The Characteristics of Personal Fulfillment: Creating a More Fulfilling Life

We all desire happiness. But what is the definition of happiness, anyway? Ask anyone and you’ll find that the definition differs wildly from person to person. In reality, there’s a deep disparity between what the individual actually wants and what the individual pursues. Most of us subscribe to a generic, lukewarm idea of happiness by default. One that is impersonal to the individual, like a two-piece suit from a department store rack.

In the worst and average case we end up pursuing other people’s ideas of happiness. This is the most common recipe for disappointment because we find ourselves trying to achieve someone else’s criteria for a good life instead of our own. Subscribing to a generic definition of happiness is the most pervasive form of self-neglect. But we do so because we rarely know how to even begin formulating what a happy life would look like for us. It’s a difficult task because the concept of happiness itself is so muddled. We can’t pursue what we can’t visualize. A clearer and more useful aspiration to pursue would be personal fulfillment.

Subscribing to a generic definition of happiness is the most pervasive form of self-neglect.

Fulfillment has a clear definition, unlike happiness. Fulfillment is a state in which one has achieved the necessary conditions to feel satisfied. Full stop. It is the feeling that you want and need nothing more because your minimum desires have been met. But how can we actually identify the experiences that will actually help us feel personally fulfilled on a daily basis? Fulfilling experiences have a unique set of characteristics. We can use these characteristics to help decide what to focus our time, attention, and efforts on in order to experience a more fulfilling life on a personal level. This is what we’ll explore here.

What Personal Fulfillment Really Looks Like

Project Untitled is grounded in the idea that living a more fulfilling life each day requires focusing on the few things that increase the quality of life. We define this as Self-Work. Self-Work involves developing the skills and habits that are conducive to personal fulfillment; it involves pursuing the desires that are meaningful and satisfying on a more personal level. In order to know what these fulfillment experiences might look like, we’ll have to familiarize ourselves with their characteristics.

The Currency of Personal Fulfillment

We’re going to go off on a tangent for a paragraph or two here and talk about currency, arguably the most powerful and pervasive concept in human history. We usually refer to currency in context of economic terms; that is, money circulated within a group of people as a medium of exchange. It’s something we trade things for, like material goods and services.

As humans, we have used, and still use, the concept of currency to convince large groups of people to come together and do important work for this thing upon which we confer value. The funny thing is, as powerful as currency is, if the society that supports it decides from now on that it will no longer recognize its specific instance of currency (say, the U.S. Dollar) then it will immediately become worthless. No one would go to their jobs tomorrow because why would you do work in exchange for nothing of value?

The real concern is the time that would be wasted. Why? Because time is alwaysvaluable. Unlike money, if other people decided that their time were no longer valuable there would be no effect on how you would value your own time. In the end, what is really more valuable? The value of money relies on the trust and confidence of the people that make up a society. The value of time relies on no one. It is intrinsically valuable. So what’s the true currency of life?

Time

The quality of our time, our experiences, is the only real meaningful measure of a life. And how we choose to use our attention determines the quality of our time. Let’s repeat these points one more time because it’s the foundation of personal fulfillment: the quality of the time you spend is the only true measure of your life, and what you choose to pay attention to determines the quality of your time.

Attention

What use is having more time if your attention is fixated on scrolling through another social media feed, for example, instead of doing the things that make you feel truly alive? If time is intrinsically valuable, then attention is the instrument that supplies our time with purpose and meaning:

“…We must reflect that, when we reach the end of our days, our life experience will equal what we have paid attention to, whether by choice or default. We are at risk, without quite fulling realizing it, of living lives that are less our own than we imagine.”

-Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants

The truth is that we won’t know how much time we really have until it’s too late; it’s not something that we can replenish once we’ve used it up. But not having more time isn’t the challenge; it’s about how you choose to use your time when you have it. When you do have time, the only way to make the best of it is to use your attention with good judgment on the things that matter. This is timeless guidance that’s been shared and practiced millennia ago, as advocated by Seneca the Younger:

“It is not that we have a short time to live, but that we waste a lot of it. Life is long enough, and a sufficiently generous amount has been given to us for the highest achievements if it were all well invested. But when it is wasted in heedless luxury and spent on no good activity, we are forced at last by death’s final constraint to realize that it has passed away before we knew it was passing. So it is: we are not given a short life but we make it short, and we are not ill-supplied but wasteful of it… Life is long if you know how to use it.”

-Seneca, On the Shortness of Life

The combination of time and attention is the only real currency that matters. Above money, material goods, expectations, the list goes on. Anyone can promise you more money, prestige, and material goods, but no one can promise you more time. The same goes for attention. However, don’t misinterpret this as eschewing money, material goods, expectations, and whatever else we exchange time for. Doing so won’t address the actual issue. The point is to hold time and attention as the highest-priority resources and to protect them as such. Direct your time and attention toward the things that serve to create a more fulfilling life for you, and be ruthless in eliminating that which does not.

Principle 0: The combination of time and attention is the only real currency of a life. How time is spent determines the quality of a life. How attention is spent determines the quality of time. Having more time means nothing if attention is squandered.

Fulfillment Criteria

Personal fulfillment is determined by how we use the time we have. It’s our responsibility to engage in experiences that accentuate our days with a healthy mix of excitement, struggle, joy, good stress, and fun. These experiences matter deeply to who we are and make up the life story we want to live. These experiences are defined as Fulfillment Criteria. These are the principles and standards that can be used to judge whether something is worth our time and attention. Ultimately, we want to determine whether something will bring us a sense of satisfaction for the day. We can make such judgments by identifying experiences that exhibit the following characteristics of fulfillment:

Excitement

A fulfillment item is, at a minimum, something you are excited to have in your day. You wake up and greet the morning with excitement because you know you will spend your time and attention well for the day. Having something in your day that you want to wake up for is one of the first hallmarks of a life aligned with personal fulfillment. The opposite of this is all too common: waking up dreading to do something that isn’t satisfying. Essentially, you wake up miserable with the fact that you’ll be exchanging your life energy for nothing of value to you.

Principle 1: A fulfilling experience is something you’d wake up excited for every morning. You anticipate the day because you know that you’ll be spending your time and attention on something that brings you deep satisfaction.

Meaningful

Every day, we tell stories about the person we are and want to become. We conduct ourselves a certain way because we’re driven to live up to the storied version of ourselves. This is the vision that guides how you choose to spend each day, month, year, and decade of your life.

A fulfilling experience is deeply meaningful to you because it’s a narrative that you’d want to include in your life story. It doesn’t matter if it doesn’t mean anything to others. What matters is that the experience is important enough to be a defining event or theme in your life story.

How would you narrate your life? When you’re on your deathbed and given the chance to tell your entire life story, what does the story look like? What are the important themes? What are the events that reinforce these themes? What are your favorite struggles? What is the narrative that you would be so proud to tell yourself and those you care about?

Principle 2: A fulfilling experience is something that you’d include in your life story because it is deeply meaningful to you.

Completeness

A fulfilling experience leaves you going to bed at night feeling like you’ve had a full day because you did. Feeling full of life at the end of the day is great indicator that you’ve focused your time and attention on the things that really matter on a personal level. Why go to bed at night not having done at least one meaningful thing?Everything else is just an extraneous element vying for your time and attention. You don’t need it. If you go to bed with this feeling, then you’ve lived a full day.

Principle 3: A fulfilling experience leaves you going to bed at night feeling like you’ve had a full day, with no desire for anything else. It doesn’t leave behind any distress to keep you up at night.

Anticipating Tomorrow

When you anticipate something in the positive sense, it means you’ve identified some thing or experience in your life that worth your time and attention. You look forward to being engaged in this experience. You look forward to tomorrow at the end of the day because you get to wake up to another day in the life where you get to spend your time in a meaningful way. This could be an upcoming travel trip, another morning of cooking, or spending time with people who fill your life with laughter, joy, and unforgettable stories.

The opposite would be something that makes you dread another day. This is the worst because you’re essentially dreading having more time. Anything that makes you feel despair and disheartenment toward the prospect of being gifted with another tomorrow deserves to be cut from your life.

Principle 4: A fulfilling experience makes you anticipate tomorrow with great excitement because you know you’ll have another opportunity to spend your time in a way that satisfies your well-being.

Fun and Joy

Joy is universal and something we all aim to experience as much as possible, regardless of where we are in life. Joy has no shelf-life. It preserves well. Joy is the value we seek to derive from the time we have in this life. No one wishes to experience more boredom and less joy. That would be ridiculous. Boredom makes you wish that time were passing quicker, with the hope that it will wear itself out and dissipate eventually. This is a cruel waste of our non-renewable time.

Living is what you’re doing right now, whether you’re satisfied or not. The quality of a life is not determined by the futures you imagine for yourself. Anything other than the time you have right now is not guaranteed. The quality of a life is determined by how you experience your present moments. Life is here, right now. When you neglect to pay attention to the present you miss the opportunity to spend your time in a way that is meaningful.

Having fun means you’re able to be aware of the gifts of the moment. You focus on living right now. That’s the beauty of fun. When you’re doing something fun, you’re focusing on nothing but the present. You create meaning out of the time you have right now. Your time will be spent either way, so why not derive as much joy from each moment as possible?

Being aware in the present has its benefits, but being engaged in fun in the present is another level. If you’re not having fun in the pursuit of personal fulfillment you’re doing yourself a disservice by neglecting your opportunity to enjoy the process. If you don’t have fun in the journey, you’ll most likely give up. You have to have some fun doing whatever it is that’s meaningful to you.

Principle 5: A fulfilling experience presents an element of fun and joy.

Time and Attention

What makes you lose track of time in joy? Take some time to think about your answers to this question. Think about the last experience where you were so into something that you were no longer aware of the passage of time.

It’s fairly simple to determine whether something is worth it. A fulfilling experience makes you lose track of time, in a good way. When we’re engaged in an activity we don’t like, we usually watch the time, wishing it would move faster so that the boredom can end. Fulfilling experiences, on the other hand, make you wish time would slow down. You want the experience to go on just a little bit longer. There’s nothing else you’d rather pay attention to right now. You’re left thinking, that was a great use of time. I can’t wait to do it again.

The Present

A fulfilling life is built up by our experiences in the present. How we choose to experience the moments in each day, consistently, determines the quality of our life once we’re near the end of our narrative.

Time is not guaranteed. The only time we all have is right now. The best opportunity to enjoy it is right now. It would be a shame, therefore, to wish for it to go faster. Unfulfilling items compel us to forego the opportunity to enjoy our time right now, which is the only time we do have. Your attention is focused on the future, wondering what else you’d rather be doing. But everything in the future is just time we might have, at best. Fulfilling experiences, on the other hand, compel you to enjoy the time that you do have right now.

A common antithetical example would be going to a job that we don’t like. We spend each moment at work watching the time, wishing that the day would just end faster. Another example would be spending time with people who only see you in terms of socioeconomic worth. Working on our side projects, as a contrast example, makes us lose track of time because we’re engaged in something that brings us joy and fills us with satisfaction.

Principle 6: A fulfilling experience makes you lose track of time in a good way and focuses your attention on something deeply satisfying and meaningful to you.

People

There are several relationships here to consider when it comes to the people in our lives. Think about this for a few seconds: there will only be a finite set of people who you will ever spend time with during your lifetime. This is obvious, but how often do we actually think about it? Better yet, how often do we consider who we’d like to include in this limited set?

A life of personal fulfillment is inseparable from meaningful relationships. The findings from the Grant Study, a 75-year Harvard Medical School campaign that tracked predictors of healthy aging, show that meaningful relationships are paramount to overall well-being. The study followed the lives of male Harvard sophomores from 1939–1944 over seven decades, looking at factors that influence overall well-being. The conclusion showed that the quality of our relationships with our partners, family, friends, and communities play a significant role in life satisfaction:

“We’ve learned…[that]…social connections are really good for us…[and]…loneliness kills. It turns out that people who are more socially connected to family, to friends, to community, are happier, they’re physically healthier, and they live longer than people who are less well connected.”

-Dr. Robert Waldinger, “What Makes a Good Life? Lessons From the Longest Study on Happiness”

We build and grow our relationships, our tribe, over a lifetime. We create a network of people with whom we share stories and memorable moments of time and attention well spent. The story of our lives is always told in the context of people who have impacted our journeys, both positively and negatively. A story without other people is boring and depressing. We don’t live our lives in isolation.

Personal fulfillment, therefore, requires cultivating deep relationships with people who are or will be a part of our life stories. We find ways to service the people we care about because their well-being matters to us. They are the why for the work we do in this life. This why motivates us to live in a way that leaves more lasting good for the world. When the work you choose to do impacts someone you care about, in addition to yourself, you’ll find it much easier to draw motivation to push past any challenge you will encounter.

Having other people to care about motivates you to spend your time and attention more judiciously. You will have a stronger incentive to bullshit less and, instead, spend your time doing things that are more meaningful to you and those you care about. For example, I struggle with writing. I find the writing process to be mentally fatiguing and fraught with opportunities to doubt myself. But I also derive deep satisfaction from writing a piece like this one because I know I’m communicating an important message to my family, my partner, my close friends, and the Project Untitled community. I am driven, personally, to help my tribe experience more personal fulfillment in their lives. Their well-being is my concern and motivation, and it allows me to engage in activities, like writing, that are meaningful to me because I do them in service of my tribe.

Principle 7: A fulfilling experience affects the people you care about in a positive way. It motivates you to spend your time, attention, and efforts in a way that creates value for not only yourself, but the people you choose to include in your life.

Worthy Struggles

Fulfilling experiences contain an element of struggle. But the struggle is one that is beneficial because you care about the work and the outcome. A fulfilling life is not about just having more time and attention. When you have nothing to direct your time and attention toward, your days become aimless and just morph into another form of dissatisfaction. Having nothing to dedicate your time and attention to is just as dissatisfying as focusing on things the do not fulfill you. It’s still a waste. Aligning yourself toward a worthy struggle is substantiating your time and attention with purpose and meaning.

A fulfilling life includes focusing on struggles that are intrinsically-valuable and therefore worthwhile. These struggles don’t have to be grandiose. They just have to be deeply meaningful to you, personally. A worthy struggle drives you to spend your time and attention in a way that makes you feel excited in the morning and satisfied when you go to bed at night. It includes all of the previous principles that we’ve discussed. It is exciting, meaningful, fun, benefits your tribe, completes the day, and worth the time and attention.

“What man actually needs is not a tensionless state but rather the striving and struggling for some goal worthy of him…”

-Viktor Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning

Worthy struggles force you to commit yourself to putting effort in everyday to do or get closer to doing something that fulfills you. Examples of worthy struggles include writing a book or screenplay, conducting research, raising a child, creating art and music, building a non-profit or business, engaging in public service, etc. These worthy struggles share a common theme: they’re not easy, but they provide an opportunity to spend time and attention in a way that gifts us with meaning and satisfaction.

Principle 8: A fulfilling life includes the pursuit of a worthy struggle. The pursuit is what fills our time and attention with meaning and purpose.

Autonomy and Resilience

This is the best measure of your state of fulfillment. The ability to control your reactions to the world is a rare but highly-rewarding skill. This is the ability to express gratitude, kindness, excitement, and joy, despite the circumstances. You have the power to generate these expressions for yourself and those you care about whenever you want or need to, without the permission or approval of other people. The highest form of autonomy, resilience, and personal fulfillment is to not need or want anything from anyone else, especially the conditions upon which to be joyful, grateful, and kind.

Principle 9: A fulfilling life includes the consistent practice of the highest form of autonomy and resilience, which is to not need or want anyone else to supply the conditions for you to express gratitude, kindness, excitement, and joy.

A View of a Fulfilling Life

The fulfilling life would be waking up every morning with excitement and going to bed at night with satisfaction, anticipating tomorrow because you get to experience another day of the life you wanted. The day will present a healthy proportion of worthy struggling and good stress, but also joy and fun because all of these emotions will be derived from your pursuit of the story that you desire to live. At the end of the day, there is nothing more to want or need from anything or anyone because you have lived a full day.

Personal fulfillment is the every day pursuit and application of the principles we’ve explored. You can use these principles to identify and build a story of what a fulfilling like would look like for you, as an individual.

The Simple Antithesis of Personal Fulfillment

It will take some effort to identify what a fulfilling life would look like for you. It will take some experimentation, false starts, some time, and effort. However, there is no excuse to not start. What you can begin with is what you don’t want to do with your life; that is, to waste your time and attention.

Sustained, repeated, and predictable boredom is the antithesis of personal fulfillment. This can manifest itself in terms of careers, relationships, and what we do outside of these two. Why? Boredom that is predictable, is repeated, and persists with no foreseeable end wastes our time and attention, the combination of which is the only true currency in life that matters and can never be replenished once spent.

Sustained, repeated, and predictable boredom is the antithesis of personal fulfillment.

How to Pursue and Experience Personal Fulfillment

Personal fulfillment is to be pursued today and every single day thereafter. Personal fulfillment therefore, is a habit, skill, and deliberate practice. Do this for one day and you’d have a fulfilling day. Practice this 365 times and you would have lived a fulfilling year. Do this every year and you’d have lived a fulfilling life.

In Practice

Using the principles that we’ve covered, ask yourself the following questions to identify candidates for what fulfilling experiences you’d like to include in your life story:

• What is something that excites me?
• What is something that makes me anticipate tomorrow?
• What is something that makes me go to bed smiling and feeling complete?
• What is something that I lose track of time doing?
• What is something that is fun and brings me joy? Always ask yourself, am I having fun doing this?
• What is something that is worth my time and attention? Will I do this thing again?
• Who are the people that I would want to experience more satisfaction from life?
• Who are the people I would want to have dinner with each week? These could be people already in your life, or the type of people you would like to include in your life story.
• What is preventing me from expressing gratitude, kindness, and joy? Start eliminating the blockers.

The answers that filter out from these questions will serve as experiences to pursue and test, and not as definitive elements of your personally fulfilling life. The next step is to test just how well you’d actually enjoy these experiences, whether you would really derive deep satisfaction from them. As stated, personal fulfillment is a daily pursuit and practice aimed at refining how best to spend your time and attention in a way that rewards you with a deep sense of fulfillment at the end of the day and every day thereafter.

Originally authored by Peter Cheung and published on December 15th, 2017