What Is The Key Of Successful Living

What is the key to successful living? Read these 5 secrets for leading a full and meaningful life.
Studies have found that a person’s outlook on life may not only improve longevity but quality of life. Optimists, in fact, are said to experience a higher level of both physical and mental functioning than their pessimist counterparts. And people who perceive themselves to be happy are less likelyto become ill, researchers say.
So what is the key to successful living? Author John Izzo set out to answer that very question in his book The Five Secrets You Must Discover Before You Die.
Named the best self-help book of 2008 by the Independent Publisher’s Association, it is based on a five-hour Biography Channel TV series in which Dr. Izzo interviewed 230 people from age 60-106 asking them toreflect back on what they had learned about life.
Interviewees ranged from a town barber to CEOs, from aboriginal chiefs to Holocaust survivors. All were considered by others to be ‘wise elder’ and to have something important to teach about how to live well and be happy. Amnong them, Dr. Izzo says, they represent over 18,000 years of life experience.
50Plus.com asked Dr. Izzo about what helearned from his research. In other words, what must we discover about life before we die?
5 secrets to lasting happiness
Secret #1: Be true to yourself
Q. Good advice to be sure, but life can be terribly busy. With so many voices, expectations and responsibilities crowding our daily lives, how to know if we’re following our heart?
A. It’s true we all have this unelected board of directors that wecarry around with us: the voice of our parents, society, and others telling us what it means to be successful. But many of the people I interviewed said that each one of us has an inner voice inside of us that is reliable but that we have to create space to hear it.
One of the simplest ways to hear the inner voice is to build reflection into your life and ask three simple questions: Did the lastweek or month of my life feel like how I want to be living my life? Am I doing what I really want to do with my life — have I heeded my calling? Is this who I really am?
Q. What if our financial or other responsibilities put up a roadblock for making the changes we want?
A. This is an important question because many people say that they should have done something else with their life but felttrapped. My book is filled with examples of people who did not let that get in the way. What I say is start small — maybe you can’t just turn your whole life over but you can integrate some of the things that you want into your life. Sometimes even doing some of what is most true to you fills the soul. Don’t let the perfect get in the way.
Secret #2: Leave no regrets
Q. I think this resonateswith many of us who are looking for more meaning in our personal lives and/or careers. Yet to move beyond the familiar requires a fair amount of courage. How to overcome the ingrained fear of failing — or of making a huge mistake?
A. One of the most striking things about these interviews is that so few people regretted their failures. What they regretted was not having tried or having left a dreamin the closet. Leaving no regrets is not possible, but knowing that you pursued your life as far as you could is possible.
It’s about dancing even though you fear looking silly, writing a book even if you aren’t sure anyone will publish it; it’s about loving even if you have been hurt, and living as if you’ve only got one shot at it.
A woman in her 70s told me that whenever she had a step she wasafraid of taking she would imagine the worst that could happen and ask herself if she could handle it. Then she’d imagine the best that could happen if she took the step. After she made the decision, she would focus only on the best that could happen. Most of us do the opposite — we think briefly about the best thing that could happen and obsess about the worst thing. The principle is simple:...