An excerpt from Dave’s Amazon #1 Best seller: The Imperative Habit: 7 Non-Spiritual Practices Towards Spiritual Behaviour – For Happiness, Health, Love and Success...

When I looked a little deeper, I realized that without putting any conscious thought into it, I set out to achieve the same “happiness” and “success” I saw in my family of origin and in the area in which I grew up, Silicon Valley. I simply jumped to the conclusion that I would find happiness when I achieved the same successes my parents, and the pillars of society around me, had achieved—professional accolades, material wealth, and an image of familial stability. Did my parents intend to convey this message to me? Probably not. However, we human beings, at any age, are adept at internalizing the belief systems at work around us and using them as a basis for our own world views. Perhaps you can relate.

I don’t subscribe to the adage, “It’s the parents’ fault.” Even if our parents do inflict some damage (find me a parent who doesn’t), at some point, as adults, we must stop scapegoating our parents and start taking responsibility for ourselves.

That said, the environments we grew up in do influence us, and it’s important to evaluate those influences. My own parents often encouraged me to “do what makes you happy.” This sounds wonderfully supportive, and I believe my parents intended it that way, but in my youth, I didn’t understand what real happiness meant. Maybe my parents assumed I knew what happiness was? Did they know what happiness was? Was it possible their definition varied from my own? Was there a “Happiness Dictionary” somewhere that could spell things out for me? Or a class on finding your own personal happiness? Looking back now, I wish there had been.

What did you learn about happiness in your family of origin? How was happiness defined in the culture in which you grew up? How have you internalized these definitions of happiness? Did you accept them wholeheartedly or question them? Have you thrived or struggled with them? How do these old definitions resonate with you now?

Like so many people, I simply absorbed messages about happiness from my surroundings. Growing up in the heart of Silicon Valley, one of the most affluent, entrepreneurial, and productivity-focused areas in the country, one message bellowed: “Happiness comes from working harder, making more money, and getting more stuff!”

Are you doing what you do because it makes you happy? Or are you doing what you do to make a good impression on others? Do you work to fulfill your own dreams and goals, or to live up to the dreams and goals prescribed by others?

Without an internal compass pointing us toward our true happiness, we tend to calibrate toward the strongest external pull. This principle applies to any instance where a collective of people are bonded by a unifying interest, whether it’s a sport, an art, a vocation, a career, or a bake-off. We look to others to chart the course of external things that supposedly lead to happiness, and the loudest collective voice wins. Dr. David Hawkins stated in his book The Eye of the I, “Few minds can escape the appeal of the authority of mass agreement.” People look without instead of within for guidance. Freud talked about how the individual conscience is dissolved in the unconsciousness of the herd and mass action.

We’re like a flock of geese flying south. One asks, “Which way?” Another answers, “This way.” The rest, having no ideas of their own, simply follow. If we let others define happiness for us, we fly off course if they too do not know the path towards internal happiness. Having never defined happiness for myself, I was lost. Everything—my struggling health, business, marriage—was telling me it was time to find my way home. To my true home. To my own definition of happiness.

But how?

The books I was reading were teaching me new ways of being. They were also showing me the destructive qualities of my old ways. In particular, how my obsession with outcome-focused achievement stopped me from making authentic connections with myself, activities, and other people.

Get the full Imperative Habit book on Amazon and learn the 7 Non-Spiritual practices for happiness, Health, Love and Success.

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