Projects

What is a project?

Adolescence is a time of gaining autonomy and discovering your talents. Later on, in our young and adult lives, we will develop those talents. That development takes years and during those years we will achieve intermediate goals before we fully develop our talents. For each of those intermediate goals, we will create projects.

A project has two ingredients: the goal we want to achieve and the plan we will follow to achieve it:

Project = Goal (idea, dream) + Plan

As you can see, having a plan is not just to have a goal, an idea or a dream. It also requires to think clearly how to realize that idea: the specific steps we are going to take, when are we going to take them, what do we need for taking them, etc. Only when we have detailed all these elements, we can say that we have a plan.

Types of projects

Consider Matias’ project of passing the entrance test of an important football club and becoming a junior football player. The project involves his parents and his physical education teacher. This is a project that requires more than one person to be completed. Besides, his parents and his teacher are very interested in Matias’ success: his happiness is also their happiness. They all share the project with Matias.

There are two types of projects:

• • Personal projects. Projects that can be completed by the person that designed the project without any extra help.

  • Shared projects. Projects that can only be completed with the cooperation of other people.

Happiness: the project of our lives

Matias’ first project will last a couple of months. Other projects last quite longer: think of becoming a doctor or building a hospital.

Therefore, we can also classify projects into two categories: short-term and long-term projects. During adolescence, your parents let you do short-term, personal projects. Your personal projects are probably different from the personal projects of your friends and classmates.

Schools have many shared projects, projects that involve students and teachers together towards common goals. Different schools usually have different goals: one school wants to win the chess championship, another wants to publish a magazine, other one wants to implement a bilingual program, etc.

¿Is there a project that all people are interested in, and at the same time, is a project shared with other people? A project that, in order to be achieved, needs the cooperation of many people, and at the same time is a project that interests to most of us.

There is such a project: its goal is human happiness.

• • Everybody wants to be happy, so the goal is common to all of us.

• Happiness is a long-term project, in fact is a life-long project: we pursue happiness during all our lives.

• Happiness is a shared project: we are happy with other people, we need our family and friends to be happy. We can't be happy if our family and friends are disgraceful. And besides friends and family, we are not completely happy if there is unhappiness and injustice in the world.

The ingredients of happiness

What ingredients should we put in our happiness project?

There are many ingredients, most of them depend on our different personalities and circumstances: some people like to travel, others like a comfortable house or a luxury car. Some people like a large family, others do not want to have children. Quite different life projects. But there are some ingredients that are common to all of us as soon as we realize that our happiness depend on the happiness of the people around us.

The ingredients for a shared happiness project are: compassion, empathy and solidarity.