Use a strategy for happiness

I'm only on the second habit of happy people, and already it feels like he has copped out on me.  His suggestion is that I use a strategy for happiness; figure out what makes me happy and make it happen.

The research he has based it on, though, says that good and bad things happen in the same proportion to happy and unhappy people.  The difference is that happy people spend about 2/3 of their time thinking about the happy things, and the unhappy people spend 2/3 of their time thinking about the unhappy things.  So that suggests to me that what I should actually be doing is monitoring my thoughts and gently guiding them back into happy paths.

It turns out that's actually much easier to do than emptying my mind, so I've been fairly successful at it.  I even find that I've associated thoughts, so that common negative thoughts are closely followed by their corresponding positives, with very little effort on my part.  My daily emails have been going well, and I've gotten some nice responses.  I'm not running out of people to send to yet, so I'll keep it up for a little longer while I explore the next "secret".