Sometimes life just seems to keep hitting me over the head with the same information. Maybe it’s just something I really need to hear.

This time it’s about doing what makes you happy. It started with a book called “The Happiness Project” by Gretchen Rubin, a book that I’d seen on a TV show and then requested from the library. The whole book was interesting but the big takeaway for me was that there’s no right or wrong in terms of what makes you happy (subject to legality, I suppose). I’ve heard the saying “one man’s trash, another man’s treasure” over and over again but for some reason it suddenly struck me that only I know what makes me happy, it’s probably going to be completely different to everyone else, and that’s fine.

The next thing (shortly afterwards) was my daughter Nicole breaking her arm at a holiday Taekwon Do programme. Obviously, none of us were happy about that. However, since my son Daniel still wanted to attend the remaining sessions, I took Nicole along to watch. She lasted maybe 15 minutes before she was begging with me to let her join in (but carefully, and keeping one foot on the floor) because she enjoyed doing it so much and she hated missing out. This made me think; how many things do I have that I would do even if I had a great reason (or excuse) for not doing them?

This all felt like delayed confirmation of something Andrew and I had done about a year ago. At that time had a number of different businesses, some of which offered the professional services that we’re trained and qualified in on a freelance basis, and some that we’d fallen into or chosen because we could see the financial opportunity. The trouble was that the ones we’d got into for financial reasons were dragging us down. Even though the financial potential was still there, we really didn’t want to do the work because it just wasn’t enjoyable. So we just stopped the businesses that weren’t “us” and now we’re much happier working on projects that we enjoy and know we’re good at.

Of course, this doesn’t mean that we’ll enjoy every second of every day that we spend working on our chosen businesses. There will be things that we’d prefer not to do and days when it all turns pear shaped. However, for me, knowing that I get to do the work I choose to do each day is, to me, worth the trade-off of the huge dollars I (supposedly) could have earned doing something I didn’t enjoy. (And hopefully the tasks I don’t currently enjoy will either become easier and more fun as I get better at them, or I’ll look at outsourcing!)

So what’s making me happy right now?

• Figuring out my first ever blog post!
• Processing tax returns (weird, I know, but that’s okay!)
• Doing the adults’ dance in Nicole’s dance school’s year end show
• Reading for fun
• Sunday mornings with many coffees and the Sunday paper puzzles
• Sunday afternoons cooking meals for the rest of the week
• Blobbing in front of the TV with Andrew (and the kids, depending on content)
• Eating the food the kids are cooking (with increasingly little supervision)

How about you? Please leave a comment with your feedback or opinions.