I was reviewing my notes from the physician finance conference I recently attended, and one of the interesting aspects is that my notes on finance were scant, while my notes on purposeful living were substantial.
This is yet another by-product of having cultivated financial literacy and developed an investor policy statement - once money is properly understood and given tasks that lead to financial independence, money goes from being the major source of anxiety to being so much background noise. Consequently, the important questions about living intentionally move to center stage.
One of the slides that got me thinking the most was a throwback to a course I'd reviewed ages ago - a Venn diagram adapted from (and credited to) Dike Drummond, a.k.a., the Happy MD, showing overlap between one's ideal life and one's actual life.
There was one significant difference between the slide I'd seen in the course and the slide I saw in this talk - and that was the level of specificity included in what was meant by an ideal life.
The reason the original slide had not resonated with me was because when I went and completed the exercise of filling in the diagrams, I had grand notions of what an ideal life would look like: meaning, purpose, community, connection.
My problem was I left those ideas as unformed (and therefore unattainable) concepts. To build an ideal life requires a more granular definition of what constitutes a life well-lived.
Taking my cue from the level of specificity I saw on that slide, I decided to try to define what measurable steps I could take toward living my ideal life.
In the hope of holding myself publicly accountable, here are the definitions I'll use to assess whether or not each preceding month in my life was an ideal month:
- In-person game night with the guys twice a month.
- Short "sneaker game" with one friend virtually, once a week.
- Date night 2-3x / month, twice with my wife alone +/- once with another couple
- Coffee and driving lessons with my son, weekly
- Coffee and a walk on the beach with my daughter, weekly
- Riding my bike 3x/week
- Late afternoon walk with one of the gamers monthly
- Bodyboarding in the Pacific at least 2x/mo
- Coffee with a friend 1-2x/mo
- Writing practice 1-2x/week (you are reading it now!)
- Attend all kid activities (theater and band performances)
- Visit mom monthly
- Creative practice in something I'm uncomfortable with (freehand drawing class?)
- Hike / pick up trash once per month with a friend who shares this interest
- Speak at a conference once a year
- Connect by phone with one distance friend or relative each week
- Lunch with a local friend who is retired and caring for an ill partner every other month
- 1-2 weekend trips to visit a friend a short flight away every year - I already have a high school friend in Portland who has agreed to host me for a weekend sometime in the next year. Another friend in Santa Rosa is in the cross-hairs.
This ties in with the talk from another keynote speaker at that conference. Vague and grandiose ideas of purpose cause anxiety. Concrete, attainable goals that contribute to more quotidian well-being often lead to greater personal satisfaction and contentedness.
Happiness and fulfillment lie in the small p purpose rather than the large P purpose.