On Wednesdays, I share posts, fables, songs, poems, quotations, TEDx Talks, cartoons, and books that have inspired and motivated me on my writing journey. I hope these posts will give writers, artists, and other creatives a mid-week boost.

A long-time fan of bestselling authors and coaches Marc and Angel Chernoff, I look forward to reading their emails and blog posts. Here’s an excerpt from a recent post:

In order to be optimistic, you have to be generally content with your life. In order to find this contentment, you have to look within yourself. Happiness after all is mostly an inside job.

If you constantly look for happiness outside yourself, by tying it to a specific achievement you must reach for example, you have two big problems:

You may never succeed. – If you feel like something is wrong with you and absolutely needs to be fixed ASAP, but you continuously fall short of fixing it, you will start yourself on a downward spiral where every time you fail to fix it you feel even worse. Eventually you will be unable to succeed simply because you no longer believe in your ability to do so.

You may succeed and decide you want even more. – If you feel like something is wrong with you and absolutely needs to be fixed, and you succeed at fixing it, you will likely find something new about yourself that needs fixing too. Maybe you’ve lost 20 pounds, but now you want tighter abs. Maybe you’ve paid down your debt, but now you want a bank account with a million dollars in it. You get the idea. It’s a never-ending cycle for your entire life. You never reach it, because you’re always looking for happiness from external achievements. You don’t find the happiness from within so you look to other sources.

Optimists set boundaries and disconnect long-term achievement from daily contentment and happiness — they give themselves permission to enjoy each moment without the need for anything more. This isn’t to say that they are complacent. They still set goals, build habits, help others, and grow, but they learn to indulge joyously in the journey, not the destination.

Note: I highly recommend subscribing to Marc & Angel’s website.