How to Find Meaning and Live Your Best Life

“Hi, I’m Paul Krismer. I’m your happiness expert and this video is about meaning. The meaning we want in our lives, and we, we all want it. Like, we have those existential questions like, ‘What’s the meaning of my life?’ ‘What’s my purpose?’ And sometimes we’re just holding on to hope that our life has some meaning.”

“Well, let’s start with this kind of depressing, but profound quote from Nietzsche. He said, ‘To live is to suffer, to survive is to find some meaning in the suffering.’ Let’s face it, we all suffer, and we all want to avoid suffering. But the human condition is that we’re going to suffer from time to time. The whole goal that we have to have is to get some practical, meaningful benefit from our suffering.”

“While I teach a lot of techniques that are designed to enhance happiness, and they’re well supported by science, we can’t really control our feelings, you know, not totally. We can’t simply say, ‘Oh, I’m going to turn on happiness.’ But we can control something about getting meaning in our lives. And when we seize control of that, there’s huge benefits from meaning. The science would show that people become, you know, less negative. They become more optimistic. They have more life satisfaction. They’re more grateful for the things that are happening in their lives. And not surprisingly, the bottom line is, people are happier. So if you want to have meaning and its benefits, stay tuned. This video is for you.”

“Subscribe now to get a weekly insight into your own personal and professional happiness. As a coach, public speaker, and best-selling author, I teach topics just like this one all around the world. So stay tuned, and I’ll give you practical tools that you can use to make both yourself and those around you both happier and more successful.”

“So if you’re hoping for more meaning in your life, you’re setting yourself up to be disappointed, because hope alone is wishful thinking. We have to claim meaning. We have to demand it from life. We have to manufacture it ourselves. We have to do something, many somethings, in order to get meaning, right? And when we take that control over our lives and say, ‘I am going to design a life with some meaning,’ not shockingly, we get more meaning. It’s about the activities from moment to moment to moment, the way we arrange our activities on a day-to-day basis. It’s in those activities, it’s in that way of living, that we find meaning.”

“As a passive observer of life, I want there to be, like, as though from heaven, some meaning to come raining down upon me so that I can understand my purpose on this earth. Well, you’re not going to get it. You have to manufacture it. And I’ve got a few tips for you.”

“First of all, understand your values. When you really know what’s important to you, what your highest priority pursuits are in life, well, then you can go ahead and construct your day-to-day life so that you’re working in those areas of furthering your values. Now, a lot of people don’t know their values. We are socially conditioned to have some values that are just so prevalent in our lives: materialism, all kinds of hedonistic desires, and kind of in unthoughtful ways, we live a little bit of that, me included. But when we really consider deeply what our values are, we usually find that they don’t include those things that are the broad social conditioning values.”

“And I am going to direct you to a link on one of my websites that’s a very profound exercise to determine your own values. It’s free. There’s no catches. Go in there, do the work. It’s maybe a 20-minute for some of you, it might be a longer exercise, but it’s an exercise that will literally let you determine your top five values in their priority order. And once you know this, meaning becomes easy to attain because you know what it is that you need to fit into your life.”

“So for example, if you find that your top value is family, and you’re not reaching out to any family member today, or tomorrow, or the day after, you’re probably going to find that you’re short of meaning in your life. Whereas once you really clearly identify, ‘Oh, family is a hugely important value of mine,’ then I can find a way to daily work into some contact, some service to my connection to family. Similarly, if health is your top value, and you know it, you know precisely that it is one of your very top values, then you will find a way to create activities moment to moment, somewhere in your day, where you’re prioritizing your health, whether it’s eating well, getting exercise, whatever it is.”

“Similarly for work, and for a lot of people these days, millennials in particular, we are struggling to find meaning in our work. And that might mean we’re in a carefully constructed job search way, you need to go get different work. But it also might be just a reflection on how it is that I want to achieve meaning in my life, and then finding ways within our work to get more meaning. It’s not easy, but it’s doable.”

“So it’s a matter of planning every single day, some actions, some concrete behaviors that further our values. And when we do that, we get mean. I want to end this video with a different quote from Victor Frankl who’s a profound scholar when it comes to meaning in life. And he says this, ‘For the meaning of life differs from man to man, from day to day, and from hour to hour. What matters, therefore, is not the meaning of life in general, but rather the specific meaning of a person’s life at a given moment in time.’ And with that, I’m your happiness expert. We’ll see you next week.”

“Click the like button if you like this kind of content. Share it with your family and friends, and we will see you next week, Sunday morning. Thanks so much for watching. Bye for now.”