In 2018, the Pew Research Center asked Americans what gives them meaning in life. Only
7 percent said helping other people. Only 11 percent said that learning was a source of
meaning in their life.
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Work gives us the means to create the physical safety upon which our lives depend. Work feeds and shelters us and those we love. Work can give us meaning. But work can also be a means of our suffering. By understanding what’s truly happening all around us, the ways our core belief systems influence our everyday experience, we can extract meaning from the suffering, coax the lotus from the mud, as the Buddhists teach. But this will happen only if we use those challenges that the calls to leadership make on us, not only to grow up but also help us discover our why.
The questions she asks are intended to steer people toward the positive: Isn’t it time you forgave yourself for that? When you and your parents are close again, what will you want them to understand about this time in your life? Early in her career, she tried to understand people by asking how others treated or mistreated them. As she matured, she found it
more useful to ask, How do you treat others? How do you make them feel?
And watch what happens to you. The more deeply you understand other people, the more you will appreciate them, the more reverent you will feel about them. To touch the soul of another human being is to walk on holy ground.
We are pointing here to a truth that is difficult to put into words; like love, attention is a gift that flows both ways. When we give our attention, we are giving life, but we are also feeling more alive in the process.
As I worked on this book, I puzzled where core values fit into the research findings. To be clear, there is no single unified set of core values across all the people in this study. That said, each person developed a set of values somewhere along the way, some more explicitly than others. These values might have come from family, or mentors, or teachers, or military service, or the ethics of their field, or the social milieu in which they lived, or their faith traditions, or reading and reflection, or personal experience, or some combination. I came to see that living to a set of core values is a choice, a personal responsibility of the highest order.