You're going to be. Welcome to the happiness podcast. I'm Dr. Robert Puff. There are many things that can keep us from happiness.

Mine is delayed gratification, or some they all.

I remember when I first started working and seeing clients

over 20 years ago, there was a financial planner who had contacted me and

told me that if I saved my money and invested it wisely that

when I would retire 30, 40 years in the future, I would have enough money that I wouldn't

have to worry about working anymore.

I wasn't necessarily planning on retiring, but I did like the idea of financial freedom.

So I remember starting to think about ways I could save money, put it into an investment plan

so that someday I could have all the time and freedom and money that I needed to sustain myself and my family and I wouldn't need to work anymore.

I could work, but I wouldn't have to.

And I spent a lot of time thinking about that.

And because I'm pretty good at delayed gratification and putting

things off for the future, after finishing high school, after all, I had gone straight through

14 years of schooling, two masters of PhD, and two postdocs before I even

started working full-time and private practice.

So I was pretty good about waiting for the future. But unfortunately I was too good at it. In the process of now

waiting for retirement I wasn't living fully in as much as I should. I'm so thankful that I was able to learn this lesson at a

younger age and haven't missed out on the past 20 years, but I did need to learn it. I

needed to learn how to live now and plan for the future. And today I want to talk about

a very easy way to do this for all of us. How do we live now and plan for the future? It's really one of the key factors of living

a happy life. Because if we're always planning for the future, as my tendencies tend to be, then we're not living in the now.

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