By now we are all back at work after what I sincerely hope was a holiday spent with friends and family, so I want to take a moment and thank all of you for being influencers and active participants in your respective industry. I know you are influencers because you take time to read this and often tell me that you share it with others. For that I am very humbled. I also want to start by thanking you for being the reason I write each week.

There are so many reasons that made 2014 really awesome for our team and I hope you've got a long list too. As tradition has it, now's the time to plan to make 2015 just as awesome and I propose that to do it, you pay lots of attention to happiness. Yes, happiness. I think Happiness is best described as - when your brain is excited. Happiness is that which makes you jump out of bed in the morning with eager anticipation to start your day and once you identify that activity or a group of activities, you can start focusing your mind around them so you can structure your life to do more of it.

Personally, my happiness is tied to my mission to help people use technology to make their work lives more enjoyable and productive, so they gain extra time for the purely fun and rewarding things they do when they aren't at work. That's what makes me pop out of bed each morning, and it is the driving force that allows me to truly enjoy the many, many hours of my "work" weeks. I am very fortunate to be an entrepreneur surrounded by people that share common goals and yes, that's an intentional part of my "happiness design."

Creating one's workplace happiness requires that we know  and beat our own bias - the what we "know" verses what we "perceive." With some insight, focus and effort we can learn to synthesize our happiness in order to avoid tension or disappointment. The most successful people do this every day. You see extreme evidence of "manufactured" or synthesized happiness in news stories or books about people who lost their wealth and/or power, and even people who lost their freedom, (having been imprisoned while truly innocent), being exceptionally happy with their situation.

Here's more proof on a mundane level. You have a task you intend to do and when the time comes to act as intended, you voluntarily and quite irrationally delay this action. You procrastinate. Our actions and intentions are not the same, creating dissonance. We can resolve the dissonance in a positive way by synthesizing our own happiness or we can use the discrepancy between actual and ideal to motivate a change in behavior. Need more evidence that we synthesize happiness all the time? How about when you presented an idea that didn't go over as expected or hoped. The gap between actual and ideal can be fuel for "the next time" you have a similar opportunity. Or how about when you participated in an athletic event thinking you or your team was a "shoe-in" for 1st place and that didn't happen? Isn't that an opportunity to resolve the dissonance?

Making progress on our goals is the route to happiness. Procrastination is related to negative emotions such as guilt and it undermines that route. Science has proven that acting on our intentions is a fundamental aspect of engaging authentically in our lives, both personal and professional. Therefore, if you want to be happier, decrease your procrastination. Don't rely on synthetic happiness to convince yourself that you're happier goofing off and not making progress to one or more of your important goals - that won't work.

Oh, and while we need to have preferences that lead us into one future over another, it's vital that we constantly look for balance. If our preferences drive us too hard and too fast because we have overrated the difference between them, we are at risk of not only our unhappiness, but the unhappiness of those around us. What I'm saying is, when our ambition is bounded and balanced, it leads us to work joyfully. When our ambition is unbounded, it leads us to lie, to cheat, to steal, to hurt others, to sacrifice things of real value.

The idea I want to leave you with is that our longings and our worries are to some degree overblown and we hold the capacity and the responsibility to create our own happiness. To be smart about creating happiness in ourselves requires us to reason with our emotions and to create a workplace we are thrilled to be a part of. So, are you ready to put synthesized happiness to work?
Come join our discussion on our blog, or I welcome your feedback through email.