“Think about the metric by which your life will be judged, and make a resolution to live every day so that in the end, your life will be judged a success.” | Clay Christensen
“Productivity is the act of bringing a system closer to its goal.” | Dr. Eliyahu Goldratt
“The most important thing about the good life is that you get to decide what good is. If you are living someone else’s good life, you’re making a huge mistake.” | Seth Godin
These 3 quotes have given me plenty of food for thought over the past 2 years. They touch on 2 big questions –
1. What is the yardstick with which you will measure your life?
2. Assuming the goal is “the good life,” what is the good life as I define it?
These questions are so incredibly heavy that it feels easier to give up before I even get started. These 2 questions get at more questions – Who am I? What matters most to me and why? Ah. So much easier to just get on our to do lists and do the next thing.
And, yet, is there anything more important than asking these questions? There is no productivity if we’re not working towards the goal, after all..
This afternoon, a close friend and I, at school, are launching the first edition of a 3 part workshop series we’re calling “The Good Life sessions.” The idea is to break the idea of the good life down by asking 3 questions –
1. What do I value?
2. How do I find my personal mission?
3. How do I create an action plan to live a life consistent with this mission?
We’ve been fortunate to receive support from a collection of inspiring professors who’ve walked this path and continue to struggle with these questions. As anyone who reads this blog knows, I have definitely been struggling with these questions for a long while and, after 18 months of wrestling with these questions, have begun to find direction. So, we were really excited to test this idea with the student community and see if we’d find a small group of people who care.
It turned out there was actually a huge group of people who care. We received 70 registrations in the first 120 seconds of our registration opening up and had to close at close to 300 registrations (~25% of the student body) in the first 4 hours. We have a main lecture room and 2 overflow rooms booked today. It helped a lot that the Professors who’re helping us have great follower-ship within the school but (and I am based here) it feels like we’ve hit on a topic that many would like to explore. And, that’s great to see.
I’m not sure this has ever been done before. So, we’re definitely working hard to create structure and tackle these big questions in bite-sized chunks. Of course, this might not work. But, I guess, that’s what makes it really exciting.
More to follow on the good life sessions. For now, I’ll end with a big thank you to Clay Christensen, Dr. Eliyahu Goldratt and the wonderful Seth for those 3 big ideas.the good
A Learning a Day 