Why Me?

When I am working with out-of-state clients and they ask me how I like living in San Diego, I frequently say that every time I head home I feel like I am going on vacation. Not bad. But hell came to paradise this past week. The high winds literally created firestorms. Like rain blowing sideways in a hurricane, we had blowing rivers of flaming embers just overwhelm our community. 1800 homes were burned to the ground. My family was lucky. We lost nothing. But so many others, including some friends, lost nearly all of their possessions.

San Diego is one of those communities where the vast majority of the residents have chosen to live. Most of us love it so much we feel lucky and blessed. We feel we have a special lifestyle that gives us a happiness advantage in life. But tragedy is not confined to any geography (as the tsunami in Thailand reminds us). And tragedies always bring us the “Why me?” question. In many cases entire neighborhoods burned. In others only a few houses on a block were destroyed. So, “Why me?” This is one of the big human questions. It applies to all the things we value that “burn down” in our lives. The unexpected car crash, a serious illness, the death of a child, an unwanted divorce are all “why me” moments.

Most of us walk around under the illusion of control. We think if we’re careful and smart nothing bad will happen. Or we believe the Just-World Theory that if we are good….if we obey the rules and keep our conscience clean, then God or the universe will keep us safe from being smacked by troubles we don’t deserve. But it doesn’t work that way. Bad people, even some real stinkers, get rich, are healthy, and live long selfish lives. And everyday some of the kindest most faithful generous people are told they have cancer or that a drunk driver killed their child or that their house burnt down. It seems unfair. But that’s only because we think we should be able to control all the bad things from happening to us and the people we love. But obviously we can’t. And maybe that’s for a reason.

Having recently been through a decade of serious challenges and grief, I’ve come to believe that we live in the best possible world. If there could be less uncontrollable suffering, there would be. We don’t control nature or the random acts of others’ violence and irresponsibility. What we can control is thought and will. How we think about what happens and what we do about it.  This is our opportunity to become more than programmed lab rats.

Perhaps it’s not so much that everything happens for a reason, as if some mean-spirited god is teaching us a lesson like an abusive parent. But rather we can make whatever happens meaningful if we choose to. What if the point of life is not material comfort but spiritual wisdom? What if the only thing we take with us is our own character? What if what really matters is not the big things but the small things? What if after our physical life ends our inner being finds ourselves with others who are just like us? Who would we choose to become?

I have come to believe as writer Matthew Kelly has put it. Our universal purpose is to “become the best version of our self.” To me this means, express our highest talents, have the most joy, love as big as we can, sing our best song just to turn up the volume on the parts of ourselves we most respect. And times of undeserved tragedy are those times when we compose our best music. Nearly everything of value that I have learned first hand in life has come from failure, disappointment and even tragedy. And I have never been happier. Go figure.

6 comments.

On Fire

First, I must thank the many of you who personally emailed messages of support for my recent surgery and observations about the supreme importance of love. Yesterday I had about 75% of my stitches removed and everything looks very positive. Thank you all.

Second, I live in northern San Diego County, which has been on fire for days. Living through such a sudden, uncontrollable, catastrophe is a soul-searching experience. The skies were filled with very creepy, smoky ash. The filtered sunlight created an end-of-world atmosphere. People were amazing: calm, helpful and mostly smart. Anytime 500,000 people are evacuated the chance for chaos rises at the same speed as the 60-mile an hour wind gusts fanning the flames. But no chaos. And we had more volunteers and donated supplies than were actually needed.

Priorities. That’s what dominates your mind in a life-threatening emergency. When you’re asked to evacuate your home it brings great clarity as to what you value. As we gathered up the “stuff” we deemed most important in our garage, and we watched thousands of others do the same on television, I couldn’t help wonder how distant our “normal” priorities are from our “emergency” ones. People were loading up their SUVs in their driveways of $3-5 million homes and mansions with three primary things: people, pets, and pictures. Add to that vital papers and passports and that’s pretty much it. People said over and over everything else was just stuff. Didn’t really matter. And any stuff people were trying to save had personal meaning, heirlooms and such. The same was true for us. When we got everything we valued in the garage there just wasn’t very much. It’s a vivid lesson in real priorities.

So why do we choose to live so differently when our world isn’t on fire? We’ve created a hyper-consuming society that has made the accumulation of stuff we mostly don’t value our religion. We have elaborate shopping rituals and even perform daily human sacrifices. The humans we are sacrificing are ourselves. We sacrifice our time and energy working and commuting so we can buy stuff that in the end, we don’t have much value for. We sacrifice our family and friends and hobbies, that genuinely enrich us; meanwhile, we increase our pace on a speeding treadmill fueled mostly by trivial goals often forced on us by others. Just what are we working for? What are we really trying to accomplish?

When I stood in the garage looking at what I valued enough to save, I couldn’t help but wonder of all the time and money I’ve spent in my life, how much of it was spent creating the experiences and relationships that matter most. As I watched people drive away from their burning mansions, I couldn’t help but wonder about all the time and effort invested and lost. How ironic it is that soon we will be back hard at work, preoccupied to restoring all the things we ultimately have so little value for. All of us only have so much time and energy, how we spend it is our most important choice.

Will Marre
Founder, American Dream Project

7 comments.

What is Life?

Yesterday I had a pretty severe “Mohs” surgery on the left side of my face! Yes, it turns out that a lifetime of surfing comes with a downside. Having my face directly exposed to the sun for five decades is a lot like sticking your head in a microwave. When I started surfing in the 1960’s, there was no such thing as sun block. Coppertone was for sissies. So I was tattooed with non-malignant skin cancer on my left temple which if untreated would take over my face like a wine stain on a white linen napkin.

“Mohs” surgery is a lot like “mowing” the skin off your face. My doctor explained that the surgery would take place in several rounds. Each time 2 millimeters of skin is removed and examined in a lab. The face scraping continues until all the bad-boy cancer cells are removed. It’s a lot like taking a John Deere to your face.

The lab time between each “mowing” is 2 to 3 hours. The doctor said 3 to 4 rounds of surgery are common. So the actual surgeries are brief but the waiting in between time is eternal. They told me to pack a lunch. Since this was virtually an all day commitment, I showed up with a briefcase full of work to pass the time and boundless optimism that all of this would be nothing more than a flesh wound. I felt like Jack Bauer. No problem.

Round One went as expected. But 2 ½ hours later the lab results revealed that the cancer was much bigger under the skin than on the surface. What was going to be nickel-sized lawn on my ace turned into a silver-dollar size cancer estate complete with potential nerve damage and skin grafts and sagging eyebrow. My Clint Eastwood evaporated into Napoleon Dynamite.

Fortunately my wife was sitting next to me. I had insisted she not wait with me. I had my work you see. This was nothing I had told her. “I’ll call you when it’s over.” She knew better. When she senses things my logic doesn’t see, she doesn’t argue; she just does what she must. She doesn’t ask my permission. So she waited with me. When I came out of the surgery room with a big pressure bandage on my head after learning of the global nature of the gang of terrorist cancer cells, she gave me her “love look” and closed her eyes and took my hand. I could feel her prayers. I could fill her grace. And finally, I could feel her confidence. We went outside and went for a walk. In her powerful, quiet way, she reassured me. I am lucky to have a wife whose fierce loyalty is irrational. If my face sagged like a bag of sand and I became clinically depressed, she would be at my side. Not out of duty or guilt, but out of grade-A, 100% pure love. She is my constant compassionate cheerleader.

You know today there are a growing number of fundamentalist scientists and angry atheists who insist human beings are noting more than bodies. That what we call love is simply brain chemistry. But on days like yesterday, it seems like an atheist is a person whose eyes are tightly closed sitting on the beach at dusk. He insists there is no beautiful sunset because he can’t see it. Real love is beyond the feeling of love. It is life. In moments like yesterday, it is the reason for everything.

Oh yes, the second round of “mowing” cut out all those pesky, perverted cells. I was clear! I got 30 stitches and no nerve damage. That’s of course great, but not the point. I am old enough to know that a loving wife and heart-felt prayers don’t always result in getting what we want. My dad died of cancer in spite of my mother’s constant prayers and loving attention and in spite of my younger brother’s heroic help. What is the point is there is something more to real love than our material selves. In life’s most testing moments we experience life in a way that confirms we are human because of our spirit not because of our body. Perhaps that is the reason we have such moments. Love. Without it there is no happiness. With it there is no emptiness.

12 comments.

World Peace Requires Virtuous Commerce

World Peace Requires Virtuous Commerce

There is a new game going on called Totalitarian Capitalism. Huge economies such as China and Russia are proving that consumer capitalism can drive economic growth without political freedom. They’re also proving that technology can easily be used to control information rather than broadcast it. This should be more than a little concerning. Remember, we thought we won the Cold War because the weak Russian economy, but Russia has become the oil and energy supplier to Europe. Now Russia is getting richer by the day, and they’re dusting off the buttons on their nukes. China is one of the most repressive police states in the world, yet it’s an economic miracle. A miracle with a 100,000,000-man army, inter continental ballistic missiles, and an appetite for Taiwan.

In a world where critical economic resources such as oil, water, and minerals are increasingly scarce, the imagined benefits of competition are simply too tempting to pursue the opportunities of collaboration.

Peace will come when leaders recognize the benefits of peace outweigh the potential benefits of war. Those benefits must cover the whole spectrum of human motivations, spiritual as well as material. This requires visionary world leaders and an international business community who see the ultimate threat not as bad financial quarter, but rather human extinction or world wide dark age of unprecedented suffering.

I know this sounds like idealist mush, but, as the McKinsey survey reflects, it’s not. We are on the verge of a whole new level of technological breakthroughs that will enable us to create everything we need from atoms and molecules instead of iron, ore, precious metals, and oil. We are on the verge of solving the problem of sustainable clean energy. We are on the verge of solving the riddles of disease. We are on the verge of creating sustainable abundance based on the economics of ideas rather than the economics of things. But being on the verge doesn’t mean now. But in real time these advances will take 50 years to come into widespread use. In the mean time we must find the will not to destroy each other and reduce the world to barbarism before we can save it.

So what is required? We must demand that our political and business leaders have a worthy vision of a new future and have practical plans to get us there. So far all I see are little ideas, politically inspired mush, and too little bold investments in world saving technologies.

But we, you and I, can do a lot. We must take stock of whom we work for. Is your employer or are you adding unique value to the world? Would anything of tangible value be lost if your employer went out of business or you quit doing your job? Human energy, brains, and talent are terrible things to waste. We’ve all been given an advantaged life. Why not use it to create the most value you can?

Don’t be reckless. Be wise. Spend enough time in daily self-reflection to get a sense of inner direction. Then take the common sense, one step at a time approach to changing your impact and elevating your influence. You will attract allies. You will see opportunities. As the door unlocks, open it wide. Speak up. Act. In your next business meeting, ask the big questions others aren’t. We can’t do everything, but what can we do? Our children are depending on our courage.

Will Marre
Founder, American Dream Project

4 comments.

Be Happy in Your Career

As thousands of people answered the questions of your Dream Life Assessment on our American Dream Project website, one thing became crystal clear. One of the greatest causes of internal stress is poor career choices we feel stuck with.

While we spend more time at our jobs than ever before, we are also least satisfied in this arena of their lives. Whereas one’s career should be our evolving means of self-expression, or better yet, soul expression, Americans are finding their careers often empty of meaning, satisfaction, and value.

Of the 10,000+ people who answered the survey, nearly 75% feel unsuited for their career and find their work to be void of value, joy, and meaning. It’s no wonder we live in a society of growing discontent when 75% of us are not working in jobs we find fulfilling.

So today when we live in a world where people are working more and more hours, under more and more stress trying to keep up in the rat race of consumer America trying to make ends meet over an ever widening financial hole, are these results any surprise at all? It’s no wonder people are filling their lives accumulating more stuff along with more debt and tuning out of their lives through mindless entertainment.

But life does not have to be this way. We can choose to have our lives be different, to stand for something that matters, to leave a lasting legacy. We are free to express our design and pursue our desires. We have permission to pursue our destiny. That’s the core idea of the American Dream. That’s what our career should be about. When our career is an expression of who we truly are and gives us the opportunity to show our traits and talents in a unique way, happiness is automatic. Sure the challenges are still there, but the background music is upbeat and even joyful.

Unfortunately, many of us seem to achieve high levels of performance doing things we don’t really value or enjoy. This is called the Competence Trap. We make a decision early in life to pursue a career that we can do – it matches our talents to a fair degree – but for which we have no heart. Thus, many of us at middle age find ourselves living with a twenty-year-old decision that no longer fits us, if it ever did. We’re competent but unfulfilled. Unfortunately, many of us build our financial lives around our competence instead of our authentic Design. We feel stuck. We think we can’t do what we are designed to do because we can’t afford to. Our lifestyle costs too much. So many of us spend 2-3 hours a day commuting to jobs we don’t value to pay for homes we only sleep in. And we think this is normal. But persisting in the grind comes at a very heavy price.

In the long term, human beings just do not invest in pursuits they do not find: 1) meaningful and 2) pleasurable. So we don’t consistently excel. To feel consistently fulfilled we must love and respect what we are doing. Our days are spent doing what we both value and enjoy.

Life is too short to live with anxiety constantly simmering. We must commit to really enjoy life as we live. Enjoyment doesn’t mean constant ease and pleasure. Worthwhile sacrifice is supremely enjoyable. And true life-joy shows up when we pursue our authentic dreams using our most natural talents to contribute to a better future.

Every time I give a speech I end with the challenge that Your Dream Matters! When you pursue your real dream, the career, relationships, and lifestyle that feed your soul, we all benefit. When you don’t, we are all diminished.

We all need each other’s dreams.

Will Marre
Founder, American Dream Project

5 comments.