佚名/Anonymous
Anyone could be unhappy；it took no courage and effort. True achievement lay in struggling to be happy. The notion that we have to work at happiness comes as news to many people. We assume it's a feeling that comes as a result of good things that just happen to us, a thing over which we have little or no control. But the opposite is true：happiness is largely under our control. To achieve a happy life, it's necessary to overcome some stumbling blocks.
One effective way of destroying happiness is to look at something and focus on even the smallest faw. It's like looking at the tiled ceiling and concentrating on the space where one tile is missing. As a bald man told me，“Whenever I enter a room, all I see is hair.”Once you're determined what your missing tile is explore whether acquiring it will really make you happy. Then do one of the three things：get it, re place it with a different tile, or forget about it and focus on the tiles in your life that are not missing.
We all know people who have had a relatively easy life yet are essentially unhappy. And we know people who have suffered a great deal but generally remain happy. The first secret is gratitude. All happy people are grateful. Ungrateful people cannot be happy. We tend to think that being unhappy leads people to complain, but it's truer to say that complaining leads to people becoming unhappy. The second secret is realizing that happiness is a byproduct of something else. The most obvious sources are those pursuits that give our lives purpose—anything from studying insects to playing baseball. The more passions we have, the more happiness we are likely to experience. Finally, the belief that something permanent transcends us and that our existence has some larger meaning can help us be happier. We need a spirit ual faith, of a philosophy of life. Whatever your philosophy, it should include this truism：if you choose to fnd the positive in virtually every situation, you will be blessed, and if you choose to fnd the awful, you will be cursed. As with happiness itself, this is largely your decision to make.