Читать книгу A Chinese cookbook for happiness and success - Nadine Koerner - Страница 4

For most people, happiness is just like a single sun ray, passing quickly. Sustainable happiness, however, is happiness that lasts, not only seconds, minutes, but for every day. That is what most people want. Happiness forever after… as it is so nicely superimposed in so many fairy tales. In positive psychology this is illustrated in a formula as:

H = S + C + V

This means: enduring/sustainable Happiness (H) = Set Point (S) + Circumstances (C) + factors under Voluntary Control (V).^[9]

The happiness set point refers to the situation when nothing extremely happy or sad happens, it is determined to some degree by our genes. According to researchers, the set points makes up 50% of our happiness, while circumstances 10% and factors under voluntary control, meaning the activities we choose to do, make up 40%. Consequently, in order to increase happiness and step towards sustainable happiness it is necessary to have some recipes to raise the set point and influence the factors under voluntary control positively, which means choosing activities which contribute to our happiness! Only 10 % of our happiness might be out of our control, so it is up to us to be happy, it is our choice! So if you want happiness to be sustainable and ‘forever after’, you have to make it to your predominant state of mind, which can be achieved by changing your overall attitude with the help of the recipes in chapter 4.

When it comes to success, most people lose sight of the real reason why they actually want to be successful. Many assume, once they get all those ‘things’, referred to as ‘status symbols’ or ‘success symbols’, like a penthouse in Manhattan, a yacht in Miami Beach and a Ferrari in their garage, they can consider themselves as successful and then they will feel happy! Well… for a short time. Until a friend has got a newer and bigger yacht and the Ferrari has got scratches making it look second-hand. Surely most of your desires will be obtainable within your lifetime but this no guarantee that you will be happy and fulfilled. Therefore it is necessary to strive for sustainable success.

What is sustainable success? Sustainable success is inexhaustible and consistent. For you to have success that is sustainable you have to develop a new mindset to focus on what you must become to attract that which you want. That means you can either obtain success or you can become it. The mindset is very different, because adopting the mentality of creating lasting success, of becoming sustainable, starts with realizing that success is a feeling! Yes, success is actually one kind of feeling. So when you are making that feeling part of who you are, especially with help of the recipes in chapter 4.3 and 4.4, you will never be without success again.