Do your daily life and work activities provide you with significant and lasting fulfillment? Do they make you feel like you are making a meaningful contribution to the world? If you can say “yes” to these questions, then you will feel more engaged and fulfilled in your life compared to those who feel that there is little or no meaning in how they live.
Work and money with meaning tends to lead to philanthropy—greater service and contribution to the world.
Work and money without meaning tends to lead to escapism or debauchery.
You have a unique set or hierarchy of values and priorities that make you stand out. Whatever is highest on your list of values is the value which provides you with the most purpose and meaning when acted upon and fulfilled.
Whenever you are sticking to high-priority daily actions, ones that fulfill your top three highest values, you will feel more purposeful, productive and alive. Your life will feel more meaningful and fulfilled.
Whenever you are allowing yourself to take on lower priority daily actions, ones that do not fulfill your top three highest values, you will feel less purposeful, productive and alive. Your life will feel less fulfilled.
Dedicating yourself to what is truly higher on your list of values liberates you from a quiet life of desperation and initiates a more engaging life of purpose, meaning and inspiration. This can add years to your life and life to your years.
There are two ways of adding purpose and meaning to your day:
- Do what you love through delegating.
- Love what you do through linking.
Doing what you love through delegating means identifying what is truly most inspiring and meaningful to you and focusing your attention and energy on these items. Saying “no thank you” to all other lower priority distractions and saying “yes” to what is most meaningful and fulfilling, liberates.
Loving what you do through linking means clarifying whatever lower priority daily actions you feel you are currently unable to delegate and linking them to what is most important.
“How specifically is temporarily performing this particular action step (until I can find someone to delegate it to) helping me fulfill what is truly most meaningful and fulfilling?”
When you are unfulfilled and feel your life is meaningless, you may seek immediately gratifying behaviors to compensate. You will possibly try to fulfill your gut with sugar, food or alcohol or fill your house, closets or garage with consumer items or your mind with escaping drugs or thoughts of sex.
A few years ago, I was asked to assist a fellow executive performance coach colleague with consulting one of his wealthy entrepreneurial clients. This client previously owned a multibillion-dollar, multinational company, but had recently sold it, cashed out more than handsomely, and retired. Although this client was a moderate social drinker before retirement, he soon found himself escalating his drinking to the point of excess and throughout most of his overly leisureful day. When I spoke with this client on Zoom, he was sloshed and could barely speak fluently. He was fully aware of his drinking escalation but was having a challenge controlling his behavior.
I asked this gentleman when he first started noticing his drinking escalation. It was quite evident to him that it began upon selling his business months earlier. I asked him why he sold his business. He stated that he was in his mid-seventies and was sensing it would be wiser to exit when he did before his health declined so he could “relax” and supposedly “enjoy” his leisure life after working so hard for so many years.
I jokingly (but not jokingly) told him: “There is nothing wrong with retirement as long as it does not get in the way of your meaningful work.” He was already starting to wonder if retiring and no longer working was truly as meaningful and fulfilling as he assumed it would be.
If you do not fill your day with meaningful actions upon retirement, you can begin to “lose” your faculties and end up with senility or indulge in immediately gratifying forms of debauchery as a compensation.
I suggested that he consider renegotiating with his previous company’s new owners and leaders that he return and once again contribute his skill and expertise in the capacity of closing big multimillion or billion dollar deals for them for a fair compensation.
The client was brought to tears considering this suggestion and said he missed making his big global deals. So, the next week he did exactly what I suggested and almost immediately reduced his drinking by 90 percent. He kept his daily diary full by calling, scheduling and doing big deals, which kept his daily life more meaningful and productive. It was not the alcohol causing his excessive behavior. It was his reduction in meaningful, productive daily actions that resulted in his ungoverned behavior.
When you fill your day with high-priority actions that are truly meaningful, your blood, glucose and oxygen flows up to the executive functioning area of your forebrain, your medial prefrontal cortex, which then calms down the immediately gratifying, desire center of your brain, your amygdala, which allows you to more effectively self-govern any of your impulsive or addictive behaviors.
Meaningful service and contribution are now adding years to this gentleman’s life and life to his years.
Keep your day filled with high-priority meaningful actions before low-priority meaningless actions dissolve your life away.
Dr. John Demartini is a human behavioral specialist, educator, internationally published author, consultant and founder of the Demartini Institute.