July 29, 2010
The Levels in Action
Summing Up Life in Six Words
Do you think that you could summarize your life in just six words? Before you dismiss the notion, you should know, if you don’t already, that many people have accepted the six-word challenge. Their very short stories were gathered into a book entitled Not Quite What I Was Planning: Six-Word Memoirs by Famous & Obscure Writers.
A friend of mine has been using the six-word approach in his consulting practice to help teams discern and express their purpose succinctly. (Half a dozen well-chosen words are far more memorable than a rambling mission statement.) When I expressed curiosity, he lent me the book, and I read it. Here’s my six-word review: “Some clever, many depressing, few inspiring.”
Insofar as a book composed by a thousand authors can have a theme, the theme of Six-Word Memoirs is disappointment. By my count, roughly one-fourth of the entries were laments of one type or another. Some samples:
• I hope to outlive my regrets.
• Time heals all wounds? Not quite.
• My life’s a bunch of almosts.
• I couldn’t protect me from myself.
• I imagined more than office jobs.
• Young optimist: proven wrong. Prematurely old.
I could go on (and on, and on) but I think you get the idea. There are lots of complaints, regrets, and downcast thoughts. There were other sentiments, of course, and purely descriptive entries. If you’d like more samples, see the box (right).
More Six-Word Memoirs Boasts: I inhale battles, I exhale victories. Jokes: EDITOR. Get it? Banalities: I watched a lot of TV. Enigmas: Cheese is the essence of life. Journeys: Traded mastheads for Texas desert sky. Successful romance: We were each other’s favorite person. Unsuccessful romance: Found true love, married someone else. Crudities: [Which I’m not about to share.]
For this I came
As a devotee of Fr. Robert Spitzer’s Four Levels of Happiness®, I was struck by the relative absence of Level 3 views among the memoirs. Very few conveyed the sense that the author’s purpose in life was contributing to others. You could see it in a handful of entries, like these:
• Amazing grace: born naked, clothed others.
• Life is circular. Caring for parents.
• I am a cartwheel of mentorship.
• Loved God, reason, simplicity; authored books.
On the whole, though, there wasn’t much that spoke of a sense of higher purpose, or even gratitude.
I’m not sure how much one ought to infer from this absence. The book’s writers were self-selected by their submissions to SMITH Magazine, and the six-word limit may well have distorted the themes they chose to express. Perhaps the book says little (in more ways than one) about the way people view their lives. Or perhaps it reflects Thoreau’s bleak quote that, “Most men lead lives of quiet desperation.”
Thoreau also said, “Not only must we be good, but we must also be good for something.” One goal of Journey to Excellence (JTE) is helping people to make this “something” explicit. The curriculum includes an exercise that Fr. Robert Spitzer calls “one of the most important things you can do in your life.” He urges participants to
… take out a piece of paper and start writing down the ways in which you can make a positive difference in the world. How can you make the optimal positive difference to your family with your talents, your time, and your energy? How can you make the optimal positive difference to your friends … your colleagues at work or employees … your organization … your community … the culture and society in general?
When you’re finished with your list, I’d like you to write in big, bold print at the end of it, “FOR THIS I CAME.” When you put these words at the end of your list, it makes it much more than a simple series of tasks. It makes it your identity statement – your reason for living. You need to look at this list every morning for the next month until it starts becoming second nature. If you don’t look at it, you will not remember it, because Level 3 is not your default drive. It has to be chosen. You have to choose your identity every day.
This isn’t the sort of exercise that comes naturally to people, and it’s possible to see its tremendous value but never do it. But if you don’t, you increase the risk that your memoir will not be all that it could have been.
If Six-Word Memoirs shows anything, it’s the fact that we all leave memoirs, written or unwritten. And the best ones aren’t written by looking back at who we have become, but by looking forward at who we want to be.
– By John Keenan, editor
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Last changed: Aug 12 2009 at 12:24 PM