A very clear picture of the undesirable future would be a life without meaning. The reason why people work hard to achieve their goals is to achieve values. The value of science is to find out the truth. The value of art is to demonstrate beauty. The value of moral is to show kindness and love. The value of political activities is to achieve social justice. Even in the pursuit of food, relationships, honour and power, these human demands are to achieve self-actualisation. According to Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, the highest level of needs would be self-actualization in our lives, which is driven by our values.
My values towards my life dominate my daily activities, and I would need to experience the values in everything, find the meaning in things that seems meaningless, find the positive values from negative things and achieve my life values. With this values system, I can try to achieve values in day to day activities, enrich my life and improve my character.
I would need to avoid living life with failure to pursue my goals, let my bad habits get out of control and ended up miserable, resentful and bitter. Instead, I would need to develop a variety of interest, work hard to achieve my ideal self. Enrich my life with many interesting contents and different hobbies. All these many activities would interact and connect in some sense to give a deeper sense of living. The more things I experienced, the better I can understand my life.
Living with a unique and enriched life, I would avoid jealousy of others life. I would continuous improve myself, forget about what I own physically, but expand on what I could achieve mentally. Never settle with my current state of soul, but keep my creativity and work hard towards stronger and better without taking a rest.
In my job, I would seek meaning and purpose in my work. I want to trace a line between my daily acts and the larger good: when I can make that connection, my work is animated. When I can’t make that connection, I feel burn out, slack off and eventually quit.
Staffs can be cynical about motivational speeches from their boss; they suspect that the supervisor is just trying to press more work out of them. Instead, a good leader can turn a bad situation into a great situation. There are words of the age-old wisdom that “Money follows management.” while the opposite is also true: “Money disappears when there is a mismanagement.” There is countless poor judgement in the senior leadership team, making work-life feels meaningless and demotivated with low morale. I need to aware that people may have the potential to lie, cheat and steal in a toxic environment, which I should avoid in the future.
I do not want to spend my whole life just work for money, which may decrease my chance of experience positive emotion, experience joy and curiosity as a consequence of pursuing valued goals. Having enough saving and passive income, I would have financial freedom and time to go down blind alleys and experiment. I can do a lot of experiments without it being very costly thus get a lot more innovation from a decentralised process. Even more rewarding is when small pilot projects directly fuel success.
I need to practice in my mind to respond to my anxiety productively. Other people may respond to my actions and speech poorly, but I need to maintain my passion even being underrated. Feel connected to the others who are with me. Imagine myself asking the right questions, exploring people needs and seeking to understand their interest. Hear the confidence in my voice and ease of my words. I would avoid a mentally unproductive response by using sarcasm, withdrawing in these tense situation. As a leader, I would bring positive energy to the workforce, impact my relationship with each other and the entire organization.
The virtual will never substitute for the real. Without actually doing, I can never fully test my passion for or competency at whatever my future may hold. I can’t only dream about what life will be like on the other side if I ever want to get there. Fear, quite simply, is the apprehension of the possibility of danger. To eliminate fear, I must fully understand possibility, that is what the odds are, and equally understand what the danger is and what the utility of overcoming that fear will be in our life.
An experience by doing allows me to visualise the future and predict where I will be in it and visualising and predicting the future that allows me to get there. Volunteering lets me test my competency. I should avoid doing nothing and being quiet while letting time and my life pass away.
Eventually one day I would die, I have no idea where I came from before I was born; I don’t know where would I go after I am dead either; the only thing I know is this moment I am having is unique in time horizon and I should avoid wasting this valuable time.
It would be a waste of time without fully utilizing my curiosity in trying new things and exploring innovative approaches and solutions. I would need to lead effectively through vision and ideas. I need to be decisive, yet always looking for a better answer and take time to think and explore alternatives. I am quality driven and motivated by achieving excellence while avoiding idealistic and perfectionistic. Never settling for just OK.
Creativity and innovation are what sparks my passion and I would seek to work with those who appreciate creative strategic thinking to bear on problems. I can see the big picture and quick to bring structure to a problem, provide inspirational strategic leadership combined with curiosity and inventiveness in solving organizational problems will be a good fit for my ideal future.
A future to avoid is not having a good fit environment to demonstrate my values, thus not able to contribute with the best version of me. Chronically feeling useless would let cynicism and anger dominate my life.
Originally published at http://victorleungtw.com on April 9, 2021.
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