What is This Website (and why is it for and from the mildly incompetent)?

I’ll start by saying, if you feel at all insulted by the “mildly incompetent” subtitle, that I was quite tempted to go with “moderately incompetent” as I thought “mildly” probably wasn’t strong enough. But believe me when I say—and I will get to this topic more in a bit—the label applies to me at least as much as to you.

What is this website? In one sense, it’s simply my attempt to achieve two goals at once. On my list of life goals (see Set Goals if you’re interested in my advice there), I always write both “Teach people something important” and “Start a podcast”. At some point several years ago it occurred to me that what I teach could be the techniques to improve happiness and success that I have learned from others and that I continue to work on myself. So I decided to build a website with articles on these topics. Some time later I realized that I could do a podcast to go with the articles. So here I am using you to check off two life goals.

The truth is that few of us are nearly as happy or as successful as we could be. I say that without arguing that we should expect perfection from life: I don’t mean we’re not as successful as we could be if we all started meditating on self compassion at age six and saving twenty percent of our income at age eight. I mean we’re generally not as happy or successful as we could be starting here and now—with our flawed childhoods, flawed characters, and flawed circumstances. There is a great deal we can do to feel better about ourselves and to achieve our goals. While we are not in charge of the world or even fully our own lives, the piece that we are in charge of comes down to our behaviors. The nice things about our behaviors is that we can change them for the better—sometimes easily, sometimes not—and doing so will lead us to more happiness and success.

As I’ve said, I didn’t invent anything that I’m going to share on the site or on the podcast. Like everyone, I learned ideas and rules of life as I went through childhood and young adulthood. (I’m forty-nine now, so well past those years.) Of course, many of the ideas that we learn are flawed or outright wrong, and we can find even the good ones difficult to implement. Sometime in my forties, after feeling like I had spent a lot of time stumbling through life, I decided to make an effort learn if there are consistent ways for a person to make themselves happier. I also decided to take more seriously the efforts I had made at different times to make myself a more “successful” person: better organized, more likely to get things done, better able to make an income and support my family. What I share on the site is what I found at places like The Happiness Lab podcast, the Waking Up app, Jim Rohn’s personal development videos and books, and other sources. So please understand: what you find here is not some secret system that I developed with my own personal genius (which sadly has yet to present itself). But rather than this lack of originality worrying me, it gives me confidence that I’m not fooling myself or teaching you nonsense. I’m sharing known ideas and expressing them as well as I can.

And though I’m obviously claiming to know these ideas well enough to start a podcast and website, I do not claim to be a master who has achieved full enlightenment. I’m still working on these skills and learning as I go. I make mistakes regularly and sometimes fail to follow the very advice that I share here. Frankly, I expect to do so all of my life. I’m not making this admission just to provide full disclosure, but to let you know that you can make tremendous progress even as you continue to make mistakes. If you try some of the ideas that I talk about, you don’t need to beat yourself up when you find that you’re a human being and therefore not one hundred percent consistent. (In fact, beating yourself up will just slow down your progress. See Self Compassion and Blame the Process.)

One unusual aspect of this site is that it tries to teach both how to make yourself happier and how to make yourself more successful. Most websites, books, and podcasts on these topics take on one topic or the other. So you’ll get someone talking about how to be a happier and they’ll present advice like spending more time with the people close to you, meditating, and appreciating what you have in life, which are all excellent suggestions. Or you’ll get someone talking about success who advises you to set goals, organize your day so that you get your priorities done, and to say “no” to distractions, which are also useful pieces of advice. But for some reason people often think these topics don’t mix—maybe even that they’re contradictory. You’re either stopping to smell the roses or you’re trying to get ahead in life. Or people think that the happiness will come after you’ve done the work to be successful.

But I don’t see any contradiction in working on both aspects of our lives at the same time. Of course we all want to be happy in our day to day experience and we all want to achieve our goals in life. You can write gratitude lists and learn to meditate while also going to school to get a better career or improving your health. (As I talk about in What Is Happiness and What Is Success, I actually see making yourself more “successful” as a way of improving one form of happiness: happiness with your life, or eudaimonic happiness.) So here I’ll talk about both, which gives me a surprising amount of work to do. As I produce new content, I’ll alternate between an article on happiness and an article on success. (The truth is that many qualities and behaviors such as honesty, kindness, and punctuality contribute to both, so you’ll see them posted on both pages. )

Now let’s jump into a very important lesson to get into your head as you start this work of improving your life: You don’t need a history of being happy or successful in order to become happy and successful. Your past affects your future, but certainly doesn’t decide it. As I’ve said, your behaviors are what matter and you can change your behaviors starting today. This site and podcast certainly wouldn’t be much use if they were only teaching happiness to the happy or success to the successful. If you look back on your life and see a string of failures, do not think those failures are showing that you can’t succeed—though of course it’s worth looking to see what has been going wrong so that you make improvements. (See Blame the Process.)

Okay, let’s address the insulting subtitle. Why do I say this site is for the incompetent (you) and from the incompetent (me)? Part of it is to be humorous, though I’m not just trying to get a laugh. I once took a class on acting Shakespeare from a man named Rob Clare who had previously taught a class called “Shakespeare for the Nervous” that got a lot of sign ups. Why was it popular? Because most people are nervous about reading and performing Shakespeare and it’s nice just to have it out in the open. Similarly, people who come to sites like this often feel incompetent, but also feel that they have to pretend they aren’t. In fact, it’s not just people who come to sites like this one: many (maybe most) people have that feeling at least some of the time. Or maybe they feel that they’re great at some things, but incompetent at others: they can handle anything their job throws at them, but have no idea how to handle a relationship. So on this site, I’d like to put this feeling out in the open. There’s no reason to stigmatize our fear—maybe our belief—that we suck.

I’d even like you to embrace the the label of “incompetent”, though by incompetent I really just mean imperfect: having a tendency to make mistakes. (A truly incompetent person will reliably get things wrong, which is not what I think of you or me.) People so often look back over their history and see a string of mistakes that embarrasses them. And we so often take on new learning—anything from an instrument to martial arts to job skills—and get extremely frustrated with ourselves when we make a mistake. But we should expect many mistakes when we’re new at things. As we get better, the mistakes will reduce, but never go away. With this understanding of how learning works and of the impossibility of perfection in your head, just take on the label of “incompetent”. Say to yourself, “I screw up and I’m going to keep on screwing up sometimes as I get better.” The label is not a way of putting yourself down, but a way of cutting yourself slack. When you make mistakes or don’t follow through as you had planned to, you don’t have to tell yourself that what you secretly feared is true: you’re a loser who screws things up. Instead you can tell yourself that you knew it would happen and you’ve been told by a guy who has a website and a podcast that it won’t prevent you from reaching your goals as long as you keep going and it won’t stop you being happy as long as you give yourself a break. Here’s a point I will make repeatedly: you will never be perfect, but luckily you don’t have to be.

Now let’s talk about my own incompetence. There is motivational poster about Abraham Lincoln that goes like this: there’s a list of failings and setbacks that he endures in his life, but the item at the bottom of the list is that he became the president of the United States. The clear message is: do not let setbacks deter you—persist and you can achieve great things. Well, I’m not going to argue with that. Indeed, I encourage you to take on this idea and internalize it. But the message is not why I bring it up. When I see that poster, I say to myself, “That’s just like me except that I never became president.” In other words, I feel that I’ve made many mistakes (I can’t even put the blame on setbacks from the world, though I’ve had a few) and am still waiting for my redemptive moment. And I think it would have to be on the scale of becoming president and successfully leading us through a civil war to actually give me the vindication that I’m looking for when I consider all the times I’ve screwed up. While I don’t intend to run through a list of all my errors in life—this article is long enough as it is—you can see I was sincere when I said that the “incompetent” label applies to me at least as much as to you.

But realize that, while giving us worthwhile encouragement, the poster is not entirely correct in its message. Lincoln was in fact not a failure until he became president: he had succeeded in many ways before he achieved that goal. And even with all of my mistakes, the same goes for me. And it certainly goes for you. It is so easy for us to emphasize our failures and flaws, but not only is it unkind to ourselves to do so, it’s neither fair nor accurate. Again, it’s important to realize that the human tendency to make errors does not contradict our ability to succeed. If it did, everyone would fail. I drop the ball regularly. If you start to work on skills that you’re not good at, which is exactly what you should be working on, you’re also going to drop the ball. But you’ll still make progress. So to repeat myself: the bad news is that you will never be perfect, but the good news is that you will never have to be.

Now if this website is misnamed, it is not because of the word “incompetent” in the subtitle, but rather because I probably should have called it “How to be happier and more successful”. The truth is that there is no easy way to say when you’ve reached happiness or success: there’s no final exam you can take or finish line you can cross that allows you to claim those words. It’s not that calling someone happy is meaningless. If you like your life and feel good much more often than you feel bad, it’s fair to call you happy. But there’s never a single day on which you’ll achieve that state and, even when you get there, there will still be more progress to make. So what we’re really going to work on here is progress: making you more and more happy, and more and more successful. It’s a process and the longer you carry on that process the greater will be your results. So that’s the true issue with the title of the site. But let’s be honest: “How to be happier and more successful” is a lousy title. It’s not at all catchy and the logo would be too complicated.

There are going to be lots of topics that I present as ways to make yourself happier. With my plan of putting out a new article and matching episode every two weeks, I’ve got about two years of material already planned. (I’m exhausted just thinking about it.) Understand that you don’t need to learn and practice all of them to make progress in your life. The more you practice, the more you’ll gain, whether that work goes into two ideas from the site or all of them. If you bought a book titled Twenty Ways to Increase Your Income, you could practice all twenty methods and surely gain a lot of money. But you could also choose to put your effort into just two or three of the methods and again you would gain a lot of money—maybe just as much. The advice I’ll give is similar: you can work on a few methods or try working on them all. Probably the best plan is to learn and focus on internalizing a few rules, then after a little while add others while continuing to practice those first ones. The ideas aren’t contradictory: there’s no reason you can’t learn to treat people well while also learning to use a budget. I will be putting what I consider to be the most important lessons right up front: gratitude, self compassion, and focusing on the present moment on the happiness side; and setting goals, working on your behaviors, and sticking with things on the success side. So those are the ideas I recommend you work on first, but of course your path is up to you.

Before finishing, I’d like to introduce something that I call the mantra (though I don’t expect you ever to meditate to this phrase). What I really wanted was a memorable catchphrase: something clever and enjoyable to say that also carried a worthwhile message. But when I started brainstorming catchphrases, I quickly stumbled upon something completely unclever that unfortunately captures the exact message that I want you to learn. And much as this catchphrase disappointed me by showing no wit whatsoever, I knew that I should go with it. So here it is: You matter, this work matters, and you can do this work. My parents were from Ireland and I can tell you as someone influenced by that culture of sarcasm and not taking yourself too seriously that this statement seems even to me to be painfully self-affirming and unironic. Nonetheless, it fits this project and, if you read my articles or listen to the podcast, you’re going to hear me say it a lot. Now let’s go through each piece of the mantra since I want you to burn it into your head for the rest of your life.

First, you matter. This statement isn’t just a positive piece of affirmation or praise: it is an attempt to make you see that we’re not trying to get to a point when you finally have value. This belief—that we don’t have value now, but will when we can achieve certain goals—is remarkably widespread. In fact, we probably all have at least a couple of voices in our heads pushing onto us the idea that we still have a long way to go before we are worth anything. (For more on the many voices that try to control the narratives in our minds, see Self Compassion.) You simply have to decide to let this belief go and grant yourself value starting now. And to be fair, you don’t generally apply the worthlessness rule to others. Yes, we tend respect people who have achieved a great deal, but we don’t look at a two year old, who has accomplished basically nothing, and say, “You’re not worth anything.” We don’t even look at fifty year olds who have unimpressive resumes and say, “You haven’t achieved much, so you’re not worth anything and your happiness doesn’t matter.” We’re willing to grant that other people have worth just by being alive. What I’m telling you here is to start applying that rule to yourself. Stop asking yourself, “When am I going to matter?” and start telling yourself “I matter.” If being that nice to yourself makes you gag, take some nausea medicine and do it anyway. And I don’t expect you to push a switch and start believing it right away. Even if you find this paragraph convincing, that intellectual understanding won’t overcome years of telling yourself that you won’t matter until sometime in the future, if ever. Just start telling yourself the mantra now and over time you’ll start to believe it.

Next, this work matters. If you matter, then your happiness and your ability to achieve your goals also matter. I suppose that, if you really had no value, neither would your happiness and success. But we’ve just established—we’ve agreed to take it as a baseline belief—that you are important. So your quality of life must also be important. People can feel embarrassed in front of others or in their own heads to admit that they’re spending time trying to make themselves happier. It can seem trivial. But if you worked to improve someone else’s life, no one would see that as a silly use of your time—it would be admirable. Because you matter, working to improve your own life is just as worthwhile.

I’m not claiming that that my website and podcast in particular matter. I’ll do the best I can with my articles and episodes, but “this work” means the work you do to improve your life using whatever resources you choose. So if you never return to this site and go on to use the Waking Up app or the 10% Happier podcast or anything else to make your lives better, terrific. The idea still applies: this work matters.

Finally, you can do this work. As I mentioned when talking about the idea of incompetence, it’s very easy to get the idea that we’ll simply never be good at things, or at least at some things. You have to get this idea out of your head. As I’ve said before and will say again, becoming happier or more successful is about behaviors and whoever you are you can improve your behaviors. It’s about the future, not the past. So you might be terrific at something or indeed be terrible at that thing, but whichever you are you can get better. And that means you can do this work.

So if you want to become happier, you can start writing gratitude lists, practice self compassion (stop yelling at yourself), spend more time paying attention to what’s happening now instead of what happened twenty years ago or will happen next week, treat the people around you with more kindness, and exercise more often.  If you want to become more successful, you can set goals, work on implementing the behaviors to achieve those goals, persist with your efforts after your enthusiasm has faded, figure out where things are going wrong instead of just assuming that you suck, and learn what your society values and rewards. (Those are the first five pieces of advice from the happiness and success pages of the site.) You—the person reading this article—really can start practicing any or all of those behaviors. I don’t promise that it will be easy and I can promise that it won’t happen overnight. But this work matters, so it’s worth doing, however challenging it is and however long it takes. Just believe that you’re capable of doing it.

  So, to repeat now what you’re going to hear me repeat a great deal if you keep coming back: you matter, this work matters, and you can do this work. I just wish it were even slightly pithy.

We’re almost done, so let me give some info about the site and the podcast. My plan is to put out a new article and matching podcast episode every two weeks. All of the articles and episodes are free. It all takes a fair bit of time—more than I had anticipated—so if you’d like to give some financial support, you can go to the Patreon page for the show. I offer nothing but my appreciation at the moment, though later I may offer member benefits.

I offer coaching as well. If you think the ideas I present are worthwhile and you’d like help implementing them in your life, read the page about coaching on the site and email me at info@happy-and-successful.com.

If you have any questions, suggestions, complaints, etc., you can also email me there. I will certainly read and will hopefully respond to any email I get, but I can’t quite promise that response. Between working, raising three kids, homeschooling two of them, and putting together this website and podcast, my time is short. So please don’t take it personally if you email me and don’t get a reply.

Now we really are done with the introductory article. Wherever you go from here, I wish you the best and I hope that you remember the mantra: you matter, this work matters, and you can do this work.