Your Total Happiness in Life Ultimately Comes Down to This 1 Question

What makes you happy? Is it spending time with family and friends? That cup of coffee in the morning? Or maybe watching your favorite team crush the competition?

While any of those may momentarily uplift spirits, discovering true happiness–the kind that will last–often necessitates a willingness to embrace change.

So, here’s the million-dollar question to measure your happiness: 

What truly lights your fire?

See, living a truly happy life kicks off with zeroing in on what really matters to you. Then, it’s about operating from that core belief, no matter the bumps and scrapes you might encounter. Because real happiness springs from doing something that, deep down, you just can’t help but keep doing.

Living the best life possible

Six years before his untimely death, Steve Jobs dropped this bombshell of truth on our psyche:

Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.

The co-founder of Apple delivered these words to a newly minted class of Stanford University graduates in 2005. Not long before the commencement, Jobs had learned he had pancreatic cancer and was given three to six months to live. 

Facing his own mortality had impressed upon him the importance of living the best possible life. Jobs’s message gave us plenty of things to chew on about what truly matters in our own lives. And to this day, whenever I watch that commencement speech, it forces me to look in the mirror and ask myself one powerful question: Am I living the life I want?

You may not be facing looming death like Jobs, but as the years fly by, I see people having deep regrets later in life because they realize they didn’t live the life they had imagined.

Jobs began to live each day as if it were his last–because it may have been. Thinking about the limited time you and I have left on this earth should empower us to use that precious time in the most meaningful way possible.

Confront yourself

So, what truly lights your fire? Be willing to confront yourself and ask this same question when you start your day tomorrow. Pay attention to what’s coming up for you as you check in with your feelings. If you’re being true to yourself, it can be frightening to admit you’re not living the life you want, but it’s the only way to pivot toward pursuing something new–something that may guide you toward real, lasting happiness.