“Happiness is not something ready made. It comes from your own actions.” (Dalai Lama) So many men spend their whole lives searching for happiness. We’re programmed to look for it outside ourselves. Go buy the thing. Go do the thing. Book the vacation. Find anything that can take us out of ourselves for a while. And when the people closest to us aren’t happy, we do the same thing in reverse. I hear it from men all the time: “My wife told me she isn’t happy.” And the first reaction is the one most of us would have, “I need to fix this. I need to do something to make sure she’s happy.” Here’s what I know from where I sit today. It’s no one’s responsibility to control our happiness. It’s ours. It’s an internal job, and it comes from our own actions, from the work we do inside ourselves. This season, I’m finishing a book. All ten chapters are on the page now, and none of them came ready-made. Every page came out of years of doing the work, and a lot of that work happened at five thirty on Friday mornings with my mentor, Nick, saying things out loud and hearing them reflected back. The book isn’t the happiness. The man who did the work to write it is. Here’s what happened this week that drove that idea home for me. For a stretch of time, I ran dream meetings at my company, helping our people go after their dreams. One man, I’ll call him Daniel, came in and told me he and his wife were taking out a loan, fifteen to twenty thousand dollars, for fertility treatment. They were already financially strapped. So I asked him, “Why do you want to have a baby with your wife?” He said he wanted to show her they could do something together, to be the man she’d always wanted. And she wanted to give him a baby so he could be a real father. “When you bring a baby into this world,” I asked, “who is it about?” “It’s about the baby,” he said. What do you think he realized? They were each reaching for something ready-made to fill the feeling of being incomplete inside them. He went home, they talked, they cried, and they decided to save up for a house instead. I’ve watched a version of the same thing for thirty years in my own father. He’s one of the most selfless men I know. Call him at three in the morning and he’s already in the car. He’s spent his whole life building toward the day he’d finally be free to do the things he always said he’d do. At seventy-five, he’s still doing the same dance he was doing at forty-five. Someday, when this is done, then I’ll live. Is that happiness? Or is it a happiness he’s waiting to have handed to him, ready-made, at the end of the road? Someday is where a man goes to die. Men, look at how many of us have found devices and vices to fill that need. The phone in your hand. The thing in your cart. They’re all ready-made. They’re on the shelf, they’re easy, and they fill nothing. The work you do on yourself is the only thing that builds something real. And once you find that, there’s nothing that can take it from you. Here’s the part most men miss. When you’ve done that work, when you’ve built the man, you finally have something to give the people around you. You can only give what you have a surplus of. This week’s lesson: Nobody can hand you happiness ready-made, and you can’t hand it to anyone else. Build it in yourself first, then give it away. Next, From the Trenches: She Can’t Follow a Plan That Only Lives in Your Head This week I sat with a man I coach. I’ll call him Aaron. He’s an extrovert and a big thinker, and two years ago he started his own company. Right now, his family is in real financial hardship. His wife is home with their two young children. She’s quieter, and over those same two years her stress has kept climbing. As we talked, we realized it together. Aaron had a picture in his head of what this business was going to be. He’d never handed it to her. He thinks in concepts, so he was operating from I don’t know exactly what it’s going to be or how I’ll get there, but I’m going to get there. And what was she getting? No plan. No certainty. No consistency. Only the wins. She wasn’t insecure. She was uncertain, and she didn’t know where the anxiety was coming from. So Aaron went home and told her, “I want to apologize for not doing my duty as a man in our relationship, as the leader of our household. I should have laid out the plan and the path, so you know there’s an end in sight.” Then he thanked her for carrying the kids and the finances while he builds. He told me it’s already changed the way he thinks. Underneath it was something I see in so many relationships. The chaotic one and the stabilizer, drawn to each other, then draining each other. We’re there by design. God put those two people together to support one another. But it takes work. You have to recognize what the other person actually needs and put effort into supporting it, instead of assuming you already know. Men, what are you keeping in your head that your people need in their hands? You can’t hand your family a future ready-made. You can hand them the plan. Next, Here’s What’s Trending in Hollywood and Men’s Mental Health RJ Mitte, ‘Breaking Bad’ actor and disability rights champion, dies at 34 Actor and disability rights advocate RJ Mitte, who was born with cerebral palsy and played Walter White Jr. on Breaking Bad, died October 12 in Brownsville, Texas, at 34. He went on to champion disability causes, including through his own foundation. His representative has since confirmed the cause of death as suicide. Mitte once said that living with his condition gave him a different way of seeing how the world saw him, and that it made him better at his work. That’s so much of the work we do. He didn’t choose his condition. He took something incredibly challenging and used it to bring light into the world. At the core, that’s one of the best things a man can do: use what he’s been through for good, no matter how hard it was. I don’t know what he was carrying, and I won’t guess. What I do know is that we all have the void. I believe it’s there by design, calling us back to a relationship with a higher power. I’ve felt it myself, that longing, the loneliness, the emptiness. No matter what you put in it, it doesn’t fill until you do the work on yourself. Too many men are carrying that alone right now. If that’s you, you’re not the only one, and it doesn’t have to stay this way. Call or text 988, or reach out to me. When you do the work, you come out the other side stronger, with a much clearer context about life. Nobody gets that ready-made. You build it, and then it’s yours to give. Next, This Week’s NFN: Gratitude Doesn’t Count Until You Send It An NFN, a Non-F#cking-Negotiable, is something you commit to doing one day at a time, for as long as it serves you. By now you’ve started building a routine, a discipline around your morning ritual. This week we’re going to the Spirit column of the Pick Your 30 chart. There’s a man on my men’s team who kept making commitments about eating healthy and logging his food, and he wasn’t honoring them. We sat down and found a system that worked for him: meal prep on Sundays. One NFN. Yup, it was that simple. He’s down fifteen pounds without setting out to lose a pound. And here’s the part I didn’t see coming. Other men on the team started going to him for advice, because they could see it working. He didn’t do it to inspire anybody. He did it for himself. This week’s NFN works the same way, except the ripple is the whole point. Here’s what I want you to watch for. First, what comes up in you when you do it. Is it uncomfortable, or does it come easy? If it’s hard, that’s showing you a barrier. Second, what happens on the other end. Does it open a new dialogue? Does he reach back out to you? Ready to take on an NFN for yourself? Here’s your challenge this week: Every day for seven days, Saturday and Sunday included, text one man three things you’re grateful for. It can be about him, about your relationship, or something he’s done for you. One man a day, every day. I’m certain… This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit billvalway.substack.com
