If You Want Something You’ve Never Had, You Have To Do Something You’ve Never Done

I recently was listening to one of my leaders speak on one of his audios. He brought up Albert Einstein’s definition of Insanity. It is stated as this, “Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.”  Yet, the majority of the population live our daily lives in this mindset controlled my the media. Growing up, we go to school, being educating to think a certain way, to go to college, to get a job, to work 40 hours a week, for 40 years, to retire on 40 percent of what we were barely surviving on in the first place.

Yet, decade after decade, the masses of people still follow this pattern even though it has less than a 2% success rate. Why?

I personally believe that people don’t know that they had another choice and feel that the world told them it was their purpose.

If you never have that feeling that something is missing, or that there is something more that you want in life, then either you do know, you are too busy to stop long enough to experience it, or you are too young to care just yet. If so, feel free to stop reading. What follows is for everyone else.

I believe that the craving I’m describing is a desire we all have for meaning or purpose. I believe the greatest driving force of mankind is to find a purpose in life.  If someone can’t find a purpose, they will blindly follow anything or anyone just to have that feeling to belong. You see this happen everywhere. Because people know that their is more to life than this rat race, they try to find it somewhere else. Yet, no matter what they find, a relationship, drugs, material possessions, it doesn’t fill the hole for long.

Somehow I think we, at least those of us who think about such things, recognize that most of what we do to satisfy the craving does’t work. Sooner or later we run out of “things” to do or get, and we are still left with the question. I think the quote in the title of this article strikes a chord because we recognize that, in order to find the answers to our questions about meaning, we need to do something really new.

Consider this: the reason that you are still looking for meaning is that you aren’t living your life the way you think you should or, more precisely, the way you want to live it.  Perhaps you keep trying to satisfy yourself with substitutes because you are not living in a way that fits your most heartfelt values. I’m not saying it’s so – I’m just asking you to consider whether there is any truth in it for you.

As an experiment, ask yourself the following series of questions. Don’t rush, and don’t answer more than one question at a sitting. Better yet, take a day or two with each question before you move on.

• If nothing were forcing me to continue, what would I stop doing?
• If nothing were stopping me, what would I do more?
• If money were not an object, what would I do for work? If I chose not to work, what would I do instead?
• If there were nothing in my way, with whom would I spend more time, and with whom would I spend less?
• If I could design my perfect day, how would it differ from my typical day? What would it take to make every day more like my perfect day?

The purpose of this isn’t to suggest that, in order to be fulfilled, you should do whatever you please and consequences be damned, nor that every day has to be perfectly what you want it to be in order to be happy. The point is to ask yourself whether you are holding yourself back from a more meaningful life out of the illusion that you are doing what you “must.” The point is to ask yourself just how fulfilled you could be if you lived according to what you value the most.

When you ask yourself these questions, what do you learn? Will you share?

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