Someone asked me this question the other day: Do you believe that something can annoy you, purely because it does?

In other words, she was asking if people can get irritated because someone or something is downright annoying.

The answer, of course, is no.

No matter what another person says or does (or whatever circumstances we find ourselves in), our reaction to anything is purely our choice. It may seem as if our reaction is instantaneous (or at least automatically triggered), but it is still a choice we make.

Thus, being annoyed is a choice. We get annoyed because we want to be annoyed. Continue reading →

I was in a class of about 400 students in my high school. It was a four-year school, with each grade comprising about the same number for a total population of approximately 1600 kids.

And one thing became apparent to me shortly after matriculating in this school. If you wanted to get accepted into a top university, you needed to graduate at or near the top of your class.

The school regularly published the rankings of each student, the top person being 1 … all the way down to student number 400 or so. Apparently the school thought displaying the numbers would increase our motivation to excel. It certainly did for me … but at a cost.

It became apparent that for me to exceed, someone else had to fail. Continue reading →

When I first heard this quote many years ago, I thought, “What a silly question. I prefer to be right and happy.”

After all, clearly there is an objective truth – so I thought – and my being right was nothing more than an affirmation of such attunement. Consequently, my happiness should naturally follow from my righteousness.

How naive I was.

Have you ever been in an argument with someone, each party completely justified in their opposing position? The lengths we go to (and energy we invest) in order to convince the other “side” that we are right can be extraordinary. Continue reading →

I used to work for a giant computer company that had many layers of management. The big boss would tell one of his deputies what he wanted, who in turn would communicate it to one of the VPs, who would inform the director, who passed it along to the department head, and so on the message propagated until it reached us worker bees.

Got it – we’ll get it built.

Of course what we ended up developing wasn’t exactly what the president had in mind. Just like the children’s game of Whisper Down the Lane, errors accumulate in each “telling” of the message. We think we properly hear what the person said, and we act accordingly.

Independent of the countless hops incurred by a corporate communique or a child’s whispering game, there’s a purposeful fundamental precept in all forms of information exchange – conveying meaning. We have a message we want to pass along, and we use words to affect such understanding. Continue reading →

Circumstance does not make the man; it reveals him to himself.

When James Allen penned this insightful quote in 1902, he glimpsed the true nature of causality and the means by which unmitigated happiness could be experienced.

We have been so conditioned and habituated to believe that our circumstances are the result of external factors such as the benevolence or cruelty of others – or the nebulous accordance of fate, randomness, and luck.

“Why me?” is our collective plaintive wail. That question keeps all of us rooted in the blind acceptance that things happen to us from which we subsequently react.

In fact, the diametric opposite is true. Continue reading →