Ok, with this post, I am going to give you a personal secret on how I have finally became a happier person. No, I don’t think I have achieved total happiness, but I am on my way to it. I bring back the quote I ended the last happiness post with.

“Don’t ask yourself what the world needs. Ask yourself what makes you come alive and then go do that. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive.”

— Howard Thurman

I think a major part of being happy is to find out what you are passionate about and then direct your energies to making that happen. Of course, for most of us those things will change over our lives, so don’t expect your search for happiness will be a once and for all discovery. In my life, I have discovered numerous things that I have been passionate about. But, most of them have been from midlife forward. Before that, I was too busy trying to figure out who I was and why I was different from those around me. As a teenager, I just didn’t have a clue, and had literally no help in discovering my “purpose”. That was frustrating and the beginning of some pretty depressive times in my life.

I became an engineer simply because that is what I father dreamed of being. I was going to live that life for him. I loved my father very much, but his low self-esteem rubbed off on me as to how to live life. It took me a long time to get over that feeling. I loved to read, but never believed I could actually be any good at writing. That would come later.

The one thing that drove me to my first actual passion was the invention of the personal computer. I discovered that I had a real knack at programming one. Fortunately, thanks to a higher-up in the corporation I worked for, that passion was fed and grew over the last ten-years of my corporate life. Success at that passion naturally led to others.

Passions have come and gone in the last twenty-five years. It just seems when I become good at something, I get bored with it and move on to the next thing. My longest running passion is blogging here at RJsCorner. I have been at it for fourteen years now. Even this passion has not been static. It has evolved into numerous areas. The latest is to try to get people who are not familiar with Aspergers, autism and deafness to understand that those of us who wear those labels are pretty much the same as everyone. You don’t need to be afraid of us. We just have different ways to look at things and sometimes have different gifts than most others.

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I am going to end this post with a secret I have learned about being happy.

Don’t get fixated on being unhappy. Recognize and appreciate it when you find even small slices of happiness. That recognition will then just naturally lead into more happiness.