“Happiness is not something ready made. It comes from your own actions.” (Dalai Lama)
So many men spend their whole lives searching for happiness. We’re programmed to look for it outside ourselves. Go buy the thing. Go do the thing. Book the vacation. Find anything that can take us out of ourselves for a while.
And when the people closest to us aren’t happy, we do the same thing in reverse. I hear it from men all the time:
“My wife told me she isn’t happy.”
And the first reaction is the one most of us would have, “I need to fix this. I need to do something to make sure she’s happy.”
Here’s what I know from where I sit today. It’s no one’s responsibility to control our happiness. It’s ours. It’s an internal job, and it comes from our own actions, from the work we do inside ourselves.
This season, I’m finishing a book. All ten chapters are on the page now, and none of them came ready-made. Every page came out of years of doing the work, and a lot of that work happened at five thirty on Friday mornings with my mentor, Nick, saying things out loud and hearing them reflected back. The book isn’t the happiness. The man who did the work to write it is.
Here’s what happened this week that drove that idea home for me.
For a stretch of time, I ran dream meetings at my company, helping our people go after their dreams. One man, I’ll call him Daniel, came in and told me he and his wife were taking out a loan, fifteen to twenty thousand dollars, for fertility treatment. They were already financially strapped.
So I asked him, “Why do you want to have a baby with your wife?”
He said he wanted to show her they could do something together, to be the man she’d always wanted. And she wanted to give him a baby so he could be a real father.
“When you bring a baby into this world,” I asked, “who is it about?”
“It’s about the baby,” he said.
What do you think he realized? They were each reaching for something ready-made to fill the feeling of being incomplete inside them. He went home, they talked, they cried, and they decided to save up for a house instead.
I’ve watched a version of the same thing for thirty years in my own father. He’s one of the most selfless men I know. Call him at three in the morning and he’s already in the car.
He’s spent his whole life building toward the day he’d finally be free to do the things he always said he’d do. At seventy-five, he’s still doing the same dance he was doing at forty-five. Someday, when this is done, then I’ll live.
Is that happiness? Or is it a happiness he’s waiting to have handed to him, ready-made, at the end of the road?
Someday is where a man goes to die.
Men, look at how many of us have found devices and vices to fill that need. The phone in your hand. The thing in your cart. They’re all ready-made. They’re on the shelf, they’re easy, and they fill nothing.
The work you do on yourself is the only thing that builds something real. And once you find that, there’s nothing that can take it from you.
Here’s the part most men miss. When you’ve done that work, when you’ve built the man, you finally have something to give the people around you. You can only give what you have a surplus of.
This week’s lesson: Nobody can hand you happiness ready-made, and you can’t hand it to anyone else. Build it in yourself first, then give it away.
