22 Who Do You Think You Are?
view, shared by a lot of extraordinarily accomplished people, that what
we call meaning is a precious resource that lives within us that we can
choose to invest in life⎯or not. I’m with Shakespeare, “things are nei-
ther good nor bad but thinking makes them so.” This idea put into prac-
tice becomes an expression of personal accountability at the highest level.
We could re-phrase this to say, “nothing has meaning other than
the meaning we give it.” We do not live in the world; we live in our story
about the world. We are the source responsible for the meaning our story
has for us. If we change the meaning we change our life. That’s one of
the essential messages that we were giving to people in the EST Train-
ing and the Actualizations Workshop. Nothing has happened in the last
thirty-five years that leads me to see this differently. How we invest our
resource of meaning shapes our life and determines the quality of our
experience and whether we are successful.
I’ve observed that people who are committed to a cause bigger
than themselves, who are engaged in serving life rather than attempting
to manipulate life into serving them, have richer, more satisfying, more
enduringly successful lives. I don’t assign spiritual causality to this real-
ity. As a metaphor we could delve into the science of genetics and make
a pretty good argument that genes are organized to choose cooperation
over competition at any price because it’s in the best interests of the
gene’s ability to do what genes do, which is replicate. So, what we have
here is a kind of cooperative altruism at work in service of evolution.
Whether this is cosmic design or serendipity, I do not know. For me, if it
is serendipity, it is even more awe inspiring.
You have posed questions worthy of deep conversation that do
not lend themselves to trivial answers. Organizations need to have a pur-
pose, and I believe people need to become aware of what it is they are
deeply passionate about, what it is they love to do⎯and then get really
good at it. Our friends Janet and Chris Atwood have written a terrific
book titled The Passion Test. I recommend that you to take the Passion
Test for yourself. We noticed in Success Built To Last that successful
people are unwilling to settle in life for doing something that they are
not passionate about or don’t love to do. And they get really good at
doing what matters to them. Most people never learn how to become
really good at anything⎯let alone something they love and that matters
to them.
Enduringly successful people get really clear about what they
are willing to invest meaning in, what matters to them, what they love to
do, and then they develop a deliberate practice to get really good at it,