Minimalism: Live a Meaningful Life (8 page)

Thus, not only is being honest the right thing to do in your relationships, it is also much simpler in the long run. And if a relationship can’t be honestly maintained, then it isn’t a relationship worth having.

Caring & Respect

This is the other side of trust. Respecting someone is the ultimate way to contribute to your relationship in a meaningful way. Respect means that you care enough about someone to express it through your consistent actions of admiration and appreciation. Respect is how you show someone you care.

Call it compassion, call it sympathy, call it empathy—but whatever you call it, we all value someone who genuinely cares about us, about our feelings, about our lives.

Support

The strongest relationships are mutually supportive relationships. Meaning, not only do you care about the other person, but you are genuinely excited when they’re excited, you’re genuinely happy that they’re happy, and you encourage them to grow as an individual as you grow, allowing you to grow together.

Time, Presence, & Attentiveness

Much of the time, especially on our website, we talk about the importance of being present, of living in the moment. This is especially true with your relationships. If these people are important enough to be in your top tier of relationships, then they are important enough to merit your undivided attention. 

These people require your full attention when you are engaged with them. No cellphone. No instant messaging. No texting. No watching the TV in your peripheral vision. Your relationships are important and they need to be treated accordingly. Hang on to their every word. You’ll be surprised with the reaction you get from people when you give them your
full
attention.

Authenticity

Be an example through your actions. The strongest example for a great relationship is displayed by people who are utterly genuine—people who are authentic.

Authentic people are refreshing. We want to get to know these people, because we feel safe around authentic people, as if we could reveal to them our deepest, darkest secrets, as if we could trust them with anything.

Be authentic. Doing so brings out the best in you, which, in turn, brings out the best in your relationships.

Nourish Your Relationships

You must find ways to continuously nourish your
primary
relationships every day. They are far too important to ignore. If you focus on the above eight fundaments, you will strengthen your relationships more than you ever thought was possible. Sure, it takes a considerable amount of work, focus, and attention, but having incredibly meaningful relationships in your life is worth every bit of work you put into it.

CHAPTER 4: PASSIONS

The Importance of Pursuing Your Passions

The pursuit of your passions is the most important of the five dimensions of living a meaningful life. Don’t believe us? Let us prove it.

Imagine winning the lottery, getting into the best shape of your life, finding your soulmate, establishing the most meaningful relationships possible, paying off all your debt, moving into your dream home (on the beach, of course), and not needing to work another day in your life. 

Now imagine you wake up tomorrow and the next day and the next day with nothing to do, nothing to be excited about, nothing to fuel your fire. Oh, the horror. There are only so many TV shows you can watch or vacations you can take before you realize passion is missing from your life, before you realize your life lacks meaning. Unless you’re doing something with your life you’re passionate about, you will not feel fulfilled, you will not experience a meaningful life. This is often the root cause of that empty feeling so many people experience.

What You Call Your Work

Back to reality. Let’s take a look at your average day. How do you spend it? In other words, what do you do for work? Do you work the typical 9-to-5? Do you stay at home with the kids? Do you run your own business?

Whatever you do, the level of passion you have for what you do can be measured by the label you give your work. People tend to designate one of three labels to their work:
job
,
career
, or
mission
. When you speak about your work, which term do you use? Do you have a job? Do you have a career? Or are you one of the few who calls your work your mission?

Chances are you have a
job
. You have the daily grind. Or, if you’re unemployed, you’re probably looking for a
job
. It’s a cultural imperative, the American Dream, it’s what we’re taught to do. We’re taught to work incredibly hard in high school or college, doing stuff we don’t care much about, then find a good job, one with reliable pay, good benefits, and maybe a retirement plan. We’re taught to work a soul-crushing job for more than forty years so one day we might actually be able to retire and enjoy our lives for three years (insurance actuary studies have shown that the average life span of a retiree is about three years after retirement). We’re taught to work incredibly hard for a non-living entity, donating our most precious commodity (our time) for a paycheck. We’re taught that there is much more value in that paycheck—and all the stuff that paycheck can buy us—than there is in actuality. 

The truth is we all need money to live. There’s no doubt that we all need to pay for a place to live, food to nourish our bodies, clothes to keep us warm, medical care when we’re sick or injured, and various other essentials. But the aforementioned cycle—this thing we’ve been told is the American Dream—is void of meaning. The American Dream is not going to make you happy. In fact, for many, the pursuit of this set of ideals is oppressive and is guaranteed to be a losing enterprise.

The Ugly Roots of a Career

If what you do everyday is just a job, then, by definition, you won’t be able to live a meaningful life. Even if you work really, really hard and establish a career for yourself, you won’t be able to live a meaningful life either. In fact, having a career is one of the most dangerous things you can do if you want to find meaning in your life.

Careers are dangerous because people invest so much of themselves into their careers that they establish an identity and a social status based upon where they work and what they do for a living. 

Think about it: one of the first things a person asks you when you’re becoming acquainted is
What do you do?
On the surface, this seems like an innocent enough question, doesn’t it? But the implied question isn’t
What do you do?
which by itself is rather expansive and could encompass thousands of things (
I volunteer at soup kitchens
,
I work at Walmart
,
I enjoy fishing on the weekends
,
I exercise five days a week
,
I drink water
, etc.); the implied question is
What do you do for a living?
or
Where do you work?
which is vastly different than the question itself. This “innocent” question actually says,
I will judge you as a person by however you make your money, and I will assign a particular social status to you based on your occupation.

People have to answer this question so often that they become rooted in their careers—they establish “what they do” as their core identity and give their occupations far more societal worth than they deserve. Once someone establishes their career as who they are as a person, it is incredibly hard to shed that identity, even if the person hates their career (
I don’t want to work here, but this is just who I am!
).

Thankfully, there are better ways to answer the
What do you do?
question. We have found that people are programmed to ask this question without giving it any thought; it’s not much different than asking
How are you doing?
So the best thing to do is to get the other person to actually think about the mindless question they just posited. Whenever presented with this question, the two of us tend to answer with another question, such as, “That’s a rather expansive question. What do you mean by it?” or “That’s a rather expansive question; perhaps we could discuss it over a cup of coffee.” 

Another way to answer this question is by stating what you’re passionate about, instead of spouting off what your vocation is. So, instead of saying, “I’m a Director of Operations,” say, “I’m passionate about writing [or scrap-booking or rock climbing or whatever you’re passionate about].” It’s nice to follow-up that statement with, “What are you passionate about?” Such a response completely redirects the conversation, changing its trajectory from
what you do
to
what you’re both passionate about
, which is far more interesting.

Such responses immediately cause the person to reconsider the question, while at the same time help you remember that you are far more than your career. You are a mother, a father, a sister, a brother, a spouse, a lover, a healthy person, a growing person, a contributing person, a passionate person with a meaningful life. You are not your career.

By changing your own thought process around this question, you can dig out those pernicious roots that every career has. Over time you can remove your identity from your career and into its appropriate place—your life. Your meaningful life should be your identity, not how you earn a paycheck.

Joshua & Ryan's Passions

Whether you follow our website or were just introduced to our writing with this book, you know our story by now. You know we worked fancy corporate careers with fancy titles and sizable paychecks. But therein lies a clue: we had
careers
. What level of passion do you think we had if we worked at our
careers
instead of living our
mission
?

Sure, we worked hard, slaving 70 or more hours a week for a corporation. Sure, we enjoyed certain aspects of our careers (viz. coaching and mentoring the large groups of people we led). And sure, we often felt fortunate to have such “nice” careers at a young age with no college degrees. But, ultimately, we weren’t satisfied with what we did for a living. We weren’t living our mission. 

We didn’t feel fulfilled by our careers, so we turned to our society’s idea of a living: we bought stuff, spent too much money, and lived paycheck to paycheck trying to purchase happiness in every trip to the shopping mall or luxurious vacation we could find. Instead of finding our passion, instead of searching for our mission, we pacified ourselves with ephemeral indulgences, inducing a crack-cocaine high that didn’t last far past the checkout line.

Eventually we discovered that our passion, and thus our mission, was waiting far beyond the sea of consumption, but first we had to remove a lot of anchors before we could navigate our way into clearer waters.

Joshua has a deep passion for reading and writing—particularly literary fiction. Ryan has a passion for mentoring and coaching people—helping them solve their problems. Once we discovered our passions, we were able to shape them into our mission over a two year period.

The Confluence of Passion & Mission

It’s important to note that we don’t subscribe to the notion that working for a corporation is bad or evil. We don’t believe that to be the case. 

We also don’t believe that you were meant to be passionate about one particular thing or that you have one true calling in life. 

Rather, we believe you can be passionate about virtually anything. So
anything
can be your passion. Consequently, any line of work
can
be your mission. Just because something sounds banal or boring to one person doesn’t mean it’s not exciting and rewarding for another. It is perfectly plausible to think that someone can be deeply passionate about financial accounting the same way another person might be passionate about horseback riding, neither of which sound too exciting to us, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t people who are passionate about both.

Occasionally, people stumble into a line of work that brings them ultimate satisfaction. These people who are paid to do what they love tend to refer to their work as their mission. Is that you? If so, congratulations—you are one of the few. If you don’t, however, feel grateful and passionate about the day’s work, then chances are you have not found (or are not pursuing) your mission.

The rest of this chapter is dedicated to helping you find your passions and pursue your mission. 

This journey is incredibly easy for some people. These people already know what they’re passionate about, but perhaps aren’t yet pursuing that passion as their full-time mission.

Conversely, this journey is sometimes the hardest part for other people. Some people don’t know what they want to do, they don’t know what they’re passionate about, they have no clue what their mission is.

No matter where you fall on this continuum, the rest of this chapter will help you identify the anchors that are holding you back from discovering and/or pursuing your passions.

A Misconception About Passionate People

A common misconception is that people who are passionate about what they do are inherently that way, as if they wake up every day feeling optimistic and passionate about the hours ahead. That misconception is illogical—it couldn’t be further from the truth.

People who are passionate about what they do are in most ways just like people who aren’t passionate about their work. Some days passionate people don’t want to get out of bed, sometimes they don’t feel like starting work on the new project that’s looming in front of them. Other days they jump out of bed feeling excited and motivated by their mission. In other words, passionate people are just like you.