exercise and watch what you eat. You lose weight and your blood sugar levels return to normal, ending your Diabetes and its associated health problems. That creates happiness.

You might notice a common theme in the above – activity. Always seek activities which create a sense of fulfillment and at the end of that activity you will find true happiness.

When was the last time you played the lottery?

If the answer is “this morning”, you might want to keep reading.

The media likes writing stories about lottery winners because the masses like reading about their stories. For those who consistently play the lottery, the stories offer a sort of validation.

But when you peel the onion, the fantasy about winning the lottery is really all about a mindset that embraces instant gratification, instant rewards and instant wealth, without enduring any of the hardship pursuing wealth actually requires.

If you look carefully at any of those lottery-winner stories, one thing you would notice is that hardly any of the winners are CEOs, senior executives, successful entrepreneurs, successful professionals or other successful types.

Why?

As I learned from my five-year study on the rich and the poor, successful people don’t play the lottery because they don’t have a lottery mindset.

What is the lottery mindset?

It is the idea that there is a shortcut to wealth; that it is possible to become instantly wealthy by virtue of random good luck.

The problem is, those who have the lottery mindset are not living in reality. The lottery mindset is a fantasy with odds that boggle the mind.

In the 25-year history of the Iowa Lottery, for example, only 110 people won $1 million or more. That equates to about 4 millionaire-lottery winners a year. In 2006, there were 50,529 millionaires in Iowa. If you do the math, only about .0079% of all Iowa millionaires are, therefore, lottery winners. Not a very promising path to wealth.

But this lottery mindset is not just about playing the lottery. It’s about embracing uneducated risk and speculating with your money.

People who frequent casinos, have a lottery mindset. The recent masses jumping on the bitcoin bandwagon, have a lottery mindset. People who invest in start-ups they know little to nothing about, have a lottery mindset.

The lottery mindset brainwashes you into believing that there is an easier path towards wealth. One in which you are not required to do the requisite heavy lifting, that success requires.

Those with a lottery mindset do not pursue their dreams. They do not set goals. They do not step outside their comfort zone, experimenting and learning new things. They do not engage in daily self-improvement as a whetstone in developing expert knowledge or skills.

The demographics of those who buy into this get rich quick lottery mindset are typically poor people who see the lottery as the only available means by which they can level the playing field and become rich. Winning the lottery is the result of random luck, of which the rich have no advantage over the poor.

The lottery mindset brainwashes you into believing that there is an easier path towards wealth. One in which you are not required to do the requisite heavy lifting, that success requires.

But according to my research, there is no easier path. Wealth is a byproduct of success and success is a byproduct of doing certain things every day that help move you closer and closer to success.

In my most famous books, Rich Habits and Change Your Habits Change Your Life, I share the habits many millionaires have in common. For those who haven’t read any of my books, here’s a quick overview of seven of those Rich Habits:

#1 Success Requires Goal-Driven Actions/Behaviors

Goals are the construction crew self-made millionaires use to build their financial empires. In my research, these self-made millionaires created goals around their dreams and then spent as many as twelve years pursuing those goals.

#2 Success Requires the Pursuit of Some Dream

One of the three paths to wealth that I uncovered in my research was the pursuit of a dream. In the context of wealth creation, dreams are ideas that you can monetize. Dreamers are typically entrepreneurs who are very passionate about their dreams and fanatically spend every available moment thinking and taking action on their dreams.

#3 Success Requires Sacrifice

Typically, this sacrifice involves the expenditure of time, especially in the early stages, which limits how much time you are able to spend with close family and friends.

#4 Success Requires Practice

In order to succeed you must become a Virtuoso at what you do. This means you must practice what you do every day. There are two types of practice: Deliberate Practice, which requires daily repetition and Analytical Practice, which requires third party feedback, as in a coach or mentor.

#5 Success Requires Relentless Persistence

One common refrain from all of the self-made millionaires in my study was that it would take death or some long-term disability to stop them from the pursuit of success. Their fanatical obsession in turning their dream into a reality imbibes them with the Rich Habit of persistence.

#6 Success Requires Daily Study

Reading to learn thirty minutes or more every day in order to gain critical career-centric knowledge was a common attribute among the self-made millionaires in my study.

#7 Success is Fueled by Aerobic Exercise

Aerobic exercise increases the myelin sheath around the axons of brain cells, which helps boost your IQ. Aerobic exercise also increases the flow of oxygen into the brain, which helps clean and strengthen brain cells. Lastly, aerobic exercise produces greater neurogenesis – the birth of new brain cells in the hippocampus portion of the brain. Due to this aerobic exercise Rich Habit, the self-made millionaires in my study had vastly superior cognitive abilities, which helped them solve problems, be creative and overcome obstacles.

There are no shortcuts in life to accumulating wealth. That’s the real secret to becoming rich, if there is one.

The lottery mindset is either a cop-out for those who are unwilling to do the heavy lifting success requires or a Hail Mary pass for those mired in poverty and feeling helpless.

You’re not helpless. Poverty can be overcome. I know. I interviewed 72 self-made millionaires who were raised in poverty and who overcame that poverty by forging habits that eventually led to success and wealth.

Happiness makes life worth living. In the absence of happiness, life is a zombie existence.

Every human being strives for happiness. This desire to be happy, directs our behavior.

For some, that behavior favors short-term happiness at the expense of long-term happiness (immediate gratification). For these individuals, they pursue activities that create immediate happiness. Unfortunately, short-term happiness is fleeting.

For others, they pursue activities that produce long-term happiness. The pursuit of long-term happiness, however, requires sacrifices most are unwilling to make (delayed gratification). For those individuals who are willing to make sacrifices today, happiness, when it eventually comes, lasts for many years, perhaps even a lifetime.

So, there is a war waging within each of us pitting the desire for immediate happiness today, against the sacrifice-dependent desire for long-term happiness tomorrow.

Those who have created a script of their ideal, future life use that vision to create and pursue goals that will help them realize the dreams that produce their ideal, future life.

The pursuit of goals, however, comes at a cost – sacrificing today’s time and money that could otherwise be used to create immediate happiness.

Having a clear vision of where you want to end up in life, gives you superpowers. Those with a clear vision of their future life, are able to marshall the willpower and internal resources to overpower the desire for short-term happiness as you pursue activities that will pay dividends down the road which produce long-term happiness.

It’s a choice each individual makes – short-term happiness (immediate gratification) vs. long-term happiness (delayed gratification).

Two of the three paths to wealth are:

1. Becoming a Virtuoso and
2. Pursuing a Dream

(The third path is the Saver/Investor path).
In both cases, the determinant of success hinges upon how much value you add to the lives of others.

Most people have a “what’s in it for me” attitude about doing business with others. And most people are not successful and thus, not wealthy.

Successful people have a “what’s in it for you” attitude. And that attitude is a game changer.

It shifts the focus from all about me to all about you, from selfishness to selflessness, from taking to giving.

Wealth is merely a byproduct of success and success is a byproduct of how much value you add to the lives of others.

But how do you know if you are adding value to the lives of others in such a way that it elevates you above your competition?

To answer that, you must answer the following questions:

• Does what you do improve the lives of others in some way?
• Does what you do exceed the value provided by your competition?
• Does what you do consistently exceed the expectations of those you serve?
• Are you able to charge your customers, clients, etc. a premium for that value in the form of higher prices, fees, etc.

If you were Apple, the answer to all of those questions would be YES.

Developing a niche is a great way to get a YES to each one of those questions. Niche’s require that you become a virtuoso.

Pursuing a dream is another way to get a YES, as well. Successful Dreamers are typically entrepreneurs who have a unique product or service that sets them apart from everyone else in their industry.

Pondering the direction of your life is a Rich Habit. It’s a Rich Habit because it creates awareness. Pondering requires that you ask yourself questions about your current life circumstances. Asking those life questions forces you to answer them:

• Are my current life circumstances what I expected at this point in my life?
• Am I making as much money as I expected?
• Why don’t I make more money? What’s holding me back?
• Do I have as much in savings/investments that I expected to have at this point in my life?
• Am I saving as much as I expected I would be saving at this point in my life?
• Am I healthy?
• Do I exercise as much as I should? If not, why not?
• Do I eat healthy most of the time?
• Do I have strong relationships with others?
• Am I investing in those relationships like I should?
• Do I love or at least like my job?
• Do I work with people I enjoy being around?
• Do I work hard enough?
• Is there something I really would rather do to earn money?
• Do I regularly set goals?
• Do I achieve my goals 100% of the time?
• Do I have bad habits? If so, what are they?
• What habits should I have that I don’t?
• Do I treat others right?
• Do I treat my family right?
• Am I happy most of the time?
• Am I angry too often?
• Am I grateful for what I have?
• Do I envy what others have?
• Do I spend too much money?
• Do I waste my money of unimportant things?
• Am I charitable with my time and money?
• What non-profit organizations should I devote some of my time to?
• How much money do I spend every month on housing, my car(s), entertainment, alcohol, drugs, gambling? Am I spending too much on those things?
• What do I spend my time on every day?
• How much of that time is wasted time?
• Do I waste too much time watching TV, Netfilx, YouTube, etc.?
• Do I waste too much time trolling the Internet?
• How many books have I read the past few years, other than for recreation?
• What am I doing to improve my life circumstances?
• Who do I want to be?
• What makes my heart sing?
• What do I want my obituary to say about me?

When you ponder, when you ask yourself life questions, the answers to those questions creates an itch that must be scratched. Life questions, irritates the subconscious, which then goes to work, behind the scenes, to seek solutions and correct the imbalance. Intuition, or that voice inside your head, soon follows, newly directing your behavior.

Unfortunately, most people won’t devote any time pondering and asking questions about their life because, deep down, they know they will not like the answers.

Ignorance is not bliss. When you ask, and you shall receive ……… wisdom.

We are living in an age of unprecedented technological advancement. New technologies force widespread change. Most view such change as a good thing. Society is advancing, so that is good.

But technological change makes repeating a behavior easier to do and can easily become a habit. The question is – is that new behavior good or bad?

YouTube 

YouTube can be a good or bad habit. I often use it to help me figure things out or develop new skills: build a horseshoe pit, understand how the seasons work, do a pig roast, build a fire pit, etc. So, for me, YouTube is a good habit. But YouTube could easily be a bad habit. Using it for entertainment transforms YouTube from an educational habit into a recreational, Do Nothing Habit.

Twitter

Twitter, when used to acquire information, knowledge, or for business, is a good habit. When used as a platform to incite unrest, agitate, fight, disparage, etc., it becomes a bad habit.

Facebook

When Facebook is used to build and maintain relationships, that’s a good habit. When used to brag about a vacation, express a political opinion (all expressed political opinions are divisive, which harms relationships) or to disparage others, it becomes a bad habit.

Instagram

I just learned that you can use Instagram to create stories. If you use Instagram Stories to help promote your business or to share valuable knowledge, then it becomes a good habit. If, however, you use Instagram to create weekend videos of you partying, it becomes a bad habit.

Cell Phones

Using cell phones to help you maintain your relationships, your business, to read books, for eduction, etc., is a good habit. Using cell phones for recreational purposes transforms that cell phone into a bad habit.

Apps

There are close to four million apps out there, which you can download for various purposes. If the apps help you become more productive, healthy, or to improve in some way, they are a good habit. If the apps are recreational, they become Do Nothing Habits.

Technology, therefore, can create good or bad habits.

Awareness is the key to keeping your habits under control. Because technology is so swift, it is easy to forge a habit before you become aware of its deleterious effects.

What technological habits have you created? Are they good or bad?

Those who take control of their lives, take control of their habits. You are the CEO of your life.

Habits come in all shapes, sizes and complexities.

Habits fall into two broad categories: Keystone Habits and Ordinary Habits.

Keystone Habits are unique and powerful habits. What makes them unique and powerful is that they give birth to other habits. Because they cause the creation of other habits, Keystone Habits impact other areas of your life. They have a domino effect. Once forged, they will begin to change other behaviors.

An example of a Keystone Habit is jogging. Once jogging becomes a habit, it will create other habits, such as eating healthy, avoiding junk food, moderating your consumption of alcohol or driving you to reduce or eliminate a cigarette smoking habit.

Some habits are less powerful, stand-alone habits, that have no impact on other areas of your life. They are known as Ordinary Habits.

An example of an Ordinary Habit would be brushing your teeth, combing your hair, or mowing your lawn on Tuesdays.

Within these two broad categories of habits, however, are numerous habits. Some habits create happiness. Others sadness. Some help you to become successful and wealthy. Others drag you down to poverty and failure. Some help you maintain good health. Others are toxic and destroy your health. Some improve your knowledge and skills. Other habits keep you ignorant.

Habits are not something to be ignored. They are literally driving the car in which your life is the passenger.

If you ignore them or pay them no mind, they will drive you to awful places. If, instead, you are acutely aware of your habits, you can avoid bad ones and forge good ones. You’ll like where that car takes you in life, because you are telling it where you want to go through your habits.

Awareness and tracking of your daily habits is a prerequisite for changing them. Once you know what your habits are, you can change them. Adding and subtracting habits becomes much easier when you know which ones to add or subtract.

One of the frequent questions I am asked is: “what makes successful people successful?”.

Put another way, what were the common success traits of all self-made millionaires, I found in my Rich Habits Study?

There were six traits that almost every self-made millionaire seemed to possess:

1. Passion
2. Curiosity (Desire to Learn)
3. Focus
4. Hard Work Ethic
5. Patience and
6. Persistence

What’s even more interesting is that, according to the wealthy individuals I interviewed, those traits were dormant most of their lives and only came to the surface after they decided to pursue some dream.

These traits did not manifest themselves all at one time. Like dominoes, one success trait set off another success trait and another and another…

The success trait, however, that set everything in motion, that brought all of the other success traits to the surface, was passion. And what brought passion to the surface, was, in every case, the pursuit of a dream.

When you find your dream (see Dream-Setting Process) and decide to take action on your dream, like a mushroom, passion bursts forth. Passion fuels your desire to learn everything about your dream. Fueled by emotional energy (passion), this desire to learn unleashes within you the ability to focus for long periods of time. This focus makes it appear to the untrained observer that you possess some incredible, relentless work ethic. That work ethic gives birth to patience, as you are forced to face and overcome problems, obstacles and pitfalls. The ability to overcome so many things gives others the impression that you are persistent.

Think of the pursuit of a dream as the fuse that sets off all of the different fireworks you would see at some major event or celebration. Each one of those different fireworks represent the different success traits.

We are all genetically hardwired with these innate success traits. Finding your dream and taking action on it, sets them off, exposing them for all the world to see.

Until you take action on your dream, those success traits will remain dormant, waiting for you to light the fuse.