Thinkfulness: The Means to Happiness and Living Your Best Life

By William W. Stuart

Adversity is a big part of life, but through thinkfulness, you can overcome adversity and improve both mental and physical well-being. In Thinkfulness, author William W. Stuart offers a guide to maximizing positive thinking.

Dr. Stuart presents a comprehensive understanding of thinkfulness—a way of thinking that facilitates living your best life possible. Thinkfulness allows you to readily overcome any obstacle you encounter by guiding your thinking factually and positively. It provides well-being and gives you your greatest opportunity to be trouble-free and happy. Thinkfulness helps answer the following questions:

Who am I and what is my purpose on earth?
What is happiness and how can I be happy?
What is my best life and how do I achieve it?

Thinkfulness discusses how to maximize positiveness in order to live your best life and experience happiness as purposeful members of a sustainable, constructive world. Positiveness-based thinking becomes the means of your mind.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu Publishing Services
• Release date: Jul 6, 2016
• ISBN: 9781483445816

Book preview

THINKFULNESS

THE MEANS TO HAPPINESS AND

LIVING YOUR BEST LIFE

William W. Stuart

Copyright © 2016 William W. Stuart.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored, or transmitted by any means—whether auditory, graphic, mechanical, or electronic—without written permission of both publisher and author, except in the case of brief excerpts used in critical articles and reviews. Unauthorized reproduction of any part of this work is illegal and is punishable by law.

ISBN: 978-1-4834-4580-9 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4834-4581-6 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2016901241

Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Thinkstock are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Thinkstock.

Lulu Publishing Services rev. date: 06/09/2016

CONTENTS

Chapter 1 Our Best Life

Chapter 2 Mind

Chapter 3 Thinking and Its Guidance

Chapter 4 Positiveness

Chapter 5 Thinkfulness

Chapter 6 The Principles of Thinkfulness

Chapter 7 Obstacles

Chapter 8 Detri-thinking

Chapter 9 Fear

Chapter 10 Happiness

Chapter 11 Practicing Thinkfulness

Chapter 12 Living Our Best Life

Chapter 13 Be Thinkful

CHAPTER 1

Our Best Life

Questions regarding life in general and our own life in particular occupy the minds of most of us occasionally; questions like: Why do we exist? and What is the meaning and purpose of life? Logical thinking about such questions usually renders the conclusion that the most rational approach to living is to focus on achieving our best life possible.

Our best life is one that maximizes positiveness.

Positiveness implies well-being, goodness, virtue, worthiness, truth, constructiveness, and living that benefits ourselves, others, and the biosphere. When we live our best life, there are at least three positive outcomes:

1. we, those we affect, and the biosphere benefit;

2. we can look upon our life as constructive and worthy; and

3. we enhance our likelihood of being happy and bringing happiness to others.

These positive results reinforce one another and nearly always coexist.

Endeavoring to live our best life, thereby maximizing positiveness, is the purpose of life.

This seems to be a goal that we would readily and naturally dedicate our lives to. If everyone did this, life would surely be a pleasant passage through an untroubled world. So why is this not so?

Unfortunately, what now prevails is an adversarial world at various levels of unrest. The majority of earth’s inhabitants are struggling and suffering, primarily because humankind’s collective and individual thinking are guided negatively and are obstructive in principle to living a best life. This detrimental way of thinking, thus living, puts aside virtue, compassion, and rationality in favor of:

1. expediency – method that is quick, easy, or advantageous, but unjust;

2. greed – desire to possess or control more than is reasonable;

3. aversion – dislike, rejection, hatred, or anger; and

4. delusion – irrationality, wishful thinking, clinging to harmful beliefs or fantasies.

Cutting ethical corners to acquire excessive wealth, malicious power, and unfair advantage has become the modus operandi of the mainstream. This spawns actions and creates products and consequences that are harmful to us; and, in their ever increasing reach, to the entire biosphere.

Most of the world’s governments are controlled by corporate bribery, unethical lobbying, biased political organizations, and wealthy, self-indulging individuals. Add to this the increasing incidence of coercion of governments by organized crime and religious authority, and it is easy to see why justice, liberty, valid democracies, free enterprise, and the status of the non-wealthy are now in jeopardy.

The politico-techno economic machine that we have invented in order to provide the excesses required by mind sets, which are characterized by ‘me first’ and ‘growth and profit no matter the consequences’, is profoundly unsustainable on a rapidly overpopulating planet like ours. It is steadily diminishing our quality of life and threatens our very existence as it continues to concentrate wealth, degrade and deplete the earth’s natural resources, defile the atmosphere, and extinct species after species at record pace.

The majority of individuals, groups, societies and nations now exist at such a distance from integrity and principled thinking that they have little knowledge of what the present state of humankind is; what a best life is; or what truly brings sustainable happiness.

At the core of most personal and universal problems is:

how we think.

Faulty thinking creates goals and behavior that make it difficult to avoid being caught up in the glitz, false promise, and immediate gratification that this fast paced, play now-pay later world throws at us. These are complicated, troubled times for unhealthy thinkers, but a reality based, ethical way of thinking exists; one that provides a kinder, happier existence and brings us our best life.

Our best life begins when: 1. we accept full responsibility for our own thinking, behavior, and emotions; 2. acknowledge our life’s purpose to maximize positiveness; and 3. understand that changing the status quo starts with improving how each one of us, individually, thinks.

The detrimental actions of groups, no matter what size, is always a reflection of how its individual members think. Nearly all of our difficulties, negative behavior, fear, and suffering – from the miseries of the third world to the possibility of nuclear annihilation – originate, worsen, and fail resolution because of the detrimental thinking of individuals. Misguided thinking precedes and initiates: 1. abusive and deceptive communication; 2. psychological and physical violence; 3. the unpleasant and harmful emotions we experience; 4. the prejudices and delusions we harbor; and 5. the numerous difficulties we create and experience on life’s journey.

Any means of changing the world must begin with and be sustained through the individual; this is where we start: with you and me. If we are to satisfy our purpose in life and experience sustainable happiness, detrimental action must be replaced by the rational, compassionate action that comes from thinking based in positiveness. Once we see that we do not just have problems but are creating