Just read a great little book here. It's called Instant Happy by Karen Salmanson.

She's written a couple other books. How to be happy, dammit.

And it's a really quick book. You can read it in like 15 minutes or something, but it's a whole,

it's more like a coffee table book. But it's actually, even though it seems a little cliche,

it's actually pretty profound. So, you know, it starts out by saying,

happiness is about thoughts, obviously. But I thought that there was a few little good sayings to remember.

It said, view your tormentors as your mentors. So, you know, in my life, there's people that I bumped into

that are super annoying, never thought to think of them as mentors, but I guess that's what they really become.

You know, it talks a lot about, she's a positive psychologist and she talks a lot about reframing the stories,

which reminds me if you study things like ontology and complex kind of psychology and metaphysics,

they talk about, you know, the story that we tell ourselves.

So, her big point in the book is we can manipulate our own mind and reframe it into whatever story you want.

You know, failure can be a creation of new wisdom. Endings can be new beginnings, mistakes can be discoveries.

I was thinking, I think it was Thomas Edison that did something like a thousand mistakes for every invention he found

or a no-coronal Sanders who started to take you for a chicken said he knocked on almost exactly 1,000 doors before somebody invested in his restaurant.

So, he was able to see, you know, these closed doors as opportunities to find someone else.

And, you know, at the end of the day, obviously, life becomes some kind of an imagination that we make up.

He says in the book, conflicts become growth opportunities and X's become teachers.

This book is something I think you have to read over and over.

The human mind, you know, if you study evolutionary psychology, the human mind was not designed for happiness, right?

It was designed for reproduction. That's evolution. That's why we get in bad relationships but stay in them because our subconscious, our animal lizard reptilian mind is interested in, you know, something else beyond our conscious happiness.

So, I'm a big believer for sure in kind of this concept in the book that happiness is something we create.

...