Guest Post by Bryan Cohen

Bryan Cohen here, guest poster and author, promoting my new book The Post-College Guide to Happiness for The Happiness Blog Tour. I'm giving away free digital review copies of the book and doing a giveaway for paperback copies, audio copies and even a Kindle Fire! Read on and check out the info below the post. "To fill the hour – that is happiness."
- Ralph Waldo Emerson
 Part of happiness is about keeping busy, but it's not the kind of keeping busy that most people assume Emerson is talking about here. People think that keeping busy is about having busy work, like deep cleaning under the fridge or doing your taxes. It's easy to fill your day with busy work from beginning to end but you aren't likely to get a lot of deeper fulfillment from it. Conversely, if you do nothing all day whether it's your day off or you're retired, a few days or weeks worth of this "relaxation" can get pretty boring in a hurry. The trick to finding happiness in the day-to-day work you do is having some worthy and exciting goals set up for yourself. For me, trying to spread the word of my happiness book and to continue to work on my writing is a goal that I enjoy trying to make progress on. In addition, I'm a runner and I constantly train to improve my speed and endurance. I'm also interested in knocking out all of my personal and college debts and thusly I'm always working hard to find new ways to increase my income. These are three major goals that require a lot of effort and you might not need three to spur you into action. You may just need to find one thing that you really want and go for it with full force. The problem for some is that they've spent such a long time assuming that they'll never get what they want that they don't know what such a goal would be. The trick is that you need to take some time to sit down and think about something you could work toward. Maybe you start with something small like trying to lose five pounds or to write the first chapter of that book you've always wanted to finish. Set your first goal within relatively easy reach to give you some confidence to continue. Keep moving the goal forward like a carrot on a stick until you are making some great progress toward your ultimate goal of reaching your ideal weight, completing your book or something completely different. Filling the hour is definitely happiness, but it only works if you're filling the hour with things you truly want to do. Fill enough hours in this way and you'll have a whole bunch of happy days, weeks and months left to come. -- Bryan Cohen is giving away 61 paperback and audio copies of The Post-College Guide to Happiness and a Kindle Fire between now and May 7th, 2012 on The Happiness Blog Tour. All entrants receive a free digital review copy of The Post-College Guide to Happiness. Bryan hopes to give away at least 1,000 copies during the blog tour. To enter, post a comment with your e-mail address or send an e-mail to postcollegehappiness (at) gmail.com. Bryan will draw the names at the end of the tour. Entries will be counted through Sunday, May 6th. Bryan Cohen is a writer, actor and comedian from Dresher, Pennsylvania. He graduated from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2005 with degrees in English and Dramatic Art and a minor in Creative Writing. He has written nine books including 1,000 Creative Writing Prompts: Ideas for Blogs, Scripts, Stories and More, 500 Writing Prompts for Kids: First Grade through Fifth Grade, Writer on the Side: How to Write Your Book Around Your 9 to 5 Job and his new book, 1,000 Character Writing Prompts: Villains, Heroes and Hams for Scripts, Stories and More. His website Build Creative Writing Ideas helps over 25,000 visitors a month to push past writer's block and stay motivated. Feel free to follow along with the tour at The Happiness Blog Tour Hub Page or on the book's Facebook Page.>