As children, we called it “make believe.” People encouraged us to be imaginative and creative, to fantasize and enjoy. Then, as we aged, the guidance changed. Grow up! Be realistic! “Making believe” became the more serious game of “making beliefs”: judging, drawing conclusions, deciding what’s good and bad, right and wrong. All our emotions and behaviors then follow from the beliefs we create.

Parents, priests, teachers, corporate executives and politicians compete busily to teach us or sell us beliefs so that they can influence our feelings and behavior. They know, and we soon learn, that winning the games of power, both personal and political, depends on what we choose to believe.

The highest spiritual path is life itself. If you know how to live daily life, it all becomes a liberating experience. But first you have to approach life properly, or it can be very confusing. To begin with, you have to realize that you really only have one choice in this life, and it’s not about your career, whom you want to marry, or whether you want to seek God. People tend to burden themselves with so many choices. But, in the end, you can throw it all away and just make one basic, underlying decision: Do you want to be happy, or do you not want to be happy? It’s really that simple. Once you make that choice, your path through life becomes totally clear.

Law of attraction practitioners know the way to attract new romance is to love themselves the way they want to be loved by another. Loving yourself creates a vibrational match for receiving love from the outside. It’s a simple matter of giving yourself that which you desire from another.

But what if you’ve already got a partner in life who isn’t “being all that he can be”? Or maybe your dream-come-true bride devolved into a shrew over time? Can law of attraction help you change someone or improve an existing relationship?

Happiness will always bring out the best in you. You were born to be happy. Happiness is natural. It suits you completely. You look good and you feel good when you let happiness ooze from within you. Your step is light, your mind is free, and your spirit soars when you let happiness happen. The whole world responds well to you.

When you’re truly happy, you’re radiant and you function fully. Above all, you are loving, for the essence of happiness is love. You’re also naturally kind, generous, open, warm, and friendly. This is because where there’s true happiness, there is no fear, no doubt, and no anxiety. You’re unrestrained and uninhibited. You are fully present, here and now, and not lost in some past or future.

Have you come across a person who is so naturally friendly that when you put him inside a room of strangers, he’ll be friends with almost everyone in no time? We call such a people-person, someone unbelievably nice and charismatic that he can charm anyone into doing anything.

A socially-empowered person achieves so much greatness, basically because of the people that catapult him to success. He earns the trust and all-out support of the people, whom he had helped before. He never runs out of help. He can do anything with the plethora of people behind him. All because he knows he maximizes his social potential!

I once was talking to my friend and mentor Steve Chandler when he said to me, “Have an average day!” Taken aback, I asked him what he meant. Isn’t the idea to have great days, even exceptional ones?

He told me a story about one of his mentors, Lyndon Duke, who studied the linguistics of suicide. After receiving doctorates from two universities, Duke began analyzing suicide notes for linguistic clues that could be used to predict and prevent suicidal behavior in teenagers.

Every year women ranging from professionals to housewives get together as volunteers in Thimphu, Bhutan, to raise funds for a nunnery in a valley far from the city. They collect donations, organize monsoon balls, sell lottery tickets, and write about the life and hardships faced by the nuns who reside there. Thanks to their diligent efforts, conditions in the nunnery have improved in recent years: A new housing facility has been built, and the nuns are provided with warm clothes and proper food.

For the past eighteen years I’ve taught medical ethics at Case Western University Medical School, and since 2001 I’ve run a research institute dedicated to exploring the extraordinary power of giving. We’ve funded over fifty studies at forty-four major universities.

I have one simple message to offer and it’s this: giving is the most potent force on the planet. Giving is the one kind of love you can count on, because you can always choose it: it’s always within your power to give. Giving will protect you your whole life long.

Laura Goodall believes she has a great life. But it hasn’t been easy. Her father deserted her mother when Laura was in high school. She suffers from chronic arthritis and psoriasis. She was 47 when her husband left her and their five teen-aged children-after divesting himself of all financial assets, so Goodall was ordered by the court to vacate their home and pay him half her teacher’s salary. Her older brother was killed in an airplane crash, and though she was still struggling financially, she often took in a nephew or two to live with her.

1. Listen to your body’s wisdom, which expresses itself through signals of comfort and discomfort. When choosing a certain behavior, ask your body, “How do you feel about this?” If your body sends a signal of physical or emotional distress, watch out. If your body sends a signal of comfort and eagerness, proceed.

“What do I really want out of life?” is the bonus question for the discouragedly successful. It waits in the darkness for its cue-a moment of self-honesty-and then it slips through the curtains of consciousness and steals the show. It comes up on the day the new car loses its shine or the applause loses its meaning or the ashram loses its glitter. It stalks the early morning hours of fitful sleepers. What do I really want out of life?

You may think the pursuit of happiness, as our forefathers mentioned in the Declaration of Independence, is that of a selfish search. However, quite to the contrary, I believe it is one of the most selfless quests an individual can undertake.

Although you may not realize it, being happy, or at the very least acting happy, are the ultimate win-win behaviors you can assume. Why? Think about it. When you reflect on all of the people in your life, which folks tend to make you feel good? The miserable ones? Of course not, happy people tend to make us feel better. When you are at work, do you like being around others who do nothing but criticize, complain and belittle others? Most likely, you enjoy working side by side with people who have a positive outlook on life and are able to find the good in others and in most situations.