Successful and Fulfilled?

“It is not in the pursuit of happiness that we find fulfillment, it is in the happiness of pursuit.”

Denis Waitley – Author, Lecturer

I’ll admit it, I have a cool job. I get to work with people who by almost any definition you can

come up with are very successful. They typically drive nice cars, have beautiful homes, take cool vacations etc. Yet when asked how ‘fulfilled’ they are with their life there is often a long pause. Take a second and ask yourself that question. How fulfilled am I with my life?

Fulfillment is that sense deep inside that your life is whole, complete, that you’re living up to your potential and loving it! It means that if it all ended tomorrow your life would have meant something. Be honest with yourself. Did you get excited just now thinking about what that would be like?

Here’s a quick test you can use to see if you are leading a fulfilled life. Do you get up in the morning energized by your work, your life purpose? Do you look forward to making a difference in the lives of your customers, employees, family and friends? If so, congratulations! However if you really explore your feelings and feel like something is missing don’t be too hard on yourself, you’re in good company.

How is it we can be ridiculously successful but have that continual feeling of, “Is this all there is?” Think about it this way, success is primarily defined by things external to us, like how much money we make, our standing in the community, the job title we have. All of these things mean we’re being measured against others. It’s external. Fulfillment is just the opposite. Fulfillment is defined by internal measures. It’s based on how we feel about ourselves and what we’re doing or have done. Fulfillment comes from discovering what our sense of meaning and purpose is and then living it.

So how does this equate to what you’re doing as a leader of your business? How much time do you spend doing the things in your business that energize you? The things you really, really, really like doing. It might be out meeting with current or potential customers. It might be helping coach your employees into being the best team they can be. It might be inventing your next product or service. Whatever it is, are you doing that as much as you’d like? The answer I typically hear is no, followed quickly by a long list of other job responsibilities that have to be done by them alone. Yet those are just the things that turn what was originally a job that excited us and energized us into the one we have now. If you dig deeper into why you’re doing all sorts of jobs you ‘have’ to do you’ll often find you’ve trapped yourself. We make ourselves victims. Being really busy at things that don’t energize you is nothing more than another form of being lazy.

So you’re working 50, 60, 80, 100 hours a week and I just called you lazy? Yes. If you’re doing it at the expense of doing what you love. Does that mean we can all have a career that doesn’t require some amount of time spent on things we’d just as soon not have to do? Probably not, but it’s amazing how we can justify having those activities fill up most of our days. From personal experience I know how fast we can do that to ourselves and be able to justify it to anyone.

If we’re not spending the vast majority of our time doing what fulfills us though, who are we cheating? Or, looking at it from a different direction, how much better could our business and our life be if we were doing what really excites us most of the time? When I ask that of my clients I’m almost always told their business would be much better off. Why? Our enthusiasm and energy rubs off! Your customers can feel it when you’re really offering something you believe in and are excited by. Your employees feed off your energy or lack thereof. Do you think your family would like to see you fired up and happy on a daily basis? Most importantly how would you feel about yourself? Going to bed each night knowing you made a difference in the world. Or in the words of Steve Jobs; “You put a dent in the universe.”

So take some time, ask yourself if you really can’t find a way to hand off things that de-energize you so you can spend more time doing what you love. It’s so easy to convince ourselves that I’m doing all these things now so I can be happy at some point in the future. Really? What if that future never gets here and what the heck is wrong with being happy now?

Don’t be lazy! Challenge yourself to create the world you want to live in now. Do what you love doing as much as possible and see what a difference it makes in your life and the lives of those around you. Find what fulfills you and leave a great legacy!