Hello dear friends and thank you for joining me for this new episode of Walk with Johan. And today, we are going to see together three things to have to be happy. You will see, these are simple things and there is a good chance that you have at least two, even three.
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So today, we're going to look at a very well-known quote. You'll see, it's very, very simple, this quote, so very well-known, very popular, you may have already heard it. It's very simple, but it's also very profound. And already, what's funny is that we're not 100% sure, so... 'Well, yes. I think I know who the author is, but let's say that it differs depending on the sources. Sometimes you'll have this quote that will be attributed to other people.
This quote appears to be from the 19th century American clergyman George Washington Burnap. Other sources attribute it to Alexander Chalmers, who was a Scottish writer in the saudi arabia whatsapp number data late 18th century, early 19th century. Others attribute it to Joseph Addison, an English poet in the late 17th century, early 18th century. I've even seen it attributed to Kant, the famous German philosopher, but it appears to be from the American clergyman George Washington Burnap, and I'm tempted to say, "Never mind, let's honor these four great thinkers and benefit together from the wisdom of this quote."
So the quote is this: "Happiness is having something to do, someone to love, and something to hope for." Quite simply. I'll tell you again. "Happiness is having something to do, someone to love, and something to hope for." And it's deeper than it sounds actually. I really suggest you write this quote down and put it somewhere where you can see it every day, because it actually covers three major basic needs that human beings have: having something to do, having someone to love, and having something to hope for.
Having something to do means being busy, that is, not getting up in the morning and saying to yourself: "What am I going to do today?" No, being busy means having things to do, simply being active, having projects, having hobbies.
I think I talked about this in this podcast. I read a book called Ikigai a while back, where the authors visited people in Japan who lived on an island or in different places where the population had a higher life expectancy than the rest of the world and where there were more centenarians. And they saw that the majority of people there were active, they were busy. At 80, they were in the garden. At 90, they were cooking. They were always busy and never sitting around doing nothing. So if you have something to do, you're going to be happy.