A Formula for Success and Happiness
There is no formula. Or in fact, there might be an “easy solution”. No, they don’t work. Instead, there are key principles. What matters are goals.
There isn’t one
“I’ll tell you the secret of life. This one thing. Just this one thing.” “What’s the one thing?” “That’s what you’ve got to figure.”
Curly in “City Slickers”
“The best advice on the art of being happy is about as easy as advice to be well when one is sick.”
Anne Sophie Swetchine
“You will never be happy if you continue to search for what happiness consists of. You will never live if you are looking for the meaning of life.”
Albert Camus
“If you pursue happiness you will never find it.”
CP Snow
“Those who have succeeded at anything and don’t mention luck are kidding themselves.”
Larry King
“Blame it on a simple twist of fate.”
Bob Dylan
“Ask yourself whether you are happy and you cease to be so.”
John Stuart Mill
“It’s hard enough just getting through the day without trying to improve as well.”
R Templar
“Don’t aim at success – the more you aim at it and make it a target, the more you are going to miss it.”
Viktor Frankl
“Many search for happiness as we look for a hat we wear on our heads.”
Nikolaus Lenus
“There is no formula for success but there is a formula for failure and that is trying to please everybody.”
Man Ray
“I've made an odd discovery. Every time I talk to a savant, I feel quite sure that happiness is no longer a possibility. Yet when I talk with my gardener, I'm convinced of the opposite.”
Bertrand Russell
“Never do anything that you wouldn't want to explain to the paramedics.”
(anon)
“If A equal success, then the formula is A equals X plus Y and Z, with X being work, Y play, and Z keeping your mouth shut.”
Albert Einstein
“All happiness depends on a leisurely breakfast.”
John Gunther
“Eat three square meals a day; say your prayers; be courteous to your creditors; keep your digestion good; exercise; go slow and easy. Maybe there are other things your special case requires to make you happy, but my friend, these I reckon will give you a good lift.”
Abraham Lincoln
“Early to bed and early to rise, makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise.”
Benjamin Franklin
“Success is simple. Do what’s right, the right way, at the right time.”
Arnold Glasow
“Get your happiness out of your work or you will never know what real happiness is.”
Thomas Carlyle
“My most brilliant achievement was my ability to be able to persuade my wife to marry me.“
Winston Churchill
“Get up early, work hard, strike oil.”
John Paul Getty
“Eighty percent of success is showing up.”
Woody Allen
Live every day as if it were your last and then some day you'll be right.
H.H. "Breaker" Morant
“There is only one way to happiness and that is to cease worrying about things which are beyond the power of our will.”
Epictetus
Passion
“A man can succeed at almost anything for which he has unlimited enthusiasm.”
Charles M Schwab
"Three grand essentials to happiness in this life are something to do, something to love, and something to hope for."
Joseph Addison
“If you want to be successful, it's just this simple. Know what you are doing. Love what you are doing, and believe in what you are doing.”
Will Rogers
“Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm.”
Ralph Waldo Emerson
“Success is not the result of spontaneous combustion. You must set yourself on fire.”
R Leach
Perseverance and Overcoming Failure
“It takes twenty years of hard work to become an overnight success.”
Diana Rankin
“If you want to increase your success rate, double your failure rate.”
Thomas Watson, Sr., founder of IBM
“Success is the ability to go from one failure to another with no loss of enthusiasm.”
Winston Churchill
“The difference between winners and losers is that winners do things that losers don’t want to do.”
Phillip C McGraw
Talent and Brilliance
“There is no substitute for talent. Industry and all the virtues are of no avail.”
Aldous Huxley
“If a man has talent and cannot use it, he has failed. If he has a talent and uses only half of it, he has partly failed. If he has a talent and learns somehow to use the whole if it, he has gloriously succeeded, and won a satisfaction and a triumph few men ever know.”
Thomas Wolfe
Proactivity and Personal Responsibility
“Accept the consequences of your actions in order to become the agent of your mental, physical, spiritual and material success. “
Les Brown
“The person who is waiting for something to turn up might start with their shirtsleeves.”
Garth Henrichs
“I don't believe in circumstances. The people who get on in this world are the people who get up and look for the circumstances they want, and if they can't find them, make them.”
George Bernard Shaw
“Take your life in your own hands, and what happens? A terrible thing: no one to blame.”
Erica Jong
“I am convinced that life is 10% what happens to me and 90% of how I react to it.”
Charles Swindoll
“Procrastination is the fear of success. People procrastinate because they are afraid of the success that they know will result if they move ahead now. Because success is heavy, carries a responsibility with it, it is much easier to procrastinate and live on the 'someday I'll' philosophy.”
Denis Waitley
Big Dreams
“Explore. Dream. Discover.” Mark Twain
“Dreams will get you nowhere, a good kick in the pants will take you a long way.”
(anon)
“If money and time were no constraint, what would you do with your life?”
David Lieberman
“There is a fine line between dreams and reality, it's up to you to draw it.”
B. Quilliam
“When people complain of life, it is almost always because they have asked impossible things of it.”
Ernest Renan
Clarity of Purpose
“The great and glorious masterpiece of man is to live with purpose.”
Montaigne
“Success is goals and all else is commentary.”
Lloyd Conant
“Everyone needs a philosophy of life. Mental health is based on the tension between what you are and what you think you should become. You should be striving for worthy goals.”
Victor Frankl
“The primary cause of success in life is the ability to set and achieve goals.”
Brian Tracy
“Living is a constant process of deciding what we are going to do”
Jose Ortega Y Gasset
“It's not hard to make decisions when you know what your values are.”
Roy Disney
“I can teach anybody how to get what they want out of life. The problem is that I can't find anybody who can tell me what they want.”
Mark Twain
“Alice came to a fork in the road. 'Which one will I take?' she asked. 'Where do you want to go?' responded the Cheshire Cat. 'I don't know Alice answered. 'Then’, said the cat, 'It doesn't matter.'
Alice in Wonderland
“The tragedy of life doesn’t lie in not reaching your goal. The tragedy lies in having no goals to reach.”
Helmut Schmidt
“People can work very hard climbing the ladder of success only to discover it’s leaning against the wrong wall.”
Stephen Covey
“If you board the wrong train, it is no use running along the corridor in the other direction.”
Dietrich Bonhoeffer
“It's a helluva start, being able to recognize what makes you happy.”
Lucille Ball
“The first step to getting the things you want out of life is this: Decide what you want.”
Ben Stein
“Take care to get what you like or you will be forced to like what you don’t get.”
George Bernard Shaw
Life Planning – is it possible?
“If you don't design your own life plan, chances are you'll fall into someone else's plan. And guess what they have planned for you? Not much."
Jim Rohn
“We also plan too much and always think too little.”
Joseph Schumper
“Management by objectives works if you know the objectives; 90% of the time you don’t”
Peter Drucker
“I find it fascinating that most people plan their vacations with better care than they plan their lives. Perhaps that is because escape is easier than change.”
Jim Rohn
“If you want to make God laugh, tell him about your plans.”
Woody Allen
“A good plan today is better than a perfect plan tomorrow.”
George S. Patton
“Results are what you expect; consequences are what you get.”
Ladies Home Journal, 1942
“Long-range planning works best in the short term.”
Doug Evelyn