In 1968, Robert F. Kennedy urged Americans to think about how we measure what makes a country great in new ways. He said the Gross National Product doesn’t measure the health of our children, the beauty of our poetry, our courage, our wisdom, or our compassion.
“It measures everything in short, except that which makes life worthwhile.”
In much metaphysical thinking there is a common phrase that “we become what we pay attention to.” In the modern world, many of us are paying attention to frenzy and the more that we live there, the more frenzied we become.
I was on a radio show where the host accused me of coming from “laid-back Los Angeles.”
I laughed, “The only laid-back people in Los Angeles are waiting for their autopsy. They’ve got toe tags!”
We are running off to our meetings, getting through traffic so dense that it is wise to bring a picnic lunch and a catheter. People elbow each other aside in line because God forbid they miss something. We are speeding towards auditions, getting our kids into the right schools, rushing to a meeting with the decision maker who will move us one more notch up the game of life and you know what?
Many of us are simply too busy to be happy.
Many of us are too frenzied to even define what that means.
People are so busy they run in the doors of our programs proclaiming,
“I will be the one person who doesn’t get it.”
“I’ve been working on the question of what would make me happy for so long. Why would it happen here?”
The fact is, most of us are so busy running through a trance created by frenzy, checking out on TVs / smartphones / and soon to be Virtual Reality that we have lost touch with ourselves.
I have client companies that give life-changing programs to their employees who walk in the door resentful because we are intruding on their busy and frantic schedules. Many of them realize their calendar is filled with quite a bit of meaningless stuff.
Measure your success with the number of times you smile per day?