I Want You to Be Happier
(Speech written for the 2020 Jack Petchey Speak Out Challenge)
You’re gonna make it — right? Life is like a mountain, they say. It never matters if you’re not satisfied with it NOW, because if you just keep working and you just keep earning and you just keep climbing — one day you’ll make it! Well, I hate to break it to you, but I can say with 100% confidence that there is ZERO chance you’ll even get CLOSE to that without a SERIOUS change in mindset, and not in the way that you think. I’m not going to tell you about buckling down and working harder. No, it’s something way simpler than that.
For a lot of you, that summit looks like having a good job and loving family — and a million subscribers. But take a moment to consider why you think these things would make you happy. It’s because you’d be grateful if you had them. And that’s the true key.
I’m sure you all know that one person. The one who’s mum’ll buy them a Tesla and they’ll still burst your eardrums complaining about how it’s one shade off from what they wanted.
Crazy! I know! Why get caught up on one tiny detail when there’s so much to be grateful for? Well, get ready for the twist — YOU’RE that person. Every single one of you is living somebody else’s dream and if they could see you now, they’d scream at YOU for not being grateful.
I don’t blame you though! No — up to this very moment, it hasn’t been your fault. It’s a sad fact that human beings are, by default, wired to focus on the negative, which breeds that harmful idea about the mountain — that the future will hold the happiness you can’t see now.
But being grateful takes practise, and if you don’t start now, you may very well find yourself surrounded by everything you thought would make you happy and still be dreadfully miserable just because you flat out don’t have the skill of appreciating things. Just like all the many miracles you have now but aren’t grateful for, the new ones will blend into the drudgery of your life until you don’t notice them at all.
The solution?
Be ruthlessly grateful. In the same way you may see ‘insert your favourite celebrity here’ as living the perfect life, someone, sometime, somewhere sees your life as perfect, and you can too. You just need a change of perspective.
Don’t wait until a loved one comes limping out of a car crash to be grateful for their life. Appreciate every second you get to spend with them. And it’s not just the big things. Say tomorrow you’ll get out of bed, trip, and permanently break your index finger. There’d be only one thing you’ll want back more than anything in the world, and you have that thing, on your hand, right now!
Things to be grateful for are like stars: the more you look, the more you’ll see, until they cover the entire sky. So, if there’s one thing you take away today, let it be this: happiness will never be the product of what you have around you, it is purely a measure of how grateful you can be. So please — be grateful.
