Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.
Leo Tolstoy

There are many ways for people to be unhappy, but happy people have common characteristics. That’s why a good way to be happy is to learn the common characteristics of happy people and apply them.

So I studied what the great minds in history say about being happy. I went through hundreds of quotes on being happy and extracted the best lessons out of them. Not only are these lessons useful, they are also timeless in nature.

Here I’d like to share what I learned with you. Without further ado, here are 17 timeless secrets of happy people:

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Note: This is a guest post by Vern from AimforAwesome.com.

Is it still called happiness when every muscle in your face is pulling to make you smile so hard that you fear your skin may rip?

Happiness feels incredible. Our mind is light and on a higher plane. Worries are diffused by happiness, even causing stress to disappear completely in some instances. We need happiness in our lives, preferably on a daily basis.

Would you think back over the next minute or two and try to come up with a time when you were so overwhelmed with happiness that your face hurt from smiling and yet you couldn’t stop it because the happiness - the joy was bursting from inside you. In fact, once you reached what you’d term the ultimate happiness, more came. Then more… you kept reaching higher levels of bliss that were nearly overwhelming. Was there ever a time like that in your entire life? I really want you to try this exercise and see if you can remember a time like that because most of us can’t. Even on your wedding day, as happy as you were there were probably parts of your mind that weren’t quite in bliss. Probably the part worrying about making everything go smoothly and making it the best wedding anyone ever experienced.

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I recently watched Nathan Myhrvold’s video at TED and it’s amazing. I want to talk about the video and what I learn from it in a moment, but let me introduce Nathan Myhrvold first. He is the man who is featured in The New Yorker’s article In The Air (I wrote a post about the article entitled How to Create Ideas: 11 Proven Lessons from Idea Generators). He is a genius. He began college at age 14 and earned PhD in theoretical and mathematical physics at age 23. He worked as a postdoctoral fellow under Stephen Hawking (a top physicist who wrote A Brief History of Time). He later moved to Microsoft where he founded Microsoft Research and became Chief Technology Officer.

In the video he talked about what he did after he left Microsoft in 1999. He talked about what he did in archeology, palaeontology, SETI, nuclear technology, photography, and even cooking! Look at the diversity of the topics. This is not to mention his earlier career in physics and information technology.

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There are some guest posting spots available in August and I’d like to invite you to participate. The theme will be Relationships and there are up to six spots available.

If you’re interested, please see Guest Posting Guidelines.

Note: This is a guest post by Stu from Improved Lives.

In the last few years the psychological study of happiness has experienced amazing growth. Happiness, once a subject that barely got any attention from researchers, has become a topic that makes the news over and over again and is the subject of many new and fascinating personal growth books.

I believe that one of the most fascinating and important things to come out of all this new and exciting research on happiness is the fact that our level of happiness is the result of three different things:

• 50% of our happiness comes from our genetics - This one is fairly self-explanatory. Some of us are simply pre-programmed to be happier than others.

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Mary Jaksch, my blogging friend from Goodlife Zen, just released a new e-book entitled From Tragedy to Triumph: How to Win Through a Life Crisis. The 42 pages e-book gives us tips on how to overcome crisis in life and turn the situation around.

I’m glad because the topic of the e-book is related to our monthly theme of Happiness. Crisis can greatly hinder us from finding happiness, so knowing how to overcome it is essential.

Let’s look deeper into the e-book.

Inside From Tragedy to Triumph

The e-book is divided into seven parts: Introduction, The Crisis, and one part each for five steps to healing: Acceptance, Presence, Action, Forgiveness, and Integration.

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