Jim Rohn taught me, “Happiness is not an accident, it’s an art. You don’t hope for happiness, you plan for happiness. You have to weave happiness like a tapestry.”

By the time you read this I will be in Monaco helping fulfill a lifelong dream for my father.

My dad is a big Formula One fan. The biggest and most celebrated race of the season is the Grand Prix of Monaco. My dad has never made it to “The Big One.” This year my wife Georgia and I are taking him and his wife. My dad is excited!

But I didn’t leave it there—the experience still needed weaving.

Months leading up to the trip I found an autographed vintage Monaco Grand Prix race poster from 1933 and had it framed and hand-delivered it to him. Later we sent him and his wife picture books on the South of France and the history of the race. Then we sent them all sorts of French accoutrements, sampling some of the things they would soon experience firsthand… weaving and weaving. And while we are there we have prepared all sorts of little surprises… continuing to weave.

How are your knitting skills?

Take a date night, an upcoming vacation, a companywide meeting, your next family night, something… and instead of just going through the motions, weave the experience like a tapestry—one layered with all sorts of wonderful textures to create a magnificent experience.

Try it and let me know how it goes. I’d love to hear about it.

Share your thoughts, ideas and experiences in the comments below. Use the ‘Like’ and ‘Share’ buttons below too.

…Maybe that’s the problem.

Pursuing happiness is like chasing a rainbow. The faster we go, the harder we try, the farther off it becomes.

I have learned that happiness is not a pursuit— it’s a choice. Happiness is a state of mind, obtainable at any time, in any moment of your choosing.

Licking a cone of creamy vanilla Häagen-Dazs makes me happy. But if someone knocks the cone out of my hand, I’m no longer happy. Happiness can be fleeting and unstable, like that ice cream cone. It’s really just a temporary sensation of pleasure, like entertainment, shopping, eating or sex.

Our beliefs about what will make us happy are heavily influenced by other people, Hollywood or commercial media. We race along this “hedonic treadmill” perpetually feeling like something is missing, like happiness is one toy, one trinket or one promotion away, but always just beyond our reach.

And still no rainbow. Disappointing career choices, heartbreaking relationships and midlife crises indicate that our assumptions about happiness and the pursuit of it often miss the mark.

It’s not the pursuit of happiness we should concern ourselves with, but rather the pursuit of fulfillment, purpose and significance.

If I have created a life of meaning in which I have a deep sense of purpose and value, that won’t change because someone knocks my ice cream cone over. Fulfillment is a state of existence, not a fleeting emotion.

What then creates a fulfilling life?

That’s the all-important question you have to answer for yourself. In fact, it’s the subject of the classic tome Man’s Search for Meaning (which I recommend!) by psychiatrist and concentration camp survivor Viktor Frankl. Typically a life of meaning requires deep relationships, a connection to a community, a sense of well-being, contribution to others and continual challenge, growth, learning and progress. Now those are some virtues worth pursuing. And once you start out on this pursuit, you will realize that crossing the finish line is not what’s most rewarding; the journey itself and the anticipation of achieving your goal is what’s so exhilarating and wonderful.

So what about being happy?

There are two ways you can choose to be happy at any moment.
One: Think about all you have to be grateful for. Some of the happiest people I have ever met are those who have comparatively few accoutrements to be happy about. When you feel gratitude, you cannot feel fear or worry at the same time. Gratitude washes it all away. If you are reading this, you’re breathing and above ground, so you have many blessings to be grateful for—just remind yourself at any moment you want to feel happy.

The second way to choose happiness—the best way, in my opinion—is to do something to make someone else happy. The person who bestows happiness always gets much more of it in return.

The June issue of SUCCESS is dedicated to the topic of happiness—what is it, how do you find it and how do you sustain it? An important enough of a discussion that we expanded the issue by an extra 20 pages (but same price!). And the CD in the issue is crammed with great content. We put my mentor Jim Rohn on it to address this important topic, as well as Deepak Chopra. There is also an excellent interview with the marketing guru Dan Kennedy on it. Don’t miss it.

I hope this issue of SUCCESS and this blog post not only brings you much happiness but also helps you in your pursuit of finding greater meaning, purpose and fulfillment in life.

How do YOU define happiness? We would love to hear your thoughts in the comments below. ‘Share’ and ‘Like’ this post as well.

As we discussed in the first post, gender and generations are changing the landscape of business and the dynamics of the work environment in dramatic fashion.

If you can learn to adapt your culture and your leadership you will thrive as we march forward into the future.

Don’t adapt and it could be curtains for your business and your prosperous future.

So I have two methods to suggest in helping you adapt, develop and thrive.

1. Reverse Mentoring
This is the best way to integrate the trading of skills, perspectives and experience throughout your organization. Have men be mentored by women and boomers mentored by millennials.

Have women teach men many of the communication, social and interpersonal skills that women are more naturally adept at and how a man should best communicate to, work with and help support women in the workplace.

Have millennials teach boomers new technology, web services, social media and how the should best communicate to, work with and help support their younger colleagues in the workplace.

You might be asking, why the one-way street?

Well, first, it’s where the greatest gap and need exists, and secondly, mentoring the other way will happen naturally through the relationship.

Women will learn a lot more about their male counterpart in the workplace and how they, too, can adopt some of the skills more natural or prevalent in males in the workplace, and certainly millennials will pick up important leadership, discipline and mindset insights from their more experienced boomer workmates.

2. Be a Student Leader
This action item is particularly for you—the leader of your organization. I want to suggest you go around asking lots of questions to those outside your gender and your generation.

The best way to find out how they tick is to ask them… and listen… really listen.

Here is a questionnaire document I made for you to go through this process. Download here

Suggestion:
Interview at least 3 people (5 is better) from the opposite gender and 3 (5 is better) people from a generation other than your own (particularly the one you understand the least and might frustrate you the most as a result).

Next Step:
Ask one of those from the opposite gender and different generation to mentor you on the topic. Ask them to be your go-to person to talk through interactions and experiences you are going through with people of their orientation and get feedback and advice from them.

Follow-up:
Let me know how it goes. I’d love to hear what ‘ahas’ you get when you interview those of different mind and background. You can find me on my blog, Facebook, LinkedIn or Twitter. I can’t wait to read your comments.

Take on these two suggestions and you will become a dynamic and influential leader of men and women… of all ages.
Wow, what power that will give you.

Share your thoughts, ideas and inspirations in the comments below. ‘Share’ and ‘Like’ below too.

We live in such incredibly dynamic times. These are exciting times to be alive… and challenging.

Most everything we have come to know is being disrupted and changed… seemingly all at once.

And for this conversation I’m not even referring to the technological or globalization changes that have impacted every function and facet of our business life.

I’m talking about the massive change in diversity we are undergoing in our workplace.

Not a diversity of race (although that is certainly another consideration with the impact of globalization), I’m talking about the diversity of gender and generations.

These changes are so significant that they are an ‘Adapt or Die’ threat level to the survival of your business over the next decade or two.

At the same time, if you DO adapt, and quickly, this can become one of your greatest advantages, helping you build a dynamic and thriving organization over the next several years, adding to your experience that these are the most exciting times to be alive.

Sex/Gender
A new milestone in U.S. history has been reached…

• According to the U.S. Census Bureau, there are more women working than men.
• Unemployment for men: 9.3% compared to 7.6% for women.
• 78% of the layoffs in recent years were men.
• More married women have unemployed husbands than ever before, a record 21%.
• Stay-at-home dads have doubled in recent years, making 1 out of 5 stay-at-home parents a father.

Add all that to this…

• 20.1 million women have bachelor’s degrees vs. 18.7 million men—a discrepancy of 1.4 million (it has been increasing since women passed men in 1996).
• And now, for the first time, women have passed men in gaining advanced college degrees.

All this gives us a very clear view of the future of our business culture. The era of yang-based business is over. It’s important you learn the yin way of doing business if you want to continue to thrive going forward.

Age/Generations
Add that to this interesting challenge…
In prior years, we have had three generations, sometimes four, but today because people are living and working longer…

• We will soon have five generations in the workplace—all at once.
• In four years Millennials (born between 1977 and 1997) will account for half of all the employees in the world, according to Harvard Business Review.
• It’s important to realize these are not all fresh from dorm rooms 20-somethings. By 2015 the oldest of this generation will be around 35, holding roles of significant leadership and executive management.
• Also, while the median age of the working population in the United States is around 36.7, in emerging markets, it is closer to 26 years old, with a larger population of younger workers.

Learning how to recruit, retain, motivate and leverage the diversity of experience, skills and capabilities of both genders and these different generations will be essential for you to stay competitive during these dynamic, very exciting and fast-changing times.

Now that you have this new awareness, in the next post I will give you two methods to help prepare and develop your internal culture and your leadership capability so you can not only adapt to survive, but actually thrive by leveraging these exciting shifts shaping our future.

How have you seen the workforce change? What have you done to adapt to these changes? Share your ideas and thoughts in the comments below.

We are talking about personal mastery and what the best in the world do to achieve their extraordinary levels of success.

If you missed the first post with traits ONE and TWO go here: Part 1

THREE
They are super particular about how they spend their time.

Because they are so passionate about what they do and their pursuit for excellence, they guard their time and attention to anything else vigorously. You too should have such vigilance.

Learn more in The Overachiever vs. Superachiever series: Installment #1, #2, #3, #4

FOUR
Those who end up achieving a level of personal mastery are willing to fail fast, fail often and continue to persevere.

This is an interesting attribute and one you might find difficult to get your emotional arms around. It seems that those who achieve mastery, which is really the opposite of failure, would be failure-averse, but it is quite the opposite.

In fact, many of these great masters thrive on failure. Since they are obsessed with improvement they know they can only experience growth through failure. They want to continually find their boundaries. That is how they understand their capabilities and find ways of breaking through.

Success is actually not that satisfying or exhilarating to them; it is the failure, thus the opportunity to tweak, iterate, improve and therefore get to the next level, which is thrilling to them.

Look at all those you admire; Branson, Trump, even Jobs has produced some duds. Google is constantly putting things out into the marketplace that flop. It’s how they find their winners and how they improve with great speed on those ideas they care about.

How about you? How much failure are you pushing yourself toward every day?

Obtaining mastery can only be achieved through a perpetual gantlet of failures. Do as Thomas Watson of IBM said: “If you want to speed up your success, double your rate of failure.” Start today.

Learn more in the Knocked on Your Tush series: Installment #1, #2, #3, #4

FIVE
Those who achieve a level of world-class excellence do it by read more »