Living Your Happy Quiet Life

Welcome to Happy Quiet Life! 

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So you want to know how to live the good life?

You could get as philosophical as you'd like when tackling this question. Still, it's subjective, and there's no right or wrong answer.

And, like everything, I'm sure some scientist somewhere has researched and has evidence for the answer.

I prefer a simpler answer that gets straight to what it means to live a good life or, what I call, a Happy Quiet Life.

For me, it comes down to these things:

• Building Great Habits

• Stacking Winning Days

• Tuning out the unnecessary

Wait, what?!?!

I know you're thinking this is a post about how you need love and happiness, and purpose to thrive in life, right? You need intention. Presence. And a drive to become your best version.

Sure.

All of those things are important, even critical. But I can't define most of those things for you, and no matter what you do to pursue those, you still need to build great habits, win your days, and ignore this noisy ole world.

Build Great Habits

You don't just become a byproduct of your habits. You become your habits.

Your routine, your habits, the things you give your time to create who you are and define your life. That may feel icky some days when you know you hammered too many bacon cheese fries or a little depressing when you fall short on a big goal you set for yourself.

But the truth is that our habits slowly, over time, develop who we are. Our results in life are simply a lagging measurement of our patterns.

And so, on the one hand, this seems brutally truthful about what shapes our lives, but it should also empower us to see the parts of it that we have control over.

Results won't show up immediately. Nothing great is ever immediate.

Still, a diligent effort towards building your own Happy Quiet Life can be made through quality habits that set you up for life.  

Easy? Oh no, I can promise you they won't be easy. Worth it? Well, it depends. How bad do you want your Happy Quiet Life?

Look, if all we're sure about is today, right here, right now, then that IS our life. And our daily routine, habits, and the things we spend our time on define that.  

As unglamorous as that may sound.

So we have to build the right ones to set ourselves up to…

Win Your Days

If you win your days, you win your life.

The most unsatisfied people in the world aren't going to bed feeling good about their day. If you want more from your life, get more from your day.

You know that feeling you feel at the end of a great day? You got done what you wanted to get done, you enjoyed some moments in a meaningful way, you reached satisfaction with the day, and now you can rest easy, knowing today was a win.

However, you define a winning day in your world—aim to create more of them.

What 3-5 practices in your life make any day a better day? What determines a winning day in your life?

(Suggestion: focus on your internal process, not external. Other words, things you have control over.)

You can't control what happens to you each day, and you shouldn't hold your happiness or satisfaction on these external outcomes. Receiving bad news may not chalk up in the win column, but how you respond and move forward still has sway in your overall day.

A Pro lives with intention. A plan, a routine, a process. They don't sit back and see how the day turns out. They push back against it, seizing to make any day a good day.

An Amateur has no plan. No intention. Their life reacts to all that comes their way, mainly because they haven't determined how they intend to win their day.

If you want to win more days, be more intentional about your actions.

Ignore The Noise

Legend has it that the personal pilot of Warren Buffett once asked him how to set priorities. His response was to make a list of 25 things you want in life, then arrange them in order of most important to the least, focus your time on what improves the top 5, and completely discard the other 20.

It seems pretty abrupt for a world with endless options, countless opportunities, and a buffet of possibilities.  

But the point Buffett (or whoever this story is truly about) is attempting to make is: the list of 20 is simply the most alluring distraction available to an individual's success and happiness.

We don't have time for it, even if we think we do.

There isn't enough time or energy to keep up with everything, be everything for everyone, and pursue every opportunity that comes our way.

We think life, success, and achievement are about our productivity levels, taking more on, and being superhuman with our time.

It's not.

Building a prosperous and peaceful life is not about doing more. It's about doing less.

Productivity isn't the super skill you should be chasing.

The superpower of the truly productive and successful is learning to say 'no.'

Less is more.

So the next time you think about building your Happy Quiet Life, start asking yourself, "What could I eliminate?"

As the author of Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals, Oliver Burkeman, wrote, "You need to learn how to start saying no to things you do want to do, with the recognition that you have only one life."

And we want it to be a Happy Quiet Life.

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