Are You Happy With Your Life?
I’ve mentioned before that I like to start my week with some motivation. For me that usually involves me checking out a TED talk.
If you haven’t come across TED talks before I encourage you to go to the TED talks website and check out what’s there. I’ve gained so many valuable insights about business, life and success from the talks I’ve listened to. (www.ted.com)
My TED talk this week outlined some astonishing facts about how happy people generally are with their lives and the impact this has on our success.
The presenter of the talk was Adam Leipzig. The talk was about finding our life’s purpose which is a very popular topic. I did a search on Amazon for how to find your life’s purpose and it came up with 843 results so it’s clearly something that interests a lot of us.
Anyway, he started by outlining what he found at his university reunion some 20 years after leaving Yale.
Adam was fortunate to have gone to Yale and so at his reunion he was surrounded by a large group of people who had experienced what many believe to have been a very privileged life.
They had all of the things that are normally associated with success, the big house, the cars, the lifestyle etc. During the evening while chatting to many of his old classmates he discovered an astonishing thing.
Despite all of the privileged education and the trappings of success, 80% of them admitted to being unhappy with their lives. Many of them said that they felt they had wasted their lives.
How sad is that, to have reached what would normally be considered the pinnacle of your life only to feel that you have wasted it.
So what about the other 20%, how did they feel? Well, as you might imagine they didn’t feel that they had wasted their lives. They felt fulfilled, they felt that they were where they wanted to be, in other words they had achieved their life’s purpose.
There have been many studies done that show that one of the greatest drivers for us as humans is to achieve our life’s purpose – to be happy with our lives.
Almost every entrepreneur once they achieve their financial goals seek ways of making a difference in the world.
For curiosity I just did an Amazon search for “find your life’s purpose” and came up with 1840 results so it’s a topic close to many people’s hearts.
Getting back to Adam. Talking to those graduates he found out something equally as interesting. It appeared that while the 80% generally studied the STEM subjects, (science, technology, engineering and math), the 20% chose to follow their passions.
They studied the arts, social sciences – subjects that interested them rather than subjects that would necessarily get them into the best jobs.
In their careers their focus was on their customers, their clients. They were concerned with what other people wanted and not what they wanted and they were happy – but also successful.
So since achieving our life’s purpose is so important Adam went on to explain how to identify our life’s purpose in less than 5 minutes.
Identifying your life’s purpose involves identifying 5 things – that’s all just 5. They are;
Who are you?
What do you do?
Who do you do it for?
What do those people want or need?
How do they change or their lives get transformed as a result of what you give (or do for) them.
Working through those things, you know who you are. I would just write down;
I am Trevor Greenfield and I’m an entrepreneur,Internet Marketer, Marketing & Business Strategist, Fanatical Techie.
Next identify what you do. If you can’t come up with that immediately think of what you love to do, what you feel supremely qualified in. One of the things I have in my profile is that I’ve been helping people succeed online since 1996. I also have a description on my profile that reads ‘helping ordinary people achieve extraordinary results’
It will be different for all of you but it’s essential that you identify what it is in your case.
Next, who do you do it for? It’s very important that we identify who our ideal customer is. We need to create an avatar, if you like, of the type of individual we feel we are best qualified to help with our products, services and skills.
It’s only when we know who our ideal customer is that we can target our marketing to the people most likely to respond favorably to it.
What do those people want or need? This is tied in with creating that customer avatar. When we know what they want or need then we can make sure that we target those wants and needs. Remember when doing this exercise that people generally buy what they want and not what they need.
Most people need life insurance but a lot less of them actually want it enough to go out and buy it. I think it’s because many of the things that people need aren’t as appealing as the things they want.
Having identified what your avatars want or need and creating a way to deliver it to them we then need to identify how they or their lives change as a result of what we deliver to them.
Having done that exercise and reached a position where we are delivering what we do to our ideal avatars we will have achieved our life’s purpose.
Finally, if we analyse those 5 things we see that only two if them are about us – who we are and what we do.
The other three are about other people, they involve us looking outward. Interestingly Adam found that those happy 20% were all involved in things that had them looking outward, focusing on other people’s wants and needs.
In general we find that truly successful people, those that are happy as well as just financially successful, are outward focusing.
Happy people love to make people happy. Take time to analyse where your focus is. If you’re not as happy and successful as you would like to be, maybe you’ll find that your focus is pointing inthe wrong direction.
I hope you find this helpful and as always please add your comments and thoughts below.
Until next time,
Trevor
