What are the secrets to happiness and meaning? Why do some people find a deep sense of purpose while they are here and die with few regrets while others end their lives bitter and disappointed?

About two years ago I set out to answer that question by asking several thousand people to identify the one person they knew who had lived a long life and found true happiness. It seemed to me that each of us knows at least one person who achieved true success. After receiving over 1,000 nominations, I interviewed 235 people from the age of 59-106 (who had over 18,000 years of life experience) asking them to reflect back on their lives: What brought happiness? What gave meaning? What did they regret? What did they wish they had learned sooner? What did not matter in the end?

These "wise elders" were an incredibly diverse group ranging from a town barber to CEO’s, from poets to native chiefs, Holocaust survivors to war veterans, and represented all the major religions and cultures of our society. My goal was not to interview famous people but to identify ordinary people who had found extraordinary happiness. What I discovered were five clear themes of what it means to live a happy and meaningful life (and to die with a smile on your face). In my new book, The Five Secrets You Must Discover Before You Die, I share the five true paths to finding meaning in life and show how we can live these secrets.

The first secret I learned from these interviews is Be true to yourself. Each one of us is on a unique human journey and the path to true happiness is to be true to ourselves. This means knowing what brings us happiness and focusing our life on what matters to us. It means reflecting on a regular basis as to whether our life fits our soul. In our daily lives it means knowing what brings us joy and ensuring that we fill our life with the right elements. It also means following our unique destiny. One of the people I interviewed was a Latino woman who talked about the importance of following our "destina." The idea is that each of us has a path that is most true to us, which is not so much a destination as a way we are meant to be in the world. For example, I am a teacher and philosopher by nature and when I stay close to that path I experience true joy.

Being true to self often means drowning out other voices that would ask us to live their dreams instead of ours. Ron, a gifted chiropractor, told me the story of how he planned to become a medical doctor but when he visited a chiropractor shortly before starting medical school he discovered a profession that connected to his true self. "Others told me I was crazy but I knew it was my path." He told me that to follow your heart you must have the "discipline to listen and the courage to follow." This means asking if the life we are living is true to our deepest sense of self and it sometimes requires a step of courage to follow our soul. Are you being true to yourself right now?

The second secret I learned is to Leave No Regrets. It seems to me that what we fear most as we age is not death, but rather to come to the end of our life feeling that we never truly lived. The saddest words ever spoken at the end of life are "I wish I had . . . " Tom, a native healer, told me that the great fear at the end of life is "the great incompleteness; that you did not do what you came here to do." One of the most interesting things I discovered in talking to 235 wise people is that almost no one regretted risks they took that did not work out and most said they wished they had risked more. When I asked these people about major crossroads in their lives, many of them talked about taking risks-sometimes large and sometimes small-which wound up bringing great happiness. One of the keys to moving towards what we want instead of what we fear is to focus on the best possible result and not the worst. Are you going for what you truly want in your life or acting with fear?

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