Once upon a time, when I was a thirteen-year-old girl, I was trying my darnedest to get good grades and I was trying to succeed in the sports I loved. One day, amidst all the craziness, I found a quote that I’d never heard before. It was one by John Lennon: “When I was five 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.”

I rarely posted on Facebook, but I remember sharing the photo of that quote and saving it to my second generation iPod touch. And, somewhere in the archives, I still have that same photo I saved years ago. It’s funny because I think that when you read a good quote that you’ll end up loving and living by for years, you don’t really know it at the time, the same way that you don’t really know your best friend is going to be your best friend the first time you meet them. But, as it turns out, that quote has really stuck with me through the years. In fact, the first day I read that quote might have been my ultimate turning point to trying to making happiness a big priority and falling in love with Bobby McFerrin’s “Don’t Worry Be Happy.”

So look, I know I’m 19, and I realize that I don’t know everything. But I do know one thing: I’m here to tell you that yeah, you can be a doctor. You can be a lawyer. You can be a mountain climber. You can be a billionaire. But, you can also be an unhappy doctor and you can be an unhappy lawyer and you can be an unhappy mountain climber and you can be an unhappy billionaire. So, if that’s what you really want to be, a doctor or a lawyer or a mountain climber or a billionaire, what’s it even worth if you’re not happy?

And here’s why it’s not worth anything.

Not everyone is going to be a billionaire. Not everyone is going to be able to afford a vacation home in the Bahamas that they visit for a week every spring. And those of you who can afford that, let me ask you a question: are you truly happy doing what you do that makes you the money to go to the Bahamas every year? Or is your source of happiness that single week long trip?

Think about it.

I don’t know about you, but I know that I’d rather be as jolly as a bean sitting at home, loving what I do (even if it makes minimum wage), playing guitar, and being silly with my family rather than wishing I had a different career or wishing I lived in a better place for 348 days out of the year.

I’m not afraid to admit that I’d rather live a simple, happy life than a (mostly unhappy) extravagant one. Maybe that’s what everybody wants, I don’t know.

Now, don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying that all billionaires are unhappy, or any are, for that matter. Maybe there’s not even a single unhappy billionaire out there. For those of you who are able to visit that vacation house in the Bahamas every spring, you must be pretty successful in whatever it is that you do. And trust me when I say I know that in order to be truly successful, you have to have some sort of passion for what you do.

My point for including this: I truly do hope that you’re happy doing what you do. Regardless of whether you’re basking in the Bahamas or you aren’t, don’t forget to do a reality check and ask yourself if you love what you do. And if you don’t, maybe it’s time to find something to love.

Doesn’t everyone have to dabble in this and that before they figure out what it is they love?

When I was getting ready to graduate high school, I remember struggling to figure out what it was that I am here for. I mean, there I was, with people telling me I’m good at this and I should really do that, and then all the sudden I was graduating and telling people what I was going to do with my life, and it turns out that is not at all what I wanted.

But, somewhere along the way, I figured it out: I wanted to be happy.

Maybe it took my dreams of going to the perfect, best school being twisted and crumpled and thrown out the window to realize it.

But I figured it out.

I figured out that no, I wasn’t going to go to college to be a biomedical engineer. Did I want to sit in a cubicle, staring at a computer screen eight hours a day? Would I be happy doing that? No. No, I wasn’t going to go to school to be a lawyer. Did I want to make a difference? Sure. Did I want to do that by sitting in a courtroom half the time and filling out paperwork the other half of the time? No. Would I be happy doing that? Not a chance.

At the end of the day, I realized that sure, I wanted to be a biomedical engineer. Sure, I wanted to be a lawyer. But, I sure as hell didn’t want to be an unhappy biomedical engineer. I didn’t want to be an unhappy lawyer.

When we say, “at the end of the day,” I think we’re talking about how we feel and what we think and what we’re glad we did and what we wished we would have done differently at the end of everything. But, I also think that we’re not just talking about how we feel at the end of every single day. We’re talking about how we feel at the end of our lives. We’re talking about how we’re going to feel when we’re sitting on our death beds thinking about all the wonderful things we’ve done, but maybe more importantly, how we’re going to feel when we’re sitting on our death beds thinking about what we could’ve done. Whether or not we’re happy. Whether or not we did what we loved.

So, if you’re an unhappy doctor or an unhappy lawyer or an unhappy mountain climber or an unhappy billionaire, fix it. Stop doing what makes you unhappy and do what you’ve always dreamt of doing. Live out your wildest dreams. Or find what you’re dreaming of. If you’re happy, you can be anything you want to be. Our days are numbered. Make them happy and make them count.

So now, go ahead and tell me that being happy isn’t better than being anything else.