I wasn't referring to the Happiness Business you first thought of. I meant the industry of distributing complex chemical compounds like Dopamine, Oxytocin, Serotonin, and Endorphins. This business is, as all serious statistics show, one of the few that reaches every single active participant in the global market—the entire population. Because we all have those exact hormones inside us and (I know it sounds unbelievable), we all want to be happy.
You can take my word for it; I've been checking and analyzing ever since I became self-aware in this life. Regardless of age, gender, state of consciousness, economic balance over the past 12 months, marital or health status—EVERYONE!
The hairdresser and all her clients. The wonderful people breaking their backs to keep this city around us clean and tidy. Your mom. Your dad. Your child and their teacher. The pizza chef and the nurse. You get the point; I won't list them all. Perhaps one more—both person A, who offers the service or product, and person B, on the other end of the transaction. Now, always, and forever; it has been so and so it shall always be.
I have yet to meet a person who purposefully goes to the supermarket to walk out feeling miserable. I haven't met a man who goes to a game specifically to watch his team get decimated by nine points. Nor a woman who goes for a manicure planning to return home with dry, cracked skin on her palms.
The basic, fundamental, core assumption—as everyone likes to say—is that both side A and side B, in EVERY transaction, in all times, want to be happy.
Even the biggest of all bosses, whose business habits you follow and analyze so closely in hopes that by emulating what they do and how they think, you too will become Great... All the Warren Buffetts, all eight million tech bros and sista's whose life recipes you trust, also want to be happy.
Except… you will rarely find interviews where they discuss their personal or corporate market share in the aforementioned chemical industry. Very rarely. And rarely does an interviewer ask them what happiness means to them. Rarer still, even when asked, is an answer like: "Increasing our market share in the biochemical industry." If you find an example of such an answer, please send it to me.
You see where I'm going with this, I'm sure.
Everyone, at the basic level of their operating system, wants to FEEL peace, wellbeing, satisfaction, joy, and balance. Everyone—though they might not see it that way—would give anything for the balance of complex biochemical compounds in their brain to be OPTIMAL.
The question is: why don't we talk about this more? Why aren't we more actively involved in it? Why don't we systematically teach this to our children from an early age? The answer is best sought by each of us, individually, deep within our own Being.
Now, follow me. Let's take a leader who wants to smash all projections this year and position his Business as the market leader.
He sits down for a regular board meeting. The talk begins; everyone is racking their brains on how to attack the problem, how to optimise resources, where to pinch a percentage to raise the result elsewhere by two... And the deeper the analysis, the deeper the paralysis. Their CEO, the general manager, the leader, sits there; he looks at them, glances at his watch, glances at his phone. His wife sends him a picture from the park with the baby. He'd much rather be with them, but here he is, grinding away because, well, life is comfortable when you've made it this far; it would be a shame to throw that comfort zone down the drain. He didn't suffer this much just to go hungry in his old age.
He forces himself back into focus. Everyone is waiting for him to provide a decision, a vision, inspiration—but he is empty. He couldn't be emptier. After so many annual cycles, he has nowhere left to draw fuel for another one. The head of marketing stares at him with piercing green eyes, hyped up to win another round of bonuses for global performer of the year in a team of 340,000 employees. The silence is heavy, someone's cough echoes further down, and our leader… has no answer. None. For the first time, there is nothing left inside him to give.
Caught in the gap between nothing and no one, he realises he has just sentenced himself to the worst possible scenario—a year of results below projections. Which inevitably leads to relegation to a lower league. The downward spiral in his head is already deep in the ninth circle of hell; he sees his wife leaving him because when money's gone, love flies out the window; his kids won't answer the phone, the nanny quits, the cars go back to the leasing companies, savings melt away... In an instant, he realizes his life is collapsing like a house of cards. His personal happiness, and that of his family, built on years of hard work, evaporates like Tesla stock when Elon gets high and talks nonsense on TV… He tries to remember all the training, coaching, and workshops for breaking mental blocks, but there's nothing—a solution based on the information processor in his head: gone. Total vacuum, true low energy survival mode. Fight or flight? He has no strength for either. A total chemical imbalance, an unprecedented fiasco in the making.
"Folks… I've just realized… how unhappy I am, how unhappy we all are!" he says, pushing his massive ventilated leather chair back. He continues, unbuttoning his tie and taking off his jacket at the same time: "And I realize that numbers will get us nowhere. Just another year of pressure. We're all going to pop like popcorn." Laughter breaks through the initial shock. "How much do we really need to be satisfied? What do we need to be happy? Eh?" Silence again, heads down. The mystery of all mysteries.
The awakened leader realizes that the more he speaks the Truth, the less active his brain becomes, and a spark, a fire he hasn't felt in a long, long time, ignites within him. He decides to go all in.
"Folks… I'm ready to risk everything I have, and everything this company has, to make a fundamental pivot and change the industry." The room is now buzzing. Voices are heard—sneers, protests.
"What do you mean, change the industry? Our industry is the most profitable on the planet, with margins over 49% Year on Year. With a brutal CAGR..." —all the acronyms were meticulously listed. "Investors are hounding us, Mr. President; we're turning down their offers." And so on, a barrage of standard arguments.
"We are moving into the happiness industry. If I'm not happy, if you aren't happy, if our fuel is the fear of losing privileges—f* all of this!" he swears loudly, to the shock of everyone in the conference room.
"From today, we have only one parameter—the happiness factor. Personal, collective, for our clients and customers. Only one factor interests me in every transaction, in every relationship. Everything we do, from today on, we do exclusively guided by principles for the general wellbeing. Not individual—GENERAL."
He picked up his phone from the table and called his wife. "Joy, wait for me in the park." He hung up and looked at everyone in the room. "Take the day off. Tomorrow at 12 PM, we meet right here, each of you with a list of actions on how to personally, as a team, and globally, get the Happiness Business on its feet. Love you."
He turned and walked out, to everyone's utter amazement. He hadn't felt this good since he scored a goal from the halfway line in his university soccer championship. Since he did something out of love for himself, from the heart—something his soul craved.
Have you checked your Happiness Business factor today?