When I was 5 years old, my mother always told me that happiness was the key to life. When I went to school, they asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up. I wrote down 'happy.' They told me I didn't understand the assignment, and I told them they didn't understand life.
The real sting here isn't the platitude about choosing happiness—it's Lennon's recognition that institutions systematically train us to mistake credentials for contentment, then punish us for noticing the swap. A child who answers "happy" to a career question hasn't failed the assignment; she's exposed how the assignment itself is built on a false premise. You see this every day in the parent who dutifully pursues the prestigious job, achieves it, then wonders at forty why the achievement feels hollow—the school never asked him to imagine that outcome. Lennon's insight is that our early, uncorrupted answer was the right one all along, and the machinery of adult life counts on us forgetting we ever knew it.
“The only way to have a friend is to be one.”
Ralph Waldo Emerson“He who has a why to live can bear almost any how.”
Viktor Frankl“Let yourself be silently drawn by the strange pull of what you really love. It will not lead you ast...”
Rumi“Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life.”
Steve Jobs