What is wealth? What is happiness?
I collect contrarian definitions, and shape them to suit me. Here are some examples:
Adapted from Peter Carroll: “True wealth is measured by the quality of the time you spend.”
Robert Heinlein put this in the mouth of his character Jubal Harshaw: “Love is that condition in which the happiness of someone else is essential to your own.”
And here is how I’d paraphrase Martin Seligman’s three factors of happiness: “In happiness, the first level is fun; the second level is connecting with people; and the third level is living with meaning.”
I was so happy to be reminded of the idea of living with meaning while reading Simple Prosperity over the weekend. It felt like having something essential unveiled.
Of course, I’ve spent a lot of time looking for meaning before. It’s something I like to muse upon as I walk. Honoring what has meaning for our essential selves is a huge part of the North Star coaching system I trained in. But my attention has been elsewhere the last while. I had holiday busyness and writing deadlines. I’m studying and deploying more business knowledge. Meaning has been on a back burner.
I’m delighted to return my attention to it. Martin Seligman is right. Acting with meaning makes me happy.
Here are some things that have meaning for me:
Learning. I love that something as lightweight as knowledge can change my life. Simply having better information lets me choose easier, more rewarding ways to spend my time. Like knowing that my powerful blender can liquefy the avocado pit and that it is actually good for me. Or having a movie reviewer I trust so that I spend my limited movie time seeing films I’ll enjoy.
Helping clients. I’m made very happy when I can help someone else live freer and more in line with their own meanings. Everything I learn has more value when I can share it with someone else.
Space. I believe in having a frontier — a challenging edge where we can become more than we were. A place to grow. I believe in having more than one basket to hold humanity and our ecosystem. I believe that we are meant to continue to explore, and learn, and challenge ourselves beyond the bounds of Earth.
Diversity. I know that your meanings may be different than mine, and that is a good thing. The billions of different works that need doing can be done by the billions of different hands that will find meaning in doing them.
What are your meanings? Would you like me to help you find them, and find ways to bring them more into your life? It’s what I do.
May you have the wealth of spending your time meaningfully.
“I have begun half a dozen books in my life and finished one. They were all going to be my all. Each time I started a book, I knew that this time I would finish a book. But I didn’t. Then I didn’t again. And again and again. I’m talking about a 25 year history of being so revved up about writing a book that I could think of nothing else but the book. And then a month or two later, the fire was out, again.
“And then along came Anna. Soon after we met, she became the editor of my articles. Six months and six articles later, we decided to do a book. When I say we I mean we as in my job would be to write the book, and her job would be to make sure I wrote the book. How did she do it? By letting, no, insisting, that I be me. By helping me overcome all the things that had been in my way before, things I didn’t even know about. And by being relentlessly passionate about writing, and words, and details, and generalities, and my project.
“I met Anna, and then I wrote the first book that I have ever finished.”
Tommy Angelo, poker coach and author of Elements of Poker