Your job from now on, as a Rules Player, is to be up around people you love. No more moaning. No more complaining. No more grumbling. These things will no more issue from your lips. You are, from now on, the positive one, the perpetually cheerful, ‘always up’ one, around whom good things revolve and happen.

When asked how are you, instead of saying, ‘Can’t complain, mustn’t grumble’, in future you will say, ‘Fine, good, marvellous’. No matter how crummy you feel, no matter what sort of a day you’ve had, no matter how low, down or fed up you are. And do you know, the interesting thing is that when you do say ‘Marvellous’, even if you don’t feel it, you’ll find something positive to say to follow it up with. Whereas if you’d said ‘Been better’, then the follow-up thoughts would be all negative. Try it – honestly, it really works.

In future, right from today, from this very second, you have to become the one who is always jolly, up, cheerful. Why? Because someone has to, or everybody will want to end it all. This life is hard and treacherous. Someone has to lift the burden, lift the spirits, lift the gloom. So who’s it going to be? You, that’s who.

I know, I know. You’ll be sitting there reading this, thinking, ‘Why me? Why lay this burden on me?’ Because you can do it, that’s why. But do it secretly (remember Rule 1), without fuss or bother. Just a simple change of heart, change of direction. From now on you cannot be anything but up around those you love. OK, moan to strangers. But loved ones get the full treatment. Up, up and away.

Successful people, those who have got it licked, are invariably cheerful. They care more about what people around them are going through, feeling, suffering than their own petty problems. They invariably want to know what’s wrong with you rather than moaning about their day. They think positively, act positively, project confidence, verve and enthusiasm.

I had a friend who went to live abroad in a country where he spoke very little of the language. But he said his mood lifted whenever he was there because he didn’t know the words for fed up or miserable or down. When someone asked him how he was, he could only say ‘Happy’, because that was the only word he knew to reply with. He found that when he said it, he felt it.