Happiness cannot be traveled to, owned, earned, worn or consumed. Happiness is the spiritual experience of living every minute with love, grace and gratitude.

Happiness cannot be traveled to, owned, earned, worn or consumed. Happiness is the spiritual experience of living every minute with love, grace and gratitude.

DENIS WAITLEY

Are you truly happy?

How often do you feel like that?

Happiness is transient, whether we wish for this to be true, or not.

Happiness is like a butterfly that lights gently upon our finger and will linger for as long as it may… yet in the tiniest breeze, it may disappear, just as quickly as it arrived.

We are continuously seeking opportunities to be happy. We do this through personal relationships, material items, physical or virtual locations, consuming things, immersing ourselves into creations, and leveraging countless other variables that we perceive as making us happy.

We exchange large segments of our lives, working, in the pursuit of opportunities that we believe will make us happy… and we expect that the rewards we exchange these for will be truly commensurate.

But are they?

If someone said to you that all you need to be happy is your own ability to look within and find gratitude for the things in life for which you are truly blessed, would you accept that as so?

Whether we may wish to believe this or not, it is a simple experiment… so at a minimum, would we not be wise to empower ourselves to discover the magic of happiness by elevating the practice of gratitude in our overall daily regimen?

There is little harm in leveraging this most obvious of resources. It costs us nothing but a few minutes of time every day.

On Thanksgiving, we celebrate a holiday that reminds the entire population to give thanks for what we have. To appreciate all those who make our world special. To recognize that we are intricately intertwined within the fabric of so many others, each of whom are contributing in their unique way, to make our world more full, alive and special. So would we not be wise to leverage this most important resource and deploy it to our advantage more than once every 365 days?

As you find yourself commuting to wherever you are going to celebrate this holiday, here is a gentle reminder that happiness is not a destination, it is a way to travel.

Happy Thanksgiving!

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Written by Brian Weiner
When I was 5 years old, I discovered that the lemon tree in the backyard + dixie cups + water and sugar and I was in business. I have been hooked on that ever since. In 1979, I borrowed $14,000 to create a brand new product... photographic greeting cards with no text on the inside, called Paradise Photography. That was the start of The Illusion Factory. Since then, The Illusion Factory has been entrusted by all of the major studios and broadcasters with the advertising and marketing of over $7 billion in filmed, live, broadcast, gaming, AR, VR and regulated gaming forms of entertainment, generating more than $100 Billion in revenue and 265 awards for creativity and technology for our clients. When I took a break from film school at UCLA to move to Hawaii, my mother did not lecture me. Instead, she took 150 of her favorite aphorisms and in her beautiful calligraphy, wrote them artistically throughout a blank journal. That is the origin of the Lessons from the Mountain series. Since then, on my journeys to the top of a mountain to watch the sunrise, I have spent countless hours contemplating words of wisdom from the sages of all races, genders and political persuasions, constantly accumulating the thoughts to guide me on my life path. I hope you enjoy my books. Please let me know your thoughts, as I highly value your feedback!