Three Minute Leadership- You Bring Meaning to Life

To: The Great Leaders Who Have a Passion for Continuous Learning

In his 1980 commencement address, “The Wilderness of Your Intuition”, at Connecticut College Alan Alda, American actor, director and screen writer, spoke of his college days and the existential philosophy that was popular at the time. He summarized it in these words: “Life is absurd and meaningless and full of nothingness.” Admitting that this may not seem positive, he said that “it’s one of the most helpful and cheerful ideas I’ve ever heard” and shared a story of his experience.

“I had a teacher in those days who saw me with a book by Jean Paul Sartre under my arm and he said to me, ‘Be careful, if you read too much of that you’ll start walking around dressed in black, looking wan, doing nothing for the rest of your life.’ Well, I read the book anyway and as it turned out, I’m tanned and lovely, I’m rich and productive and I’m happy like nobody’s business.

“Maybe it was my natural optimism at work, but what I saw and warmed to in the existentialist writings was that life is meaningless unless you bring meaning to it; that it is up to us to create our own existence. Unless you do something, unless you make something it’s as though you aren’t there.”

What powerful words that push us to action: “Life is meaningless unless you bring meaning to it.” You are in control of your existence. You give it shape and meaning in your choices, in the discovery of the gifts within you, in your daily stretching and challenging the limitations of assumed realities, convinced that you will achieve whatever you commit yourself to accomplish. Robert Byrne, poet, wrote: “The purpose of life is a life of purpose.” Fill your life and the lives of those whom you touch with passion and purpose. Find meaning in the great and the small, in everything however innocent that comes your way. There are gifts to be found in them. Remember the words of Alfred North Whitehead, British mathematician and philosopher: “Our minds are finite, and yet even in these circumstances of finitude we are surrounded by possibilities that are infinite, and the purpose of life is to grasp as much as we can out of that infinitude. ”

Have a beautiful day and a magnificent week!!!

Mike