“At the end of life, what really matters is not what we bought but what we built; not what we got but what we shared; not competence but our character; and not our success but our significance. Live a life that matters. Live a life of Love.” — Unknown
Bonjour from Paris!
Trust you had a productive working week. I am on my way to Budapest and excited to be visiting the “City of Thermal Springs”. This will be my first-time visiting Hungary.
As I sat through the eight hour flight to Paris from Nairobi, I reflected on what is really a life that matters. Incidentally, today is my birthday and so a perfect place (above the clouds) and time to reflect on this subject. In my last email, I talked about how my friend and mentor, John Maxwell defined a life lived intentionally.
A life that matters is choosing to live an intentional life everyday. It’s about being intentional with your thoughts and actions. It’s about knowing why you are doing what you are doing.
Oftentimes for a lot of people, life just happens to pass by – hence the question at the end of the year – where did all the time go?
One critical step to living a life that matters is knowing your WHY. What are you on earth for? Most people tend to over complicate answering this question, and so do not attempt to answer this life question, or even think about it.
The best place to start is to identify your strengths – Most likely, the purpose of your existence will be using your gifts, strengths and abilities to solve a problem, meet a need in the world around you. That is when you are operating at your best self. There are several free online questionnaires to help you identify your strengths. A good fee-paying tool online is Strengthfinders. This tool will help identify your top strengths and give you more insights and how to grow in those strengths.
The next step will be to answer “What can I do with this?” My next question is then, where do you feel the greatest need around you? Or to put it in a different way, what grieves you the most? What causes me deeppain may not be the same as you. For some it is poverty, education, injustice, abuse, hunger etc. The key is to be aware of this pain and think of ways to do something about it.
Life does not consist in an abundance of possessions – Jesus Christ
However you may say – “Look, Nneka I am just starting out, – I just got my 1st job or need to save for a house, or start a family etc. I can’t think about what you are saying now.” There is a path to a life of significance – it goes from survival to success and then to significance.
The challenge is however if you don’t know your WHY, when you get to the success phase, you get stuck there – earning lots of money but focused on only yourself. There is always the latest car, house, stuff to own. These things are not bad in themselves. The problem is when you don’t see the bigger picture and its purpose.
For many years, I always wanted to help support orphans and vulnerable children in remote parts of my home country, Nigeria. I did not do anything about it, because I guess I was in the survival stage – However I would still seek out opportunities to sponsor the education of 1 or 2 children at a time. That desire has still not left me, so I have decided to take action and relaunch the Enspire Educational Foundation.
My goal is to help, along with my partners to educationally sponsor a minimum of 5000 orphans and vulnerable children in the remote parts of Nigeria and Africa by Dec 2020. You will be amazed at how little it costs to give a child in the villages a decent education.
There are two ways you can be a part of this:
1. Send me the contact details of schools in your village that are self-funded and need some support
2. Contact me if you would like to sponsor 1 or more children, or be a part of this initiative
Question – What is that one thing you desire or have always desired to do that will make a difference?