Beginning of the Year

At the beginning of the year, a lot of us are setting our personal goals. Often, these goals are centred around material wealth - how much money we want to make in the upcoming year, buying a new home or purchasing a more prestigious car, going for that top job etc.

What we often overlook is the danger of getting stuck in that hamster wheel. Not looking left, not looking right, we join the rat race and even when we reach our goals, we typically suffer from arrival fallacy. We falsely believe that reaching a certain goal or destination leads to sustained happiness.

However, what does reality look like? Isn't it that the moment we bought a new car, let us say a Volkswagen Beetle, we dream already of having a bigger car, like eg a Toyota Camry. And a few years later, the moment we get the Camry, we dream of having an S-Class Mercedes Benz. It's the same with our career. Suppose we are salesmen, the same day we get a promotion to the position of sales supervisor, we start immediately working towards our next promotion as a sales manager. We hardly ever lean back, reflect and enjoy what we already are or already have.

We are not rewarded by society for enjoying the journey, but for our successful completion. Society rewards results, not processes; arrivals, not journeys. We are living in a rat race culture.

However, as Dr Tal Ben-Shahar - author of one of my all time favourite books "Happier - Learn the Secrets to Daily Joy and Lasting Fulfillment" - who taught one of the most popular courses at Harvard University, states: "Happiness, not money or prestige should be regarded as the ultimate currency - the currency by which we take measures of our lives."

Ben-Shahar explains: "Happiness is not about making it to the peak of the mountain, nor is it about climbing aimlessly around the mountain; happiness is the experience of climbing towards the peak."

Ben-Shahar's book, grounded in the positive-psychology movement, is a guide to increase happiness no matter how...