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| If we whittle life down to one concept, one commodity, it's energy so imagine your happiness is determined by the amount of fuel, i.e. energy, you have in your tank. Any level above half makes it easier to be happy. Any level below half makes it more difficult. Surprisingly, a lot of people live closer to 50% than they realize. At first glance, most people seem reasonably happy going about their day to day lives, but as soon as one little unexpected thing happens we find out just how happy they really are. If a person is running too close to 50%, it doesn't take much for them to drop below half and go from happy to unhappy in a matter of seconds. This is when we see a very different side of them. Sound familiar? One second they seem nice. The next, you are the enemy and they're declaring war on you. It wasn't until I became a happy person that I realized just how many people in my life weren't even though from the outside they appeared to be. The easier someone is to anger the closer they live to half a tank, or far below it. Anything below half is a degree of unhappiness growing more unhappy the lower this level falls, 49% being almost happy and 1% feeling dead inside. Some people can live completely miserable on the inside while completely comfortable on the outside just as long as they have enough physical resources, i.e. energy, to maintain this existence. This is because it takes more than physical energy to make a person happy. Some people choose being in control over being happy. With a little success at over-controlling, they can convince themselves or, at least, others that they're happy, but as soon as something alters their world in the slightest bit, the reality of the situation takes over and the truth comes pouring in. This is when they become a very difficult entity to deal with. Because we have built an entire world contrary to the formula for life, very unhappy people can easily live, even become "successful" in this world because a person needs to give little to no energy in order to function in it. They can simply consume resources without giving any back in return. This could never be possible in the natural world because by Mother Nature's design if an organism has no energy to participate in the formula for life, it will die. Life requires action. Action requires energy. A blunter way to put it is, our artificial world is breeding a race of useless, unhappy human beings. Sorry, that sounded harsh, but look around. No worries, the happy healthy people will lead the way because they are stronger and those who aren't will eventually have to make themselves useful and start giving not just taking. The beauty of natural law is when you give your real, actual energy properly you get energy back. This is how one becomes stronger. At the opposite end of the spectrum, the more full a person's tank is the more they can absorb unexpected events. Disappointments and misunderstandings are not the end of the world if a person lives far above 50%. At 75%, when something happens that doesn't go their way and takes a little of their energy, it barely affects them. When you're driving your car with a full tank of gas and get lost, it's no big deal because you've got plenty of fuel to make it back to where you started, but if you're running on fumes, things can go from bad to worse very quickly. The fuller your tank the more of a buffer you have from anything changing your mood and happiness. The point is, the directions on a road map or the instructions in a book, including this one, cannot help a person if they don't have any gas in their car or fuel in their tank. If their fears, insecurities, lack of hope or loss of motivation depletes them because they haven't learned how to keep their tank full, they either need to learn how to replenish themselves through real work or learn how to take energy from others. A person's bank account may seem like a perfect analogy for the metaphor of a fuel tank, but it is far from it because we are talking about real energy, not an artificial representation of it. All money really is, in terms of energy, is the storage of someone else's work, which is often not the person's whose bank account it is in. Real energy can neither be created nor destroyed - only converted from one form to another. This is the law of the conservation of energy first introduced to the world by Émilie du Châtelet (1706-1749) who during her lifetime made great contributions in the field of physics, philosophy and mathematics. How we fill our tanks and keep them full will be covered in later chapters, but, for now, it's important to apply this tool when interacting with people on a daily basis, including ourselves, to know what level of energy we are operating from. If a person finds themselves losing their temper easily or experiencing a lot of fear in their everyday life, it is most likely because despite any material resources they might have they are living with a fuel tank that is far from full.
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