The first in a short series unpacking the brilliant ten commandments of happiness from the Art of Brilliance team, with a small rant about marketing and online advertising thrown in for free.
The thing about marketing is that it has no inhibitions when it comes to trying to sell you something. It doesn't see why it should be hampered by truth or whether the approach is damaging to you as a customer, as long as you buy something. That's why there are so many regulations they have to follow and why the big companies have teams of lawyers looking at how the can push the envelope to sell you more. Marketing has no soul, it's not your friend and it doesn't want to connect you to the right products for your lifestyle. It just wants to sell you any old sh1te it can for the largest amount of profit.
But compared to the platforms that place those online adverts and profit from it, the marketing companies are loving, caring, beautiful people !!!! Because the platforms really don't give a stuff about anyone, as long as the marketers keep paying and you keep clicking.
No sales from that advert ❓
Not our problem 🤷
Pay up 💰💰💰
Blue Monday is a great example of what the travel companies would call an innovative marketing idea about the third Monday in January that they used to sell moreholidays. I'd call it an example of how marketers will happily mislead and lie to you to sell you something that has evolved into a reality that encourages you to feel really miserable on Blue Monday. If I was Monday I'd have sued them because, as days of the week go, Monday has already got a bad rep. Can you imagine how Monday would get treated by the rest of the weekdays ? They'd probably talk about it behind it's back, turn up with 'things could be worse, I could be Monday' t-shirts on and I bet Friday and Saturday would be unbearably smug to hang out with.
One of the many things I love about being part of the Art of Brilliance team is that we do marketing differently. We're lucky in that we know that we're selling what everyone needs, the behaviours and practises that help you thrive in the 21st Century. Unfortunately, not everyone gets what we do at Art of Brilliance and Out Beyond Ideas and how massively impactful it can be in your life, so we are lucky to have a fabulous marketing team to help us get the message out there.
My Blue Monday this year was spent driving up to Stoke (see It's All About Balance for more on that), meeting with my mate Tony and then on Tuesday I supported Dr. Andy Cope at one of our rare Art of Brilliance open programmes. I got to meet some fabulous people who get what we do and had a fab day. Driving back on the M6/M5 I was thinking about our Blue Monday marketing - The Ten Commandments of Happiness - and the beautifully illustrated poster that you can download from the Art of Brill Website for free (link at the end of this post). I love it because, like Blue Monday, it's something we made up, but unlike Blue Monday, it will have a positive impact on your life if you apply it. Plus you can do it for free !
Roll forward to Wednesday and my mate Tony came up with the idea of sharing a commandment a day in our online wellbeing community, the Buzz (link at the bottom of the post if you want to check it out). So I thought it would be worth talking about the ten commandments on here and digging a bit deeper into them, because the simplicity of the list may disguise the power that each commandment has to change your life for the better.
As Andy points out in his blog, the big difference between our commandments and God's is that we've 'de-notted' them, which is a linguistic game changer. 'Not' is a bit of a naughty word really, because it makes you think of what you're not supposed to do:
Do not think of a pink elephant in a white tutu wearing a tiara and ballet pumps doing a pirouette whilst waving a magic wand....
I pretty much guarantee you have that image in your head now, because to process the not you need to understand what it is you are not doing. Thinking a bit more, but not too much about it, how many men hadn't even considered coveting their neighbour's ox, ass or wife before Moses told them not to ? Best move on from that one....🐂 🫏 🧍♀️
So I think there is a zeroth commandment implicit within this which is to frame your actions and behaviours in the positive, rather than the negative. From a marketing perspective we've given you 11 for the price of 10 and the 10 were free to start with. As an aside, when I was doing my degree in Physics in 1982 and learnt about the zeroth law of thermodynamics I thought it had been discovered by someone with the surname Zeroth 🤦.
The first commandment is a biggie. We are born with a negativity bias hard wired, so having a positive attitude is something we need to learn and practise. For many years it was thought that your attitude was hard wired so if you were a miserable bugger, that was it for life. Then Martin Seligman and others came along and started talking about learnt helplessness and learnt optimism and Positive Psychology was born.
The key outcome for this commandment is the postive attitude as it will form the foundation of a brilliant life, but the key part I want to emphasise is:
Make an effort
Maintaining a positive attitude, or, more specifically, a realistically optimistic attitude, takes effort. You need to forge the habits that support it (some of which feature later on in the commandments) and you have keep up the effort if you don't want social media, the news, marketing etc to grind you down. It will take you more effort in 2026 to maintain a positive attitude than in previous years and there is no sign of it getting any easier. But it's worth it. Once you have it in place maintenance is low but is still needed, just in case Donald Trump thinks there's oil under your house and decides to invade you 🙄
I've decided not to cover them all in order as some just sit better together. The 8th commandment sits really well with the first as it will get you to stop some of the stuff we do that helps erode the positive attitude we have.
If you live in Britain, and have reached adulthood, I can pretty much guarantee that you like to have a moan. There seems to be an unwritten rule that where two or more people gather together they must moan about the weather, the government, council tax, the NHS, their neighbours (coveted or otherwise) and anything else one can think of. It feels good to moan and gives us something to bond over, but it eats away at your positive attitude.
I'm not advocating for the elimination of negativity and 'positive vibes only' as down that path lies toxic positivity. But the low level grumbling doesn't change anything, has no intrinsic value and is a gateway habit towards more serious health problems. There is more than enough stuff happening that will erode your positive attitude, so it's a no-brainer to cut out the personal habits that are contributing to its decline.
I chose this one as the last commandment to look at today, because it goes so well with 8️⃣. I live in Wales. We call it God's country because of its spectacular beauty, but that beauty comes at a price. It rains a lot. A beautiful day in Wales is truly paradise, but on a rainy day even the sheep look miserable....
So I could decide only to go out on nice days and then break commandment 8️⃣ and moan to all and sundry about the weather for the rest of the year. Or I could make the most of the weather that we're given, put the right clothing on and enjoy the day that is presented to me. Dog walkers and horse owners know this already and as long as you have wellies, jumping in puddles is great fun and saves you dragging lots of mud into the car.
I think I've gone on long enough this week so I'll continue posting about the commandments in the coming weeks until we've covered them all and maybe uncovered some more that are hiding underneath.
Ultimately this is about the 4000 weeks we have on this planet. Some of us will have more and some will have less. If you've lived a fair few of them, like I have, it's not that big a number. It's certainly not worth writing off a 7th of the rest of the weeks you have because they fall on a Monday, or spending a significant proportion of them sitting inside moaning about the weather or grumbling about the low level stuff. But is is worth spending some of that time building your positive attitude, 'de-notting' yourself and spending time in the magnificent beauty of nature, whatever the weather.
A big thank you to Amy Bradley for her fabulous artwork, Julien Steffan and Sean Foster for sharing their photos on Unsplash, Andy for the commandments and Tony for inspiring me to cover them in a bit more detail. Check out the links below and print yourself a copy of the commandments for the fridge or notice board and maybe even for your team in work. Imagine what it would be like to spend time with people who all followed them and supported each other to achieve them 🤔
Mike xx
Check out the Art of Brilliance Blog about the 10 commandments of happiness and download a copy of Amy's brilliant artwork.
Come and join me, Tony and the Art of Brilliance team in our online wellbeing community on WhatsApp
