Is Your Pursuit of Success Hindering Your Flourishing?
What does it mean to live an excellent life? While many equate excellence with achievements and productivity, this episode challenges these conventional notions of success. Through personal reflection and insight, we explore a transformative perspective on excellence that goes beyond the superficial metrics celebrated in today's society. Many individuals, despite adhering to societal prescriptions for success, find themselves in a state of dissatisfaction, which prompts a critical examination of what it truly means to flourish. Throughout this episode, I will share three pivotal insights that have reshaped my understanding of excellence, emphasizing the importance of embracing life's unpredictability, cherishing the journey, and cultivating a foundation of virtue. Join me as we embark on this enlightening exploration, seeking not only to redefine excellence but also to foster a more authentic and fulfilling existence.
Craig Van Slyke's exploration into the essence of an excellent life reveals a critical reassessment of contemporary values surrounding success and fulfillment. Through his own experience of feeling overwhelmed by academic productivity metrics, he illustrates how easy it is to fall into the trap of equating self-worth with external validations. Through personal anecdotes and reflective insights, he emphasizes the necessity of stepping back from a life dictated by rigid goals and societal pressures. He proposes that living excellently involves nurturing one's character and virtues—qualities such as kindness, justice, and wisdom—which form the bedrock of genuine fulfillment. This episode encourages listeners to engage in self-reflection and to redefine their pursuits, emphasizing that the journey towards excellence lies in appreciating the richness of life experiences rather than solely in tangible achievements.
Takeaways:
- Living an excellent life requires us to redefine our understanding of success beyond mere productivity.
- Excellence is not a planned event but rather an emergent quality that develops over time.
- The act of experiencing life fully enriches our existence and contributes to true excellence.
- A foundation of virtue is essential for leading an excellent life, guiding our actions and decisions.
- Regular reflection on what excellence means to us personally is crucial for authentic growth.
- True excellence emerges when we prioritize being excellent individuals rather than merely achieving external success.
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What does it mean to live an excellent life? If you're like most people, you might think it's about achieving more, doing more, being more productive.I used to think that too, but today I'm going to challenge that notion of excellence and share a perspective that transformed how I think about living well.If you've been feeling unsettled and dissatisfied despite doing all the right things, today's episode might help you understand why and show you a different path forward.
CraigWelcome to Live well and Flourish, where I help you understand what it means to live a flourishing life. I'm your host, Craig Van Slyke. If you're ready to think beyond material.
CraigAnd external success, if you're ready to.
CraigTake control of who you are and the kind of life you live, if you're ready to flourish, this is the podcast for you.
CraigWe seem to live in a grind culture based on productivity and external measures of success. This may or may not be a good way to get rich, but it's a terrible way to live. And it is certainly not a recipe for an excellent life.I've been thinking a lot about this lately. Just recently, I joked with my wife, Tracy, that I needed to go back to being a dean so I wouldn't have to work so much.To those of you who might not be familiar, the life of an academic dean is incredibly busy and stressful, especially when compared to the life of a tenured full professor, which is the highest rank a professor can have. It occurred to me that I may have become too focused on external measures of success.For an academic, that's often numbers of journal articles and articles in top journals. Frankly, I produce much more than what's required of me or even of what's expected of me.This focus on externals is causing me a fair amount of stress and fatigue. I'm in a constant state of tired. Sometimes I even feel guilty taking time out of my day to play with the pups. That is not a good thing.So it was time for reflection. I'd lost my way a bit on my path towards flourishing. There were a few outcomes from my reflections.First, I realized that I needed to make some changes to create more space to enjoy life. I'll talk more about that over the next few weeks. But something more fundamental struck me.So many of us try to plan out our lives, seeking a perfect recipe for living an excellent, flourishing life. My epiphany is that such a recipe just doesn't exist other than as a recipe for disappointment. I started thinking more about this.If there isn't a recipe for excellence. How can people live excellent flourishing lives?Through this period of reflection, I've discovered some fundamental truths about excellence that might help you on your own journey. Here are three key insights that have changed how I think about living an excellent life. An excellent life is emergent, not a planned event.Goals, interim goals, strategic life plans, time blocking. All of these may have their place, but they're all focused on external aspects of life and on external measures of excellence.That's not the real path to excellence. These external measures and plans may be necessary in modern life, but they're not going to guide you to a truly excellent life.Think of your life as a garden, not a blueprint. You can cultivate it, nourish it, but the precise beauty that emerges can't always be predicted.And that unpredictability is exactly what makes life so rich. An excellent life is not engineered.One of the things my reflection revealed is that I'm not taking enough time or giving enough attention to enjoying the journey. This is a bit ironic since I've written about this before and I know better, quoting James Taylor. The secret to life is enjoying the passage of time.As I've found out, it's easy to get caught up in the trees and not enjoy the forest or something like that. The point is that an excellent life is enriched by the act of experiencing and appreciating every aspect of life.Experience life, don't just grind through it. An excellent life is built on a foundation of virtue. I cannot overstress how critical this is. Work on being the kind of person you want to be.What virtues make someone a good person? Courage, kindness, wisdom, justice, Temperance is different for you than it is for me.Philosophy and religion can guide your thinking here, but everyone has to determine what it means to be an excellent person for themselves, including you. This is the sort of planning you should do. What is your plan for being an excellent human who lives an excellent life?So I challenge you right after this episode. Take 5 minutes to reflect on your own definition of excellence. Are you pursuing external measures of success at the expense of genuine excellence?Are you over engineering your life rather than letting your life of excellence emerge? Do you know what kind of person you want to be and what virtues you want to guide your life?These are deep questions that require considerable reflection. They're not easy, but they're questions that are critical to understanding how you can live an excellent life.Remember, true excellence isn't something you achieve. It's something that emerges when you focus on being excellent and experiencing life fully. Until next time, stay Excellent, my friends.
