Discoveries to Use on Your Journey
What about you? Do you see the nature of the highest goal for your life? As you contemplate this question, you may want to jot down a few thoughts. Make this a continuing process of understanding. As you read this book and bring its ideas into your life, you’ll get a better sense of your own quest and touchstone. Let your statement that you put into words earlier be the start of your commitment to live from the highest goal.
Know that this is a journey; only a few of us achieve the highest goal fully in our lifetime. Yet you can integrate the journey to the highest goal into your everyday life, bring out your best as you face challenges and bring harmony and energy into every moment.
Once you commit to living with the highest goal, certain steps will help you on your way. These steps are the discoveries I’ve made in the Stanford creativity work. If you practice any of these steps, you’ll be ahead of the game. Do them all and your life will be changed for the better forever.
1. Go beyond passion and success. Living for the highest goal is radically different from what is normally considered the highest: reaching success in external terms and having passion for what you do in life. Most of us “sub-optimize,” that is, we go for the short-term and transitory. Go beyond these lesser goals to use the gift of life you have been given.
2. Travel your own path. You can create your own path by simply paying attention to your own best performance—the critical incidents in your life—when you feel most your Self, in flow and in tune with the highest goal. Remember the experience of these times, apply what works to new situations and keep improving your path to the highest goal.
3. Live with the highest goal. Because everything in the world is a connected system, you can’t beat it, you can only join it. And the best way of joining it is to live with heuristics—generalizations or rules of thumb for learning and discovery. Without this practice of living with heuristics—such as Pay Attention, Ask Dumb Questions, See with Your Heart, or Be Ordinary, or other “live-withs”—the content of this book remains just that, content. Enliven your journey with live-withs.
4. Find true prosperity. The more you express and experience your highest qualities, the more you are filled with a rich feeling of self-worth, and the wealthier you will become in the truest sense. Find the prosperity that will sustain you through the ups and downs of life and keep increasing, even through difficulties.
5. Turn fears into breakthroughs. When you have the grounding of the highest goal, you can see your fears for what they are. Learn from them, and turn their energy into breakthroughs and opportunities of the most lasting kind.
6. Relate from your heart. I define “compassion” as seeing the highest in your Self first and then seeing the highest in others. If you have a full, rich feeling of self-worth, you have already taken the first step toward having compassion. See others from this perspective, and you begin to change the nature of your relationships for the better and make connections that move you toward the highest goal.
7. Experience synergy in every moment. You can achieve synergy—a much more dynamic state than balance—among the parts of your life by developing organizing structures based on your highest goal and by getting into the flow of intuitive decision-making.
8. Become a generative leader. Generative leaders pass along their experience of the highest goal and ignite creativity in others. Share the fruits of your quest for the highest goal with others, and spread its effect in a beneficial spiral.
The rest of this book is devoted to these steps. In a sense, once you know your highest goal and these eight discoveries, you know everything that is in this book. But unless you live with the highest goal and interact fully with these discoveries, you will have only knowledge. Use them, and you will go beyond knowledge to live with wisdom—the wisdom that comes from within you and beyond you and that sustains you in your life’s journey.