8 Clues To Happiness

EIGHT CLUES TO HAPPINESS

By- KHUSHWANT SINGH

Having lived a reasonably contented life, I was musing over what a person should strive for to achieve happiness. I drew up a list of a few essentials which I put forward for the readers' appraisal.

1. First and foremost is GOOD HEALTH. If you do not enjoy good health you can never be happy. Any ailment, however trivial, will deduct from your happiness. 

2. Second, A HEALTHY BANK BALANCE. It need not run into crores but should be enough to provide for creature comforts and something to spare for recreation, like eating out, going to the pictures, travelling or going on holidays on the hills or by the sea. Shortage of money can be only demoralizing. Living on credit or borrowing is demeaning and lowers one in one's own eyes. 

3. Third, A HOME OF YOUR OWN. Rented premises can never give you the snug feeling of a nest which is yours for keeps that a home provides: if it has a garden space, all the better. Plant your own trees and flowers, see them grow and blossom, cultivate a sense of kinship with them. 

4. Fourth, AN UNDERSTANDING COMPANION, be it your spouse or a friend. If there are too many misunderstandings, they will rob you of your peace of mind. It is better to be divorced than to bicker all the time. 

5. Fifth, LACK OF ENVY towards those who have done better than you in life; risen higher, made more money, or earned more fame. Envy can be very corroding; avoid comparing yourself with others. 

6. Sixth, DO NOT ALLOW OTHER PEOPLE to descend on you for gup-shup. By the time you get rid of them, you will feel exhausted and poisoned by their gossip-mongering.

7. Seventh, CULTIVATE SOME HOBBIES which can bring you a sense of fulfilment, such as gardening, reading, writing, painting, playing or listening to music. Going to clubs or parties to get free drinks or to meet celebrities is criminal waste of time. 

8. Eighth, every morning and evening, devote 15 minutes to INTROSPECTION. In the morning, 10 minutes should be spent on stilling the mind and then five in listing things you have to do that day. In the evening, five minutes to still the mind again, and ten to go over what you had undertaken to do. 

RICHNESS is not Earning More, Spending More  Or Saving  More, but ... 

"RICHNESS IS WHEN YOU NEED NO MORE"

What is Success for you ?

What is Success for YOU?

Most of us learn that success equals some form of achievement in the world.   For many it’s not the achievement but the recognition and the applause that they crave.  For others it’s not the arrival but the journey that generates the satisfaction of success.  They value the process more than the prize.  For some the pursuit of success will be avoided at all costs, sometimes for fear of failure, and sometimes for the fear of ...success!  And, for a few, just living simply and sincerely each day will be deemed to be successful enough!   At some stage in all our lives there’s a good chance we will each stop and consider the question, “What does success mean to me?”, even if it’s only for a few fleeting minutes! However, if we don’t contemplate this question deeply then it’s likely we will blindly follow others ideas and measures of success, usually learned in childhood, craved in youth and pursued into our adult years.  We may not notice the connection between our dissatisfactions, however superficial or deep, with the absence of a consciously defined and chosen idea of a what ‘successful life’ looks like and feels like. It is the clarity of this inner vision/wisdom that gives focus to our energies, adding significantly to the sense that we are creating a meaningful life. So what price success?  That’s the note that many of the modern day ‘success gurus’ begin and end on.  It means how much are you prepared to sacrifice to achieve the success you want.  How hard are you prepared to work?  What are you willing to do to get there?  What sacrifices are you prepared to make?  Interesting questions, but they do make it all sound like hard work!   How do YOU define success? Is it simply the completion of the next task, another job well done, a promise kept, an exam passed, a medal won, a mountain climbed, a target hit, a happy family raised or the leaving of a legacy that ensures you will be remembered long after you have gone? Whatever you ‘believe’ success to be will have a profound influence on your life. If you were to follow the predominant mindset in the world today then success would likely be measured by acquisition. The more you have the more successful you are.  When we inherit and absorb the prevalent beliefs that the world is a place of scarcity, that the purpose of life is survival, that we must accumulate stuff to prosper, and that the more you get the happier you will feel, then success equals ‘more’.  More can be almost any quantity - objects, money, properties, trophies, celebrity, fame, fans.  And in terms of position, it simply means higher. When we are taught to believe there is not enough to go around the media delights in keeping us abreast of upcoming shortages.  And if there aren’t any obvious ones they will likely invent them for us!  So we learn to speak the common language of `not enoughness’ or ‘scarcity'. We then struggle and strive for what we consider is our rightful share of the ‘great pie’, before someone else gets it, and ‘more’ is not only good, but applauded when attained.   So what does it mean to be successful? At what level, in what context and by whose standards?  If you were to give yourself some time to live in this question you would likely arrive at the fairly obvious insight that, at the deepest level, success in life is not a material thing, it is not something that can be possessed, or won, or even attracted!  It is a state of being.  Some call it contentment, or happiness, or even peace. These are, for some, the deepest and most meaningful ‘symptoms of success’, but only when they are internally stable and consistent and therefore not dependent on anything outside ourselves.   In the meantime success for most of us, tends to be context specific.  As we consider ‘context’ we start to see why the kind of success that we have been encouraged to pursue has many levels and more than a few flaws. SPORTING Success - in this context it’s obviously about competition and winning, being number one and being recognised and glorified by others as the one who took the prize.  How often are we reminded that no one remembers the runner up?  But few seem to ask why would I want to be remembered?  Should the desire to be ‘not forgotten’ have a ‘danger sign’ hung around it that says ‘ego at work’?  And notice how much suffering is required to reach the sporting peaks.  Seldom do we see relaxed and contented sports people as they take their struggling and striving very seriously.  They will say it’s worth the pain.  Others would say life was not meant to be a painful, tense and injurious affair, inflicted upon our self by ourselves! Was sport not originally a game in which the ‘joy of play’ was given free reign?  A time when faces smiled consistently and frustration, tension and anger were impossible. BUSINESS  Success - seems to range from building a large business to profitability to being recognised for excellence of service.  Sometimes all three parameters are pursued, but unless they are prioritised there is the danger none will be achieved.  And if profit is prioritised over service it’s fairly obvious that the energy behind the enterprise will become fear based and therefore quite a stressful endeavour.  Which explains why most business people know stress intimately.  It’s a serious business...business! And, when the ‘purpose of service’ is lost and the profit motive kicks in, that’s usually when need turns into greed and the ripple effect touches many far and wide.  Hence the global financial turmoil that we see today. ACADEMIC Success - intellectual prowess tends to be the way this kind of success is achieved, coupled with rather a good memory, naturally!  It is often dependent on acquiring peer approval and the desire to join a select club.  It can easily result in an ‘I know the most and the best’ attitude; a closed and narrow mindset that tends to characterise the ‘specialist’ and the ‘expert’.  And is it not unnatural to be closed and narrow at any time and in any area of life, unless you are a water pipe! SCIENTIFIC Success - new theories, new dimensions of old theories, inventions of new technologies, the creation of new procedures, making fresh discoveries, all carry the ‘success kitemark’ in the scientific arena.  Yet it’s all very material and ‘out there’ which tends to deny the other dimension we call spirit and the ‘in here’.  Scientific success certainly dominates our world today, but at what price we now ask, as we live increasingly isolated and technologically dependent lives, while sucking dry the natural wealth of the planet!  Mmm...! POLITICAL Success - tends to be measured by the acquisition of position and power, though much ‘lip service’ is given to the notion of public service.  And while the intentions towards the upliftment of society are authentic and worthy we now know success in this arena is fragile and crumbles easily, can often be easily corrupted, and darker motives can often be found behind the desire to serve others.  And as more people rebel against the dictatorial political forces that have traditionally controlled our destiny,  as more people demand a greater say in their fate, we now see the moral and ethical chaos that is generated as we/they realise and exercise new freedoms.   RELIGIOUS Success - once upon a time the pastoral care of a community provided the primary measure of a religions success.  But religion has also become blurred and burdened by it’s own structures and systems, internal politics and power games, not to mention the fanatical adherence to belief and behaviour systems that were invented hundreds of years ago in another age and in a completely different context.   SPIRITUAL Success - is a state of being sometimes referred to as enlightenment.  But is it achieved or restored, or both?  Perhaps it’s one fundamental difference from the other ‘levels of success’ is you wouldn’t know someone has arrived at such an intangible and internal success unless you were in their presence for some time.  Even then their simplicity and humility would probably deflect attention away from themselves.  Can this form of  incognito success still be classified as ...success? That’s not to say that success in any of the above arenas is not worth pursuing.  But there is value in considering how success is both viewed, defined and achieved in each context. Inner Success When we do take some time out and reflect on what exactly is personal success we may notice a deepening of our awareness.  We may realise that personal success comes in ways that we seldom recognise as signs of success!  The signs are internal and usually momentary in the context of our relationships.  And when we build and shape, design and create, these inner capacities and states, then all other levels of success become both easier to achieve, and yet, paradoxically, less relevant and/or much less meaningful. Inner success looks and feels more like the capability: to act with total honesty and integrity thus generating a clear conscience without which the authentic happiness that we call contentment is impossible to remain peaceful and stable when all around you are in crisis or chaos  to value what you are more than what you have to accept full responsibility for all thoughts, feelings, words and actions to be able to see past the weaknesses/mistakes of others and focus on their inherent goodness/strengths to be able to let go of the past to give without the desire for anything in return Notice how intangible these measures are.  No one else can measure them except our self. Notice how we seldom ask ourselves why we cannot achieve and maintain these inner states of being and the kind of enlightened behaviours that we would probably all desire all the time.  Unless we ‘can do’ all of these it is unlikely we will achieve the deepest measure of success which is to be content within our self and able ‘to give’ our best to others without condition.  And as long as we desire to change the world around us it means we are still trying to ‘police the universe’.  The enlightened soul however, has realised that is not ‘my job’.  They know that the light and power that emanates from a stable state, a contented state, from a giving intention, is the greatest and most influential gift to others and to the world. Success is Personal As you reflect and contemplate on what success is going to look like and feel like for you, perhaps it’s useful to include three key considerations. 1  Any success that is dependent on public recognition and acclaim will inevitably lead to insecurity and eventual depression, as does all forms of dependency. 2  When success is defined by an end product, an outcome, or some final achievement, then life tends to be a continuous struggling and striving to ‘get there’.  Our happiness is continuously delayed.  In other words, not such a joy filled journey! 3  If success is defined by the acquisition or accumulation of anything then fear will always be lurking in the background.  Fear of failure which is the same as the fear of loss.  Stress will be our companion. No matter which way that you look at it success is a very personal issue.  It tends to be shrouded in many illusions and delusions, depending on our upbringing.  It’s achievement is now championed by hundreds of success gurus and coaches, mentors and trainers, all waiting in the wings to advise and guide us.  All promising a ‘magic formula’ which ranges from the secrets of attraction to the power of self-belief, from the work harder ethic to the development of your creative genius, from how to ‘unleash’ your potential to invoking the angels of success to take over your life! But before we listen to anyone (including this article) it’s probably worthwhile finding a tree, on a quiet and sunny hillside, by a peaceful meadow, next to meandering river, to sit and gently reflect on what only our own heart can tell us in response to the question, “What does success really mean to me”?   It will of course generate many other questions.  Like what is the purpose of my life?  What do I value?  But then ‘they’ do say that when it comes to this unique and special journey called life there is a time when the asking ‘right questions’ are much more important than having the right answers. Question:  What does success mean to you? Reflection:  Why do you think your definition of success might be challenging to achieve (scribble some notes to yourself) Action:  Initiate a conversation sometime this week with friends, family or colleagues and ask them what success means to them. The Last Clear Thinking was: Do YOU Have a Hierarchy of Needs?

Lee Kuan Yew On Getting the Best out of Life

Lee Kuan Yew On  Getting the Best out of Life “The human being needs a challenge, and my advice to every person in Singapore and elsewhere: Keep yourself interested, have a challenge.

If you’re not interested in the world and the world is not interested in you, the biggest punishment a man can receive is total isolation in a dungeon, black and complete withdrawal of all stimuli, that’s real torture.”

 MY CONCERN today is, what is it I can tell you which can add to your knowledge about aging and what aging societies can do.

You know more about this subject than I do. A lot of it is out in the media, Internet and books. So I thought the best way would be to take a personal standpoint and tell you how I approach this question of aging.

If I cast my mind back, I can see turning points in my physical and mental health. You know, when you’re young, I didn’t bother, assumed good health was God-given and would always be there.

When I was about 57 that was – I was about 34, we were competing in elections, and I was really fond of drinking beer and smoking.  And after the election campaign, in Victoria Memorial Hall – we had won the election, the City Council election – I couldn’t thank the voters because I had lost my voice. I’d been smoking furiously. I’d take a packet of 10 to deceive myself, but I’d run through the packet just sitting on the stage, watching the crowd, getting the feeling, the mood before I speak.

In other words, there were three speeches a night. Three speeches a night, 30 cigarettes, a lot of beer after that, and the voice was gone. I remember I had a case in Kuching, Sarawak . So I took the flight and I felt awful. I had to make up my mind whether I was going to be an effective campaigner and a lawyer, in which case I cannot destroy my voice, and I can’t go on.

So I stopped smoking. It was a tremendous deprivation because I was addicted to it. And I used to wake up dreaming…the nightmare was I resumed smoking.

But I made a choice and said, if I continue this, I will not be able to do my job. I didn’t know anything about cancer of the throat, or oesophagus or the lungs, etc. But it turned out it had many other deleterious effects. Strangely enough after that, I became very allergic, hyper-allergic to smoking, so much so that I would plead with my Cabinet ministers not to smoke in the Cabinet room. You want to smoke, please go out, because I am allergic.

Then one day I was at the home of my colleague, Mr Rajaratnam, meeting foreign correspondents including some from the London Times and they took a picture of me and I had a big belly like that (puts his hands in front of his belly), a beer belly. I felt no, no, this will not do. So I started playing more golf, hit hundreds of balls on the practice tee. But this didn’t go down. There was only one way it could go down: consume less, burn up more.

Another turning point came in 1976, after the general election – I was feeling tired. I was breathing deeply at the Istana, on the lawns. My daughter, who at that time just graduating as a doctor, said: ‘What are you trying to do?’ I said: ‘I feel an effort to breathe in more oxygen.’ She said: ‘Don’t play golf. Run. Aerobics..’ So she gave me a book, quite a famous book and, then, very current in America on how you score aerobic points swimming, running, whatever it is, cycling.

I looked at it sceptically. I wasn’t very keen on running. I was keen on golf. So I said, ‘Let’s try’. So in-between golf shots while playing on my own, sometimes nine holes at the Istana, I would try and walk fast between shots. Then I began to run between shots. And I felt better. After a while, I said: ‘Okay, after my golf, I run.’ And after a few years, I said: ‘Golf takes so long. The running takes 15 minutes. Let’s cut out the golf and let’s run.’

I think the most important thing in aging is you got to understand yourself. And the knowledge now is all there. When I was growing up, the knowledge wasn’t there. I had to get the knowledge from friends, from doctors.

But perhaps the most important bit of knowledge that the doctor gave me  was one day, when I said: ‘Look,  I’m feeling slower and sluggish.’ So he gave me a medical encyclopaedia and he turned the pages to aging. I read it up and it was illuminating. A lot of it was difficult jargon but I just skimmed through to get the gist of it.

As you grow, you reach 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25 and then, thereafter, you are on a gradual slope down physically. Mentally, you carry on and on and on until I don’t know what age, but mathematicians will tell you that they know their best output is when they’re in their 20s and 30s when your mental energy is powerful and you haven’t lost many neurons. That’s what they tell me.

So, as you acquire more knowledge, you then craft a programme for yourself to maximise what you have. It’s just common sense. I never planned to live till 85 or 84.! I just didn’t think about it. I said: ‘Well, my mother died when she was 74, she had a stroke.. My father died when he was 94.’

But I saw him, and he lived a long life, well, maybe it was his DNA. But more than that, he swam every day and he kept himself busy! He was working for the Shell company. He was in charge, he was a superintendent of an oil depot.

When he retired, he started becoming a salesman. So people used to tell me: ‘Your father is selling watches at BP de Silva.’ My father was then living with me. But it kept him busy. He had that routine: He meets people, he sells watches, he buys and sells all kinds of semi-precious stones, he circulates coins. And he keeps going. But at 87, 88, he fell, going down the steps from his room to the dining room, broke his arm, three months incapacitated.

Thereafter, he couldn’t go back to swimming. Then he became wheelchair-bound. Then it became a problem because my house was constructed that way. So my brother – who’s a doctor and had a flat (one-level) house – took him in. And he lived on till 94. But towards the end, he had gradual loss of mental powers.

So my calculations, I’m somewhere between 74 and 94. And I’ve reached the halfway point now. But have I? Well, 1996 when I was 73, I was cycling and I felt tightening on the neck. Oh, I must retire today. So I stopped. Next day, I returned to the bicycle. After five minutes it became worse. So I said, no, no, this is something serious, it’s got to do with the blood vessels. Rung up my doctor, who said, ‘Come tomorrow’. Went tomorrow, he checked me, and said: ‘Come back tomorrow for an angiogram.’

I said: ‘What’s that ?’ He said: ‘We’ll pump something in and we’ll see whether the coronary arteries are cleared or blocked.’ I was going to go home. But an MP who was a cardiologist happened to be around, so he came in and said: ‘What are you doing here?’ I said: ‘I’ve got this.’ He said: ‘Don’t go home. You stay here tonight. I’ve sent patients home and they never came back. Just stay here. They’ll put you on the monitor. They’ll watch your heart. And if anything, an emergency arises, they will take you straight to the theatre. You go home. You’ve got no such monitor. You may never come back.’

So I stayed there. Pumped in the dye, yes it was blocked, the left circumflex, not the critical, lead one. So that’s lucky for me. Two weeks later, I was walking around, I felt it’s coming back. Yes it has come back, it had occluded. So this time they said: ‘We’ll put in a stent.’

I’m one of the first few in Singapore to have the stent, so it was a brand new operation. Fortunately, the man who invented the stent was out here selling his stent. He was from San Jose, La Jolla something or the other. So my doctor got hold of him and he supervised the operation.  He said put the stent in. My doctor did the operation, he just watched it all and then that’s that. That was before all this pr`oblem about lining the stent to make sure that it doesn’t occlude and create a disturbance.

So at each stage, I learnt something more about myself and I stored that. I said: ‘Oh, this is now a danger point.’ So all right, cut out fats, change diet, went to see a specialist in Boston, Massachusetts General Hospital. He said: ‘Take statins.’ I said: ‘What’s that?’ He said: ‘(They) help to reduce your cholesterol.’ My doctors were concerned. They said: ‘You don’t need it. Your cholesterol levels are okay.’ Two years later, more medical evidence came out. So the doctors said: ‘Take statins.’

Had there been no angioplasty, had I not known that something was up and I cycled on, I might have gone at 74 like my mother. So I missed that decline. So next deadline: my father’s fall at 87. I’m very careful now because sometimes when I turn around too fast, I feel as if I’m going to get off balance. So my daughter, a neurologist, she took me to the NNI, there’s this nerve conduction test, put electrodes here and there.

The transmission of the messages between the feet and the brain has slowed down. So all the exercise, everything, effort put in, I’m fit, I swim, I cycle. But I can’t prevent this losing of conductivity of the nerves and this transmission. So just go slow.

So when I climb up the steps, I have no problem. When I go down the steps, I need to be sure that I’ve got something I can hang on to, just in case. So it’s a constant process of adjustment.

But I think the most important single lesson I learnt in life was that if you isolate yourself, you’re done for. The human being is a social animal – he needs stimuli, he needs to meet people, to catch up with the world.

I don’t much like travel but I travel very frequently despite the jetlag, because I get to meet people of great interest to me, who will help me in my work as chairman of our GIC. So I know, I’m on several boards  of banks, international advisory boards of banks, of oil companies and so on. And I meet them and I get to understand what’s happening in the world, what has changed since I was here one month ago, one year ago.

I go to India, I go to China. And that stimuli brings me to the world of today. I’m not living in the world, when I was active, more active 20, 30 years ago. So I tell my wife. She woke up late today. I said: ‘Never mind, you come along by 12 o’clock. I go first.’

If you sit back – because part of the ending part of the encyclopaedia which I read was very depressing – as you get old, you withdraw from everything and then all you will have is your bedroom and the photographs and the furniture that you know, and that’s your world. So if you’ve got to go to hospital, the doctor advises you to bring some photographs so that you’ll know you’re not lost in a different world, that this is like your bedroom.

I’m determined that I will not, as long as I can, to be reduced, to have my horizons closed on me like that. It is the stimuli, it is the constant interaction with people across the world that keeps me aware and alive to what’s going on and what we can do to adjust to this different world.

In other words, you must have an interest in life. If you believe that at 55, you’re retiring, you’re going to read books, play golf and drink wine, then I think you’re done for. So statistically they will show you that all the people who retire and lead sedentary lives, the pensioners die off very quickly.

So we now have a social problem with medical sciences, new procedures, new drugs, many more people are going to live long lives..

If the mindset is that when I reach retirement age 62, I’m old, I can’t work anymore, I don’t have to work, I just sit back, now is the time I’ll enjoy life, I think you’re making the biggest mistake of your life. After one month, or after two months, even if you go traveling with nothing to do, with no purpose in life, you will just degrade, you’ll go to seed.

The human being needs a challenge, and my advice to every person in Singapore and elsewhere: Keep yourself interested, have a challenge. If you’re not interested in the world and the world is not interested in you, the biggest punishment a man can receive is total isolation in a dungeon, black and complete withdrawal of all stimuli, that’s real torture.

So when I read that people believe, Singaporeans say: ‘Oh, 62 I’m retiring.’ I say to them: ‘You really want to die quickly?’ If you want to see sunrise tomorrow or sunset, you must have a reason, you must have the stimuli to keep going..’

Have a purpose driven life and finish well, my friends. 

If you have to fall, do fall like a seed to germinate, unlike a leaf to die.