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Surviving the High-Speed Road to Happiness
L. Ron Hubbard's tips for success in the real world
Ever wonder why you're not as rich, successful, and happy as you should be? Maybe you've even blamed yourself. Well, don't. Chances are your failures are someone else's fault. Sloppy co-workers, friends with bad breath, incompetent spouses, communists, and crazy people....These folks clutter the highway to happiness and sabotage your efforts to succeed.
The Way to Happiness: A Common Sense Guide to Better Living (Bridge Publications, Inc., 1989), written by L. Ron Hubbard, offers methods to safeguard your survival and success. While only a thorough reading does the work justice, I think we can all use a few tips for travelling the High-Speed Road to Happiness, so I've gathered some highlights from the "first nonreligious moral code based wholly on common sense."
~ Vera Djordjevich
| Trying to live in a high-speed world with low-speed people is not very safe. |
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happiness |
| If one does not survive1, no joy and no happiness are obtainable.
1. survival: the act of remaining alive, of continuing to exist, of being alive. |
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health |
| [A] person's general failure to get proper rest can make him or her a burden to others....Just when you need them they can dump the whole workload on one. |
| If one brushed one's teeth after every meal, it has been said that one would not suffer tooth decay. This, or chewing gum after each meal, goes far toward defending others from oral diseases and bad breath. |
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sex |
| Unfaithfulness on the part of a sexual partner can heavily reduce one's survival. |
| A "feeling of guilt" is nowhere near as sharp as a knife in the back or ground glass in the soup. |
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children |
| [W]hile most children are capable of great decency, a few are born insane and today, some are even born as drug addicts: but such cases are an unusual few. |
| A school is not a place where one puts children to get them out from underfoot during the day. |
| It is not a place where one manufactures parrots. |
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crime |
| The way to happiness does not include murdering your friends, your family, or yourself being murdered. |
| Stealing things is really just an admission that one is not capable enough to make it honestly. Or that one has a streak of insanity. Ask a thief which one it is: it's either one or the other. |
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government |
| It is, after all, the people and their own opinion leaders who sweat and fight and bleed for their country—a government cannot bleed, it cannot even smile.... |
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environment |
| It sometimes does not occur to some individuals—as they do not have to spend their days looking at themselves—that they form part of the scenery and appearance of others. |
| An environment disfigured with unkempt people can have a subtle, depressing effect on one's morale. |
| While clothes can be expensive, soap and the other tools of self-care are not that hard to obtain. The techniques are sometimes difficult to dig up but can be evolved. |
| In some countries, old people, the unemployed, do not just sit around and go to pieces: they are used to care for the gardens and parks and forests, to pick up the litter and add some beauty to the world. |
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ethics |
| People who keep their word are trusted and admired. People who do not are regarded like garbage. |
| Not all harmful acts are reversible....Murder is such an act. |
| A person, who for one reason or another has been unable to honestly accumulate possessions, can pretend that nobody owns anything anyway. But don't try to steal his shoes! |
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competence |
| Movie stunt men who don't practice first get hurt. So do housewives. |
| The new model eggbeater or washing machine, the latest year's car all demand some study and learning before they an be competently operated. When people omit it, there are accidents in the kitchen and piles of bleeding wreckage on the highways. |
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final thoughts |
| True excitement, happiness and joy come from other things, not from broken lives. |
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