Welcome to Living Happy, a super short weekly encouragement sharing insights and action steps for living a happy life.

Every week I'm going to be sharing a passage from my book, The Year of Living Happy, and it's available on October 2.

But if you pre-order it right now, you're going to receive a great free gift that I've built for you.

It's called 30 Days of Happiness and it's a guided journal experience

where I'll be giving you one short action step every day for 30 days that's going to help you

live a happier life. So go to year of living happy.com to find out more. So let's dive in today

for today's Living Happy Minute. The importance of guardrails. I was driving along the coast of

California recently, and I was white knuckling that steering wheel like nobody's business. You see,

some parts of the coast of California are hilly with these deadly drop-offs around hairpin turns

that follow the curve of the ocean. It's scary in the daytime, but at night,

it's terrifying. Where it not for the guardrails all along the edge of that highway, the road

would be treacherous and unforgiving, even to the smallest mistakes. And you know the funny

thing about guardrails? Most of us don't pay any attention to them until we need

them. I've never heard anyone say, you know what I hate most about driving? I hate those guardrails.

They're the worst. No, not one person has ever complained about a guardrail. In fact, the only time

I ever even heard someone talk about a guardrail is when it saved

their life.

However, when someone brings up the idea of having guardrails in other areas of our lives,

we're often surprised at the thought.

Be it guardrails for our marriage, our kids, our career, our schedule, the idea that our freedom

might be hampered by some kind of restraint

is a hard pill for most of us to swallow. But just as guardrails keep us from disaster on the road,

...