A CEOs quest for intrinsic happiness and how not to waste your life
Pleasure or Fulfillment — What do you want more?
It’s a question we need to ask ourselves in all honesty.
As CEOs and business leaders, not many of us can confidently say that we are living the best possible life or are on the path of seeking such exhilaration. Your best life is basically when your notions of a good life do not necessarily have to conform with society’s or close social circle’s standards yet you’re content at the end of the day. For eg. if you’re happy clocking in 18 hours a day and feel great about it every single day but society expects you to be working lesser hours and grabbing beer with friends every week then you needn’t beat yourself on it. You have professional and personal fulfillment happening for you.
And let me be honest, I’ve spoken to hundreds of entrepreneurs and business leaders all my life. Nobody ever really gets his/her fulfillment formula right until a few years into the system they love.
Now you’re wondering what’s all this got to do with wasting your life. Well its got a lot.
A life less lived is a life wasted.
A life is less lived if there isn’t a balance in it. If there is less of Happiness and more of stress. When there is more panic than calm. When pleasure takes over fulfillment.
That’s what I want to talk about. The quest for fulfillment.
Of course, I understand that Happiness is a deeply subjective feeling and difficult to generalize. Though some might say that people seeking pleasure over fulfillment is a fatal error, it really depends on how you perceive and organize your thoughts about these pleasures.
While pleasures are fleeting, and constant pleasure-seeking may not be the most sustainable form of happiness, if you can somehow reflect on all these pleasures that you feel to give you a greater sense of worth, purpose and “centered-ness”, you’re score.
Fulfillment, then, is sort of like delayed happiness. It is like the foundation of your emotional well-being, pleasures are merely the highs. The stronger the foundation, lesser the need for these highs, greater the satisfaction and enrichment.
The process is not the most pleasurable at first but is what makes us feel a sense of worth, a purpose. Whether this is helping someone, nurturing a skill or a passion, a dream that feels like too much effort to pursue, putting effort into meaningful relationships that may not always be rosy, these fulfillment related processes are the things that make us feel most alive. These are the things that matter. This nurtures that ‘intrinsic happiness’.
One specific way to be more fulfilled, is to find ‘flow’. Flow, is a term used in psychology, to describe a state of complete involvement, focus and enjoyment that we lose track of time or space, like a self-contained universe. Flow, which occurs easier when say playing sport or an instrument, specifically happens when a person is performing a task that challenges the person, just a little above what he can normally perform. Finding this flow in our lives, whether work or play, will strengthen this foundation called fulfillment.
In an age where we obtain constant stimulation and instant gratification, especially-cliched but true-social media, seeking fulfillment alone is not easy. We are constantly capturing moments before we can feel the moment itself, a sort of hyper-reality that makes our focus towards fulfillment all the more difficult. Pleasure seeking has now become a way to constantly stay afloat on murky waters instead of momentarily drowning in the uncertainty we feel so that we can come afloat with a new perspective.
