On happiness and confidence.

People think they are chasing happiness, but they’re really chasing confidence.

I’ve been chasing the sense of optimism, confidence, and progress I felt the year leading up to starting my company.

So, I picked up a book I read that year, and this passage jumped out at me.

The book is The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen R. Covey. Here is the passage.

The commitments we make to ourselves and to others, and our integrity in those commitments, is the essence and clearest manifestation of our proactivity.

It is also the essence of our growth. Through our human endowments of self-awareness and conscience, we become conscious of areas of weakness, areas for improvement, areas of talent that could be developed, areas that need to be changed or eliminated from our lives. Then, as we recognize and use our imagination and independent will to act on that awareness — making promises, setting goals, and being true to them — we build the strength of character, the being, that makes possible every other positive thing in our lives.

It is here that we find two ways to put ourselves in control of our lives immediately. We can make a promise — and keep it. Or we can set a goal — and work to achieve it. As we make and keep commitments, even small commitments, we begin to establish an inner integrity that gives us the awareness of self-control and the courage and strength to accept more of the responsibility for our own lives. By making and keeping promises to ourselves and others, little by little, our honor becomes greater than our moods.

Simply put, we feel better about ourselves when we do the things we say we are going to do. We trust ourselves and grow more confident in our abilities.

It’s true that sometimes, the things we are doing stop working. But it’s probably more often the case that we stop doing the things that are working.

That’s what I did. Somewhere along the way of starting and growing businesses, of facing setbacks, pivoting, and slogging through a pandemic, I began to let myself down.

I chose to let myself off the hook. I stopped making good on the promises I had made to my younger self. This choked out the fire, the confidence, I had when everything was an opportunity and the sky was the limit.

I’ve spoken to a lot of entrepreneurs, and most of them say they’ve gone through something like this. When you choose the path that puts the weight of responsibility squarely on your shoulders, the weight can wear you down.

I’m so grateful for books like these that have the power to wake me up and put obvious, yet forgotten, truths in front of me. I am excited to read back through this book, and the others, that have been instrumental in my success.

I’ll be breaking these books downs and sharing my personal takeaways here on my Substack. If that sounds interesting to you, make sure you subscribe to follow along.