There is a different way of seeing the world—one that venerates the present moment rather than the ... [+]
Consultants, coaches and entrepreneurs can often lose their way in a career of attracting and serving high-paying clients. The world’s leading business coach wants those facing that dilemma to discover the steps to earning your path to fulfillment and living without regrets.
How can you accommodate a persistent need for achievement and the inescapable “stuff happens” unfairness of the world of serving clients? In his great new book, The Earned Life, world-renowned leadership coach Marshall Goldsmith offers a better way.
By grounding your achievements in a higher aspiration, you can avoid the easy temptation to wallow in regret. The key is to align with an overarching purpose.
Goldsmith is the New York Times bestselling author of many books, including What Got You Here Won’t Get You There, Mojo, and Triggers. In his coaching practice, Goldsmith has advised more than 200 leading CEOs and their management teams.
Taking inspiration from Buddhism, Goldsmith reveals that the key to living the earned life, unbound by regret, requires connecting to something greater than the isolated achievements of your career success.
“When Gautama Buddha said, ‘Every breath I take is a new me,’ he wasn’t speaking metaphorically,” writes Goldsmith. “He meant it literally. Buddha was teaching that life is a progression of discrete moments of constant reincarnation from a previous you to a present you.”
Goldsmith says adopting this mindset doesn’t mean you have to abandon your articles of spiritual faith or convert to Buddhism. “I’m only asking you to consider Buddha’s insight as a new paradigm for thinking about your relationship to the passage of time and living an earned life,” he states.
“A core pillar of Buddhism is impermanence—the notion that the emotions, thoughts, and material possessions we hold now do not last,” writes Goldsmith. “They can vanish in an instant—as brief as the time we need to take our next breath. We know this to be empirically true. Our discipline, motivation, our good humor—you name it—they do not last. They fall out of our grasp as suddenly as they appeared.”
Goldsmith says there is the Great Western Disease of “I’ll be happy when . . .”
“It is the pervasive mindset whereby we convince ourselves that we’ll be happy when we get that promotion, or drive a Tesla, or finish a slice of pizza, or attain any other badge of our short- or long-term desires,” states Goldsmith. “Of course, when the badge is finally in our hands, something comes along that compels us to discount the badge’s value and renew our striving for the next badge. And the next. We want to reach the next level in the organizational hierarchy. We want a Tesla with more range. We order another pizza slice to go. We are living in what Buddha called the realm of the ‘hungry ghost,’ always eating but never satisfied.”
Goldsmith says this is a frustrating way to live, which is why he is urging a different way of seeing the world—one that venerates the present moment rather than the moment before or after.
“We are living an earned life when the choices, risks, and effort we make in each moment align with an overarching purpose in our lives, regardless of the eventual outcome,” states Goldsmith.
According to Goldsmith, at one moment, through your choices and actions, you may experience pleasure, happiness, sadness, or fear. “But that specific emotion doesn’t linger,” says Goldsmith. “With each breath, it alters, eventually vanishing. It was experienced by a previous you.”
That means whatever you hope will happen in your next breath, day, or year will be experienced by a different you. The only version of you that matters is the present one.
