An Essential Guide to Fullfilment and Success: How to Live a Life of Happiness

The laughter, tears, and sighs. The earth beneath our feet and the star-speckled skies. How beautiful, how precious, is the feeling of being alive. The boundless possibilities that life contains. The freshness and wonder that it always retains. How much can we do with it but how few of us ever dare? To give life a second stare.  

Life is precious, a fact that we all know. We want to cherish it and live it to the fullest. We want fulfillment. But few of us live a life of fulfillment and satisfaction. Especially in this day and age when everything around us is more confusing than ever and our lives are like a boat with no anchor, finding fulfillment seems like a joke and a futile effort.

But fulfillment is not as far removed from our lives as we think. Almost anybody can achieve it. Even if we don't want to put too much effort we can get near to it at least or in its general direction. 

Here is a guide on how to live a life of happiness and success. 

Follow your Heart's Desire

Yes, it is really that simple. Fulfillment lies in following your heart's desire. Not the ordinary everyday desires based on feelings, but the desire that lives deep down and manifests itself time and time again. This can often be tricky because life is rarely simple and analyzing yourself and finding out what you actually want can be a daunting task. 

There are many things that you can do to find out what you really want, but it all boils down to thinking about your life and interests and finding out what lies there. You will make mistakes, no doubt. You might choose something that you don't actually desire. But such mistakes and errors are not a problem as long as you keep going. 

What really matters is that you act in what you believe you want from life. Act and find out. If you will never act, you will never find out. For example, if you have a deep passion for some career path, pursue it. If you want to go skydiving, go for it. Work towards your goal, your desires, and find out what you really want.

Keep reading or you can read about what not to do in order to find fulfillment. 

Believe in Yourself

An important thing in achieving your goal is a strong belief. A strong belief not only gives you strength, but it also inspires others. When you believe in yourself, your whole disposition changes. You exude strength that others can feel. You show the best of yourself. You become more confident about your final goal and more hopeful about achieving it. 

One of the factors in the success of people like Steve Jobs and Elon Musk is that they believed in themselves. Only then they could have inspired others. Joan of Arc led a defeated French army to victory after victory. Her unwavering faith in her purpose had a large role in her success.

Read more about How to inspire yourself to work hard.

Prioritize tasks and goals

But how to believe in yourself? It seems almost impossible at first, but it can be done. Setting priorities and goals can help you move in this direction. Set some very small goal that helps your ideal and achieve it. For example, you want to become a writer? Read a book or an article about writing. This can boost your confidence and faith greatly. 

In the same vein, you can set larger goals towards achieving your ideal. And then you can move towards them by following a routine or by prioritizing them. The more successful you are in doing this, the more quickly you will gain more confidence.  

Critical thinking: Importance

You will face lots of hurdles in achieving your goal and ideal. You will struggle and you will be thwarted. Sometimes things will not turn out according to your expectations. Your theories and inferences about your reality and about your idea of life will fail.

This is the place where thinking comes and plays its part. Sometimes people keep acting on what they believe, but they don't make much progress. The reason is that they don't think about their mistakes. They just keep making the same mistakes over and over again. 

If you really want to achieve your ideal, you will have to think like a scientist. You will act on one hypothesis and make errors. You will then think about those errors and make necessary corrections. Then you will act again. 

If you keep doing this for a while you will make fewer and fewer mistakes which will, in turn, make you more and more confident in your idea and goal. The result will be that you will believe more in your idea and in yourself. You will achieve your goal more quickly. 

If you keep acting and don't think much, you become delusional. Eventually, you make a mistake from which there is no turning back and you completely lose faith in your idea and yourself. Hence thinking is very important if you want to succeed in living according to your ideal. 

Thinking is what makes us who we are. Here is an article on thoughts and thinking.

Don't fear mistakes learn from mistakes

In the process of achieving your goal, you will make a lot of mistakes. Most people lose faith when they make a mistake that they can't handle, emotionally or otherwise. But if you want to progress, you will have to prepare yourself for mistakes and errors. 

Human beings can't live without making mistakes. It is only wrong to keep persisting in your mistakes when you know them. When you don't know, don't blame yourself too much. Just correct them and move on.

The importance of self discipline

When you will start on your path to action, you will have to make one decision again and again. On one side you will find comfort and things that give temporary satisfaction and pleasure. On the other side will be your goal. You will have to decide which way you will go and you will have to make that decision every morning, noon, and evening. 

This is one of the most critical parts of achieving your goal. If you succeed in this, you will increase your chances by leaps and bounds. Most people unfortunately fail here. And therefore are unable to succeed. 

Living with a purpose

Life in this world is a struggle between people who act in what they believe. The rest of the people are either spectators or instruments in someone else's hand for their goals. This is a harsh reality, but it is true. 

If you live a purposeless life you are a means to someone else's ends. You become an empty boat in a sea that the winds throw wherever they want. Most people in this world live like that. They are directed by their environment, society, and peers. So find a purpose and throw your life in it. It is far better than being just a stair's step for somebody and nothing more. 

The importance of Action

Some people when they realize that they are nothing more than pawns in other's games think of just pausing life. In theory, it might seem like a good idea to abandon everyone and live your life on an imaginary island, but in reality, you can't live like that. 

Actions create meaning in our life. If we stop acting, we start to lose meaning. And meaningless is a dangerous thing. It can suck all color from life and can lead one to depression and suicide. 

People turn to media and the internet when they become actionless. They constantly feed themselves with meaning from outside without ever thinking about what they are feeding their brains with. It eventually leads to a distorted view of reality or an inner conflict. This can tear a life apart and can cause unimaginable pain. 

The pain is far less if one starts acting on one's goals. No doubt that hurdles, other people's actions, and life itself cause pain, but when you have a goal towards which you are moving this pain becomes temporary. 

The importance of people who act and think

Most people in this world fall into one of the two categories. Either they act and don't think. Or they think, but don't act. In simple words, they are either philosophers or laborers.

The philosopher keeps living in his own world of thoughts, and the laborer keeps himself busy with work. Such people don't bring any change in this world. They just become wheels in the system of civilization.

To bring any kind of change or progress, we need people who can think and act. Civilizations that have more of such people are more flexible and have more potential to succeed. Civilizations that don't have such people become autonomous machines wandering purposelessly until some other civilization comes and steers them in whatever direction they want.   

So find a goal for yourself and start building your life around it by your actions. And think. Most people don't. Set a goal, act on it, and keep thinking. You will find fulfillment in your life.