Your assignment is to live a charmed life in the midst of people who don’t believe you can do it , and to accomplish this despite them, not to spite them.

Chances are there is at least one significant person in your life who thinks that all this charmed-life stuff is ridiculous. They may have told you to grow up, be realistic, and get with the program. Of course, it’s their program, some variation on the theme of “Very few people do anything exceptional, and you won’t be one of them.”

They might begrudge the time you spend reading books like this one and putting the suggestions you find there into practice. They may cite every time you’ve been sad or angry or things didn’t work out the way you wanted as evidence that you’re deluding yourself.

Over the years I have had a lot of feedback on this book. Most of it has been very good; many of the stories about what people have done after reading this book are what I call miracle stories.

One woman woke her husband up at 3:00 in the morning after she finished Visionary Business and told him, “I’m going to double our sales in three months.” She was working on her dream, her own retail shop, selling the things she loved, but it had been a struggle every step of the way. She knew if she doubled her sales, she would be cruising along profitably and would be able to do substantial profit sharing with all her employees. Within three months, she had doubled her sales.

In my role as a counselor, teacher, and parent, I’ve heard many reasons that people use to explain an unhappy existence . . . and almost all of them inevitably fall into one huge category, which I call “excuses.”

The rest of the chapter will introduce you to 18 of the most commonly used ones, along with a brief commentary about each of them. This will give you a primer before you go on to learn the Excuses Begone! method that’s detailed in the rest of the book.

Here they are, in no particular order:

How is authentic happiness different from synthetic happiness?

Ten years of scientific findings from some of the world’s most prestigious institutions have shown that lasting fulfillment and sustainable happiness cannot be synthesized from the material or the physical world. That is, success in any respect – whether it is financial, professional, romantic, social, physical, or otherwise – does not lead to a happy life.

Successful life circumstances, by and large, will not guarantee that you live happily ever after. In other words, there are no purely “happy circumstances” in this life – no circumstances that serve as a one-stop-shop for creating a happy life.