Introduction
History is the long tumultuous chronicle of our collective attempts to answer the question: What is the good life? While libraries have been written on this subject, and many useful answers are available,1 there has yet to occur a mass outbreak of joy. Are you aware of any group of people living out their highest potential from the grandest ideal to their daily tasks? Are you aware of even one such person?
In place of fulfilled people, modern society consists of people violently thrashing between what they feel they must, but don’t want to do, and the distraction and entertainment they stuff into what time and money remains. Yet these synthetic substitutes fail to provide the meaning deeply yearned for and desperately needed in the modern world.
Joy comes from meaning, and a lack of joy comes from a lack of meaning. Deep meaning is possible for all people, as well as the overflowing joy it provides, but neither comes unintentionally.
The ambitious aim of this book is to enable you to articulate and live the most joyous life possible through learning and living the life plan. The life plan is a novel system for maximizing long-term joy through intentional living. It is a practical, easy-to-use, and easy-tounderstand means of injecting greater meaning into every corner of your life through designing, prioritizing, and living each day to best advance your purpose while aligning with ideal character qualities and values.
As you implement your own life plan, you will feel, do, and be better than you are now. You'll trace the interplay of articulating your purpose and living out your daily task list. You'll build out your repertoire of tactics to combat the obstacles of emotions, meaninglessness, and lack of clarity that plague the modern human.
You will drastically increase the quality and quantity of what you do each day while consistently strengthening your mental well-being.
While reading this book will not immediately give you overflowing joy, it will provide you with the inspiration and the tools to begin your path. As you practice the principles provided, you will find deeper and more continuous meaning in everything you do each day. You will have far less stress, anxiety, and uncertainty, even while becoming more ambitious and intense in your endeavors. You will find yourself with more of what you say you want in life, and you will have stronger reasons for knowing you are on the path to what still remains. You will find the path to joy on purpose, and sufficient reasons to walk in it.
Footnotes
- 1. In this book, you will notice an occasional reference to some of the books, authors, and speakers who have made valuable contributions to the field of improvement. Those familiar with the field will notice that this list is far from exhaustive, and even those mentioned are only referred to glancingly. Some will share my opinion that, prior to this book, a compilation of one book’s worth of the best said about the topic so far was not available. Some would prefer a listing of those contributions with full citations and retained wording from the original rather than a re-rendering seamlessly integrated into my own additions and innovations. The latter format was selected to make this work as accessible and appealing to the greatest number of people, most of whom would suffer from an academic style, where standards such as retaining the words used when the idea was first published, rather than integrating ideas into completely reformatted structure. Another factor in the formatting decision was the fact that I thought it less than honest to cite ideas I wrote here without having heard them from anyone else until after the fact, when pointed out by early readers giving feedback. In many cases, I felt the phrasing of the idea as found here fit better into the intent of the book and the expected background of the reader than the alternative as penned by another. ↩