Watching the Olympics is inspirational if you need a kick in the pants to set high goals for yourself, but the trick is not to make goals so lofty that you make yourself sick.

Having finished 17th at beach volleyball nationals, I can tell you that the difference between the very top and those near the top is not skills — everyone has the skills. The difference is mental. Players in the top five or ten are so tough that almost nothing makes them waver, and their belief in their ability to succeed is extreme. I know because I didn't have those qualities, and as I inched closer to the top ranks the pressure gave me stomachaches during games.

I remember the first time I played the team ranked #1 in the United States: I got killed. Their focus on the game was unflappable, whereas I found myself thinking about my bathing suit, the crowd, my mother. Anything. Everything. It was like my mind was possessed by the volleyball devil. And every time I lost focus I made an error on the court.

Lack of focus became a defense against the goals that overwhelmed me. By distracting myself from my goal – to get to the number one spot — I protected myself from huge disappointment. Unfortunately, I also ensured that I never inched up beyond 17th place. I found myself spending too much time off the court, excelling at ancillary parts of professional sports where the stakes weren't very high. I was great at landing sponsorships and sniffing out the best coaches, but my fear of failing at my real goal always held me back.

Today I play volleyball only recreationally, but my experience with competitive volleyball informs my approach to setting goals in all aspects of my life: Goals should be tough enough that they challenge you to stay focused; goals should scare you a little because that's how you learn about yourself, but if the goals are too hard, you get stuck and stop learning.

Today most advice is about how to dream big. But goals need to be flexible. Too small a goal would not be rewarding, but too big a goal can be stifling. You need to create goals for yourself that enable you to stay focused. One way to know how well you're setting goals is to look at your intensity of focus: Too small a goal does not require focus, and if you want for focus but you can't make it happen, then your goal is probably too large. The better you know yourself the better you will be at setting goals.

I noticed that Natalie Coughlin, who has been called a more natural swimmer than anyone in history, decided to race in only two individual events in Athens. Most aficionados would say she's capable of winning more — maybe even a Michael Phelps sort of feat. But she knows her own limits and said, “It's good I'm not getting a lot of the attention he's getting. He does really well with that attention and I don't think I would do as well.”

I cannot imagine what it would be like to be as great an athlete as Natalie Coughlin, but I got shivers when I saw her holding a gold medal in Athens. Because I can imagine what it's like to have to adjust your goals in order to cope with the pressure. That is a path to success that requires knowing yourself very well, and it is a path as brave as any other.

That was the first time I realized that my focus was not strong enough to get into the top ten.

But I had worked so hard to get to #17. I felt surely I could figure out how to overcome the focus barrier. I tried the punishment approach (pushups for every mistake) and I tried the Zen approach (lessons in meditation). Nothing worked. Then I tried the introspection approach: I found that in a low-pressure game I had almost perfect focus. But in a high-pressure situation — like the end of a close game – I'd start thinking about my laundry, my mother, my senator. Anything. Everything. It was like my mind was possessed by the volleyball devil.

I came to the conclusion that I was too scared to focus. The harder you focus on a goal, the more energy you put into a goal, there more there is at stake. When you focus very little, then not achieving that goal is okay. But when you dedicated every ounce of energy to that goal, the pressure to achieve is huge. In order to put that kind of pressure on yourself you have to have total faith in yourself. I had total faith until I reached #17. Then I folded.

One summer, when I found myself with no job and no plan, I panicked and took a job on a chicken farm in the French countryside. I told myself the job would look good on my resume — showing I am adventurous and understand the agriculture business to boot. Neither is true, in fact, and I have never put this experience on my resume. But I did learn a lot on the farm about getting ahead at the office.

My deal with the family that employed me was that I would perform household chores in exchange for room and board. To me, “chores” meant sweeping and dusting. To them, it meant killing and plucking chickens. In my lame French, I said killing animals was not among my duties. The matron of the house said I’d be kicked out for breaking the agreement. So I learned to pluck. Lesson 1: Get everything in writing.

The farmer blocked off a small area of the coop where the wee chicks could live without getting lost. Every week, the chicks would double in size, as would the area. By the end of the summer, the coop was full. Lesson 2: Start small, but prepare for rapid growth.

It was important to move the chickens into the buyer’s truck before they realized what was happening. So in the middle of the night, while they were sleeping, we grabbed the chickens by the legs and held them upside down. The farmer couldn’t believe I did it without throwing up, and he gave me three days off. Lessons 3 and 4: Have a strategy, and learn skills outside your job description.

I once bit into an apple before noticing that everyone else had peeled theirs first. The 8-year-old daughter declared in French, “She eats apples like the pigs.” The mother responded, “Be careful, she is beginning to understand.” Lesson 5: Learn another language.

I picked cherries from the branches that were too high for the 8-year-old. Later she gathered the eggs out from under the hens so I wouldn’t get pecked. Lesson 6: Make friends in low places.

I fed the rabbits on the farm for five weeks. One evening, they were gone. “They are not pets like the dog,” the farmer said as we dined on my charges. Lesson 7: Never get too attached to anyone you work with.

Relatives of the host family came to visit from Lyon. I had more in common with the city French than the rural French did. They invited me to spend my last month with them, when I was supposed to be harvesting hay on the farm. I told the farmer I would stay only if I didn’t have to feed the pigs anymore. Lesson 8: Job offers give you more leverage.

Every day a few chickens would be trampled to death or die from heat exhaustion in the coop. I walked close behind the farmer, who would scoop up the dead birds before me. Lesson 9: When there’s crap everywhere, stick close to someone in the know.

I didn’t read any books, and I worried all summer that I wasn’t learning a thing. But really, I was learning solid fundamentals that would help me throughout my career. Lesson 10: Never assume that anything is a waste of your time.

Looking for happiness through financial success? Wondering what the magic number is? It's $40,000 according to Harvard psychologist Daniel Gilbert. Really. So technically, most of you should be happy. And if you're working for the next big raise, forget it. You're better off working on teaching yourself how to look at your money with a different eye.

I remember when I passed the $100K mark. My boss loved my work and gave me a raise that put me at $125,000. But a competitor offered me $140,000 and my boss told me he wouldn't match it. At that point, I had no kids, no mortgage and no car payments, so I didn't need the money. But I recognized salary as a gauge of prominence in my field, and although I was making $125,000 I felt under appreciated.

Eventually, I left that job for one that paid more than $200,000 a year, and I lived the aphorism that you have to spend money to make money. I couldn't take high-end clients out to dinner in my refurbished wreck of a car, so I leased a BMW. Dressing as well as my clients cost an arm and a leg. And I hired an assistant to manage my personal life since my new position left no time for that.

You might scoff at my choices, but I was not unique among those whose salaries hit six figures: My expenses rose with my salary, and my desires expanded with my bank account. You might think, “That won't happen to me,” but how foolish you would be to assume you would be the exception to the rule.

In fact, the rule is well established in research: The first 40 thousand makes a big difference in one's level of happiness. Happiness is dependent on being able to meet basic needs for food, shelter, and clothing. After meeting those needs you need to turn to something other than consumerism. Because additional money has negligible impact on how happy you are. Your level of happiness is largely dependent on your outlook.

Maybe you're thinking there's another magic threshold beyond forty thousand. Like maybe 40 million. But you're wrong. When I ran in circles of venture capitalists, there was a common phrase, “It's not jet money.” Which was a way of saying, it was a good deal, but it won't earn enough money to pay for a private jet. No matter what size the pile of money is, there's always a way to see it as small.

So for those of you looking for more happiness, realize that a new job or a new home won't be nearly as rewarding as a new outlook. Optimism makes people happy. Raising your standing on the optimism scale will impact your happiness more than raising your worth on the pay scale.

Here's a ten-second test to figure out how optimistic you are:

Think of something really bad that has happened to you. Do you think:
1. It has made me a better person.
2. I made some mistakes, but bad things happen to everyone sometimes.
3. Nothing ever goes right for me.

Think of something really good that happened to you. Do you think:
1. I am good at creating my own success.
2. I got lucky.
3. In the end it didn't turn out to be that great a thing.

If you chose the first answer both times, then you probably already feel pretty happy regardless of your income. If you didn't answer one both times, then a shift in the way you think could dramatically improve your happiness.

The good news is that you can train yourself to think positively. Watch how happy people behave. The cliche about gaining strength through adversity might annoy you, but happy people live by those words.

If you took the test above and picked the third answer both times, you probably blame your life on external things so that you don’t have to take responsibility for your plight. Happy people take responsibility for their success and consider failure a temporary fluke. To change your thinking, start assuming responsibility for your emotions.

If you chose the number two answers, you probably tell yourself, “I’m not happy but I don’t know why.” Start believing that if you take action, good things will happen. Tell yourself good things happen because you expect good things and bad things happen to make you stronger.

Maybe you’re thinking, “Forget it. I don’t believe any of this works. And I can’t do it anyway.” But that’s part of your problem, isn’t it?