"The secret to happiness is freedom... And the secret to freedom is courage." - Thucydides
Today, I wanted to discuss my interpretation of this beautiful quote. This quote is brilliant as it's a simple one liner but it gets across a powerful message. The quote is simply connecting together courage, freedom and happiness.
To achieve happiness we need freedom but to get that freedom we need courage. In other words, we need to take the first few steps; we need to brave to do what we want and not get discouraged by what others say. After achieving this step, we have plenty of choices that come afterwards which I want to call the happily unhappily ever after choices.
These happily unhappily ever after choices is the freedom we get from being courageous and taking those first steps. Of course in life we have plenty of choices, we decide our own future what we want to do, what kind of life we want etc.
These happily unhappily ever after choices are more towards the choices that play a bigger role in the level of happiness in our life long term. I guess we could also call this our "ideal life". Everyone has a happiness they want to achieve and not everyone will have the same end goals that lead to that ideal life.
I will use my goal for my own happiness as an example. I know for a fact that I don't want to work for others for my whole life. I will eventually want to start my own business when I'm ready. It's not easy to start your own business; it takes courage firstly. Then you have those happily unhappily ever after choices which is basically do you put in the work or do you slack off. It's our freedom choose to build or to fall apart. If I'm able to build and work hard on creating a successful business I will be happy. I'll be making a ton of money firstly and I will get to live the lifestyle I want and I will have more time to do what I want and be with family after putting in all the hard work. That's the happiness I would want to achieve. On the other hand, if I don't make the right choice and work at building my business well I will crumble and be unhappy because I will have to work for others and probably have less time for family and that's not what I want.
Ok I guess I have overcomplicated it so let me use another example where you may understand and relate to better. Writing on Hive is a great example of being courageous. You have to put yourself out there, and share your experiences and input to people from online. Some people aren't so comfortable sharing all this. In a sense, blogging on Hive is like a business. We have the freedom to grow this business by writing quality content, engaging with others, and powering up Hive.
We also can do the opposite by writing garbage, not engaging and always powering down. I'm almost positive people that do the former will be happier in the end and those that do the latter well they are the ones that always complain and wonder why they can never earn on this platform. The people that will do the former will be able to write what they love and earn money doing it, make awesome connections and ultimately be happy. The latter will end up usually sad, angry, and literally leave the platform with nothing learned and nothing gained.
To be honest, I could go on forever with that but I would like to conclude by saying find out what's your end goal. The end goal that you want in your life that will make you happy. Take those first steps towards there and keep working at it. Use the freedom you have to make the right decisions. You may make wrong decisions but at least learn from it. In the end, I hope you reach that happily ever after. As for me, I'm still working towards that happiness. This doesn't necessarily mean I'm unhappy but I'm still young and I have a lot of things to learn as well as achieve.
Sorry for the long talk. I got kind of carried away as I resonated with the meaning of this quote and I hope I was able to enlighten you with my interpretation of this quote. Anyways I hope you all have a great weekend!
