Ask yourself these two questions:
- What does success look like to me?
- Does the path I’m on lead to success (as I’ve defined it)?
Your answer to the first question will initially be nothing more than a highlight reel of messages you absorbed from parents, family, friends, church, educational institution, political party, culture, etc. Avoid judging them as good or bad. Just pay close attention to the answers. When you do, you’ll start to realize “hey, wait a minute….” On closer inspection, many of those ideas don’t actually make sense. You have begun the process of tuning in to what actually matters to you.
The second question is about alignment. Your time and energy are going to something. You better make sure they’re contributing to success as you have defined it. Ambitious people tend to put a lot of emphasis on this. But without having brought much awareness to the first question, we end up arriving somewhere that feels largely meaningless. The journey we took to get there seems similarly hollow.
An analogy that comes to mind is when you drive home from work and automatically make all the turns along the way without thinking. You pull into the driveway but you don’t remember the specific drive to get there. You were operating with a low level of awareness. How many of us tend to live more or less the same way?
Get clear on what you actually value, then bring your life into alignment with it. That’s how you lead a meaningful life.