The Rhythm of Life

Our modern culture proclaims with all its force: What you do and what you have are the most important things. This is a lie. It is a deception that has led whole generations down the well-trodden path toward lives of quiet desperation. But it is a lie that is reinforced with such regularity that we have grown to believe it, at least subconsciously, and have shaped our lives around it.

Two of the most common tools of social judgment are the assessment of what make and model of car you drive and the question “What do you do?”

The whole focus of our culture is on doing and having. I get on the plane, and nine out of ten times, the person next to me will ask me, “What do you do?” We ask young children, “What are you going to do when you grow up?” and seniors in high school, “What are you going to do in college?” and college graduates, “What are you going to do now that you have finished your studies?” We live in a task-oriented culture. But this task-oriented approach completely ignores our need to connect the activities of our daily lives with our essential purpose.

Doing and having are natural, normal, and necessary aspects of our daily lives; the challenge is to do and have in accord with our essential purpose.

In this task-oriented culture, one of the real dangers is to slip into an episodic mode of living. What I mean is, the happenings of our day-to-day lives can become episodic, one after another, like the episodes of a soap opera. In a soap opera, there is always something happening, but nothing ever really happens. In every episode there is drama—activity takes place, words are muttered, but nothing really happens. People abusing one another, people using one another, people talking about one another, people plotting and scheming, but nothing meaningful ever happens. Their lives are filled with superficialities, and they are constantly restless and miserable. There is no theme, no thread—just another entertaining episode.

When the days and weeks of our lives become like this, we grow depressed, disillusioned, and miserably unhappy. The reason is that without a clear sense of the purpose and meaning of our lives, the emptiness is overwhelming. We try to fill the void with pleasure and possessions, but the emptiness is unaffected by such trivialities. There are moments of pleasure, but they are brief in a long succession of twenty-four-hour days.

Pablo Picasso was walking down the street in Paris one day when a woman recognized and approached him. After introducing herself and praising his work, she asked him if he would consider drawing her portrait and offered to pay him for the piece.

Picasso agreed and sat the woman down there and then on the side of the street, brought out a sketchbook and pencil, and began to draw the woman. A small crowd of spectators gathered very quickly, but in only a handful of minutes Picasso had finished the drawing. As he handed it to the woman, he said, “That will be five thousand francs.” Surprised at the price, the woman objected, saying, “But Mr. Picasso, it took you only a few minutes.” Picasso smiled and replied, “No, my dear woman, you are mistaken, it took me a whole lifetime.”

The individual experiences of our lives cannot be separated from the whole. Life is not a series of separate episodes. All of life’s experiences thus far have played a part in the person you are right now. The common reaction to this statement is to recall some negative or abusive event in our past and use it as an excuse for the person we are today. Such adoption of victimhood is one of the most destructive spirits at work in the human psyche in these modern times.

Victimhood denies the great truth that life is choices.

The point I am really trying to make here is that we are not a composite of everything that has ever happened to us, but rather what happens in our lives is almost always a result of those things we habitually think and those things we habitually do. Life is the fruit of discipline, or lack of it. We are our habits. For example, you cannot separate Tiger Woods’s phenomenal performance and record-crushing victory at the 1997 Masters from the twenty years of his life prior to that event. His practice sessions fifteen years earlier at the age of six were as much a part of that Masters victory as his final approach shot to the eighteenth green.

Every disciplined effort has its own multiple reward.

Artistically and professionally, Pablo Picasso had a profound understanding of the value of compounding effort and experience. His professional life had theme and thread, direction and purpose—and was held together as one whole. His personal life lacked that wisdom. From lover to lover he passed, from wife to wife, from friend to friend—always moving on, eventually deserting even those who loved him. In the end, he abandoned all those who were close to him. Picasso’s personal life was plagued by this episodic quality we have just discussed. He was unable or unwilling to apply the truth he had discovered professionally to the other areas of his life.

Life is the gathering of truth. Any truth we discover must not be allowed to remain isolated in one area of our lives, and certainly must not be allowed to remain merely in our minds. Rather, any truth life reveals to us must filter into every aspect of our lives, like blood to the cells of the body. Life is one. Truth should be lived.

What we do in the span of our lives may bring us financial rewards, status, fame, power, and unimaginable possessions, but lasting happiness and fulfillment are not the by-products of doing and having.

The truth is a startling contrast to the present culture’s credo.

Who you become is infinitely more important than what you do or what you have.

The meaning and purpose of life is for you to become the-best-version-of-yourself.

I am often amused at how scared some people are to wonder, or ask, what God might want for them or from them. They imagine that God might want them to become a missionary in some obscure, poverty-stricken country or that God might want them to become a monk…or a nun…or that God always wants them to do the one thing they don’t want to do.

What is God’s dream for you? Do you ever wonder? Let me tell you.

God wants you to become the-best-version-of-yourself.

God doesn’t want to control you, or stiﬂe you, or manipulate you, or force you to do anything you don’t want to do. Quite the opposite, in fact. God will let you do whatever you want to do, whenever you want to do it, with whomever you want to do it, and as often as you want to do it. When was the last time God stopped you from doing anything?

But if we can find the courage within our sometimes timid hearts to turn to God and ask, “God, what is your dream for me and my life?” God will whisper in reply, “Be all you can be. Become the-best-version-of-yourself.”

Our essential purpose is to become the-best-version-of-ourselves.

Once we discover it and place this purpose at the center of our lives, everything begins to makes sense. Until we discover our essential purpose, nothing makes sense, and we wander around aimlessly, slowly being numbed into lives of quiet desperation.

It is the quest to improve ourselves, to be all we are capable of being, to test our limits, and to grow steadily toward the-best-version-of-ourselves that brings meaning to our lives.

If we return for a moment to our earlier discussion of happiness, we also discover that our yearning for happiness is intimately linked to our essential purpose. In each of the four areas—physical, emotional, intellectual, and spiritual—we discussed certain activities that bring us happiness. Why do we get a deep sense of fulfillment and happiness from those activities? Because they help us fulfill our essential purpose. The activities that help us become the-best-version-of-ourselves also fill our lives with sustainable happiness.

There is purpose and meaning to life. You were born to become the-best-version-of yourself. In the words of Robert Louis Stevenson, “To be what we are, and to become what we are capable of becoming, is the only end of life.” In part 3 of this book, we will discuss how you place this truth at the center of your life by using it as a compass in your decision making.

Embrace this one solitary truth—you were born to become the-best-version-of-yourself—and it will change your life more than anything you have ever learned.