It is better to have a meaningful life and make a difference than to merely have a long life. --Bryant H. McGill |
Seven Paths to a Meaningful Life
--by Philip Zimbardo,
Seven Paths to a Meaningful Life
The following is adapted from a commencement address Philip G. Zimbardo delivered at the University of Puget Sound earlier this month. Dr. Zimbardo, a giant in the field of social psychology, is now a professor at Palo Alto University, a professor emeritus at Stanford University, and the president of the Heroic Imagination Project.
As I now complete my 55th year of teaching psychology, I am ever more grateful for the unique opportunity we teachers each have to learn from and share in the youthful exuberance of our students.
Teachers who inspire their students are everyday heroes, who should be more treasured by our society, as should parents and guardians like you here today who have sacrificed much for the well-being and success of your longtime students.
I wish for all of you graduates a happy life and one that contributes to the collective good. To help you on your way, I want to lay out seven paths to personal happiness and collective well-being based on insights from my research on evil, heroism, time, shyness, and the power of the social situation.
So, here are Dr. Z’s seven paths to a fulfilling life, both personally and communally.
1. Use time wisely and well.
Time is our most precious asset, never to be wasted, and always to be used mindfully by balancing its three energy sources: Being well-grounded in a positive past that links you to your family, identity and culture; being open to the power of the hedonic present that connects you to the energy flow of the moment; and also in being motivated to succeed to the full extent of your ability in your hope-filled future that in turn, enables you to soar to new destinations.
With that temporal balance comes a new flexibility in adapting to the many situational challenges you will face. Respect and learn from the past, yours and those of others. Selectively immerse yourself in a present-orientation that fosters human connection and compassion, while opening you to appreciate nature and art more fully. Use its pleasures as self-rewards for the hard-earned successes you have won, and will achieve by being future-focused.
Finally, although there is never enough time in our fast paced lives, we each must learn how to make timefor family
, make time for friends, and make time for personal fun.2. Love a lifetime of learning.
For several decades, you have been living a rather privileged life—one filled with the entitlement of being free from many societal obligations in order to think, to learn, to reason, to question, and to create. It is now time for you to more fully appreciate that gift by continuing to be a studious student for the rest of your life. As you do so, in Life 2.0, you will add on the commitment of making your community and your nation better in every way that you can.
For me, my continual joy in being a somewhat ever-older student means that I am always filled with curiosity and wonder, asking why, discovering how, challenging ignorance, and demanding evidence for all assertions by the “true believers.”
3. Nurture your passions.
In addition to making your usual, to-do list of tasks for the day, try making a second private list of what it is that you really want in life each day. Discover what you really feel passionate about and make that an essential focus and energy source in your life.
Doing so means that passionate endeavors will become a source of personal pride, which will help guarantee that your life will never be “meaningless” to you when you look back on it in the future, as too many economically successful business people have sadly reported.
4. Transform shyness into social engagement.
Practice becoming the socially engaging host at life’s parties instead of resigning yourself to be its perpetually reluctant shy guest.
Just as we all have a choice of being a leader or a follower, we each choose whether or not to adopt a shy persona, or a more outgoing one. Shyness is a self-imposed social restriction that limits others from having access to your inner strengths and virtues because you have created that social barrier. My metaphor for shyness is that it is a self-imposed psychological prison, in which one gives up freedom of association and freedom of speech—the most prized and hard-won freedoms of any democracy. But it is our own thinking and feeling that makes it so, not any natural law of nature.
One unexpected joy of graduation and moving on to new venues is that no one there yet knows that you are shy, so you can start all over and fool them into being excited to come to your parties, where you will dance with them, like in novelist Nikos Kazantakis’ wonderful Zorba the Greek.
5. Remake your image.
It is time to trade in your familiar, comfortable habits for personally challenging, novel adventures that canliberate you
from the boredom of predictability. From time to time, consider violating the expectations others have about what you are expected to do, or you have come to do routinely and mindlessly.Last, and for me most important, is path seven.
7. Train yourself to become an everyday hero.
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