When asked for the specifics, 2000+ respondents — workers across all ages and salary groups — said that they would forgo an average of 23 per cent of their future lifetime earnings in order to secure a meaningful job until they retire.
We all need a ‘reason for being’ that transcends the superficial, that taps into the deep human yearning to leave the world a little better off for our time here; to have lived a life that mattered even if our name was never put in lights and our story never etched in history.
As a boy, my dad spent several years living in a corrugated-iron shed at the water's edge along the south-east coastline of Australia. (It's a pretty but little-known place, without even its own postcode, called Nungurner, if you care to look it up.) Dad fondly recalls those years, living barefoot and subsisting off the land and lake, among the happiest of his life. Every day my ‘nana’ would cook the fish they caught in a camp oven on the sand beside their shed. Every night, they slept in the rafters since, when the tide came in, their sand floor became the lake.
When Dad was 13 his parents bought a small dairy farm and a few years later, at 16, he left school to work on it. He spent most of the next 50 years milking cows — every morning and evening — and only just making ends meet and raising his seven kids (I'm number two). A man of deep faith, Dad often prayed to God to help him find if there was a deeper purpose to his life beyond being a humble ‘dairy cocky’ as he called himself. He said it was not until his 50s that he realised he'd been living his purpose all along — being a loving husband and father, and a generous member of his local church and rural community.
Now well in his 80s, Dad is back living by the water's edge just a few steps from the ‘red shed’ he lived in as a boy. Whenever I visit my parents, it's near guaranteed that Dad will tell me at some point during my stay — often over one of the many pots of tea we share or out fishing in his old boat — that he feels like the richest man in all the world. While Dad is far from wealthy in a material sense, his gratitude and love for his life and family connect him to a more meaningful sense of wealth than money alone can ever buy.
Given most of us live with creature comforts that our parents, much less grandparents, could not have imagined, the answer to a more rewarding life cannot be found by chasing more money, but by finding greater meaning. As Lynne Twist, author of The Soul of Money, shared on my Live Brave podcast: ‘Living from a space that more is better just leaves us on a chase with no end and a race without a winner.’ If we think that money is the answer to meaning, then even too much is never enough. After all, there'll always be someone with a bigger yacht.
Finding your ‘reason for being’ takes deep reflection and serious soul searching — something many of us are masters at avoiding. As John W Gardner, who ran Carnegie Corporation for many years, once said, ‘Human beings have always employed an enormous variety of clever devices for running away from themselves.’
In the hurly-burly of life, we run the risk of missing out on life itself. It's why gifting yourself with time out to become truly present to this finite and fragile gift we call life, what you want to do with it, and why that matters at a soul-deep level, is an investment that pays life’s richest dividends. Only once you connect to a purpose that eclipses your fear can you summon the courage to honour your gifts and heed the siren call of your spirit.
This may sound deep, but I didn’t write this book to help you live a more successful, shallow life. That said, I also didn’t write it to convince you to change career, quit your job or start a side hustle (though perhaps you will). Rather, I wrote it to help you get clear about what you want to do, who you want to be and what brave actions you must take to live your highest purpose; to do more of what lights you up and less of what doesn't. And on the days when life feels like a grind — as it did many times for my dad getting up before dawn each morning, or enduring long droughts with little income — to press on in the sure knowledge that it's not what we get by living our lives in ways that honour our deepest values and noblest intentions, but it is who we become in the process.
The philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche once said, ‘He who has a why can endure any how.’ A quick web search will yield hundreds of methods for discovering your why; your ‘reason for being’. But let's face it, neither an app nor a guru can give you the answers that reside within you. That said, the right questions can help you uncover your why. And there are compelling reasons why you must.
President Kennedy once wrote that ‘Effort and courage are not enough without purpose and direction’. In fact, effort and courage can land you in all sorts of trouble if not anchored to core values, principles and purpose.
Living and leading from why provides a compass for navigating your life. As shown in figure 1, only when you are clear about why what you do matters can you muster the courage to be who you must be to figure out what needs to be done to achieve what you want and change what you don't. Only then can you have what you yearn for most in life. Which, at the deepest level, is peace.
Figure 1: begin with why
Now indulge me for a moment and just lay aside any doubts or cynicism on your mental bookshelf for a moment. In the space that opens up, give yourself permission to sit with the possibility that there are things that you — and only you — can do that will never be done if you don't do them (or at least not in the same way you would). Consider for a moment that it's not been a lack of opportunity that's held you back but a lack of clarity about what you truly want your life to stand for. Until now.
The truth is that most of us humans live in a restricted circle of our full potential. Even using conservative estimates, neurobiologists estimate that the human brain has approximately 100 trillion neuron junctions which, in layman language, means that our possible mental states exceed the total number of atoms in the universe. That's a lot of potential left under the bed.
Unleashing it requires focusing your inner ‘laser beam’ with a reason to set your alarm before sunrise (except if you live in Alaska), roll up your sleeves, and take a brave leap of faith in the moments it matters most. There will be many. Only then will you be able to resist succumbing to pride's ever-tempting pull that confines so many to lives of immaculate mediocrity. Only then will you build your ‘courage muscles’ for the bigger, albeit sometimes messy, life you have it within you to live.
HOW DO YOU WANT TO MEASURE YOUR LIFE?
The multiple crises of the COVID-19 pandemic jolted most of us out of our comfort zone, shaking up our lives in ways we could never have predicted, much less planned for. Yet when the world you know falls apart and you're compelled to piece it back together in a whole new way, it can pull back the curtain on what truly matters to you.
If you are not feeling ‘on fire’ in your life (or are bona fide languishing), then step back from your busy doing to re-evaluate who you are being in the storybook of your own life. As you do, ask yourself: is this a story you'd want to read one day? Is how you're showing up for life aligned with how you want to measure your life?
About a year after we got married, my husband Andrew and I decided to pursue our shared vision of living and working internationally. At the time we were both working for multinational organisations in Melbourne, Australia. Over a bottle of wine one evening we came up with a playful competition: who could land us the
