“I am serious, so I laugh a lot. You need to laugh. You don’t laugh enough. I don’t trust anyone who doesn’t laugh.”

- Maya Angelou

I have a friend who can have fun with anyone, anywhere and at any time and I am jealous of his abilities. I copied many of his techniques, but like anything the original is always better. His number one rule is don’t take yourself seriously. If you can’t laugh at yourself then you’ll have trouble enjoying life.

I was riding with some friends on a four hour trip home. The car’s radio and A/C was broken and the vents pushed out hot air. It was over 100 degrees. Four guys all stuck in one big sweaty stink box of torture. Most people would have sat in angry silence, but not my friend, he made the ride an adventure. He sang for four hours straight.

The titles of a few of his songs were:

• “The sweat dripping down my armpit”

• “Gasoline reminds me of my father”

• “Why are we lost?”

• “Who wants to buy my toe cheese”

It didn’t matter that he couldn’t sing that well. The only thing that mattered was that it was one of the most interesting four hours of my life. The other two guys hated every moment of it. They screamed, pleaded, and tried to ignore him to no avail. He was going to sing the whole trip home. While he sang I laughed and chimed in with my own verse every once in awhile, but mostly watched in admiration. I learned that every experience can be fun if viewed from the right perspective.

Check out this laughing baby on Youtube.com. Every time he hears paper ripping he laughs so hard he falls over.

Related Links About Working a Little Happier:

• 25 Lessons on Working Happy From My German Father
• How You Are Silently Signaling Your Co-workers to Treat You
• Create 12 Parties a Year Instead of 1 Boring Holiday Party

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I’ve been Netflixing the TV show Scrubs on DVD. What a great show! My wife and I finished season one and we were watching the bonus material. Donald Faison (Chris Turk) was being interviewed about the show and he said that the set only had one rule…

Don’t be an A**hole.

“When someone says that if you are an a**hole you are not going to be here for very much longer, you’d be surprised how much nicer people will be.”

I think we need to implement this rule at every company.

Anyone who has worked in human resources knows that the people who stay with a company are usually happy, communicate well and are liked by most of their co-workers. They don’t cause trouble, they encourage teamwork.

Related Articles:

• Why are Icelanders so Good at Working Happy?
• How to Get Your Boss Naked
• Company Karma

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We can’t always be feeling great, smiling at every customer and co-worker as we tackle every job with robot-like efficiency. We are human and our emotions fluctuate. Right now I don’t feel like writing, but my fingers and mind keep on going, so I continue for my future, to help you, and because tomorrow I will be glad that I pushed another good article out. That’s right I’m not working happy, but I’m doing my best with what I’ve got.

Now you know the truth. I’m not always working happy. Please don’t tell your friends.

We all have bad days and sometimes we need to fake it. Seth Godin is a blogging wunderkind. Okay, I guess he isn’t that young but he’s a great blogger at any rate. He wrote an article Pretending that you care that has some great insight.

No, you can’t always hire exceptional people for these jobs. No, you can’t always invest enough time to train them sufficiently. But yes, you can make, “pretending you care,” a barely acceptable alternative.

It doesn’t take much to take the edge off an encounter.

[Boy does this sound cynical. How inauthentic! How manipulative! Isn't it better to just hire people who actually care? Of course it is. But as far as I can tell, that's a lot harder than it looks--because so many organizations are organized around policies, not caring, and because so many employees have been trained not to care.

So, the essence of the lesson here is this: if people start out pretending to care, next thing you know, they actually do care. They like the positive feedback and they like the way being kind makes them feel. It spreads. It sticks.]

Read the whole article here.

Sometimes we need to fake it to get to where we need to be. I know that you don’t always feel like working on that boring project, writing that last email of the day, or calling one more sales lead, but no one wants you to pack it in because you don’t feel like doing it. Your company wants you to fake it like any good professional.

What was the last thing you faked? I’m not talking about what goes on in your bedroom. I’m wondering when was the last time you faked your happiness on the job and eventually became happy.

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