Reinventing Yourself: From Chasing Happiness to Creating a Meaningful Life

My journey from corporate success to federal prison, losing everything, and reinventing my life has led to much introspection and reflection.

Part of that reflection is looking back at my life and seeing clear stages and my role within those stages.

I identified 3, and I believe we all, in our own way, experience them.

Stage 1:

Childhood Creator:

We live in our imaginations, and they run wild.

Everything is possible, our imaginations defy conventions (because we don’t know what that even means), and they can even defy the laws of physics (because we don’t know it exists).

No one’s told us that’s not how things work, so we can create whatever we want.

We accept ourselves unconditionally, live from within, and are as free as we ever will be.

Stage 2:

Adult Chasing.

We chase the things we’ve been conditioned to chase and believe will make us happy.

This can be, but is not limited to:

Jobs, money, status, power, materialism, and pleasure.

Everything we chase is external, and we chase for 2 reasons:

1. How we believe we’ll feel when we achieve/acquire the object of our desire.

2. How others will perceive us because we’ve achieved/acquired the object of our desire.

We chase externals because we’re chasing happiness and acceptance, and by doing so, we run from our true selves and decimate our self-image.

When we chase externals, we’re confined to complacency and what we believe will make us happy and accepted; anything outside of that is terrifying.

Our lives are limited by the boundaries of our beliefs.

Stage 3:

Adult Creator:

A rarified stage experienced by very few.

We connect deeply with ourselves and begin the journey of becoming who we want to be and creating the lives we desire.

We cultivate what we have been chasing all those years, a sense of mission and meaning.

We experience the overwhelmingly beautiful fulfillment of knowing our unique skills and talents are utilized to their full potential toward a meaningful craft that serves something more significant than ourselves.

We cultivate the peace and freedom born when we embody who we are and share it freely with the world.

We may never reach the unadulterated freedom of childhood, but we come damn close.

If we want that peace and freedom, we must reinvent ourselves from a chaser of happiness and acceptance into a creator of mission and meaning.

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