Do you want to be happy, or be right?

I love the Winston Churchill quote that “You will never reach your destination if you stop and throw stones at every dog that barks”. Mainly because there is no shortage of barking dogs in this world. I go for regular walks with my loyal dog, Rossie and it’s fascinating to watch this phenomenon unfold in real life. There is one particular dog, a tiny squealing jack russel my kids nicknamed “Sneaker”. Sneaker as his names suggests, manages to sneak under his gate and runs up close to Rossie barking his head off. Rossie typically won’t have any of it and engages Sneaker aggressively until Sneaker returns to his home.

There are other louder more animated dogs that Sneaker along the route but Rossie plain ignores them. There is one beautiful Alsatian that makes a scene all the way from one end his garden to the other. He barely gets a look from Rossie. Just like the crazy pitbull from down the road that runs in circles and headbutts it’s own gate when we walk past. Rossie doesn’t even look at him. You can tell that in reference to the larger dogs, Rossie has chosen happiness over anything else. Barking contests with Sneaker are fun, but irritating a pitbull that is behind a locked gate, maybe not be worth the risk.

Fascinating how my dog seems to have mastered the idea that it doesn’t have to engage every canine in the road. Even when it has done nothing wrong it doesn’t need to prove it hasn’t. All it has to do is enjoy its walk. Why is it on the other hand I struggle to let the human noise go so easily? At any given moment there are so many issues in the world. Many of which are infuriating and if you go looking for them you will find them. Some of the big issues society is facing are not worth ignoring or letting go of. Some are matters of principle or values where doing nothing would be morally incomprehensible. However, many issues are quite frankly noise and not worth spending 5 minutes on.

Could one of the secrets to happiness, therefore, be the need to apply an extreme filter over what we care about and don’t care about? Like many of you I am a member of many WhatsApp groups and a generous recipient of an onslaught of social media every day. Like many of you I encounter people on a daily basis people who infuriate me by holding views of life or business that are infuriatingly wrong (to me). Just like you it’s a daily struggle not to spend time convincing these people that I am right. When the easy way out may not be to engage at all.

One of my biggest recent leadership lessons is that there is a large difference between engaging someone and aligning someone. In the latter one is looking for the other party to agree with a certain point of view. In the former, it’s just a discussion where opinions will be shared in both sides. In order to be happier I think the lesson is that you don’t necessarily need to align or get agreement or consensus on every discussion. Some people may disagree vehemently with your opinion…but in many cases the decision is still yours to make. It’s like a classic case of “thank you for your opinion, although I will still do what I think is best anyway”. And there may not be anything wrong with that.

There are a lot of mad barking dogs in this world. Choose carefully the ones you want to throw rocks at and the ones you just want to plain ignore.