Can You Be Happy and Have It All?

Wanting things alone doesn't make you happy

00:00Announcer: Have you ever had a week when you're completely slammed, but somehow nothing actually moved? Is this one of those weeks? That's not really a time problem. It's a busyness habit problem. My new book, Busy Is Broken: Do Less, Scale More, is all about growing by doing less, not more. Read or listen to a sample chapter over at busyisbroken.com. That's busyisbroken.com. It's also on Amazon and other booksellers.

00:27Bill Gallagher: Well, it's kind of a heavy one. I want to tell you now how to be happy and have it all in life. This is the simple message of how to be happy and have it all in life. And I'm speaking as an entrepreneur and a CEO to entrepreneurs and CEOs. This is really, really, like, how to be happy and have it all in life. It's kind of deep. It's kind of conceptual, and it really is really powerful, and it's not super complicated.

00:59Bill Gallagher: First of all, we want to get that we want a lot of things in life, and wanting them in and of itself won't get us really what we want. So we're going to dive into that all in just a second. Before we get going, let me just remind you all that my name is Bill Gallagher. I'm the host of this Scaling Up Business Podcast, and our show comes to you every week with, I don't know, approaching 700, closing on 700 episodes now. And we've talked about so many things with so many guests and CEOs. These conversations are short conversations, sharing experiences and tools and things like that as they've in my life that I think are useful and helpful for me and for the people I've worked with. So it's a pretty big, deep one.

01:43Bill Gallagher: So we're talking about how to be happy and have it all in life. We want a lot of things, and wanting them alone doesn't get us what we want. We get unhappy when we don't get what we want. So you want to be happy? It's a challenge because you want things that you don't have, and you wish you could just wish them or magic them into existence, and that isn't really kind of how it happens. Right?

02:10Bill Gallagher: So when we want something that we don't have and we resist that, we suffer. And that suffering, the resisting the way that things are, what we don't have, wanting them and wishing it wasn't the way that it was, leads to suffering. And the thing to get is that pain and loss and the gaps and all that is inevitable. There will be setbacks, disappointments. There will be loss. There'll be pain, and all of that's inevitable. But it doesn't have to stick around.

Pain is inevitable but suffering is optional

02:44Bill Gallagher: So what do I mean by that? Well, things are going to happen. Events in our lives, in our health, in the world, that kind of thing, will affect us. We don't have any idea what they're going to be, and they will be against what we want in life. And then we won't have what we want, and we'll be unhappy about it, and we'll resist the way that it is. Like, we'll resist it. We'll wish it was another way. We'll complain about it. We'll lean into it, and that will cause us suffering. We will suffer as a result of that. So there's going to be some pain. There's going to be some loss, but the suffering is about resisting the thing rather than accepting it. So the key is acceptance.

Love the one you're with

03:27Bill Gallagher: There's a lovely song. You probably all know it. If you can't be with the one you want, love the one you're with. Love the one you're with is in a song made popular by Stephen Stills. He was inspired by a tagline that Billy Preston, the fifth Beatle, always talked about. He said, if you can't be with the one you love, love the one you're with. He asked Billy Preston if he could make it into a song. Billy Preston said a lot of really interesting things. He was the fifth Beatle. He worked on Let It Be and many other Beatles songs, and he had great kind of wise things to say. And this line, if you can't be with the one you love, love the one you're with, is about acceptance. It's about moving on. It's about embracing the setback and leaning into it and finding love again or in light of something else and learning to love and appreciate.

04:19Bill Gallagher: So I think for me, the thing that I noticed that's really powerful is really, like, accepting and embracing everything. All of it. Right? So think about the things that have most gutted you in life. Right? The business setbacks, the personal setbacks, that kind of thing. Losing a loved one. The end of a relationship. Like, all of those kinds of things, those are heartbreaking, gutting, that kind of thing. But when you can learn to accept them and to lean into the reality of that, something else is possible.

04:56Bill Gallagher: I think about, I don't know, what comes to mind right now is a couple things. One of them is thinking about the loss of my father. I share my name with my dad. I'm the junior, the Bill Junior. He was just a huge, huge force in my life and many great things in his life and so on. But he was the outsized character, the more dominant parent emotionally in my world. And then one day he was gone.

Accepting the loss of his father

05:37Bill Gallagher: And learning to love and appreciate all that he was for me and to take the lessons of that, and also to accept and embrace the things that led to his passing and the disappointments and the judgments and the thought, like, take it all in and love all of it is really, really useful. And that leads me to a space of peace and, like, an emptiness and an openness where I can then begin to create what's next and find joy in new things.

06:10Bill Gallagher: So today, my dad's with me when I'm sailing. My dad's with me when I'm teaching. My dad's with me when I'm surfing. My dad's with me when I'm flying around the world. My dad's with me when I speak another language. So all of these are kinds of things that were particular gifts of my dad to me, and I can carry all of that, and I can find joy in all of those kinds of things. Right?

06:37Bill Gallagher: I think also about, let's say, the events of September 11th back in 2001. Life changed in many ways. I don't know how what your life looked like then, before and after and that kind of thing, but big changes. Right now, that's twenty-four years ago. It's a little while ago. And there have been other kinds of things that happened, 2008, and the COVID and the way that affected each of us in different ways. But in each case, one of the things that I found is really useful is to start to accept and embrace.

Step outside your own head to gain perspective

07:15Bill Gallagher: Right, there is, including all that I love and all that I'm not happy about, but, like, accepting and embracing all that. So I start to get in touch with it. I lean into the feelings, the sadness, the disappointment, the sorrow, all of it, but also the joy. And I connect to the feelings of my body, to my body, to myself in the world, and I get some perspective. I step outside of my own world. If my own head is spinning with what I can't be with, fear, upset, loss, regret, things like that, then I don't have a lot of room to create or to be happy or that kind of thing. So I have to sort of get to a place where I can accept it all and get perspective on it. So I might need to talk to someone else, take a walk. I find it really, really helpful to look out across, like, into the trees, to look up to the sky, to see the passing clouds, to get things out of my own, like, body and mind and that kind of thing, and get out into the world, get perspective, to look back, to expand my view from this moment to time.

08:26Bill Gallagher: Consider my whole life, the people that have come before me, to look out at the length of my life and how much time I have. So I like to look forward and back to expand that, to get out of my realm, to get out of my own frame of reference, think about the other people, the other things, to look out to creatures, to nature, to expand that, and to allow myself to be awed by the magnitude and power of life and the universe and all of that, and then to go out into time and space and take all of that in. Right now, I'm going from the personal pain and anguish that I feel and the perspective and the balance of that relative to the vastness and power of the universe and even my life and the legacy, and it starts to change everything. And now I think of my dad as a beautiful gift that, although he's not physically alive in my life anymore, he's forever alive in spirit in me. And even qualities of him I share out with others in ways that, if there is an afterlife or a reincarnate or anything like that, he's sure to see and be honored by all of that. So this business embodied in the song, Love the One You're With, is a key to the happiness.

Acceptance creates space for what's next

09:55Bill Gallagher: And so how's it a key to having it all? Well, you can't create what's next. You can't create and imagine anything when you're hanging on to other things, or it's very hard. So if you're hanging on to things, right, to the past, to the relationship, to the business that you had, to the time in your life, to the health, to the loved one, whatever it is, when you're hanging on to that thing, you are resisting the way that it is now, and that keeps that whole thing persisting, and that fills your space. And when your space is filled with stuff, your time, your space, your mental bandwidth, your emotional space, like all that, you can't go and create what's next. And you can't really be happy because you're fixated on something from the past that you're hanging on to. So acceptance starts to lead to some open space and the space with which you can create whatever you want. So acceptance also leads to happiness, like contentment, satisfaction. We're starting to love the one we're with. In this case, loving the one we're with is ourselves and our lives and our circumstance. The one is us, our world, our life, the present moment, now, what we've got.

Resistance makes the past persist

11:10Bill Gallagher: So acceptance, right? Resistance creates persistence. If we resist the thing that's happened, we're actually hanging on to it, and that keeps it there, and that blocks us up and everything. So accepting it, letting it be, making our peace, learning to love it, learning to love all of his passing, to take all of that in, his good and his bad and all the judgments that I had about him, including all the things that I loved about him, starts to create acceptance, starts to free me up, and then to move on. Acceptance opens up a space to create what's next. In that space, you could create anything that you want. In that space, you could have it all in life. So you have what you have right now. You love it. You embrace all of it, all that brought you here, and including the things that you deeply regret. You make your peace with it. You let it in. You move through the emotional space. Just don't hang on to it. Don't hang on to the event. Don't hang on to the feeling. Let it come and go. It'll come back again for sure. The feelings, as you can hear or see in my delivery right now, feeling about my dad sometimes, I feel it very strongly, right? And then I just move right through it and then on to the next thing. And now I'm creating what's next. I'm imagining how my dad's legacy and lesson and impression on me creates who I am and creates something that's a gift to someone else.

12:44Bill Gallagher: Any suffering you have from hanging on to the things that you're not happy about, that you wish you still had or weren't the case, embracing all of it, leaning into it, accepting it, learning to love everything that you have right now, fully, and honor all of it, including yourself and your experience and all of it, and open up some space for yourself. Give yourself some grace and then move into the thing that's next. Anyway, that's what's worked for me. That works time and again for all of the companies and the leaders that I'm privileged to work with. I hope it makes a difference for you in your life. I hope it opens up something and lets you move through this season, this time, this chapter in your life onto what's next, and that it is just amazing and breathtaking. And I can't wait to run into you somewhere or have you drop me a note and hear what this opened up for you, what it helped you navigate, and what came after that. Thanks again. Until we talk, keep scaling, keep growing. I'm Bill Gallagher. Talk to you soon.

13:55Announcer: Thanks for listening today. One last thing. If anything in this episode hit home, my book digs into it further. Busy Is Broken: Do Less, Scale More. It's all about how to stop drowning in work and build a business and a team that scales without you. Available right now with content samples at busyisbroken.com. Go grab it. Be less busy.