A few months ago, I wrote an article on how to come up with business ideas. I basically said to look at the world with a critical eye, and to keep track of everything that seems to suck. I still maintain that philosophy, and I recently discovered something about my "passions" in life: Everything I aspire to do is directly related to something that I dislike. I hate education, and I always have. School has never been a fun place for me. In elementary school, I was bored out of my mind. My 5th grade teacher discouraged me from my entrepreneurial pursuits. High school was more about dealing with girl drama than it was about learning meaningful things. By having spent more than 80% of my life suffering through these traumatic experiences, I've become interested in something that I've forever dreaded. While I'm yet to do anything super innovative to help the world of education, my past project internshipIN.com was a start in that direction. I realized that most of my learning came from working at a company, and so I spent my limited free time on helping students find real world internships. More recently, I decided that I hated accounting, I hated finance, and I hated money (although I enjoy the idea of having it). Managing finances is the one thing I despise most in building a company, and nothing stresses me out more than thinking about money. It's the root of all evil, it causes people to kill, it leads to people going to jail (think Madoff), and yet it's the biggest driving force behind every person's life aspirations. So I built a startup, Indinero.com, around the idea of making money suck less for businesses. It's something I plan on dedicating my career to. One of my friends in the investment world recently asked me why I'm building Indinero. After all, why would any young college student want to work on a finance startup? I think about my life as doing two primary things: Minimizing my risk, and minimizing my dissatisfaction with the world. This is an odd way to think about things, because most people think about their life in the opposite way. But I've come to realize that minus the shitty things that happen in life, I'm an optimally happy person. If I can remove the things that crush my soul, I'd be a happier person, and the world would theoretically be a better place. What would you rather do: Make the world a better place, or prevent it from sucking as bad as it does? I'd pick the latter, because it embraces the fact that the world is far from its optimal state. As my friend Manu told me, "make sure you're creating a painkiller instead of a vitamin." As I write this article, I'm suffering from the worst cold I've had in years. I'd pay anything to make this go away, and no cold medication has worked. So thinking about life from my current unhappy perspective, I see the world as a crappy place to live, and I'd be 10X happier if I simply wasn't unhappy. What a seemingly simple idea! Because think about it: during the happiest moments of your life, you probably didn't have anything special or unique that made you happy. But in each and every one of these happiest moments, you lacked the things that would otherwise drive you mad. This past summer was the happiest time of my life. I lived on ramen (literally), I shared a tiny Berkeley home with my team members at Indinero, and I was at the peak of my happiness despite my having zero material assets and close to zero fulfillment in my career. But I didn't have the two things that stress me out most: 1) school and 2) money issues. Between being on summer break and having $35k in the bank (and a startup that creates software that helped cure my finance concerns), I couldn't be happier. Or in more meaningful terms, I couldn't be happier with my life. I'm going to suggest the inverse of what Tony Hsieh from Zappos.com preaches. He's big on figuring out what makes you happy, and it was inspiring for me to see. But being honest with myself, I felt that it wasn't very satisfying because it just seemed too idealistic for even my liking. If you gave someone a week to think about what makes them happy, they still won't be able to give you the correct answer. People are generally bad at thinking of what makes them happy, so instead of focusing on happiness, I think it's much more practical to focus on unhappiness because it's much easier for us to identify and eliminate. Identifying sources of unhappiness is the easy part. Eliminating them is the difficult part. but it's what makes life seem more interesting. I think entrepreneurs are so fascinating because they first eliminate that point of dissatisfaction in their own life, then dedicate their remaining time to helping others eliminate it too. My mom is a prime example: growing up in a poor family, she had no choice but to wear her older brother's hand-me-downs. There's nothing more depressing than a teenage girl wearing her older brother's ugly clothing. So as a 13 year old, my mom designed and sewed her own clothing. Soon later, she started doing this for others. Fast forward a few decades, and it's the driving force behind her career and the jobs of hundreds of people. As pessimistic as it sounds, I think that identifying your sources of unhappiness is the most effective and honest way for you to live a better life. (and find ideas for your next company) What do you hate? How can you turn it into helping yourself and ultimately helping others? And that's the key to happiness.