The what and the how of our lives are more easily identified, but the why of living the way we are is where the power comes from. My why is to become the very best version of myself I can, to fully actualize the person I was meant to be. Like many of us, the motivating energy behind this comes from my younger years. Grade school, high school, and even the first couple of years of college were tough. I was small for my age and was endlessly bullied. My standardized test scores, which I have framed to remind myself, were high. But my teachers treated me as a not-too-bright kid who just wasn’t wired the same way as the other kids. My parents, rather than seeing that I could do a lot of things the others couldn’t, tried to dumb me down to be like the other kids. Anyone that stood out made them nervous — it was a small town, and individualism was not really the thing. Thus, my why has always been about self-improvement — anything less would be self-disappointing. This is what gets me to the gym, to be as healthy as I can, to learn new things, and to keep making AGEIST the very best publication of its kind showing people what is possible.
From the research we have done here, we have seen that the what and the how will only get you so far; it is the why that will take you the distance. We need to uncover the why, which may not have been important in younger years but gets increasingly so with time. Remember Peggy Lee’s “Is That All There Is?” We don’t want to be there in the later decades of life. One way to discover your why is to look back at how we were as kids — what is the red thread leading us from there to today? Once we grow up, we are often convinced we are doing something for our career or family or maybe some reactive force in our lives — that there is no underlying why. This is especially difficult to sort through until one has enough life experience to step back and examine how that 5-year-old’s ambitions intersect with our lives today.
There is no shame in being who we are with all our own motivations. Ambition, contrary to what I was taught, is a very good thing. It can be the ambition to help as many people as we can, it can be growing the best garden possible, it can be having an all-around amazing family life, it can be trying to be as healthy or learned as possible, and it doesn’t need to be Elon-style megalomania. This is something it has taken me decades to grasp. Once we get clear on our why, which is not easy as it will be hidden and disguised under layers and layers of “shoulds”, we need to run with it and put it into action. Seize the day, as they say; get moving in alignment with your why. It is up to all of us to own the person we were meant to be. This is what I want for all of us.
Onward and upward,
David
