Your Personal Breakthrough Blog Home About Richard Contact Products Ask Richard! Relationship Help Book Reviews Testimonials. Which is Better: Being Right or Being Happy? by Richard on scalesYou may have noticed, a presupposition in the title of this article! Which is that rightness and happiness are somehow mutually exclusive. Whilst I’d accept that’s debatable… I want you to run with it for a couple of minutes, please. Let me have my say and then you can have yours, okay? ’Coz I’m about to prove a point. The fact is, you’ll never meet anyone who agrees with you about absolutely everything. Which means you can be sure of never running out of people to pick an argument with. It also means that beliefs, along with dreams, desires and personalities, are as unique as fingerprints. Our differences are at the very least something to get curious about. They may be something to be followed or influenced by, once you’ve done your own due diligence to check if they’re a good fit for you. And certainly they should be celebrated. A world full of clones would indeed be very dull. And yet, right now and throughout the history of humanity, people actually will kill each other if their beliefs clash. The need to be right actually stems from a deeper need to be loved and accepted. Imagine if you were constantly told that you were wrong about everything; not just facts, but about your decisions, beliefs, ideas and ambitions. You would have to escape somehow. That would be severe mental torture, wouldn’t it? Sometimes I find it useful to examine both extremes of a position to see the bigger picture… so take a moment if you would and imagine the opposite scenario: that you have been assured that you’re right about absolutely everything all the time. You’d surely be so unbearably smug and arrogant that you’d lose all your friends, even supposing you could ever make any in the first place! “The Big Bang Theory” finds clever humor in this: A group of geeks, who manage to be friends with one another because they have their awkward geekiness in common, are unable to function in most other ways socially. One character is struck dumb in the presence of a woman, for example. Again, as viewers we see the humor, (as do the writers obviously!), in that their knowledge has rendered them inadequate people. No matter how clever you are, no matter how certain you are of a belief or an opinion, what we all need from life is love. I chose the word “need” not “want” in that last sentence with deliberate care. Love is necessary for our survival both as individuals and as a species. It isn’t the icing on the cake, it’s the entire cake and main course too. Love is happiness. When you love your life and your fellow human beings, not to mention the planet and certainly not forgetting your family, you will be half happy. When just one or two of them love you back, your happiness will be complete. When that’s going on, who cares if you’re right about everything? Q.E.D. (Told you I was right!) … well that’s my opinion, anyway :) Do you think I proved a point? I would love to hear from you…. With love, Richard
Posted on: Sat, 25 Oct 2014 10:18:50 +0000