There are so many times in my life that I wanted to know what so-called "ingredients" I needed to achieve ultimate happiness and satisfaction with my life. I just wish someone could give me a recipe to follow. It would be so simple to just follow the recipe and try my hardest to add 1 cup of travel, 2 cups of hard work, 2 tbsp love etc.

Maybe just maybe if I did it right, exactly as the recipe said, my life would be fulfilled.

What I have a learned though is that this recipe doesn't exist for everyone because each person's individual recipe for a good life is so different. We can't follow what others do to be happy! Yes, there are certainly some similarities in things that make me happy that also make others happy, but just as the same, some recipes use a pinch of salt and others don't.

When you start realizing that you can't follow a recipe to happiness then you open yourself up to the creativity of making a recipe for YOU.

Sometimes that recipe is going to have a bad flavor and sometimes you are going to add too much salt and not enough sugar, but a "happy life" is going to have way more ingredients than the one you can follow in a book.

It's going to have experiences. Experiences unique to the individuals. It's going to have failures. Failures that only you can learn from. It's going to have success. The success that's going to make you wish this could be the only ingredient.

In the end, your recipe for a happy life has no set of ingredients. There's no telling how much love you need, how often you should travel, how many mistakes you can make or even how many bad batches you can make until you create the perfect final one. Life is a recipe designed to be created by you. Stop following the ingredients others add.

Write your own recipe and surely happiness will be the outcome.