FBC – 216 – Do this and you’ll be happier! Guaranteed

Do this and you'll be happier! Guaranteed.

Today it's christmas eve and I have something really cool for you. I have a little trick that can radically change your life and get rid of a lot of hassles in your life.

With 2019 approaching, most of us want to make changes but we usually suck at making positive change and at sticking to our resolutions.

This exercise will be 10x easier than resolutions and will produce fare better results.

Merry christmas guys!

So there is that one exercise that I wanted you guys to do. And it is going to help you for two thousand and nineteen. OK. So here's the thing.

I want you to take a sheet of paper. And you will divide it into three columns. On the first column on the left, you will put everything you absolutely love to do. Stuff that you absolutely love. I love basketball and all that stuff.

So everything that makes you happy. You have to put that on that list. Like the things that if you had, you know, the perfect day and if there was something you could do, then what would it be? Okay, so you put that on that list.

Now on the middle column, you are going to write down what your average day looked like in 2018. All right. So everything you were doing normally every day, like the kind of stuff that you're doing, just put it on there. Maybe you're commuting and all that stuff. You know, like it can be good or bad.

So you put what you do on an average day. So for now, there is no judgment as to whether it's good or whether it's bad or anything. OK.

On the final column, write 2019 on the header of that column. Now compare the first column with the second column, and the third column is what you need to do to have the perfect day. In the third column, what we want to do is write down what you are going to do in two thousand nineteen.

So how are you going to recreate that column A and column B? Just put some, some action steps or something. It's big. It's very important for you guys to realize that, for example, oh, well, you know what? I actually love playing basketball, but I don't play basketball. I need to change something.

So I'll make sure that I go to basketball more often and it will make me happier. Right. So, you know. So if you see something in the middle column that you don't like doing and you're doing it on average, try to figure out how to get rid of it.

Okay. That's the exercise. So this is how, you know, people have resolutions and a list for the year. So it's usually nice. You know what? I kind of like to add this to my life or whatever. Right. What I'm asking you here is deeper than this. Right. What makes you happy?

Do this and you'll be happier! Guaranteed

People just want to be happy. And this exercise is going to help you be happier. All right. So let's say, for example, on the first column you had. Oh, you know what? I love spending time with my kids.

And then you realize that you know what? On this the second column, I'm commuting four hours a day or something. I don't know. Or I go to the bar with my buddies. Well, you can make some change there. Well, for commuting, you might actually try to find some sort of solution or something. I don't know.

But if there is something you really want and that's not what you do, figure out a way to actually do it. And this is going to make you happy. OK? It's not something that you just want to add in your life for whatever reason, because you've seen it on TV or something.

What you have on this list is personal to you. Nobody will have the same list as you do. OK. That's something you need to understand.

My formula for happiness is pretty much to figure out what you like. Figure out what you don't like and then what you have to do is do as many of the things you like and as little as possible things you don't like.

OK, so this exercise is a good exercise to be able to do this, right? So you need to identify what you like first and then figure out a way to do it more often.

It's something that's, you know, super personal and unique to you. OK. And this is going to make you one of the happiest people on this planet.

Happiness is not an accident. It is the predictable result of consciously choosing to do more of what you love and ruthlessly eliminating what you don't.

Most people design their year around obligations. The people who actually feel happy design their year around their Column A. The exercise is simple. The discipline to act on it is where the real work begins.

The one shift that made me happier than any milestone ever did

I chased the milestones for years. The revenue goal, the client logo, the number in the account. Every time I hit one, the happiness lasted about a weekend, and then the goalposts moved on their own. What actually changed things was smaller and far less glamorous. I started protecting the ordinary parts of my day that I could control, and I stopped outsourcing my mood to results I could not. I have run businesses through 49 countries, and the freedom never felt like the postcard. It felt like a quiet morning with nobody able to command my time. Harvard Business Review has covered how autonomy, not income alone, is the strongest predictor of day to day satisfaction at work, and my own life is the proof. I talk about this trap in the interviews on my Freedom by Choice podcast, and I share the personal version on my story page. The systems help too. Make.com writing on automation captures why removing repetitive drudgery buys back the hours that happiness actually lives in. Guard those hours first.

Frequently Asked Questions: The Happiness Exercise That Actually Works

What makes this three-column exercise more effective than standard New Year resolutions? Resolutions are additions. They assume the problem is that you are not doing enough good things. The three-column method forces you to confront what you are actively doing on an average day versus what actually makes you happy. Very often the two lists barely overlap. Once you see that gap visually, the problem is impossible to ignore and the solution becomes obvious: do less of Column B, more of Column A.

How specific should Column A be? As specific as possible. Not “spend time with family” but “play basketball with my kids on Saturday mornings.” Not “travel” but “wake up somewhere new without an alarm.” The more specific the item, the easier it is to engineer your life around it. Vague happiness goals produce vague results. Specific ones produce actual change.

What do you do if Column A and Column B feel impossible to reconcile? Start with the smallest possible substitution. You do not have to redesign your entire life in January. Pick one thing from Column B that you could reduce by 30 minutes a week and one thing from Column A you could add in that same window. Momentum builds from small, real changes. A year of small weekly shifts produces results that feel unrecognizable from where you started.

About the Author

Martin Ebongue is the founder of martinebongue.com, an online business and lifestyle design blog focused on helping aspiring entrepreneurs build location-independent businesses. Since 2014, he has been creating and scaling online ventures across multiple niches, from digital products and affiliate marketing to SaaS and content platforms, while traveling the world. He shares the real-world strategies, tools, and systems that work, with a particular focus on AI-powered automation for solopreneurs. Follow him on YouTube, X (Twitter), and Instagram.

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