This article is an extract of chapter #1 in Karl Moore’s best-selling book, ‘The 18 Rules of Happiness.’

“Self-pity is our worst enemy and if we yield to it, we can never do anything wise in this world.” – Helen Keller

Oh, come on. Admit it.

We all do it every single day.

Everybody enjoys wallowing in a little self-pity. It feels great to remind ourselves how terrible the world is. How we’ve not been given the right opportunities. How people are against us. How life has been a real struggle this past year.

Right?

But here’s a true secret to happiness. And it’s probably the biggest, easiest and quickest happiness secret you’ll stumble across. Ever.

One of my favorite past times, as I traveled the world, was participating as a member of the Hash House Harriers Running Club. The premise often involved hundreds of runners (pack or hounds) looking for clues along the road to indicate the correct path, better known as  “True Trail” in order to get to the finish line.  The clues are left on sidewalks by designated runners, called “Rabbits”. As one might expect the lead rabbit would leave clues for the correct path, while two or three other rabbits would leave  misleading signs or “False Trails” enticing anyone willing to follow to a dead end. It was designed to keep the pack together.

Your life is supposed to feel good to you.  Before your birth, you knew that the primary component of your physical experience that would offer the greatest value for your personal and collective expansion and joy would be the component of the relationships that you would experience with each other. It was your plan to relish the diversity of your relationships and to choose from them the details that would make up your creations – and here you are.

Before your birth, as you were making the decision to focus yourself into this Leading Edge time-space reality, it was your powerful intention to enjoy every moment of the process. You understood then, from your Non-Physical perspective, that you are a creator and that you were coming into an environment with enormous potential for joyful, satisfying experiences in creation.

Enlightenment is about seeing through the illusions of life and knowing what reality really is. When you are enlightened, you can have everything you want. Because you’ll know the truth about what everything is, and what does it really mean to have something. It is an irony of the world that the people who seek material things and desire to have them before thinking about enlightenment, tend to attain neither, but those that acquire enlightenment first are the ones who do. The desireless attain all their desires.