The Hidden Art of Happiness

When I was fourteen, I stumbled onto an author who introduced me to the idea that we should pursue our rational self-interest. His name was Robert Ringer. I devoured books like Million Dollar Habits and Looking Out For #1 and, eager for more, I hunted down the work of someone he cited as an influence—a philosopher named Ayn Rand.

Even before reading Rand, I was dissatisfied by some of Ringer’s ideas. In particular, I found his conception of happiness disturbingly shallow.

Rather than go around in a circle of technical definitions, I think you and I inherently understand what it means. When you experience pleasure or an absence of pain, you know one thing: you’re feelin’ good.

When you boil it all down, I think that’s what everyone’s main objective in life really is—to feel good. Happiness isn’t a mysterious condition that needs to be dissected carefully by wordologists or psychologists. It’s your state of mind when you’re experiencing something pleasurable; it’s when you feel good. (Looking Out For #1, 12)

This struck me as utterly superficial and possibly even untrue. Was happiness really ineffable? Did it consist of nothing more than racking up pleasures and avoiding pains? Could you really make sense of human behavior by asserting that the serial killer, the addict, and the entrepreneur were on the same quest: “to feel good”?

It wasn’t until I discovered Ayn Rand that I found someone who could put into words—and into stories—what I sensed as a young teenager: that happiness is something sacred, profound, and rare.

Most people share Ringer’s superficial conception of happiness. But happiness is deep. It is a reverential attitude toward your life. It is a hard-won, enduring form of joy that can only be achieved through the realization of your values, including very abstract values like reason, purpose, and self-esteem.

Given how superficial the conventional understanding of happiness is, it’s no surprise that the conventional understanding of how to achieve happiness is equally superficial. Tony Robbins’ website lists 17 ways to feel happier, and while much of the advice isn’t awful, claiming that happiness is primarily a matter of spending more time outdoors, listening to upbeat music, and journaling is like saying that a successful marriage is made by buying your partner flowers.

What Robbins and almost everyone else ignores is the role of morality in achieving happiness. And to the extent they don’t ignore it, they promote the anti-happiness morality of altruism. “Remember,” Robbins tells us, “the secret to living is giving.” I get it. It rhymes. But just because the words fit, don’t make ‘em legit.

Even many Effective Egoists, however, don’t appreciate the full implications of a pro-self morality for happiness. There is what I call a hidden art of happiness, which is easy to miss yet indispensable to understand and practice if you want to live a life that you love.

How Human Beings Value

I often tease my cat Harley for her lack of ambition. As far as I can tell, she’s content to eat, sleep, and collect belly scratches. “Damnit, Harley. You’re sixteen and what have you achieved?”

Don’t tell Harley, but she’s actually killing it when it comes to living the life of a cat. She gets her daily fill of everything life has to offer her. But if a human being tried to live that way, it would be intolerable.

A human life is not a cycle of repeatedly securing the same handful of physical pleasures. As beings who live by reason, we experience our life as a progression—a story that we write, where each day adds to what came before and moves us toward a future created by our choices.

Our values are not raw physical pleasures: they are abstract values that reflect the life we want to live, the world we want to live in, and the person we want to be.

This is true even of values we share with animals. Harley is content to stick her face in a bowl and wolf down the same beef and gravy stew day after day. I am not. I can’t be indifferent to the meaning of the meal. Does the chicken and rice on my plate symbolize poverty—or a commitment to getting in shape? Is this pizza I’m stuffing in my face part of a celebration of my boy’s birthday or a reminder that I’m stressed and desperate for comfort?

For human beings, every material value has a spiritual dimension—and every spiritual value demands physical expression.

The hidden art of happiness is the art of making our abstract values concrete and real—and of bringing out out the abstract meaning of the concrete.

Symbols and Rituals

Your house is on fire and all the people and pets are safe, but you only have time to save one thing. What do you save?

If you’re like most people, you won’t rescue something of purely utilitarian value, like a crockpot or washing machine. Maybe it’s a box with your kids’ childhood drawings. A photo album. An engagement ring. For me, it would be a letter Leonard Peikoff wrote me when I was fifteen. These things may have no practical or financial value, but they have deep, personal meaning. They are irreplaceable.

Symbols and rituals are not an incidental part of life, but a central feature of what it means to be human. In his book Ritual, Dimitris Xygalatas notes:

rituals are central to virtually all of our social institutions. Think of a judge waving a gavel or a new president taking an oath of office. They are held by militaries, governments and corporations, in initiation ceremonies, parades and costly displays of commitment. They are used by athletes who always wear the same socks in important games, and by gamblers who kiss the dice or cling on to lucky charms when the stakes are high. And in our everyday life they are practised by each and every one of us when we raise a glass to make a toast, attend a graduation ceremony or take part in a birthday celebration.

Why are symbols and rituals so important? Because they bring fully into reality what would otherwise remain ephemeral, abstract, hazy. But they do so in unique way.

Legally, the act of marriage takes place when you fill out a government form. That formalizes your commitment to you betrothed, but emotionally it is meaningless. If anything, it takes something away from your wedding—it injects the bureaucratic into the sacred. The marriage ceremony, on the other hand, is elevating. It makes your love more real and your relationship more meaningful.

Symbols and rituals make your abstract values concrete—but in a way that doesn’t empty them of spiritual meaning. On the contrary, it enhances their spiritual significance.

To experience your life as a sacred value, you have to make the key moments of your life sacred. To practice the hidden art of happiness is to cultivate symbols and rituals that fill your life with meaning.

Contemplating Meaning

The physical world around us is rich in meaning. Bright color and light represent energy. The outdoors represents freedom. Candy stores represent abundance. An upright posture represents pride and virtue. Across cultures, our emotional language is tied to the physical in predictable ways. To be sad is to feel blue. To experience joy is to feel light. Elation comes from the Latin elatus, which means elevated—raised up.

None of this is arbitrary. In her book Joyful, Ingrid Fetell Lee writes about the way that everyday places and objects can evoke intense emotions, and how this has its roots in our nature as evolved beings. The bright lights and colors that energize us, she argues, are in nature indications of literal energy in the form of calorie-dense food. Or take our love of harmony and symmetry. Lee writes:

Putting objects with similar features together taps into a principle of gestalt psychology called similarity, which says that the brain tends to perceive similar objects as a group. The individual feathers or leaves or toys cease to be seen as independent objects. Instead, they become modules in a larger composition. According to gestalt theorists, the brain does this to simplify and make sense of information coming in through the visual system. After all, similar objects often have a practical relationship to one another, not just a visual one. A group of similar leaves likely belongs to the same plant, and it’s simpler to look at a forest and see a hundred trees rather than millions of individual leaves. According to neuroscientist V. S. Ramachandran, the pleasurable “aha!” sensation we feel when we see related objects as a group suggests that the brain’s processes for identifying objects may be intrinsically connected to the reward mechanisms in the limbic system. In other words, joy is the brain’s natural reward for staying alert to correlations and connections in our surroundings. (Joyful, 108–109.)

As conceptual beings who survive by viewing existents as units—as members of a group of similar members—we experience pleasure in viewing things as units. In seeing “like with like,” we experience the joy of a well-organized world, which evokes the immeasurable value of a well-organized mind.

Wherever we look, we see what is—but we can also see more than what is. A while back, I was watching a baseball game. My favorite team, the Philadelphia Phillies, was down by one in the final inning of a game against division rivals, the Atlanta Braves. They were down to their last out when a young man stepped to the plate. Luke Williams was playing in his second professional game—the first start of his career. With one man on, and all the pressure in the world on his back, he hit a towering home run to left to win the game.

My reaction—and the reactions of countless other Phillies fans—went far deeper than the joy of winning a single baseball game. Many of us were brought to tears as we witnessed a moment of triumph against great odds. We witnessed a young man live though a moment he had been dreaming about, hoping for, struggling for, his entire life—and we saw the joy on his face, and his teammates’ faces, and his family’s faces, and we felt: this is the stuff of life.

Human beings have the ability to find deeper meaning in the objects and events around us. A home run isn’t just a home run but a story about grit and perseverance. A building isn’t just shelter but a monument to human ingenuity. A smile isn’t just a smile but a testament to innocence, or joy, or seduction. These things and moments crystalize our abstract values, make them tangible and real, bring them down to earth so that we can experience them with an immediacy that otherwise eludes us. It is one thing to value courage—it is another thing to watch a lone man in Tiananmen Square confront a line of oncoming tanks.

Sometimes, as with Luke Williams’s home run, the meaning of a moment hits you over the head. It forces itself on you. You’re overcome with emotion and may not even know why. “It’s just a baseball game. Why am I crying?” But you can also prime yourself for such moments, cultivate them, actively pursue them. You do this through the act of contemplation.

To contemplate is to pause on something, to seek its deeper meaning. To contemplate is to take the concrete and ask yourself what it conveys about life. Poet Sylvia Plath eloquently described the act of contemplation in a diary entry:

On a relatively unfrequented, stony beach there is a great rock which juts out over the sea. After a climb, an ascent from one jagged foothold to another, a natural shelf is reached where one person can stretch at length, and stare down into the tide rising and falling below, or beyond to the bay, where sails catch light, then shadow, then light, as they tack far out near the horizon. The sun has burned these rocks, and the great continuous ebb and flow of the tide has crumbled the boulders, battered them, worn them down to the smooth sun-scalded stones on the beach which rattle and shift underfoot as one walks over them. A serene sense of the slow inevitability of the gradual changes in the earth’s crust comes over me; a consuming love, not of a god, but of the clean unbroken sense that the rocks, which are nameless, the waves which are nameless, the ragged grass, which is nameless, are all defined momentarily through the consciousness of the being who observes them. With the sun burning into rock and flesh, and the wind ruffling grass and hair, there is an awareness that the blind immense unconscious impersonal and neutral forces will endure, and that the fragile, miraculously knit organism which interprets them, endows them with meaning, will move about for a little, then falter, fail, and decompose at last into the anonymous soil, voiceless, faceless, without identity.

From this experience I emerged whole and clean, bitten to the bone by sun, washed pure by the icy sharpness of salt water, dried and bleached to the smooth tranquility that comes from dwelling among primal things.

Contemplation is not a wasteful activity. It is a vital one. It serves two purposes—one mental, one emotional. Mentally, you need to be able to experience your abstract ideas and values as if they were perceptual concretes. Only concretes exist, and for you to be able to keep your abstractions tied to reality, you need to be able to experience them as if they were concretes. Emotionally, contemplation can give you the experience of living in your ideal world. The world where your values are not out there in the future, waiting to be achieved, but where they have been achieved, here and now. Where the work of living is done—if only for a moment.

Though you can gain some of these mental and emotional benefits from contemplating objects and events, there is only one field of human endeavor designed to concretize your deepest ideas and values and refuel your soul—a field that exists solely for the purpose of contemplation.

Art

I’ve spent my career advocating unpopular ideas: championing reason in a world that reveres faith, championing self-interest in a world that exalts self-sacrifice, championing capitalism in a world that valorizes collectivism.

I enjoy the challenge and most days the work is rich in joy and satisfaction. But occasionally there are moments when the world hits me over the head with its irrationality and I wonder: what’s the point? And then I think of these words and pick up my pen:

In the Carboniferous Epoch we were promised abundance for all,

By robbing selected Peter to pay for collective Paul;

But, though we had plenty of money, there was nothing our money could buy,

And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: "If you don't work you die."

Then the Gods of the Market tumbled, and their smooth-tongued wizards withdrew

And the hearts of the meanest were humbled and began to believe it was true

That All is not Gold that Glitters, and Two and Two make Four

And the Gods of the Copybook Headings limped up to explain it once more.

That’s from Rudyard Kipling’s “The Gods of the Copybook Headings.” Copybook headings were maxims written at the top of notebooks which schoolchildren used to have to copy over and over again in the early 20th century—for Kipling, basic truths that were being questioned and denied by the modern intellectuals of his day (“the Gods of the Market”).

“And the Gods of the Copybook Headings limped up to explain it once more.” That line gives me strength. It brings meaning and dignity to the act of voicing the truth in a world unconcerned with truth.

Art has an awesome power to refuel our spirit. Why? Because it concretizes and elevates. Kipling gives us a vivid image that has an indelible specificity—yet symbolizes the deep abstraction of a heroic devotion to truth.

Think of the difference between Michelangelo’s David and the hunched-over figure of Rodin’s The Thinker. Think of the difference between the twisted, deformed Pietas of the Middle Ages and the proud, upright figure of Mary in Bouguereau’s Pieta. Think of the difference between the stirring, triumphant melody at the climax of the 3rd movement in Tchaikovsky’s 6th symphony and the ominous, crashing notes that kick off Beethoven’s 5th.

You could say that these works stir very different emotions, and you would not be wrong. But it would be more accurate to say that each conveys a different kind of world. An artist builds a unique world, a universe that conveys: “This is life as I see it.” An artist recreates reality, but in a very different way than a photograph recreates reality. A photograph copies reality—an artist stylizes reality. She selects every detail—of a story, a poem, a painting, a sculpture, a song—and says to us: This is what’s important in life. This is what counts. This is what’s possible to human beings and worthy of contemplation.

Our daily lives are swamped by the journalistic, the accidental, the incidental. An artist cuts through the trivial and says: here’s what life is really about. That is what makes art, art. Because every element is selected, every element carries a meaning—and the meaning is, “This is what man is, this is what the world is, this is what life is.”

And this explains the profound emotional reactions we have to art. We fall in love with art when the artist’s view of life matches our own. “Yes, that is life as I see it.” We recoil in horror in disgust when we encounter a work and think, “No! That’s not how I see life.” All of this happens automatically and subconsciously. It’s not primarily an intellectual judgment, but an emotional reaction. It flows instantaneously from our core values.

As with any act of contemplation, contemplating art fulfills a mental and emotional need. Mentally, Ayn Rand explains, art provides “a confirmation of [a man’s] view of existence—a confirmation, not in the sense of resolving cognitive doubts, but in the sense of permitting him to contemplate his abstractions outside his own mind, in the form of existential concretes.” Emotionally, “the pleasure of contemplating the objectified reality of one’s own sense of life is the pleasure of feeling what it would be like to live in one’s ideal world.” Art gives physical expression to an artist’s deepest values, and we respond to art by seeing the abstract meaning in the concrete.

To practice the hidden art of happiness is to consume (and, perhaps, create) art that refuels your spirit.

Work

Every now and again, my daughter conceives of some personal project to embark on. The other week, she decided that her dolls needed a poolside movie theater. She hunted down some cardboard and other household artifacts and spent hours designing an elaborate setting. When she was satisfied, she assembled her dolls, and, as the finishing touch, used her iPad as the screen.

What’s striking about her personal projects is the intense seriousness with which she approaches them. She is tense, eager, focused, thoughtful. She starts with a vision—something she wants to create—and then she exerts enormous effort to bring that vision into reality. This is not play. This is work.

"Man,” writes famed educator Maria Montessori, “builds himself through working, working with his hands, but using his hands as the instruments of his ego, the organ of his individual mind and will, which shapes its own existence face to face with its environment.”

Work is the essence of life. It is the core activity by which we sustain ourselves. Every other activity we engage in consumes resources—work is what creates the surplus that makes that consumption possible.

But work is more than that. It is not merely a means to creating material resources. It is—or can and should be—a deeply spiritual activity. That’s because what we do when we work is conceive of a better world and bring that world into reality. This can happen on a grand scale—envisioning the a new kind of phone or a transformative work of art or a new nation founded on freedom—and it can happen on a modest scale—tidying messy hotel rooms or crafting a satisfying meal for hungry patrons or building a charming setting for your dolls. But the process is one of transforming the world according to your own vision. Ayn Rand put it this way:

Productive work is the road of man’s unlimited achievement and calls upon the highest attributes of his character: his creative ability, his ambitiousness, his self-assertiveness, his refusal to bear uncontested disasters, his dedication to the goal of reshaping the earth in the image of his values.

While preparing to write her magnum opus, Atlas Shrugged, Rand reflected on this aspect of work in more personal terms:

I seem to be both a theoretical philosopher and a fiction writer. But it is the last that interests me most; the first is only the means to the last; the absolutely necessary means, but only the means; the fiction story is the end. Without an understanding and statement of the right philosophical principle, I cannot create the right story; but the discovery of the principle interests me only as the discovery of the proper knowledge to be used for my life purpose; and my life purpose is the creation of the kind of world (people and events) that I like—that is, that represents human perfection.

Philosophical knowledge is necessary in order to define human perfection. But I do not care to stop at the definition. I want to use it, to apply it—in my work (in my personal life, too—but the core, center and purpose of my personal life, of my whole life, is my work.) (Atlas Shrugged, 6)

It is entirely possible for a theoretical philosopher to find fulfillment in creating purely philosophic products: philosophy books, lectures, articles. The purpose of sharing that knowledge is for the consumers of philosophy to translate that abstract knowledge into concrete action. That is what makes the work of the philosopher productive.

But Rand wasn’t satisfied with providing abstractions and leaving it to others to bring those abstractions into full reality.

I am interested in using it, applying it—that is, stating it in concrete form of men and events, in the form of a fiction story. This last is my final purpose, my end; the philosophical knowledge or discovery is only the means to it. For my purpose, the non-fiction form of abstract knowledge doesn’t interest me; the final, applied form of fiction, of story, does. (I state the knowledge to myself, anyway; but I choose the final form of it, the expression, in the completed circle that leads back to man.) (Atlas Shrugged, 7)

She added one more note that suggests an important parallel between art and work.

In learning, we draw an abstraction from concrete objects and events. In creating, we make our own concrete objects and events out of the abstraction; we bring the abstraction down and back to its specific meaning, to the concrete; but the abstraction has helped us to make the kind of concrete we want the concrete to be. It has helped us to create—to reshape the world as we wish it to be for our purposes. (Atlas Shrugged, 7)

Whereas the artist, Rand writes elsewhere, “starts with a broad abstraction which he has to concretize, to bring into reality by means of the appropriate particulars,” the consumer of art “perceives the particulars, integrates them and grasps the abstraction from which they came, thus completing the circle” (Romantic Manifesto, 25).

In a similar way, the producer uses reason to conceive of a way to enrich human life and then brings that into reality in the form of a finished product. The consumer, on the other side, perceives how the product could improve his life and uses the good, “thus completing the circle.”

This connection is masked to the extent that we think of people as buying physical goods for purely functional purposes. Sometimes this is true. But in most cases, what we buy is tightly bound to a certain vision of who we are and what we want from life.

Marketers have long understood this. Marketing has often been dismissed as manipulative for arbitrarily connecting products to our deeper values and aspirations. But this is actually one of the services marketers perform: they highlight and enrich the meaning of physical goods, which gives us the power to make our lives more meaningful by buying and using those goods.

Famed marketer Eugene Schwartz calls this process Identification. “It is the desire of your prospect to define himself to the world around him—to express the qualities within himself that he values, and the positions he has attained” (Breakthrough Advertising, 109). We buy products that help us become who we want to be, and that express who we believe we are.

To practice the hidden art of happiness is to remake the world around you—as both a producer and a consumer—so that it comes a little closer to your ideal universe.

Love

Typically when I write an essay for Earthly Idealism, I share the first completed draft with my girlfriend. But as I was working on this piece, I couldn’t wait. I was so pleased with the first few sections that I couldn’t help but show her an unfinished version.

Part of my motivation was practical: Samantha (follow her on Twitter!) is an incredible writer whose editorial feedback improves everything I publish. But that wasn’t my primary motivation. Really I just wanted to share something I was proud of with her and see her reaction.

But why? What is the root of that desire? The answer to that question goes to the essence of what we seek from love—especially romantic love.

Production and contemplation allow us to bring our abstract values into reality, to experience them in concrete form. But there is one value that we cannot experience directly and concretely: ourselves.

We normally experience ourselves as a process: our consciousness, notes psychologist Nathaniel Branden, is an ongoing activity made up of “a shifting flow of perceptions, thoughts, and emotions.” Our own mind “is not an unmoving entity which man can contemplate objectively—i.e., contemplate as a direct object of awareness—as he contemplates objects in the external world.” He goes on:

In the course of a man’s life, his values, goals, and ambitions are first conceived in his mind, i.e., they exist as data of consciousness, and then—to the extent that his life is successful—are translated into action and objective reality; they become part of the “out there,” of the world that he perceives. They achieve expression and reality in material form. This is the proper and necessary pattern of man’s existence. Yet a man’s most important creation and highest value—his character, his soul, his psychological self—can never follow this pattern in the literal sense, can never exist apart from his own consciousness; it can never be perceived by him as part of the “out there.” But man desires a form of objective self-awareness and, in fact, needs this experience. (The Psychology of Self-Esteem, 198)

What other people give us, paradoxically, is an enhanced form of self-awareness. Through their interactions with us and responses to us, they act as a psychological mirror by which we more clearly perceive our own soul. “Man is able, alone, to know himself conceptually. What another consciousness can offer is the opportunity for man to experience himself perceptually” (The Psychology of Self-Esteem, 199). When I share my achievements with Samantha, her enthusiasm and admiration make those achievements more real and more meaningful. My inner pride becomes her outward smile.

But notice that the precondition for Samantha to act as a mirror for my soul is that she actually embody my values. Her praise has meaning because I admire her mind and share her standards. Praise from a stranger would be empty unless he articulated reasons for his praise I agreed with. And even then, it would not mean much. The value of her praise rests in the fact that it comes from her—and she represents what I most care about in life.

Romantic love is a response to your highest values embodied in another person. This includes morality—the universal values and virtues that should guide human life—but it includes much more than that. You fall in love with someone’s core values—not as empty abstractions, but as expressed and embodied in every detail of a person. You fall in love, writes Rand:

with that essential sum, that fundamental stand or way of facing existence, which is the essence of a personality. One falls in love with the embodiment of the values that formed a person’s character, which are reflected in his widest goals or smallest gestures, which create the style of his soul—the individual style of a unique, unrepeatable, irreplaceable consciousness.

If art allows us to temporarily live in our ideal world, and if work allows us to bring the world closer to our ideal, then romantic love allows us to share our life with our ideal person—someone who embodies what we value and who allows us to experience ourselves as the person we love being.

Practicing the Hidden Art of Happiness

The other day, Samantha and I were taking our daily walk and began reflecting on one of the common critiques of social media. People on social media, we often hear, present a false image of their life. They share their best moments and hide their worst, and this is supposed to show that they’re being inauthentic and trying to impress people.

Maybe, but Samantha wondered if that truly named what we do when we capture slices of our life on our social media feeds. What if we aren’t trying to present a distorted picture of our lives for social cache, but are highlighting for ourselves what we regard as important about our lives?

Maybe social media isn’t an exercise in journalism, but in art.

I thought back to one of my favorite scenes from The Office, which I have been showing Samantha for the first time. It’s the day of Jim and Pam’s wedding and Pam shares her aunt’s advice: the day goes by so fast, they should pause to take mental pictures of the high points. Jim pantomimes a camera, directs it at the face of the woman he’s about to marry, and says “click.”

Our life goes by fast with so much of what’s important lost in the day-to-day trivia. Social media allows us to capture and share the high points. To remember that what’s important is not your child’s tantrum, but the beaming pride on her face when she cleaned her room on her own initiative. Not the the errands you had to run or the doctors appointments you had to make, but the romantic dinners and adventurous vacations. Not the days you struggled to find the motivation to write your book, but the day your book was published.

Your life is a sacred value, but you have to work to make it sacred by living up to a pro-life morality—and you have to work to experience it as sacred by practicing the hidden art of happiness: the art of making your abstract values concrete and real—and of bringing out out the abstract meaning of the concrete.

I have explained again and again how the biggest barrier to people adopting the morality of Effective Egoism is their embarrassingly primitive notion of self-interest—a notion nurtured so successfully by altruism’s propagandists. They equate self-interest with empty narcissism and equate the pursuit of happiness with accumulating meaningless pleasures.

Few people have the first clue what self-interest means. And who would tell them, when even the motivational speakers and licensed psychologists who make careers out telling you how to be happy are unable to conceive of the heart and soul of seeking joy?

The core of self-interest, its actual heart and soul, is conceiving of a vision of who you want to be and the world you want live in, and bringing that into reality.

• When you become immersed in your work and bask in the achievement, you experience your life as sacred

• When you walk out of the gym, exhausted and dripping with sweat after a workout you almost skipped, you experience your life as sacred

• When you get dressed up in your favorite suit or dress, and slip on a new watch or new necklace, and attend a party with your favorite people, you experience your life as sacred

• When you enter a room decorated with your favorite paintings and posters of your heroes, you experience your life as sacred

• When you hold hands with your partner and look up at the night sky and take a moment to appreciate that you get to be part of this universe, you experience your life as sacred

• When you scroll through your Instagram feed, and see images of your smiling children, your favorite vacations, your chaotic adventures, your closest friends, you experience your life as sacred

That is the hidden art of happiness. It is the art of devoting your days and your thoughts to your highest values and aspirations—to your vision of the life you want to create, and do create with each day that you author.

Effective Egoism 101

The conception of earthly idealism I champion was defined by Ayn Rand. Here are three key works that summarize her perspective:

• Faith and Force: Destroyers of the Modern World by Ayn Rand

• Causality vs. Duty by Ayn Rand

• The Objectivist Ethics by Ayn Rand

And if want the full case for egoism, you can buy my book Effective Egoism: An Individualist’s Guide to Pride, Purpose, and the Pursuit of Happiness.