How to attain good quality of life

Chanthy was living in a dusty-looking house with a small bedroom. He optimistically believed in himself that he would soon graduate from IFL. Everyday, he would have a book or two with him because he likes reading so much. His goal in life is to live with a person whom he loves and to become a CEO of a multinational company. Although he is poor, he still thinks that ‘money is not everything’. A few years after his graduation, Chanthy contracted a job with a comfortable salary in one multinational company. Then, he got married to a woman with whom he had been deeply in love for years. Now Chanthy is so successful both in his career and family life. Chanthy’s story leads us to think that he has a good quality of life. Quality of life refers to how good or bad, convenient or stressful one’s life is. We believe that a good quality of life can be attained by: being optimistic, keeping on learning, living a purposeful life, and seeing money as not everything.


Being positive is an absolutely important key to living a good and happy life. We should be positive towards life because no matter how bad the situation really is, people with positive thoughts can still produce happiness. As it was said by Brian Tracy, an expert in the field of Human Development, in his book, You Can Create Your Own Future, “A happy, healthy, and prosperous person is invariably a person who thinks about his/her life in positive terms, most of the time.” Brian is right, we think, because optimists are usually creative people who can generate more solutions; with more solutions, their likelihood of solving problems tends to be higher than pessimists. Thus, the tendency of their problems reduces, while their happiness increases. Moreover, optimists always think of their problems as challenges that they have to face and, more often than not, they see challenges as only temporary. For example, the effect of financial crisis has washed away many people’s hope to make profit from their businesses. Simply put, it has made many people become hopeless. However, if we are genuinely optimistic, we should not be desperate at all since an optimist would think that the situation might well comeback soon. In short, we believe that unless we keep positive thoughts in mind, we will neither be truly happy nor have good quality of life.

Keeping on learning is another way of attaining good quality of life. We, as a student, go to school everyday to study in order to absorb knowledge. As the saying goes, “Knowledge is power.” We need knowledge to work, to build good relationship, and to progress in life. Without knowledge, to our best understanding, we cannot be truly happy. Nevertheless, the question is: how much knowledge is enough to make us happy so that we can attain good quality of life? There is neither formula for calculating how much knowledge is enough, nor recipe for acquiring sufficient knowledge in life. We cannot just say that this or that knowledge is important to us, and we will be happy if we have it and miserable if we do not. That is not true. What we have to do, thus, is to keep on learning. There is abundant of knowledge available for us to absorb. With new knowledge and new ideas, we could be able to compete in the workplace and earn more salary than before; thus, we will be much happier. In addition, knowledge can also help us build a good family relationship. For example, we learn to be patient and sympathetic in order to make our family become a strong family. Hence, keeping on learning is just as important as keeping ourselves alive.

Living a purposeful life is one of the ways of reaching good quality of life. A sense of purpose in life leads us to see that our lives are more meaningful and happier—if we know it would give us happiness. Also, it tells us to do what we have to do in life not just to breathe in and out. Robin Shama once said, “The purpose of life is a life of purpose.” Inferring to Robin’s words, we should have clear goals in life so that we would know where our destination is and what we should do on a daily basis. When we have an exact target, in addition, our lives will not be decided by God any longer. In our opinion, we are happier than the others because we have a plan in our lives. That is, we know what we really want out of life—we know where we are heading for. For example, if we plan to earn $USD 100,000 by the age of 30, and we reach it as we expected, we will generally be happy. However, if we have no plan in life, even if we earn a million dollar before the age of 30, we will not be much happier than those who have a plan in their lives. In short, we are usually happy when we know where we want to go then we arrive there.

Money is not everything, but it can be a source of fear, dread, regret, envy, guilt; it can also be a tool that brings confidence, peace and happiness. It depends on how we perceive what money means to us. If we perceived it as everything, we would possibly lose everything because we will be crazy about money which can lead us to do steal, corrupt, or bribe. Before, we believe that money is synonymous to success and happiness, but now we know that success and happiness are not measured in money. Although some people believe that ‘money can buy everything, it is just a matter of price’, we do not believe so. We believe that money is only a device that can help us to attain happiness. For example, we have a million dollar in hand at the moment, can we surely be happy? We do not think so. Happiness is priceless but the means of attaining it is affordable. We can use a million dollar to make us happy by helping the disabled people, donating to poor students, or going around the world and the list goes on. In brief, seeing money as not everything to us can also make us a feel contented.

In conclusion, we strongly believe that these four ways of attaining good quality of life are extremely effective. Had we looked more closely at some successful people in the world, we would see that they have applied at least one of the ways described above. Not everyone in the world has attained good quality of life because most of them did not know how to attain it or have no chance to get it. So if we know the how-to and have a chance now, we should not waste it. We do not need to apply these methods to survive, but we do need to apply them to make us happier, more successful, and more prosperous like most of the great men on earth.