I’m going to give you a simple & effective overview on the fundamentals of creating a life of personal happiness…

Because, so often, our outlook on our lives gets clouded by the present day routines & details in our lives, which usually makes us less aligned overall with effectively creating or maintaining the amazing lives we want until the day we die. This type of mistake often deceivingly perpetuates the status quo or leads us to outright mediocrity. And it often happens by unintentionally losing focus & connection with one’s personal vision and the core strategies & actions for realizing it in real life.

Fuck that! Let’s try to help knock that personal vulnerability out by simplifying the core fundamentals of envisioning, planning, & pursuing the ongoing life of happiness we desire, so that we don’t lose it & stagnate as time goes by.

I find that by simplifying things and focusing on the impactful fundamentals, it is easier to stay in focus & alignment with the life you want, and continue moving the ball forward in the right direction, despite all of curve balls life throws.

So here we go…

[Skip to End Summary]

I’m going to layout a perspective & structure to sum up the pursuit of a very happy personal life.

1. Primary Targets

Most of what people really want out of their lives, which makes them really happy, falls within these primary focuses…

- Being who you want to be.
- Consistently doing what you want to do.
- Having the relationships you want to have.
- Consistently doing what you want to do with these people.

How would you feel if these core elements were really well taken care of for the long-term of your life? Pretty damn good, I’m sure. I think most people, myself included, would have a notably more happy life if this were the case.

So these are the simplified primary targets of one’s life. When life is getting stressful or clouded, just realign your mindset & focus to these primary targets of what your personal life experience is ultimately about.

2. Visual Structure

But there is a specific way to perceive these primary targets. I want you to mentally chunk these down into a specific visual & conceptual structure.

Notice that the first 2 targets focus personally on you. So let’s chunk these together, like this…

Self:
- Being who you want to be.
- Consistently doing what you want to do.

And the other 2 targets focus on you along with other people you want in your life. So let’s chunk these together, like this…

Connections:
- Having the relationships you want to have.
- Consistently doing what you want to do with these people.

However, there is another distinction to help chunk these targets down in an even more meaningful way.

Notice that, in the previous chunks (Self & Connections), the first stated targets focus on the static accomplishment of being or having and that the second stated targets focus on the continual actions of doing.

So let’s chunk these two separate lists into an integrated grid structure, like this…

Now, let’s take this grid one step further and make it more visual with a simplified graphical version…

Within the self focus… There is the static accomplishment of who you want to be, represented in the first circle with you on a pedestal. And then there are the continual actions of personally doing what you want to do, represented by the first zigzag arrow.

Within the connections focus… There is the static accomplishment of the relationships you want to have, represented in the second circle with multiple people figures. And then there are the continual actions of socially doing what you want to do with these people, represented by the second zigzag arrow.

This should serve as a simple image that you can recall to identify the primary targets of what end results you want to experience throughout your life.

Overall, just remember the two circles & the two arrows. Then you’ll likely recall the personal & social context as well as static & continual targets.

3. Target Categories

Now, here is where we start to customize this structure to your personal identity.

Life ultimately comes down to the details of each individual scenario that transpires, so we need to account for this basic fact within our general structure without over complicating it.

The answer is to establish overall custom categories within the primary targets.

So what we want to do is simply reflect upon what types of results & experiences you want within the defined primary targets and then list out the core categories that represent them.

You could use generally vague categories of life, such as health, career, hobbies, etc. However, it is usually much more meaningful & impactful to personalize the perspective to your own unique identity & brand of life, based on the custom experience & lifestyle you desire.

For example, my target categories would simply mirror the personal “themes” of who I uniquely am and what consistently turns me on in life, which I just recently defined for myself. For me, these are:

If I felt like it, I might list out some specific subcategories within these, but this will work well enough as is. Beyond this tool, you’ll certainly want to list out the specific goals & visions you have for your life. This step is simply for categorizing them within the context of this overall structure.

Your target categories can certainly change & evolve over time. Don’t stress out over perfection here. Just do a decent job & optimize it over time as you make new distinctions & evolve as a person.

Also, another thing regarding my sample target categories… Notice that I have one single unified list of target categories that fit within each of the defined primary targets. You will probably have separate lists with some overlap. My list here happens to be a special case due to my recent advanced breakthrough on the core themes of my personal identity. So you’ll likely want to try going for separate lists, at this point, based on each primary target.

Take one minute and, off the top of your head, list out what your target categories might be within each of the primary targets…

4. Secondary Life Infrastructure

We’ve been talking about the “What” within the life we want for ourselves. Now, it is time to address the “How” in regards to consistently creating the desired “What” in our lives, until the day we die.

What we want to accomplish within our life is the ongoing fulfillment of our primary targets. If we consistently have these fulfilled in our daily experience of life, then our happiness is going to be sky high. However, it takes an ongoing pursuit, involving effort & resources, to produce the conditions necessary to consistently fulfill our primary targets and ultimately experience this great life overflowing with happiness.

Our desire is to be & do what we want to do, with those we want to do it with. Our desire is not to spend our life working for the resources & developing the capability to pursue the experiences we want. Our desire consists completely of having the actual experiences themselves. We simply want exactly what we want…always.

Yet, as we said, we aren’t going to have our dream life handed to us on a daily basis. So we have to ongoingly work to produce the life we want. However, we don’t have to go about this in the weak, monotonous, & laboring fashion that most human beings do throughout their entire lives. Instead, we want to build infrastructure within our lives that helps predictably keep our primary targets fulfilled. This is the secondary infrastructure that helps support & ongoingly produce the first-tier infrastructure of our primary targets.

Here are the likely primary categories of secondary infrastructure that you will consistently need handled in your life, in order to keep your primary targets fulfilled & ensure stable levels of heightened happiness…

- Personal Development: You are the primary creator of your life experience and the end result we are trying to create, within the biological machine that is you, is the consistent emotion of happiness. If you try to function as a low-performing & inadequately maintained machine, then it will be much harder to keep the stable production of happiness at a high level over a span of years & decades. So you must make personal development a part of your life, such as handling key aspects of your health, fears, habits, beliefs, knowledge, skills, etc.

- Relationship Building: Human connection is a fundamental component of personal happiness and an integral part of our structure’s primary targets. Yet, people & relationships are not inherently static or fixed. They must be qualified, acquired, developed, & maintained. So deepening & maintaining your current relationships along with qualifying & acquiring new one’s is a key part of your secondary life infrastructure, which ultimately allows you to have the people & relationships you desire and do the precise things you want to do with them that lights you & them up with great pleasure.

- Experience Flow: You want to do what you want to do, but you can’t always do what you want or precisely how you want to do it. In order to more often do what you want, when you want, how you want, you need to create an ongoing flow of opportunity for the custom tailored experiences you desire. Just like a capitalist needs to establish quality deal flow of investment opportunities, you will want to create a quality flow of pleasurable experiences to indulge in throughout your life. This is all about producing what you want to actively do with your free time in life, which we defined in the “continual” chunk of the primary targets.

- Money: Virtually everything in life takes some type of resource in the form of a product or service, which all cost money. The more of an optimized life of modern happiness you desire, the more likely your financial requirements will go up. So, money making & money management, is a fundamental piece of secondary infrastructure that is necessary to enable the fulfillment of your primary targets. The first step is to figure out how much money you need to fund your secondary infrastructure and primary targets. You might easily find out that your unfiltered desires require millions of dollars per year to securely fund the infrastructure & operations of your life. You can & likely should create stair-stepping levels of your life outlook, such as low-medium-high, to make your progression more enjoyable & predictable, instead of all or nothing. Sharp distinctions & policies for allocation of your money is very important as well.

- Free Time: Ideally, beyond the physical maintenance of our bodies, our time would all be free time that we get to invest into the fulfillment of our primary targets. However, in reality, we have to develop & maintain each component of this secondary life infrastructure, in order to be able to have the great life we want. Overall, depending upon where you are at in your desired life, it is usually worth it to continue trading a chunk of your free time for the ongoing development & maintenance of your secondary infrastructure, so that you can continue enjoying more of the end results you desire. This is a fundamental and very often necessary trade-off of one of the most basic & finite components of your human life, your time. By giving it away to something that doesn’t produce the experience & happiness you want, you are permanently losing that time forever, yet it is often necessary to make that investment to get the future return on quality of life you desire. However, you can aim for the result of systematizing & delegating the development & maintenance of your secondary life infrastructure, to free up your personal time. There is often no inherent reason why you have to do this task yourself for the rest of your life. Think of it like eating a well prepared meal at a restaurant. Most people want to enjoy the experience of eating the meal, but would rather skip the work & supervision of making the meal as much as they can. Same ultimately goes for the plumbing of your life’s infrastructure. So, do what you got to do, but maybe have a concrete goal of moving up the ladder from mail room of your personal life corporation to simply being chairman of the board, while your employed capital, systems, & workers ensure that the machine of your life operates & grows like clockwork. As chairman provide minimal oversight and maintain 90+% free time to indulge in your best personal desires. This principle goes for a simple & low-key lifestyle as well as an outrageous, jet set, hedonistic bomb of a lifestyle. Trade away your free time very shrewdly throughout your life.

Your first-tier infrastructure is made of up the direct components involved with fulfilling your primary targets. Your secondary life infrastructure is the necessary components that continually produce the first-tier infrastructure. It is the fundamental “How” behind the ongoing creation of the life experience you intensely desire.

In this section, this model of pursuing personal happiness in life may have started to sound a bit grand & formal. I don’t want to overcomplicate it, but I just want to stress how fundamentally essential these basic component categories are for making your dreams an actual reality…

- Personal Development
- Relationship Building
- Experience Flow
- Money
- Free Time

Defining what you specifically need to develop within each of these categories of secondary infrastructure is up to you. I strategically talk about these areas of human achievement all of the time and there are tons of resources & expertise available out in the world. At least craft a simple & decent plan within these categories for your specific primary targets to start with, and then optimize & iterate it over time.

Remember that all strategic pursuits of meaningful results in life involve both the objectives of ceasing opportunities & mitigating risks. Also, you’ll want to consider the dynamic of what I call the 1st & 2nd Levels of Human Achievement. And ensuring you keep effective alignment between your secondary infrastructure & personal primary targets as life goes on is key.

When you have the a simple & decent plan for these categories of secondary life infrastructure, then you will be clear & certain on the “How” for getting the life experience & happiness that you desire.

5. Achievement Is Overrated

Take notice of how I left out any notion of public achievement in the primary targets of this life structure.

If you are a person who feels that you absolutely have to achieve specific purpose driven results out in the world with your life, beyond the personal pleasure an experience of achievement would bring you, then fine, I’ll let you be stubborn about the nature of life & happiness.

Up until June 24th of 2010, when I had my big personal transformation from humanitarian to hedonist, I would have been one of those people who would protest against such a notion of not stamping out my ultimate goals of public achievement as primary targets in my life.

Now, for me, achievements are simply secondary components to be categorized within the primary targets of my desired life experience. To demonstrate this point to myself, I imagine the primary targets that I already defined being completely fulfilled in my life, without any notable public achievements. Then I reverse the scenario and I imagine massive public achievements throughout my life, but never having the primary targets in a consistently good place. The listed primary targets make up like 90 some percent of my projected life’s happiness, where massive public achievements would only be temporary & fleeting highs, like popping your cherry. Genuine world class personal fulfillment almost always lies within the consistent experience of the primary targets being well satisfied.

However, I know that the notion of achieving great things, unto themselves, in life is very seductive and it can zero your focus in entirely upon the achievement itself. If you stopped for a while and deeply reflected & introspected, then you’d probably find that it is the perceived life experience & derivative happiness that comes from the achievement that is the big turn on, and not the surface-level achievement itself.

But, some people, either consciously or unconsciously will still want to make their life about the surface-level achievements they fall in love with and obsess about, despite the major risks of throwing their alignment with personal happiness way off. Read: A life of long-term sadness & depression or at least never experiencing sustainable fulfillment.

So for you brass-balled achievers, who I used to be one of before seeing the light, you can go ahead and build your ultimate purpose driven achievements into your primary targets. Although, acting as your official doctor & attorney, I do not advise this. Read: Are you a fucking masochistic nutzo???

To make this ill-advised move and bet all your happiness chips on your big life achievements, simply rearrange your structure like this and fill in your achievement target categories…

When you never get a real shot at the outrageous pleasure of lifelong fulfillment, then don’t say I didn’t warn you!

Here’s an image of your probable future, Mr/s. President…

So there you have it! Compared to unsystematically striving for happiness and pushing & pulling your way through life’s natural complexity, you now have a simple & integrated structure for envisioning, planning, & pursuing your dream life of personal happiness.

Now, let me recap the core framework that this simplified structure is built upon…

1. Focus your overall life on the primary targets of:

- Being who you want to be.
- Consistently doing what you want to do.
- Having the relationships you want to have.
- Consistently doing what you want to do with these people.

2. Mentally chuck the primary targets down into the following grid:

And remember this simplified visual representation of that structure:

3. Establish your personal target categories within each of the primary targets, so you know what your custom life looks like for you:

Remember to try and personalize the perspective & terms of your target categories to your own unique identity & brand of life, based on the custom experience & lifestyle you desire, instead of using general & vague terms.

Here are my own personal categories that happen to fit within each primary target:

4. Strategically develop & maintain the necessary secondary life infrastructure that helps support & ongoingly produce the first-tier infrastructure of our primary targets.

The key secondary infrastructure necessary for your life’s primary targets will likely fit within these core categories:

- Personal Development
- Relationship Building
- Experience Flow
- Money
- Free Time

5. Purpose driven achievements were specifically not built into the primary targets of this structure, because they are an objective that very often runs counter to the experience of personal happiness.

To me, achievements are simply secondary components to be categorized within the primary targets of my desired life experience. However, if you want to learn your lesson the hard way, then you can foolishly build your purpose driven achievements into your structure’s primary targets, target categories, & secondary infrastructure. But, I warned you, kid!

Now, if you think this is good shit, then go install it into your life (write it down) so you can have a much easier time maintaining strategic certainty & clarity about your ongoing life path throughout the natural ups & downs of every day life.

Then you might just become one of the special few throughout the world who actually creates a life of consistently high happiness for your remaining years.

Brian Watkins