The world is changing at a faster and faster pace. Social and cultural systems are all in a jumble. It may seem to you that the world is coming together and falling apart simultaneously, because it is. While you can find an abundance of prophecies and projections about what the future holds , the problem with predicting the future is that it changes as soon as you predict it. Every day brings new announcements about old systems in decay, exciting breakthroughs and scary surprises, and no one really knows what will happen next. This accelerating acceleration is intense for almost everyone.
Amidst so much uncertainty, this much is certain: If you don’t choose what you want in life, life will choose for you. To experience fulfillment in a mixed up world, you’ve got to make wise choices. In part one, ‘Choosing Fulfillment,’ we will explore the choices that form the basis of a meaningful life, and the essential skills for holding your focus and turning your hopes and dreams into reality.
Even after charting a course in life, there are plenty of ways to miss out on happiness. As a human being, you’re a creature of habit. Your habits can distract you, disrupt you, even destroy your best intentions. The force of habit can make you waste your precious resources on meaningless temptations and mindless traps that add nothing of value to the quality of your life. Yet habits can also serve and support you, remind you of who you are and where you’re going when everything around you appears to be moving in the opposite direction. All too often, low energy, or even worse, no energy, are the inhibitors of happiness and fulfillment that people use to justify their meager existence. Yet energy, too, is in great part the result of the force of habit, and you have more access to more than enough energy for full-on living. Since every choice you make eliminates other sets of choices entirely, it only makes sense to develop the habits that maximize your energy and enhance your quality of life. In the second part of the book, we will provide you with tools for getting the habits in place that can support and sustain you in living your life by design.
Life can be hard, and nobody gets out of here alive. When it comes to living wisely, you can’t just ‘duck and cover’. Regardless of your gender, age, income or intelligence, everyone faces challenges in the course of living. While you can anticipate and take action to prevent some of life’s difficulties, many are sudden by nature. An unexpected event, whether a fire, a flood or the illness of a loved one, can change your trajectory in a heartbeat. Ambivalent or ambitious, you can’t avoid the challenges of life, and how you choose to deal with them is entirely up to you. Your attitudes determine how you take of yourself when confronted by adversity, whether you get bogged down in negativity or rise above it, and the degree of your engagement or complacency when the going gets tough. In the third part of the book, you will learn attitudinal strategies for living your Life By Design when faced with life’s challenges.
No one is an island, and isolation is deadly to the human spirit. What is the benefit of a life by design when there’s no one to share it with? You need friendship and assistance to nourish you and bring your visions to life, and you need support to get you through the hard times. In the fourth part of the book, you will learn how to build a support system that sustains you in your determination to live a life by design.
Yet your need for others goes well beyond your personal relationships, because your connection to the world is greater than the number of people you know. The whole of humanity faces big challenges in the years ahead. When you see the faces of starving children against the broken lines of ravaged lands, you have to know that humanity could be doing better. To overcome human selfishness and stupidity is the prayer of every generation. That’s where you come in. The most potent force for change is, was, and will always be the same. Not you or me, us or them. The big picture reveals, as you will see, that it is you and me, we the people , upon whom the future depends. Yet we the people have failed to elevate our shared interests over our differences. Only by each of us defining and making such basic agreements can all of us gain a victory over the misery of history. With the idea of ‘making a meaningful difference,’ the last part of the book will make the connection between your choices as an individual and the way the world around you turns out.
This is a book of big ideas and blinding flashes of the obvious. We trust that it can have a tremendous impact on your quality of life. By the time you’ve finished reading this book, you will know beyond a shadow of a doubt that you can live a life worth living, a life that matters, a life by design.
(signed Rick and Rick)
