One of my wonderful artist friends just told me today that her life was feeling like a lot of ups and downs at the moment.

We do live in uncertain times, and uncertainty is gaining in momentum on a daily basis. The illusion of safety, the idea that we can continue to turn our back on the fragility of our lives is being eroded day by day (and we have to remind ourselves that living in a “Western” country is a most cushy experience to begin with compared to the rest of the world).

As artists and alchemists, our lives are about transmuting the muck, turning lead into gold: Using our personal experience and work as a platform for shared transformation, be it through our artifacts or teachings. And we do it as prototypes, so that others can do the same in their own lives. While she agreed, she said it was tough to persist sometimes, and to keep a long-term perspective. I absolutely agree with that, and I think the two are connected.

Long-Term Perspective

We will all die at some point. I know, I know, this might be fatalistic sounding from a transhumanist perspective, but with all the age research and life extension, it’s going to be a while, and maybe death isn’t such a bad thing after all. Because one thing it’s really good for is that it provides perspective.

An exercise I enjoy doing with myself, clients, and people I speak with, is to think of my funeral. Who would be there? What would my obituary say about me? What do I want my legacy to be?

It’s easy to get caught up in our daily lives: Bills, rent, partners, kids, people, work, entertainment… One way to deal with this is by setting goals, by planning our time, by executing against winner scripts. But usually life is what happens when you make other plans. While we have all been reasonably successful in setting goals for ourselves and achieving them to the best of our ability, maybe there is a better approach, one that honors uncertainty in new ways?

Purpose and Progress

Recently, I have decided to replace goals with purpose and progress indicators for my life management. I found goals not motivating enough. Too short term, too limiting – and not flexible enough in our world of instant communication, sharing, networks and clouds, and accelerated evolution. If I think of the goals I have had in my life, many have drastically changed again and again. Sometimes because I realized that it wasn’t what I wanted after all, sometimes because the times changed around me (I remember the dotcom era too clearly), sometimes because I banked on the wrong tools or people, sometimes because I had set my expectations too high or too low… And sometimes, because they felt more like “shoulds” than “wants” – and who wants to should on themselves?

Focusing on purpose creates a bigger game. Instead of looking at goals for a few years out (and who knows how long I will ultimately live  – I could get run over by a truck this afternoon), instead of analyzing the derivates of the function that is my life, I look at the integral and ask myself “what does this function cover?” With that, the ups and downs along the curve become much easier to manage, as they become part of a larger holistic picture.

As progress indicators, I look to my values. Having clear core values provides me with a wonderful framework for performance management, as I can look at any activity and see how it affects my values. All of them are intangibles, values we reach for, but as Ingeborg Bachman said, values that keep moving further out of our grasp each time we take a step toward them. Regardless, in any situation, I can measure if what I am doing has a positive or negative effect on my values. And I can ask myself at any point “Am I advancing toward any of my values with this action?”

Having a clear purpose

Thanks to a great mastermind group I have been in, I have become much clearer around my purpose. It’s “to consciously and creatively serve my soul, be visible doing it, teach others and have fun.” Simple. Even felt a bit like a cop-out at first, as I thought I needed to know what that looks like. I don’t.

Instead, I have a wonderful tool to constantly calibrate my actions in every moment. In any situation, in every minute of my life, I can look into this mirror and ask myself: “Does this conform with my true will?” “Am I doing what I can to show up?” “Is there something I have learned that I can share?” – and most of all “Am I enjoying myself?”

Dharma

In eastern thought exists the concept of Dharma. I keep using it as a great framework, not just for personal, but also for business performance measurement.

Dharma means “the natural order of things.” Birds fly in the sky, fish swim in the sea and everyone here does what they are truly here to do. It is often translated as “duty” or “personal responsibility.” Makes sense. If there is a natural order of things, doing what I am here to do would be my duty and responsibility.

There are five indicators that let you know whether or not you are in alignment with Dharma:

• Whatever you do gives you tremendous joy. You love doing it, it’s fun, you would do it for free and all day long simply because it makes you happy. There have been studies that show that people begin to lose interest in things they love doing once they get paid for it. Think about that for a moment.
• Whatever you do utilizes your strengths and neglects your weaknesses. We live in an ecology, in a world where special flowers attract specific insects and repel others, where each of us has gifts and talents and things we are not so good at, which in turn happen to be gifts and talents of other people – in business they refer to this as “focusing on core competency”
• Whatever you do benefits others. Like force in physics, you can measure your actions mostly by the effect they create in the world you are perceiving. Simply do good. If you have a business, make sure all your stakeholders benefit. Your customers first and foremost, but also your vendors, employees, the community you operate in, and even your competitors.
• Whatever you do sustains you. It provides you with what you need. Not just materially and physically, but also emotionally, mentally and energetically. Who wants to feel worn out and drained, exhausted and sucked dry just to make a buck?
• And finally, whatever you do is supported by synchronicities.

Seems like a pretty good guideline for living your purpose. Somehow thousands of years of empirical study have brought forth some good ideas… Thank you writers of the Vedas. Great legacy!

Legacy

My friend asked me what the legacy I would like to leave behind would look like. I told her that I want to do what I can every day to leave a world behind where people get up every day, do what they love, do what they are good at, that uses their unique perspective, gifts and talents  and that fully supports them with all the physical and spiritual sustenance they need. And it all felt like a magical carpet ride along the way…

I know I can’t do it by myself. But I know I can act on my purpose and focus on my dharma in every moment. Writing this blog was part of it. Now you know.

What do you want your legacy to be?