One of the biggest myths on the planet is: When I get what I want, I’ll be happy. This implies that happiness is a destination which can only be reached by focusing on yourself and once you’ve reached this destination, you can sit down, relax and enjoy the good life for the rest of your days. In reality, the opposite is true. You can only achieve true happiness by making others happy. Think of those times when you wanted something very badly and finally got it. It may have made you feel happy for a day, a week, or even a month, but eventually the novelty wore off, and it was back to business as usual. Now think of those times when you did something that made someone else happy. You felt happy as a result and each time you recall one of these incidents, you feel happy all over again. This means that happiness is a journey and the more that journey is filled with incidents where you make other people happy, the happier your life is going to be.
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Recommended Reading
Instant Turnaround!: Getting People Excited About Coming to Work and Working Hard
Transform Your Workplace!
Imagine a company where people are excited about coming to work and giving their best efforts every day. In this innovative and engrossing business parable, Harry Paul and Ross Reck show managers at all levels how they can immediately and easily increase productivity by tapping into the discretionary effort of the people who work for them. Starting from the most basic aspect of business reality—that people intentionally regulate the amount of effort they put into their jobs based upon how they feel they’re being treated—the authors point out that the most important part of the job of every manager, team leader, supervisor, and executive is to treat people in such a way that they become excited about applying all their discretionary effort toward performing their jobs.
At the book’s center is the story of Nancy Kim, a human resources director at a magazine that is struggling with all the problems associated with unhappy employees—low productivity and morale along with high absenteeism and turnover. After she openly challenges the CEO’s new management-by-the-numbers system, she’s charged with turning the situation around immediately. Filled with real-world studies, Instant Turnaround! shows anyone how to turn the workplace into a destination—a place where working hard feels like hardly working because it’s engaging, enjoyable, and fulfilling.
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