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PROLOGUE:
Why I Wrote This Book

After spending so many years giving advice and sharing my ideas about happiness with relatives, friends, acquaintances, strangers, and almost anyone who would start a conversation with me, I felt it might be fun and worthwhile to put my perspective in writing. That way, my ideas could be more widely accessible to a greater diversity of individuals. In other words, I thought that maybe a book could allow me to reach even more people and help them find happiness. Also, this book is a testament to my philosophical thoughts.

Some time ago, friends began to tell me things like: “You know, Antonio, I find it hard to believe that you are consistently in such a good mood — you’re always so cheerful and you express a nonstop positive attitude.” Some began to wonder whether I was “full of it,” or perhaps even more surprisingly, whether I might be for real.

You see, more than 30 years ago I made a life-transforming decision: I chose to embrace and build my now-well-known positive attitude. From that important moment forward, I have noticed many remarkable benefits. As a pianist who always values the next gig, I’ve been able to honor all the performance engagements I’ve been given the opportunity to fulfill throughout my five-decade career (knock on wood). And beyond my annual physical exam to reconfirm my good health, I have had little need to see a doctor in my many years (knock on wood again — harder!). Each day that I am given to live and breathe on this earth seems like a precious present to me. I am filled daily with a sense of joy and bewilderment and I appreciate the wonders of everyday life from the moment I wake up each morning to the moment I close my eyes to drift off to sleep at night.

To achieve this state of mind, spirit, and body that my family (with one exception) and friends have come to admire, I needed to make some changes in the way I looked at my life. I was not born seeing life through rose-colored glasses; I made a conscious decision, just as life offers each one of us choices every day. I realized that each day can either be a struggle just to get through or a joy to experience. I can’t tell you how thankful I am that I chose the latter.

By following just a few disciplined daily principles and practices, you too can discover the capacity to truly transform your life. I know this to be true, because it happened within me, and others have noticed the positive difference. And I have proven (through my “scientific experiment” of one) that the joy of living is sustainable…even after more than 30 years.

The principles and practices I follow on a daily basis work, and they are quite easy to implement. Ultimately, a content and joyful state of being, simply requires the discipline and commitment to be happy. Believe it or not, the inner transformation begins right then and there, just by repeating to yourself the simple phrase “I want to be happy” — and meaning it.

Antonio Who?

I was born in Veracruz, Mexico, to a beautiful family, including my mother, father, grandmother, grandfather, and my three brothers, Francisco, (RIP) Javier, and Jorge (RIP). We were not well-off by American standards — we had no television at home and only occasionally did we have access to a telephone. Our prized possession was a half-broken “ortofonico,” an archaic-sounding word that my grandmother coined to reference our very old record player, which had a charming crank at its side and on which my grandfather would play both classical and opera recordings from his now-collectible records…well, I’m sure they would be collector’s items if my brothers and I had not come up with the brilliant idea to use them for target practice with our BB guns and slingers!

I can now see, with the benefit of hindsight, that it was precisely our lack of TVs, phones, and certainly Internet access that led my brothers and I to become so much closer to our parents and to each other than if we had had such distracting, though world-expanding, resources. I believe that our bond with one another was far stronger than many children today enjoy with their parents and siblings, judging from my limited observations. To this day, I treasure the fact that we built a community and everlasting connection to one another through our shared passion for music, books, conversation, and, above all, family.

When I think of my childhood home, my very first memory is of the baby grand piano that graced our living room. It was a beautiful black Knabe that had brought music into my family’s hearts since my grandmother was a child. I think that piano had been in our family since the late 1800’s! My lifelong passion for the music which, in my view, the piano alone can uniquely evoke, began at the young age of three. In fact, I gave my first performance in kindergarten, or the Jardin de niños #1. Amazingly, I still can remember what I played for my audience of five-year-old peers, their parents and our teachers. It was an old Mexican song, “El Gavilán Pollero” (“The Chicken-Hunting Hawk”).

My grandmother, Elena Porragas de Rodriguez de la Gala, who was my first piano teacher and an endless source of musical inspiration, had a spirited sense of humor, which I am blessed to have “inherited” from her. It was through her joking around with everyone, that we understood ourselves to be truly loved for exactly who we were, and it was through her love, that we sought early on to become our best selves in the process of growing up. In her honor, I have tried to infuse my music with a light-hearted sense of joy, balanced by the profound impact that sublime melodies and arrangements can inspire in sensitive souls. So, I suppose the seeds of my happy approach to life were first sown by my grandmother, who had a great influence over me.

After completing high school in Veracruz, I moved to Mexico City to study at the National Conservatory of Music, where I graduated as a concert pianist with the highest degree they conferred — the equivalent of a Ph.D. in the United States.

I guess there are moments in each of our lives when we have to actively decide to try to advance and grow. For me, this was one such moment. I felt that I was not growing as an artist and that my career was going nowhere in Mexico. After pursuing a career as a concert pianist for several years as well as performing in a band I had formed along with my brothers, I made one of the most momentous decisions of my life, I decided to move to the United States of America.

America has provided me with so many unbelievable opportunities and blessings that it would be impossible to name them all. We truly live in the land of opportunity. Believe me when I tell you it is not a mere coincidence that this land is the birthplace of my philosophy of happiness and my disciplined attempt to make every day genuinely count.

CHAPTER I
Does Everybody Want to Be Happy?

Happiness, n. An agreeable sensation arising from contemplating the misery of another.

— Ambrose Bierce

A couple of times, people have asked me “What is happiness to you?” I understand that most people probably don’t need to define that feeling, as they likely feel either happy or unhappy. I always tell them, that happiness, in a nutshell, is the feeling of being satisfied, full of positive emotions, having joy in my heart and peace in my soul, and of being fully aware that I have never intentionally harmed another person in my life. I have an almost complete absence of negative thoughts and emotions and very little stress. As a matter of fact, a few years ago, I took a stress test along with a lot of people working at a hotel where I was performing. I did it just for the fun of it. The person conducting the evaluation told me that he had never seen such a low score in the stress results. I wasn’t surprised. I am filled with calm and the never-ending belief that everything is going to be OK.

The first time I read the Ambrose Bierce quote above, I thought, “What a curmudgeon.” But sometimes I wonder if Mr. Bierce had a point. Let me tell you about Mr. and Mrs. Curmudgeon.

For 11 years, I played the piano five days a week from 11:00 a.m. to 2:00 p.m. at Macy’s Plaza in downtown Los Angeles. Playing there for all those years, as well as in many concert halls, hotels, restaurants, shows and private homes, and talking to probably thousands of people around my piano, has been, and remains, a great joy. My experiences have given me an exceptional understanding of human nature by observing the varying philosophical approaches to life of countless people from so many different backgrounds. Say what you will about Los Angeles, but it is certainly filled with interesting people!

In my opinion, Los Angeles is a city that has one of the best climates in the world. Only every so often, a little — and very welcome — rain falls here, clearing the air and making everything smell fresh again. I mention this because it caused me to notice something, that I thought was strange. Sometimes on those rainy days, people would walk up to my piano and, before even saying hello, begin saying how much they hated the rain, and how depressing it was for them.

For a while, I tried to explain to those people that in a place like Los Angeles, where it doesn’t happen very often, rain provides welcome relief and a refreshing change of atmosphere. But there was simply no reaching most of them. Some people will hate the rain even if it is as sporadic as it is in L.A. Remarkably, I noticed similar behavior during the nearly perennial sunny days. There was always someone in the crowd who would say something like, “I always hate these sunny days; why can’t we have some rain?” Actually, for all I know, some of those people could have been the very same complainers I mentioned before!

You get the point. To some people, the glass will always be half empty. To me, it’s always half full. For instance, I think that the sound of rain falling outside can make playing Chopin even more poetic. The rain makes my mood more nostalgic and it provides a lovely background to the music.

If it is sunny, the weather is perfect for a game of tennis. If it’s cold, somehow my mind goes to my favorite time of the year, Christmas. It’s all about perspective.

Speaking of Christmas, every year, as soon as the malls put up the decorations, I hear more curmudgeons. They say things like “I don’t like this time of year” and “Can you play something other than those silly songs?” I have heard these complaints every year at my piano, even though I only play Christmas music from the day after Thanksgiving until Christmas day. Well, to be honest, I play Christmas carols until January 7th. In Mexico, as in many countries all over the world, January 6th is the day when children get their Christmas presents. In Egypt, Georgia, Russia, Serbia and the Ukraine, the children get their presents on January 7th. I still remember how exciting was for my brothers and me the evening of January 5th; we could hardly go to sleep, the sense of anticipation very hard to describe. A great majority of people would smile at the sounds of the first Christmas carol they heard, and I could feel the warmth of their greetings. But there were always a few complainers.

The same can be said about the decorations in the mall. Most people would smile at the first sign of them, saying, “I can’t believe it is that time of year again!” or “I’d better start my shopping.” Again, there were also the complainers (“I don’t like the decorations this year!”) and, of course, the “everything in the past was better” crowd.

You probably know who I’m talking about. We all know someone like that. They’re the eternal complainers. The ones who, when talking about a film, will say something like, “In my day, movies were better.” Such contempt is not limited to cinema. Perhaps you are also familiar with these gems: “In my day, children behaved better,” and “In my day, music was better.” And so on.

I always tried and tried to please these people, and I would point out the pleasure in enjoying the present. I love that word in the English language: the present. It is indeed a “present” to all of us. It is a lovely gift. I don’t waste my time or energy in comparing the present with the past or obsessing over what the future may bring.

When I tell complainers that in “their day” a lot of children died very young because of a lack of advanced medicine, they quiet down. I also love to play music for these eternal complainers that was written in recently. Knowing they enjoyed it, I then reveal the truth to them about the song’s age. They usually dismiss it by saying, “Well, I am sure that was an exception.”

Try it my way. When I see the decorations in the mall, instead of complaining about how much nicer they may have been in the past, I appreciate the fact that we have them at all. Instead of complaining about how movies aren’t as good as they used to be, I try to find the enjoyable new ones, and believe me, there are plenty of them around. The same goes for music and anything else. It’s a simple choice: You can either waste your life lamenting and making people around you feel miserable, or you can be grateful for the fact that you are alive and can enjoy things that are only a dream in many parts of the world.

A few years ago, I would frequently visit a friend of mine who owned a Mexican restaurant in Westwood, which is a nice neighborhood in Los Angeles. Many nights, after I finished playing the piano at the Beverly Hills Hotel, I would go to his place, where he, a couple of other friends, and I would play dominoes or poker for a few dollars. We enjoyed great conversation in the grand old tradition of Mexican men getting together, with roughly 70% of the talk focused on politics and philosophy and 30% on women.

Sometimes, I would go to see this friend of mine during the day while he was getting ready to open for business. Typically, I would walk in and say, “Good morning!” to which he would retort, to my amusement, “There’s nothing good about this morning!” He was in a grouchy mood most of the time.

We’re still friends today, and when we talk about those days, we get a kick out of it, especially because I tell him, “You know, every time that I left your restaurant, I was happier and felt better than when I walked in.”

It’s funny, I think. Maybe in a subtly sadistic way, we sometimes feel better about our lives once we hear of somebody else’s misery. By the way, my friend doesn’t own that restaurant anymore. He is a successful attorney. Talk about misery!

So, can this be? Can people really garner happiness from other people’s misfortunes? If so, why? And here’s a question that’s even more interesting: Does everyone want to be happy?

One day, I was discussing the idea of happiness with people who were gathered around my piano. I said to them, “Everybody wants to be happy, right?” To my surprise, one person in the group answered, “No; I don’t want to be happy.” He continued to explain how he believed that feeling blue made him more aware of being alive. I couldn’t understand such a feeling. I asked him what kind of music he liked, and he uttered, “I only enjoy listening to the blues.” What a coincidence.

That reminds me of another story from a few years ago. I was playing at the world-famous Hotel Bel-Air in Los Angeles, at a time when they still permitted smoking in the bar (They banned it in 1999, thank God). I went up to the bar to refill my glass with water (I drink water the whole night while I play piano). While I was waiting for the bartender, I saw a lady looking at me with a cigarette dangling from the side of her mouth. Her head was sort of bobbling up and down. It reminded me of the little toy dogs in the back of cars that you can see moving their heads up and down, up and down. She was staring at me and I had the feeling that she wanted to say something to me. Finally, I looked right at her. Then she asked me, in a raspy, throaty kind of voice, “Do you play the blues?” Before I had a chance to answer, Steve, the bartender, told her, “No, he can’t; he’s an optimist.”

I am not going to imply that everybody who listens to the blues is a pessimist, but I found it kind of funny that the man from the previous story loved the “blues.” And that lady who started a conversation with me later said, “Sometimes I just kind of like to hurt, to feel sad, to feel pain. Don’t you?” I told her the truth, “No, I don’t like to hurt; I don’t enjoy pain and I love being happy.” She gave me a look that I read as saying “Get out of here,” so I happily went back to the piano.

I’ve talked to probably thousands and thousands of people around my piano while playing at hotels, restaurants, concerts, recitals, shows, and malls (more about that later), and similar topics usually come up with the people that approach me. Many people comment on how I really seem to love my work. That usually sparks an animated conversation concerning one of my favorite subjects: career goals and happiness. While I believe that the great majority of people whom I have encountered in my life would love to find happiness, I have come to accept the fact that a few of them don’t find the concept of happiness very appealing.

Somebody told me long ago that the idea of being happy was boring to him. He mentioned something about how the state of being happy was not “a fertile ground for creativity.” I am paraphrasing here, but that was the gist of what he said. Another lady that I met a few years ago told me, “Happiness is like a fairy tale because it’s never true.”

I am sure that their idea of happiness was shaped by their personal experiences or perceptions of life, just like my own. I guess some people are just wired differently.

The notorious curmudgeon Aldous Huxley wrote, “I can sympathize with people’s pains, but not with their pleasure. There is something curiously boring about somebody else’s happiness.” That quote reminds me of a particular acquaintance of mine who told me a few years ago, “I can’t stand Mozart’s music; it’s too happy!”

Sometimes when I interact with these types of people, my happiness tends to throw them off. One lady I went on a few dates with, tried to explain to me that I wasn’t really happy, that I was only deceiving myself. Another lady I went out with a couple of times told me over the phone, “I can’t go out with you anymore. I don’t believe in happiness and to see you acting happy all the time makes me believe that it’s all a mask, not for real; therefore, I don’t think that you are for real.” She hung up on me and I never heard from her again.

Oh well. I guess we have to accept that the concept of happiness means different things to different people, and that it’s just not 100% accepted by or even appealing to everybody’s way of thinking. But reconciling our own experiences with others is a constant theme in life.

For instance, I used to foolishly think that everybody loved classical music, but of course throughout the years I have met individuals who really don’t enjoy it. That doesn’t mean that I think something is wrong with them or that I can’t relate to them at all; it’s just that different people have different tastes formed by their wonderfully different experiences. Personally, I do not enjoy rap “music” (an oxymoron, in my humble opinion) or the blues, and I don’t think there’s anything wrong with me either.

If you are the kind of person who enjoys feeling sad, hurting, listening to the “Why did you leave me” or the “I am going to die without you” kind of music, this may not be the right book for you. On the other hand, you might be pleasantly surprised and find something useful for you, something that you might relate to.

So, if you’re one of the unlucky few who do not believe in happiness, please keep reading anyway. You might be happily surprised (sorry about that —couldn’t resist).