What does life ask of us? What is our mission in life? We can ask ourselves this question in hundreds of different ways, but probably the worst way to put it would be “What should life do for us?” The answer to that question is “Nothing”. It is up to us to give something to life, to ourselves and to others.
Paraphrasing the great Jorge Bucay, these are the only three goals we should have in life. They may seem far too simple, but the truth is that you could say they cover everything.
According to Jorge Bucay, these 3 goals are:
- To be the best person you can be.
- To be happy.
- To help other people be happy.
It is that simple, but let’s look at what each point involves.
1. Be the best person you can be
The least anyone should ask of themselves is to be a good person, and if we look around us, and even if we look inside ourselves, not all of us could say we are good people.
But being the best person you can be also implies being the best version of ourselves and improving every day in every area of our lives, both personally and professionally.
At the end of the day or the week, ask yourself whether you have been as honest as you could be, whether you have acted as rightly as you could, whether you have lived by your values and principles, and above all, how have you improved? What new things have you learned? In short, in what way are you better today than yesterday? Be the best version of yourself that you can possibly become.
2. Be happy
And being happy implies having goals and objectives in life. As we have said countless times, being happy is also a choice we make as people. We choose to be happy, or we choose to be sad and bitter in the face of life’s setbacks (and there are always some).
If you think you have already done everything you were meant to do in life and that you cannot or do not want to do anything else, happiness starts to fade, life starts to lose its meaning, and unhappiness begins to rear its head.
Closely tied to the first goal, we must keep improving and learning all the time, pursuing goals and objectives. If we were running because a lion was chasing us, nobody would stop halfway to think: “Did I put the washing machine on? Did I close the window?”
In the same way, while we are chasing goals and objectives, hardly anyone has enough time to wonder whether they are unhappy. This is what we call having a purpose, a goal to fight for, and in that fight, life has meaning whether or not we achieve the goal.
See also: Never complain
3. Help other people be happy
And note that we are not talking about making others happy (we take that for granted), but about helping them to be happy themselves.
To explain this point better, I’ll give an example. Tony Robbins doesn’t make you happy, but with every article, every book and every talk, he helps you find meaning in life and gives you some advice so that you can be happy in the middle of chaos.
A business owner can help you be happy because, first of all, they offer you a job and give you financial stability. They can also offer you a career with a future. Their products or services can meet other people’s needs.
Even if it sounds like a self-help book, the truth is that we should adopt the philosophy of giving to others, of being helpful to others.
As Tony Robbins puts it, he discovered that if he helped enough people get what they wanted, he would always get what he wanted.
So, in the same way, when the day or the week is over, ask yourself whether you have done everything you could for others, whether you have helped or contributed to society as best you could. This way your life changes because, as a rule, if you help others, personal and financial success follows.
So be happy, help others be happy, become the best version of yourself, and help others become the best version of themselves. That would be an excellent philosophy of life.
Featured image: Edward the Confessor, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
