Make fun of country music all you want, but each song tells a story that everyone can relate to on some level, which is the great appeal, in my opinion. A song that does precisely that is Jason Aldean’s “Keep the Girl” from his 2009 release Wide Open. The song is filled with great lines, but one that sticks out is the opening line,” This life is full of choices, hard to make one with all the voices in my head.”

Can’t put it any better than that.

When do we know to pull the plug, especially on something that used to be great or on something is so life changing?

The thing about life is that it has the ‘human element’ or emotion. In sports, that’s not the case. There’s analytics and within a couple clicks of a mouse I can tell you very quickly that even though Prince Fielder plays in every game, his stats diminished tremendously this past season.

This isn’t possible in real life situations. We desire human interaction, appreciation and validation.

Everyone gets tied up in emotions. We are human, it’s natural. We care about what others feel, sometimes to a fault. We aren’t all Billy Beane, the general manager of the Oakland A’s, who doesn’t get personal with his players, so, in essence, they are easier to cut.

A well-referenced stat for baseball geeks is wins above replacement or WAR, which, at its most simple level, pinpoints if Player X is better than a replacement player/average MLB player. Life needs a WAR system.

I purpose Happiness Achieving Status or HAS, a statistic or system that highlights if you are happier with Situation A or Situation B.  It takes work to figure out your HAS. Hell, it takes a lot of soul searching, but you need to try to achieve the highest score possible.

The premise of the whole system is basically a pros and cons list of every major decision you have to make in life. You don’t need the HAS system to figure if you want Subway or Jimmy Johns for lunch, but you probably need it if you are deciding if you want to live in the house next to Subway or the one next to Jimmy Johns.

Here’s what you have to do. Write down all of the pros and cons of both situations and then cross off anything that is not directly about you, yourself and I. I’m not pushing a system that turns everyone into a heartless, emotionless person, but the fact of the matter is that the person that needs to be happy in your life is you. Happiness is the key.

If you aren’t happy everything else will falter and break eventually. Finding your place in this world is no easy task, it’s an incredible task. Once you find it though, it’s a grand form of euphoria and you won’t be able to remember why you needed HAS in the first place.

The things that make you happy will follow wherever you go and if they don’t follow, well, they probably didn’t truly make you happy in the first place.

There is no number associated with the HAS system, it’s all a series of multiple feelings. You’ll know you have achieved the highest possible HAS when you feel complete happiness in your mind, soul and gut.

By the end of “Keep the Girl”, Jason Aldean figures out that he needs to both chase his dream and keep the girl. That’s figuring out your HAS.