I read a short article in an in-flight magazine years ago that ignited my career and changed my life. The small publishing company I had started was about three years old; we had no capital and we were losing money every month.

The article I happened to see was about a Swiss hotel that had been losing money as well. The building was run down and employee morale was low. The owners interviewed a potential new manager, and he said if he was hired for the job, he would implement this simple formula: one-third of the profits would be plowed back into the hotel for renovation, one-third would go to owners, and one-third to employees.

What makes a person successful? Is it measured by wealth; by how many expensive cars you have parked in the garage of your multi-million dollar home, or is it something more? Many people judge success by money, but others determine success by happiness. When you go to bed at night you should be satisfied with everything you’ve accomplished during the day, and when you wake up in the morning you should be excited about the challenges before you.

Live life to the fullest – that is a wonderful creed to live by. Living a full, successful life can be as simple as putting your ideas and plans into motion, but sometimes that can be easier said than done. Where do you start?

The root of much unhappiness is comparison. Comparison gets in the way of healthy self-appreciation — and thus happiness – more than anything else. Because of comparison, hardly anybody is ever happy with what they get and nothing’s ever good enough for practically everybody. That’s because we measure our success in anything by comparing it to what others have or to what we have had before.

In other words, whether you are happy with what you get depends on how it measures up to some norm. That norm depends on two things: what other people get (social comparison), and what you yourself are used to getting (habituation). It is hard for success in any form (money, status, prestige, and so on) to improve your happiness because as actual success rises, the norm by which success is judged rises in step.

The core lesson in this chapter is based on one you learned as a child: “If you don’t have anything nice to say about somebody, don’t say anything at all.” We only have to modify this adage a little so that “somebody” includes yourself and the situations in which you find yourself.

The idea is, very simply, to reach for a positive feeling before you speak, whether it’s in your head or out loud. If you can learn to do this one thing, you’ll be amazed at how much better you feel and, consequently, how much your relationships and your life will improve as well.