The One Key to Lasting Happiness and Greater Success

What You Should Give More Attention to Have a Happier, Fulfilling Life

5 min readApr 23, 2019

Can there really be one key to lasting happiness and greater success? Is it even possible for us?

Our desire to experience higher levels of joy drives most of the decisions we make and things we do. We’re generally at our best and feel good about ourselves if we’re experiencing happiness consistently.

Yet for most people, happiness isn’t something they experience consistently. We all have experiences or moments that make us laugh and feel good in the moment.

If we rely on external things to experience happiness, it’s difficult to sustain those emotions. Genuine happiness comes from within us. It’s something we generate each day through our choices and actions.

Lasting happiness isn’t a onetime experience or moment. It’s how we feel and who we are every day.

Common Keys to Lasting Happiness

Throughout history, things suggested on how to find lasting happiness and greater success include:

Staying healthy in mind, body and spirit.
Being present and experiencing each moment for what it is.
Knowing the motivation behind why we do the things we do.
Practicing gratitude or appreciation daily.
Having close or strong relationships and connections with people.
Practicing forgiveness and letting go of resentments and judgments.
Listening to our intuition.
Giving up the need for approval or validation.
Not being attached to things or outcomes.
Being generous.
Not relying on others to make us feel happy.
Tapping into what make us great and sharing our greatness with others.
Finding and living our life purpose.

My belief is these are true and should be how we live our lives, if we want to experience happiness.

However, there is an important key to lasting happiness and greater success. If we don’t know what it is, experiencing lasting happiness will be highly unlikely.

The first 20+ years of my life was mapped out. I did what most of us did, which was to attend school until my teenage years. Then do further studies at a university or college, which I also did.

I was in my early twenties when I finished my university studies. I was supposedly a highly educated person, yet I felt lost. Finding a job became my focus. Once I started working, I didn’t feel I was heading in the right direction. I was out of alignment with my true self and my purpose in life.

Interestingly, during my university studies, I didn’t learn anything about myself or my passions or purpose in the world. These were things I had to discover and has led to finding the one key to lasting happiness and greater success.

The Key to Lasting Happiness and Greater Success

There are two sources we can utilise to find answers. One is to go within through practices such as meditation, contemplation, prayer and reflection. Another option is to find answers in nature through observation.

When I wasn’t experiencing happiness and success, one thing was missing. If we look at nature, its primary function is to expand and grow. That’s how nature expresses itself.

The thing missing for me was progress. When I didn’t feel happy about myself and my life, I wasn’t making progress in life.

As human beings, our nature is to expand and grow. When we’re not doing that, part of us is literally dying. This is a law of the universe; if we’re not growing, we’re dying.

Therefore, the one key to lasting happiness and greater success is progress! If we aren’t making progress in our lives, we won’t experience happiness long-term.

Progress results in growth.

Growth results in greater self-awareness.

Greater self-awareness results in better decisions and intelligent actions.

Better decisions and intelligent actions results in greater success.

Greater success results in a better quality life.

A better quality life results in long-term, lasting happiness.

If we don’t feel good or happy, it’s highly likely we’re not experiencing progress in life.

Factors That Can Affect Your Desire For Lasting Happiness and Greater Success

Factors that affect our lack of progress includes:

Attachment to things or outcomes.
Lack of direction or clear intentions.
Unproductive or unsupportive habits.
Lack of accountability.
Not addressing fears or limiting beliefs.
Lack of challenges or goals.
Not processing and letting go of unpleasant emotions.

How to Apply This One Key to Lasting Happiness and Greater Success

When we experience constant progress in life, it means we’re growing and gaining more self-awareness. To experience progress consistently, things we can do include:

Create a plan for your life.
Set new learning challenges.
Set and achieve goals that are meaningful.
Experience novelty regularly by doing things for the first time.
Be part of a peer network or community focused on growth, service and making a difference.

Conclusion

We all want to experience lasting happiness and have greater success, regardless of what our definition of success is. When we pay closer attention to how we’re progressing towards what we want, we’ll have greater clarity in life.

With greater clarity comes better decisions, which will result in consistent progress and lead to lasting happiness. Our commitment to making progress in every area of our lives will impact our overall quality of life.

Action Step: Before you can make any change, you must know your starting point. This is why I created the free Life Progress Assessment to know your starting point. Get greater clarity so you can make faster progress, accelerate your breakthroughs and create more success. Click here to take the free Life Progress Assessment.

Question: What do you believe is the one key to lasting happiness and more success?