Stop Chasing Happiness and Realize You Already Have It was written by Benjamin Foley and originally appeared on Medium
Let's start with a story.
There was once a businessman who was sitting by the beach in a small Brazilian village.
As he sat, he saw a Brazilian fisherman rowing a small boat towards the shore having caught quite few big fish.
The businessman was impressed and asked the fisherman, “How long does it take you to catch so many fish?”
The fisherman replied, “Oh, just a short while.”
“Then why don’t you stay longer at sea and catch even more?” The businessman was astonished.
“This is enough to feed my whole family,” the fisherman said.
The businessman then asked, “So, what do you do for the rest of the day?”
The fisherman replied, “Well, I usually wake up early in the morning, go out to sea and catch a few fish, then go back and play with my kids. In the afternoon, I take a nap with my wife, and evening comes, I join my buddies in the village for a drink — we play guitar, sing and dance throughout the night.”
The businessman offered a suggestion to the fisherman.
“I am a PhD in business management. I could help you to become a more successful person. From now on, you should spend more time at sea and try to catch as many fish as possible. When you have saved enough money, you could buy a bigger boat and catch even more fish. Soon you will be able to afford to buy more boats, set up your own company, your own production plant for canned food and distribution network. By then, you will have moved out of this village and to Sao Paulo, where you can set up HQ to manage your other branches.”
The fisherman continues, “And after that?”
The businessman laughs heartily, “After that, you can live like a king in your own house, and when the time is right, you can go public and float your shares in the Stock Exchange, and you will be rich.”
The fisherman asks, “And after that?”
The businessman says, “After that, you can finally retire, you can move to a house by the fishing village, wake up early in the morning, catch a few fish, then return home to play with kids, have a nice afternoon nap with your wife, and when evening comes, you can join your buddies for a drink, play the guitar, sing and dance throughout the night!”
The fisherman was puzzled, “Isn’t that what I am doing now?”
I often find myself in the mindless pursuit of more.
More "likes." More email subscribers. More money. More security. But in the end, what am I going after? And more importantly, do I actually want what I am going after?
A sad reality of life is that most people follow in the exact same footsteps outlined by the businessmen in the story above. They continuously focus on getting more things.
Whether it's building a bigger business or achieving more fame, we often don't realize that the outcome we so desired in the first place may in fact be available to us today, if we allowed ourselves to view the world with a new lens. A lens in which we go after the things that matter most to us TODAY. Rather than 10 years from now.
Stop deferring your life to the future because…
…the truth of the matter is that not a single person is guaranteed to make it there.
When we stop chasing the world’s definition of happiness, we begin to recognize the decision to experience happiness has been right in front of us all along.
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