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Once a week, I take one idea and put it under the microscope. Sometimes it’s about business, sometimes it’s about how people think, and sometimes it’s simply an observation about the world around us. If it challenges the way you see the topic, then it has done exactly what it was meant to do.

A good friend of mine has this concept he calls happiness points.

Every experience in your life generates a certain number of them. Some generate a lot. Some generate almost none. Some, if you are being honest, generate negative points — they cost you energy and well-being rather than adding to it.

The framework is not scientific. It is just a lens. I have been walking around with it in my head for the past few weeks, and it has changed the way I am looking at almost everything.

Here is how it works in practice. You could go skiing for a long weekend — let's say that costs you $5,000 and gives you 5 happiness points. Or you could buy tickets to see your football team play, also $5,000, and that gives you 50 happiness points.

Same money, same window of time, completely different return. Once you start thinking this way, certain decisions become obvious very quickly. Others become uncomfortable because you realize you have been investing heavily in things that were never really paying off.

I have been running this calculation on my own life lately, and some of what I found surprised me.

Moving to Bulgaria was supposed to be a high-happiness point decision. The cost of living here is roughly three times cheaper than in Toronto. What I used to spend on mortgage payments and bills in Canada buys me about four months of rent here.

On paper, the efficiency is extraordinary. On the happiness-points ledger, the math looked airtight.

What I did not account for — could not have accounted for, until I no longer had it — was the sense of belonging I had built in Toronto. The community. The particular texture of a city where I knew people, where I had history, where I could walk into a room and feel oriented.

I did not know how many happiness points that was generating because I had never had to live without it. You rarely know the value of something until it disappears and the number goes missing from the total.

That experience taught me something I think about constantly now. The happiness points generated by belonging, by community, by feeling rooted somewhere — those are some of the hardest to quantify in advance, and some of the most devastating to lose. They do not show up in a cost-of-living calculator.

Before we go any further…

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Now, as I was saying…

The morning espresso is a better example of the framework working in my favor.

Sitting in my favorite coffee shop with a single shot, watching people, nowhere to be for about thirty minutes — that is worth ten happiness points to me. It costs almost nothing in money. The return per unit of input is extraordinary.

When I compare that to going to the gym first thing in the morning — ninety minutes, good for my health in some abstract future-tense way, worth maybe two happiness points in the moment — the espresso wins every time. (I have stopped feeling guilty about that. The framework gives me permission to be honest about what actually fills me up versus what I have been told is supposed to fill me up.)

This is where I want you to sit for a moment.

Where are your happiness points actually coming from? Not where you think they should come from. Not what looks impressive on a calendar or a lifestyle spreadsheet. Where are they actually coming from, in your real life, right now?

Richard Koch — who wrote The 80/20 Principle, one of the books that shaped how I think about almost everything — calls these happiness islands. The idea is that in your life, as it currently exists, there are pockets of genuine joy that are already there, already accessible, often already free or close to it.

Most people sail past them without noticing because they are busy pursuing happiness points that require more money, more status, more arrival at some future condition before the feeling is allowed to begin. The happiness islands are already there. The work is identifying them.

For me, one of the clearest ones showed up when I ran this calculation on my work.

I have built and sold several businesses over the years. Each one had many moving parts — operations, people, systems, delivery, customer service, finance, all of it. Looking back honestly at which parts of that work generated happiness points, the answer was singular and consistent across every business I have ever run.

Creating marketing campaigns.

Specifically, building the asset from scratch. Writing the email, designing the funnel, sitting down with a blank page, and figuring out how to talk to people in a way that moves them. That, every single time, was where the happiness points were for me.

Which is probably why, without ever consciously planning it, I have outsourced and automated every single part of my businesses except the marketing. I never let go of that one thing. Looking at it now through the happiness-points lens, I understand exactly why. I was unconsciously protecting the thing that gave me the most return.

The question I keep coming back to is a simple one, and I want to leave it with you.

Sit down this week — not with a vision board or a goal-setting framework — just with a piece of paper. Write down the last ten or twenty things you did, in work and outside of it. Next to each one, write honestly how many happiness points it gave you.

Then look at where your time and money are actually going and ask yourself how well those two things match up.

The gaps are where everything interesting is. Most people are spending enormous resources on experiences that generate very few points, while the things that genuinely fill them up sit untouched, underfunded, or quietly dismissed as too small to matter.

Find your happiness islands. Write them down. Then, slowly and deliberately, start building your life a little more in their direction.

That is the only goal-setting process I have found that consistently produces something worth having.

P.S. If you enjoy these ideas, you’ll love the deeper conversations we have on the List Building Lifestyle podcast.