What Is It That Matters Most?

“It’s not what you do, but how much love you put into it that matters.” ~Mother Teresa.

One very interesting research study I came across a few years ago was done with very senior citizens who were all over 95-years of age. What interested me most were the top regrets these people had with their long lives. At the top of everyone’s regret list was not contemplating life enough. I chuckled inwardly because I may be on the other side of this equation, sometimes wondering if I spend too much time thinking about ‘silly’ philosophical questions I never seem to be able to answer adequately.

Ironically, I just published a 500-page book titled, “Do What Matters Most,” in an attempt to summarize my own and others’ experiences and reflections on what matters most in life. Sure my ten tough life tests and common sense solutions offer some valuable clues about doing the most important things to be successful in life; but I still didn’t simplify it all enough to uncover the heart of the matter—the essence that remains beyond all the inept verbal descriptions. That’s what I’ll try to do here.

We talk and write about ‘success’ a lot these days. The trouble with talking about ‘success’ intelligently is that ‘success’ is a very complicated concept and process. It is like thinking that the letters T.V. really tell you anything about all the things that are involved in a television set, too long to list here. Now hang in there with this next obnoxiously long but necessary sentence.

Success involves doing many things—like dreaming and imagining; finding a purpose; setting goals, developing skills and making the effort to carry out this purpose; mustering enough determination, cleverness and tenacity to avoid quitting, obstacles and failure; keeping your goals in intense focus; being sensitive to good timing, etc., which together result in a litany of feelings and outcomes—including things like genuine happiness, peace of mind, contentment, goal achievement and accomplishment, power, wealth, influence, sense of making a difference, professional recognition, and even a legacy.

In the quest to find out what it is that really matters most, focusing so much on success can miss the point. Everything starts with a purpose and when you can find a basic purpose that doesn’t have another ulterior or side purpose, you are looking at essence—what really matters most. Personally I think we all have a common purpose and the lives we choose to live in finding that purpose is what makes us different and unique. It also explains why there are failures and successes, even in the same person.

Success requires uncovering our basic purpose by understanding it backwards and living it forwards, at the same time. Obviously this is not an easy process. Ha, that’s an understatement! The challenge is to discover what matters most, by trial and error and experiencing which choices lead to failure and which ones result in success. What matters most in this experience is to learn the choices that bring about failure and practicing them less and knowing the ones that lead to success and practicing them more, as measured by the good character you build, especially in confronting adversity, along the way.

I have always been interested in trying to figure out how determinism and free will work together to both be true (I am driven to reconcile the many opposites my dualistic mind won’t quit coming up with). Since I have directly experienced the truth of both these things in my life, I have a difficult time dismissing either as not being a fact of life, just like the parallel material and spiritual worlds.

What I have recently uncovered is that maybe it is the “wrong” choices we make that lead to the failures we can accept as being pre-determined by the mechanical laws of the universe (you jump off a cliff and die from the fall); whereas when we discover the value of using our free will to make right choices, we are moving towards the realm of genuine success and real abundance of all the good things such success brings. In that sense, using our free will to make right choices is success.

What are the important right choices to make with our free will? Here is my list that works for me and also seems to be working for many others:

• To learn, grow and improve into my best physical, mental, emotional, social, vocational and spiritual self.

• To practice virtues such as patience, generosity, understanding, forgiveness, compassion, adaptability, creativity and unconditional love.

• To serve others and help them to achieve more success and the abundance it brings.