To live your dream life and to become the best you can be, you must first ask yourself the right questions. By asking yourself the right questions every day, you will find that some of your daily habits, goals, and dreams are not actually what you want. You will also find that you might want to add something to your vision of your dream life. By asking the right questions, you will be able to figure out what you are truly striving for.

I used to ask myself, “What are my goals?”and, “What can I do today to accomplish these goals?” I have been asking myself these questions for years, and these questions helped guide my day and life. But I realized that they were not the questions I should be focusing all of my energy on every day, and I’ll explain why.

There is nothing wrong with these questions about goals, in fact they are great questions that you should ask yourself! But for true happiness and success in living your dream life and becoming who you were meant to be, these are not the most important questions to ask yourself. Let me explain.

First of all, don’t confuse success and happiness as the same thing. True happiness comes from within, and so does true success. But true success can only come from someone who has true happiness within them. It may look like someone is successful on the outside. They may have tons of money, cars, family, vacations, you name it! But If they aren’t happy then they aren’t successful either, because not only do they feel unsuccessful, but they also can’t enjoy their own success due to their unhappiness. True success is a feeling, and it has little to do with anything external other than a sense of accomplishment (which is also a feeling, and you can get this feeling from having true happiness).

So many people fall for the ‘outer success’ trap where they feel like they need to create this image of success for other people to see. But truthfully, this show they are putting on is not real success. And it is definitely not real happiness either. When you are truly happy, you aren’t worried about what others think. You are not tying to pretend or put on a show, you really are happy.  And the same goes for true success, since true success comes from true happiness. If all you are trying to do is please the world and chase after society’s idea of success and happiness, you will always be running. You will never find real happiness, and you will never be truly and personally successful. It is time to find out what  happiness and success looks like to you, and you only.  By thinking about this, you make sure that your goals are for you, and not for any other outward reason.

Recently, I became very sick and I was feeling absolutely terrible. All I could really do was lie in bed because I didn’t have the energy to do anything else. Although I was feeling awful, being forced to lie in bed for a week was actually a blessing in disguise. It gave me some time for my body and mind to slow down, recoup, and think about how life was going. I realized a few things:

1. I was looking back at the years and everything I had accomplished, and I realized that I had accomplished all of this great stuff and I was currently working on accomplishing even more, but I didn’t feel any happier or sadder. I felt the same as I did a year or two ago! This surprised me because I figured that I would feel happier since I had accomplished all of these goals that I had wanted so badly and worked so hard to reach.
2. I was working too much on my goals, and too little on my inner happiness. True, lasting happiness does not come from reaching your goals. Having your goals and dreams become reality will contribute towards happiness, but these will never bring lasting happiness because your goals and dreams are always changing as you change. True happiness comes from within.
3. True success is a result of true happiness.
4. True success is when you feel successful. Whether or not you are seen as successful by others doesn’t matter. If you are happy, your personal success will naturally follow.
5. I realized that I value happiness over success, so all this time I have been focusing so hard on the wrong questions! Instead of asking myself about my goals all the time, I should be asking myself about my happiness more often. Questions like:
   • “What makes me happy?”
   • “What do I truly enjoy doing?”
   • “What excites me?”
   • “What is happiness to me?”
   • “What can I do today to bring more happiness into my life?”

Ask yourself these questions, and really think about the answers. Let your mind be open, and don’t try to shut out any answer you think of. Each answer you think of is there for a reason!

When you start focusing on asking yourself the right questions, you suddenly see everything in a new light. You will notice that you might have some new goals, and at the same time you might have gotten rid of some goals that actually weren’t as important to you as you thought. By asking yourself what makes you happy, you will realize that you will naturally weed out the goals you have that don’t support that question. This is great because the goals you just dumped were motivated by external things, such as money, hype, other people’s opinions, etc.! External stuff. To live your best and happiest life, make goals motivated by passion and inner happiness. By getting rid of anything in your life that does not correlate with your happiness, a big burden is lifted from your shoulders, because you are no longer a slave to it anymore! You are free to truly live your best life and be your best you!

“People are just about as happy as they make up their minds to be”

– U.S. President Abraham Lincoln

So what will you do today to bring more happiness into your life? 🙂

To your truest happiness and success!

-Alex