Fifteen Things You Should Give Up to Be Happy

Online World Observer recently printed a piece titled "Fifteen Things You Should Give Up to Be Happy."  It contains a lot of wisdom I've come to accept over the years, some of which I've been able to incorporate into my life and outlook and some of which I'll have to refer to as a work in progress.  The key point is that a lot of things we hang onto aren't necessarily very good for us, and by that I mean they don't truly serve to make us happy.  Often times they have precisely the opposite effect.  We have a limited time and but one go around at this life.  How will we spend it?

In bold, Here are the fifteen in the list. The comments in regular print are mine.

 1. Give up your need to always be right. 
Pick your battles.  I find it liberating to admit when I am wrong. 

2. Give up your need for control. 
 I find the only thing I can truly control is myself, and even that imperfectly. 

3. Give up on blame. 
 Blame is a self-defeating trap to excuse failure without learning from it.  It also burns bridges to cooperation by making enemies of those blamed.

4. Give up your self-defeating self-talk.
 "As a man thinketh, so is he."  I have no harsher critic than myself, and have to step back at times and give myself permission to be human.  Positive, affirmative thinking is extremely powerful and becomes self-fulfilling.

5. Give up your limiting beliefs.
This is closely related to number four, and just as debilitating.  

6. Give up complaining. 
 Honest appraisal is one thing; mindless negativism is something else.  I avoid complainers like the plague.

7. Give up the luxury of criticism.
 Gossips and constant criticizers are to society what cancer is to the body. 

 8. Give up your need to impress others.
"Virtue is its own reward."  I have to be happy with myself for what I am and do.  As number two tells us, I cannot control their thinking anyway.  I do need to be attentive to others' reactions to me, since they are valuable feedback on my own conduct, but having a need for their approval to feel right about myself leads to all manner of ultimately unacceptable compromises.

9. Give up your resistance to change.
The only state without change is the grave.  The only way I progress and improve is through change.  I have to remember to adapt to difficult change, embrace positive change and initiate needed change.



10. Give up labels. 
 Labels are artificial constructs, often intended to minimize, ridicule or demonize that which is different.  Herbert Spencer is quoted as saying the surest path to "everlasting ignorance...is  contempt prior to investigation."

11. Give up on your fears. 
Most are merely illusory.  Fear paralyzes necessary action.  That is what Franklin D. Roosevelt meant when he said, “The only thing we have to fear, is fear itself.”

12. Give up your excuses. 
This is the most destructive form of self-deception.  If I succumb to excuses I cannot overcome my challenges.  Instead, I wallow helplessly in misfortunes.


13. Give up the past. 
I need not forget the past, but I cannot live in it.  The present is all I have, and I must make the most of it. 


14. Give up attachment. 
It is not healthy to be obsessed with possessions.  True love is quite different from unhealthy attachment.  It is focused on selflessness and joy rather than compulsion and fear of loss. 

 
15. Give up living your life to other people’s expectations.
 Similar to number 8, this principle is the key to genuine freedom.