Michael J. Fox, despite his Parkinson's disease has learned that happiness increases directly with acceptance and decreases directly with expectations.

If someone with a terrible condition as Parkinson's disease can learn to accept life as it is, should an able bodied person not be more easily accepting?

If you accept life as it presents itself to you without expectations, happiness will increase.

If your only expectation of life is that you will experience it and you accept whatever life gives you, you will be much happier.

If you expect that people will behave a certain way toward you then you will be constantly disappointed.

I remember going to do work for an elderly self-employed man. I was an accountant back then, doing books on the side.

My client, John,  asked for my opinion about his adopted son. His son had broken off with his father.

John's son had insisted on quitting school and going to work in another city. Like most boys his age, he rarely called to see how his mother and father were doing.

John felt his son was ungrateful for being adopted.

His father expected his son to get the proper education to continue the family business. He was very strict with him as a boy. And now a rift had grown between them.

I held my tongue at the time.

In retrospect, I realized that John was not accepting his son as he had grown up to be.  John was used to controlling everything in his small business. He wanted the same thing in his family life.

John had difficulty seeing that his expectations were about himself, not about his son. He could not accept that his son would have expectations that were different from his.

Life will just give you whatever it gives you. People will not behave the way you expect them to. No matter how hard you try, you cannot control your path through life.

Accept that fact. Accept that, and forget your expectations. Live life as a  moment to moment experience and happiness will be yours for the taking.

The more you expect of life, the more you want it to proceed in the way you think it should, the more frustrated and unhappy you will feel.

If you expect to be treated "fairly" at work, in a highly competitive environment, then you will become very frustrated, tense and unhappy.

Learn to accept that people will be competitive without judgement and your happiness and relaxation will increase  your happiness.

If your only expectation is that life will unfold, and if you accept that fact then you realize that happiness is just living in this moment.

If there is a real secret to life, then that is it.