“He who has a why to live can bear almost any how.”
Nietzsche said that. Others have quoted him and paraphrased him. It’s a popular sentiment.
And it’s wrong.
Not incorrect – more incomplete. Maybe it’s more obvious in this blighted era of social media, where everyone shrieks constantly about their Big Enough Why:
Racism, global warming and intolerance.
Crime, ethnic replacement and foreign interference.
Tyranny.
The problem isn’t that folks don’t have something important to care about. If anything, there’s too much of that. Too many armchair political analysts and not enough electricians.
These people have a Why to Live, yet they do little more than talk. And they don’t even talk to friends, family, colleagues and people from church – no, they argue with bots online.
A quest to save the world isn’t enough.
It’s necessary, sure, but insufficient.
I have a quest to save the world and I found that arguing online distracts me from it. One of the relevant side quests is saving as many men as possible from weakness, madness and folly.
To do that, I must keep my applied psychology skills sharp. I hold myself to absurd and unrealistic expectations with the work I do. I have to. The smallest, most reasonable mistakes have led me straight to failure in the past.
I also need to dress well enough, embrace hygiene and exercise enough that folks won’t ignore me on sight.
Plus I need to manage my energy levels and morale while working hard.
It means a lot of studying, a lot of writing, a lot of travel (some fun, some not), a lot of brain-breaking practice, a lot of wrestling with my despair…
This flows inevitably from my Why to Live.
“Yeah, I get it. You incorporate your Big Enough Why into your daily decisions, filtering every choice through that.”
Nope. Maybe that works for some folks. It doesn’t seem to – and it led to mixed results for me.
No, I took a different approach.
An approach I often use with my 1 Big Win sessions.
If you know the world is broken in some big way…
If you’d die to fix the problem yet can’t bring yourself to live differently to fix it…
… there’s a disconnect between your why and your how.
Luckily, it’s a quick and simple fix.
Unfortunately, I rarely hear others talk about resolving this disconnect. There’s a lot of talk of “find your purpose!!!” and not so much about how to then live to your purpose.
Bringing your mission into your daily life counts as 1 Big Win – a win big enough to reshape the rest of your existence. And maybe even the world.
Claim that win here: