I believe that happiness is a skill that can be learned. I’m not saying that if you learn to be happy, problems will stop jumping in to your life. I’m saying that you can learn to be happy no matter your place in life.

In “How To Win Friends & Influence People,” Dale Carnegie says:

You don’t feel like smiling? Then What? Two things. First, force yourself to smile. If you are alone, force yourself to whistle or hum a tune or sing. Act as if you were already happy, and that will tend to make you happy. Here is the way the psychologist and philosopher William James put it:

“Action seems to follow feeling, but really action and feeling go together; and by regulating the action, which is under the more direct control of the will, we can indirectly regulate the feeling, which is not.

“Thus the sovereign voluntary path to cheerfulness, if our cheerfulness be lost, is to sit up cheerfully and to act and speak as if cheerfulness were already there…”

Everybody in the world is seeking happiness - and there is one sure way to find it. That is by controlling your thoughts. Happiness doesn’t depend on outward conditions. It depends on inner conditions.

I think there’s a great lesson there. You can become a happy person by faking it long enough. Faking it requires action, though. How does a happy person sit? How Does a happy person talk? How do they breathe? Now go do those things.