Happiness Is the New Rich. Inner Peace Is the New Success.

Happiness Is the New Rich

Money doesn’t make you happy. Read that again.

You’re smart and you already knew that. It’s some of the most cliche advice you will ever receive in your life. The focus in the self-help industry has shifted away from money in recent years. We’ve all read the headlines of a rich person who got famous and seems to have more problems than one could ever imagine.

Billie Eilish, Charlie Sheen, Ellen Degeneres, Chandler from the tv show Friends, Elon Musk and his bad jokes, former political power Donald Duck … Do you need me to keep going?

These people have plenty of money. They seem to be untouchable, yet they have all the problems of the world on their shoulders. They’re not happy — they’re endlessly chasing a form of happiness that doesn’t exist. Call it toxic happiness if you will.

The new generation of rich people doesn’t have money. They have found happiness. Where? In strange places they weren’t expecting.

That’s what happened to me. I found happiness after years of life-threatening mental illness. It came from a strange place: a blog about success. The blog wasn’t the cure. The blog was the start of a different way of thinking.

It took seven years to understand this is real happiness:

• Time to do what you want.
• A human character you’re proud to have created.
• A mission slightly bigger than yourself.
• A family you love and get to spend time with.

Money is an information system that lives in a boring excel spreadsheet. Happiness is a feeling you get when you look back on where you’re at in life and gently smile at how far you’ve come.

The new rich aren’t chasing money anymore. They’ve found real happiness through the cliche parts of life that are overlooked.

Inner Peace Is the New Success

Inner peace is the opposite of being stressed or anxious. You get inner peace by gaining perspective. Let me give you an example. I spoke to a guy from work. We disagreed about how to divide our customer portfolios. I told him this:

“You can have all the customer relationships you want. You can hoard them. But if you die tomorrow, how many of those customers will be at your funeral? And if one or two decide to come along, how long will it take for them to get over you and become somebody else’s customer? Answer: 48 hours at the most.”

This is perspective. The same scenario applies to your employer. If you were involved in a car accident and didn’t make it out alive, how long would it take your employer to replace you? Would they be emotional about it?

Nope.

They’d spawn up a new employee to sit in your office chair in no time at all. So why do you give more than 50% of your life to an employer and take the whole relationship seriously? They don’t care. They don’t lack empathy and they’re not unkind. It’s just that your employer has perspective on your role in their company and the value of your life.

Once you have perspective on what matters, your life changes.

Inner peace to me is having somebody run into my car and smiling at them.

“It’s okay. You didn’t mean it. You must be having a rough day. How about we do coffee and exchange license plates. We could even eat cheeseburgers.”

That’s inner peace. Something bad happens and you’re happy about it. Why? You expect bad things to happen. Bad things are part of life. People make mistakes. Cars fly off the road and into yours. People say things they don’t mean without thinking beforehand.

Jay Shetty is a former monk. He is one of the most famous personalities on the internet. The success of Jay Shetty is the result of all the years of inner peace he learned as a monk. I’m not joking when I say monks and teachers are the next generation of successful people.

Success used to be get more.
Success is now have less to get more inner peace.

When you take away stress and anxiety from life, your mind has room to breathe (figuratively speaking). You can see things other people can’t see. You can reflect on your life and join the dots of your future in an entirely different way. Success is simply living your life the way you were supposed to: in peace.

The inner peace of knowing you have enough and are enough, is a thought worth thinking deeply about.

Health Is the New Wealth

If you are young, then you’re a billionaire.

Warren Buffet is one of the richest investors in the world. He has lots of money, but not a lot of time left. His diet to this day includes Coca-Cola and McDonalds. Warren would do anything to trade some (or all) of his money for more time on earth. Warren is poor because time is against him. Life extension technology is still some time off.

When you see time as wealth, you won’t trade your time for money any longer. You will accumulate assets that help you buy your time back, and take the time you have and increase its value.

When I go to eat food, the first question I ask myself is, “Will this food give me energy or take away energy?” Energy leads to a better quality of life. When you’re healthy, you feel better. When you feel better, you feel wealthy. Wealth through health is an opportunity all of us have access to. How do you look after your health? You already know the answers.

Eat plants, exercise daily, practice mindfulness, focus on the present, protect your sleep, spend time in nature, build strong human bonds with others.

Kindness Is the New Cool

Selfishness ruled the world when I began using social media. It was all about how much you could extract from the internet for yourself. Bragging and selfies dominated. Showing off was standard. Being rude to people in the comments section was acceptable and expected.

Then the online selfishness movement quietly changed.

The trend started on Youtube with channels such as “That was Epic.” Then kindness infected Zucks’ empire, Facebook, through pages such as Humankind and Try Not To Cry. Even on you-must-keep-a-straight-face-and-be-professional platforms like LinkedIn have their own kindness movements.

Why is kindness the new cool? Duh … it feels good.

It’s our secret naughty fantasy. We shouldn’t love kindness. It feels tacky, gimmicky even. But kindness, no matter how small, makes you feel something. You can’t resist being attracted to kindness if you are human.

Self-help brought kindness back in fashion. Let’s help to keep it that way with small acts of random kindness wherever possible.

Closing Thought

What is timeless always comes back in fashion. The problem is, humanity forgets about what matters. All it takes is a global event such as a pandemic to bring us back together again.

Don’t become obsessed with money. Focus on the removal of unhelpful forms of stress and your version of happiness. Don’t spend the majority of your time in the future with your thoughts. Come back to the present to find inner peace. Don’t trade your energy for garbage inputs.

See energy as health, and health as true wealth. Trade money for health. Health buys you more time. Lastly, trade selfishness for small moments of selflessness. If you can learn to go beyond your own survival, you can discover higher levels of living.

The self-improvement movement finally came full circle.
Rich people are those who are happy.

The good life is happiness money can’t buy.