Quit Relying On The World To Make You Happy.

About a year or so after I left the company I’d co-founded a decade earlier, my wife said to me, “You are so much more fun to be around.”

At first, I was a little offended that I could have ever been anything but fun to be around, but I saw it for the compliment it was, and it became even more clear to me that the job I’d been doing wasn’t just stressful to me, but was robbing everyone around me of the best version of myself.

Like most entrepreneurs, we had employee issues, money issues, and client issues. I was on the road half the time, and when I was home, my head was often buried in my phone. Much of my happiness in those years came from external stimuli. New clients, bigger gigs, fun travel, etc.

Intellectually I understood that happiness is an inside job and that I couldn’t rely on shit going perfect out in the world for my well-being. But operationally, I still largely depended on external circumstances to make me OK.

That is not a tenable arrangement. It is not sustainable.

As we move into the second half of life, we stop relying so much on jobs, money, people, etc, to be OK. We start cultivating an inner OKay-ness.

For me, this has largely been done by cultivating a mindfulness practice. I know I sound like a broken record, but the truth is that putting in the daily work of meditation and journaling has given me what I need to stop relying on the world to make me happy.