You may have noticed from the counter in the right hand sidebar that we finally made the $100,000 barrier of copies of How To Be Rich and Happy given away to good causes. It has been a struggle at times and not all plain sailing as the last post explained, but we made it with a couple of weeks to spare.

Although the main goal is to giveaway 1,000,000 copies of the book, the sub-goal for this year was to get to the $100k mark and use that to generate some publicity and as a launch pad into 2011. So thanks for helping us make it happen, now if you just have a spare million bucks lying around that can speed things up a bit, that would be nice.

Every person that has ever walked on this planet has been criticized at some stage. In fact most ‘ordinary’ people will be criticized hundreds, or more likely, thousands of times during their life time. It gets even worse if you join the ranks of the visibly super-successful, then there will even be people waiting to criticize you that have never even met you.

The difference between Rich and Happy people and those stuck in the poor and miserable mindset can often be seen through their attitude toward criticism.

I wasn’t feeling very Rich and Happy. In fact I was feeling pretty damn poor and miserable if truth be told.

My wife’s car had been making a strange rattling noise for a few weeks and we’d held off taking it in until it needed a service. It didn’t seem that serious so why make the trek across town twice in the space of a couple of months?

Rich and happy people don’t say “I can’t do that” they say,

“I haven’t been able to do that until now”

I’m sure you know that one of the most powerful positive emotions known to man is gratitude. The human brain is so poor at holding two contradictory thoughts that the moment you throw a sense of gratitude into the mix it’s really difficult to feel all of those nasty negative emotions that may have previously been loitering in the nether regions of your mind.

In the exceptional book Authentic Happiness, Martin Seligman talks about an exercise designed to move us into a sense of gratitude which in turn leads to feeling happier. Seligman suggests that every now and then we should say thanks to people we are grateful for, but may not know of our gratitude.