How Your Mistakes Can Be the Path to Happiness

The worst of us may just be a little closer to finding happiness, if we use our mistakes to our advantage.

When you have a reputation as an asshole to uphold, humility is for saints and dogs. Since most of the stories I heard about saints involved mobs of unhappy people setting them on fire as they stared meekly up to heaven, I decided early on that the path to sainthood wasn’t my jam. As far as dogs go, we all know no human could ever be as virtuous as any dog, so I didn’t sweat my inferiority there.

I had a mouth on me from a young age that suffered many bars of soap and fat lips as my mom attempted to cure me of my devil tongue. The poor woman even taped my mouth shut once. I marched my taped-up smart mouth down the block so the neighbors could see her desperate attempt to tame my ungodly tongue. Nothing worked.

My single mother and my sensitive little sister leaned toward saintliness, and I saw how much they suffered. While I had been born with the asshole gene, feeding it stoked a fire within that kept me hotter than the flames the world tried to burn me with.

Let the Asshole Go

You might think assholes aren’t happy, but we are. As long as you’re a funny asshole, you can have a lot of friends and a lot of fun. This kind of happiness is a shallow impersonation of the depth we all seek, but you don’t know that until you give it up. For many years, my punk rock attitude problem served me well.

Then I had kids. Three in two years. I was buried in real life. The art of being an asshole required too much energy. I had to let it go.

I soon realized I’d fortified myself behind a wall built of my identity. Once I abandoned the upkeep, it crumbled, and rays of light broke through the holes in that wall. The longer I went without being an asshole, the brighter everyone else outside that wall shone.

Humility was never my goal. No one wants to watch movies where the bad guy kills John Wick’s dog, and then John Wick forgives him. Again, that kind of nonsense is for saints and dogs. I want to see the bad guy suffer for his mistakes. But getting what I want might not be making me happy.

What Is Happiness?

To pursue happiness, we first have to define it. It’s true that happiness can be different things for different people. But those are just the causes of happiness. What is happiness?

Aside from being animated by the mysterious power that makes something alive, there’s one thing that every living being has in common. Every single thing we do, we do in pursuit of happiness. Every single thing. There is not a move you make that isn’t motivated by an obsession with being happy.

This applies to everything we share that life spark with. Trees. Weeds. Ants. Zebras. Serial killers. No, you might argue, I hate going to work. I don’t do that for happiness. But without going to work, you wouldn’t have money to do the things that bring you happiness. Just the simple act of eating is motivated by happiness as being hungry makes you unhappy.

Numerous religious traditions, according to Karen Armstrong in her seminal work A Case for God, accepted that one can’t speak of God at all, but only what God is not. Perhaps you’ve heard the Hindu “I am not my body, I am not my mind” chant.

Happiness can only be defined in the same way. Does this make happiness a synonym for God? That would explain why the pursuit of happiness is hardwired in all of creation. It also explains why the path to God resembles the road to happiness. Conveniently, you don’t have to believe in God to believe in happiness. Nor do you have to be religious to understand what happiness is not.

Happiness is not being hungry. It is not being in pain. Happiness is not focusing our attention on the flaws of others, mostly because it separates us from others, and happiness can’t reach you on your illusory pedestal.

Cue Humility

Humility makes its appearance as soon as we take an honest look at ourselves. In Benjamin Franklin’s seminal short biography, he writes about his daily ritual of journaling how many virtues he was able to act out each day. His long list of possible virtues purposely excluded humility.

“There is perhaps no one of our natural passions so hard to subdue as pride,” Franklin wrote in his biography. “Beat it down, stifle it, mortify it as much as one pleases, it is still alive. Even if I could conceive that I had completely overcome it, I should probably be proud of my humility.”

It must be hard to be humble when you’re such a legend. Lucky for me, I’m not.

The pursuit of humility is hard. It is the most difficult virtue to master. None of us will ever overcome our ego completely unless we are a saint (or a dog). But we all know hard work is one of those tricky rules for happiness. And the coolest thing about humility is on the road to seeking it, the other virtues attach themselves to us on their own.

Pride is like a bush that’s blocking you from reaching happiness. Striving toward humility is removing that bush at the roots first, rather than trimming each branch one-by-one. Other paths toward happiness take the long way, sawing away each branch before inevitably reaching the root, where you will have to tackle humility before destroying the bush anyway.

Being a jerk most of my life and then having to give it up may have been the most useful tool for tackling humility. Once you’ve come to terms with all the shitty things you did in your life, it’s almost impossible to feel superior to other people. You might not even realize you are feeling superior. But any negative feelings toward others is a type of superiority.

I’m Good. You’re Not.

We often feel justified in disliking (hating) our fellow lifelings because, for instance, they voted for that evil political party. We would never do that. We are better than that, so our disdain is justified. Maybe they also insulted us. They are bad. We are good.

The art of being an ex-asshole involves accepting that I’m capable of bad things. Things that hurt others. Humility involves remembering all my faults to block that knee-jerk reaction to disdain for anyone.

I can still judge a person’ actions as wrong, just as I judge my own actions, but I don’t have to nurture any negative feelings toward the person. There’s plenty of people I prefer not to have in my life, but I try to avoid them with kindness and compassion.

Once you get to the point where you stop wasting energy comparing your good opinions to the bad opinions of others because you know it is essentially an exercise in pride, you uncover a freedom that had been hiding in plain sight. You become less affected by the unhappy feelings of other people.

Humility works as both an input and output filter.

Because I own my failings, when someone is angry at me, rather than feeling defensive, I first want to know if they are right. If they are, then I apologize. If they aren’t, I think of how many times I was angry at people who didn’t deserve it.

I feel sorry for the person suffering from anger. Humility protects me from the viral nature of anger. We all know happiness is not anger. Although, there are plenty of people who ride that storm in pursuit of happiness.

Humility In Practice

Just like religion is a practice in pursuit of God, humility is a practice in pursuit of happiness. We do not reach a state of humility. We have to work for it in all we do. One of the most powerful ways to practice humility is through gratitude.

Let’s take a simple example from life. We go out to eat at a restaurant. The food takes forever, and when we finally get it, the order is wrong. Our first reaction is anger. I deserve better service. I am the customer. This reaction lacks humility. It reflects a self-image full of the conviction that the world owes us something. That for some reason, we are too important for anything to inconvenience us.

A humble approach to the situation avoids unhappiness. Practicing gratitude in that situation would mean instead of focusing on the things that went wrong, pointing your attention toward all the things that are not going wrong. We are wealthy enough to go out to a restaurant. We will not go hungry tonight. We have legs to walk into the restaurant. I could go on forever.

Reacting with humility means I don’t think I’m too important for things to happen differently than I’d prefer them to. I worked in restaurants many years of my life. Your server is a great person to determine if you are a happy or unhappy person. There’s just something about a restaurant that makes every jerk suddenly think they’re king. Humble people avoid the unhappiness of being king in a world that doesn’t adore them.

Happiness Doesn’t Work Like the Movies

Based on the number of people getting rich off selling self-help books, there’s plenty of advice out there on finding happiness. The funny thing is, to get your money, these books need to tell you what you want to hear. I want to be sold a movie where Keanu Reeves kills the jerks who killed his dog. In real life, the best I could do was hurt the murderers’ feelings with my soapy, devil tongue.

As an animal rescuer, I deal with a lot of animals who deserve a Keanu reckoning for the abuse they suffered. Practicing humility means I accept I have no control over anything beyond myself and go on with life focusing on what I can do rather than what others do. If I didn’t, life would be absolute hell.

Try not to get too distracted by self-help advice that doesn’t challenge you to give up that blockbuster ending. Humility isn’t sexy, but it works. The best part is that the lower you’ve been in your life, the easier it is to put into practice. Your mistakes may be your greatest hope for happiness.