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Richard Carlson is well-known for his best-selling series of books called Don’t Sweat The Small Stuff. According to this psychologist, happiness comes when we can lessen the gap between what we have and what we want. Our problem is that once we get what we want, we have a bad habit of letting our minds drift towards something that would be better. Our drifting minds keep us from having a spirit of thankfulness. Many of us have not learned to appreciate what we have. Instead we have learned to believe that the next desire, or the next achievement will be better. If we are in the habit of always focusing on what we want, we will always feel dissatisfied. For example, let’s say you won 10 million dollars in the lottery. Of course, we don’t play the lottery. But this is just for an example. You could win 10 million dollars in the lottery and still feel dissatisfied or worried if you focused your attention on the taxes the government would be taking out of your winnings. Do you understand what we are saying? It is where you place your attention that determines how you’re going to feel. So if we want to be happy, what should we do? We need to move away from focusing on what we think would make us happy. And we need to learn to focus on what we have. We need to learn to focus on what we have. We need to learn to be thankful for what we have.

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