by Marc Halpern, Part Time Investors LLC
June 15, 2024
In preparation for the “Offshore Goals Retreat” (Nov 10-17, 2024) during which I will be presenting advanced strategies and practical guidelines for setting and meeting your goals for simultaneous happiness and prosperity, I created some very simple tools that will help you:
Define your needs and wants to achieve happiness.
Differentiate between those needs and wants that require not much more than changing your mindset and those that require more significant resources such as additional cash flow and/or additional net worth.
Making purposeful investments that match the amount and type of resources you need to engage in activities that you enjoy without causing harm.
One purpose of this article is to help you focus with clarity on your endgame goals while preparing you for your customized practical path to reach those goals.
The second purpose of this article is to help you prepare material customized for your personal situation that you will use in workshop sessions that I will conduct offshore in November 2024 and onshore starting in 2025.
Happiness Goal
It is essential to start this discussion by stating how to set the overarching measurable goal for happiness. The measurable goal for achieving happiness is to MAXIMIZE THE NUMBER OF SECONDS THAT YOU ENJOY WITHOUT CAUSING HARM TO YOURSELF OR OTHERS from this moment until the end of your life.
You can learn the full details about the definition of happiness and how to measure happiness in my book “Now Be Happier” available on Amazon and described in my TEDx talk “How to Measure Happiness and Be Happier.”
List of Activities You Enjoy Without Causing Harm
Since the goal is to maximize the number of seconds that you enjoy without causing harm, the first step when setting this goal is to IDENTIFY every activity that you enjoy that does not cause harm. That includes activities that you anticipate you will enjoy at any time in your future life. It is crucial to compose this list of activities that you enjoy since we need a target to shoot for or else we will be leaving unrealized enjoyment on the table and never even know it.
For that reason, you should really invest at least 15-30 minutes writing down every single activity that you enjoy to any degree whether it is daily (reading?), occasional (going to a concert) or once-in-a-lifetime (skydiving? travel to the North Pole?). Don’t be surprised if you add 100 activities to your list of things that you already enjoy o