The future will offer us both pleasant and unpleasant moments.

It'll offer us happiness and sadness both.

No matter what changes you make or what plans you execute.

A far more certain source of happiness for you is to be found in your past.

Up until today, your happiest days are behind you.

I guarantee you.

For you can, with nearly 100%% accuracy look to earlier times and identify those moments that were the

most pleasant, the most positive, the happiest. And using a mental technique that is no more

complicated or foreign than simply remembering.

You can actually drag those experiences from the past into the present, and you can experience

them right here and now with the same emotional resonance, the same actual joy that you did earlier in life.

I am going to offer one of my own memories to you to illustrate this point.

A few years ago, I was in Calcutta, India, and I was doing what I do.

I was conducting interviews about happiness, only I was doing it in an illegal slum settlement, a really deplorable living place.

It was a ramshackle collection of thatch and bamboo huts in which whole families of

sometimes five, six, seven people would crowd together, often in a single room. The interiors of many of these shacks were lined with old

yellowing newspapers, and often they were blackened with the unventilated fumes of propane

stoves that are used for cooking the day's meager meals. And these families, when they're lucky

enough to find work, it was almost always as day laborers,

as domestic servants or rickshaw pollers, and they subsisted on merely a dollar or two a day.

The slum itself abutted a stagnant pond that was just teeming with garbage.

And the residents there were under constant threat of eviction from developers angling for their land,

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