Lesson 2

Science of Happiness, Lesson 2

Finding Your Calling, Seneca, Aristotle, Mozart

After an introduction in the Science, some call it the Art of Happiness, we can now try to address one of the most important aspects of life:

-          Your profession

-          What will occupy most of your waking life

Many people are not able to choose what they do for a living. In countries like Somalia, South Sudan, many if not most men and women cannot be picky. They must try to put food on the table, no matter what.

But in the more developed countries, there are large groups that do not know that they have an important choice to make.

Some will get to work only for the paycheck. Others will be interested in promotions and a career that brings material benefits.

-          The happiest are those who have found their calling and that is their main activity - screen

Once you have found your calling and more generally the activities that you like, you are on the way to happiness

-          Finding Your Calling- on the screen

-          What you like

-          What you are good at

-          The activities that have meaning for you

-          Where they intersect

This is how you find your calling- by identifying what you like; you are good at and what has meaning for you. Where these groups of endeavors intersect you have to look and focus your attention and do that for the rest of your life. This is the ultimate bliss, to be able to “work” at what you love and would do even if you did not get paid to do it.

On a more general note, you would do well to look at the pie chart with your daily, weekly, monthly activities and the time you dedicate to each. Then, within the limits that we all have, you should try and cycle more if that is what you like, read positive psychology if it makes you feel better and so on.

-          A chart of activities to be inserted here, for the screen

Seneca has anticipated, such a long time ago, the findings of modern science, including the notion that time is relative and it is not so accurately measured in minutes and hours. The great thinker has said that

-          “It is not that we have a short time to live, but that we waste a lot of it. Life is long enough, and a sufficiently generous amount has been given to us for the highest achievements if it were all well invested. But when it is wasted in heedless luxury and spent on no good activity, we are forced at last by death’s final constraint to realize that it has passed away before we knew it was passing. So it is: we are not given a short life but we make it short, and we are not ill-supplied but wasteful of it… Life is long if you know how to use it. “…. To be inserted for the screen

Once you have established what your calling is, what the activities that give you pleasure and meaning are, you can dedicate them three hours per day and at the end of a period of ten years you will be among the best in the world in your domain.

-          Malcolm Gladwell, Outliers – this will show on the screen

-          The Eastern culture and its roots in the rice fields- for the screen again

-          3 hours per day for ten years- screen

In conclusion, you find the best possible profession, the occupations that offer you pleasure and meaning and as much as possible you dedicate more time to them. If your job is your calling, you can enjoy a minimum of 3 hours spent at it per day and then you have a good chance to join the ranks of

-          Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, The Beatles

-          We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.'-

-          Rituals

In the next session we will talk about the Rules of Happiness, then Meaning