The road to success isn't necessarily one of motivation and hard work. Happiness and enjoyment should be the path we follow. When I make a sale, I'm not usually happy because I make a sale, but rather I make the sale because I am happy and enjoy working with my customers.

I love the song from South Pacific called Happy Talk, which links happiness, dreams, and success. It's about life.

Happy talk, keep talkin' happy talk,
Talk about things you'd like to do.
You got to have a dream,
If you don't have a dream
How you gonna have a dream come true?
-- Happy Talk Music by Richard Rodgers and Lyrics by Oscar Hammerstein II

In setting goals and making up plans of action, drudgery should never enter the equation. Even though you know that you will be working hard, what you're really doing is dreaming and in that dreaming you should be enthusiastic and happy. How else you "gonna" have a dream come true?

Dr. Sonja Lyubomirsky, happiness guru from the University of California, Riverside, says, "Happy people frequently experience positive moods and these positive moods prompt them to be more likely to work actively toward new goals and build new resources."

Building new resources generally means meeting more people, learning more, and keeping an open mind. The whole world is available for us to play in. Dr. Lyubomirsky also says, "When people feel happy, they tend to feel confident, optimistic, and energetic and others find them likable and sociable. Happy people are thus able to benefit from these perceptions."

There is a great audio presentation by Maxell Maltz, M.D. based on his "best seller" Psycho-Cybernetics. It's abridged and still runs for four hours and twenty-minutes. You can download it directly to your computer and listen to it at your leisure.

Happiness and success are habits. So are failure and misery. Habits can be changed, and Psycho-Cybernetics shows you how. Focusing on the mind-body connection, Psycho-Cybernetics demonstrates how to turn crises into creative opportunities, dehypnotize yourself from false beliefs, and celebrate new freedom from fear and guilt. With this expanded edition of the classic best seller, Dr. Maxwell Maltz personally teaches you more fully than ever before his techniques of "emotional surgery."
- Ad copy for Psycho-Cybernetics

Psycho-Cybernetics is a fun program to listen to, and it ties happiness to success. Aristotle said, "Happiness depends upon ourselves." We need to take the first step.

We are successful because we are happy, not the other way around. We are motivated because we are having a good time, and having a good time means we're happy.

People like being around happy people. It's fun and it's catching. Who wants to be around someone who is constantly mad at everyone? Abraham Lincoln once said, "Most people are as happy as they make up their minds to be." That is so true.

Are you happy? You should be. What's life without being happy? What's success without being happy? It could be boring and lifeless . . . but then it wouldn't be success.

Don Doman

Don Doman is a published author (How to Produce a First-Class Video for Your Business: Work with the Pros or Do It Yourself, Market Research Made Easy, and Out of Work? Get Into Business: a Guide for the Middle-Aged Entrepreneur. He has also been a corporate producer for over two decades.

Don and his wife Peg are local food and theatre critics in the Pacific Northwest, where they write about their adventures.