 The
Five Secrets You Must Discover Before You Dieby John Izzo What are the secrets to happiness and meaning? Why do some people find a deep sense of purpose while they are here and die with few regrets while others end their lives bitter and disappointed?
About
two years ago I set out to answer that question by asking several thousand
people to identify the one person they knew who had lived a long life and
found true happiness. It seemed to me that each of us knows at least one
person who achieved true success. After receiving over 1,000 nominations,
I interviewed 235 people from the age of 59-106 (who had over 18,000 years
of life experience) asking them to reflect back on their lives: What brought
happiness? What gave meaning? What did they regret? What did they wish they
had learned sooner? What did not matter in the end?
These
“wise elders” were an incredibly diverse group ranging from a town
barber to CEO’s, from poets to native chiefs, Holocaust survivors to
war veterans, and represented all the major religions and cultures of our
society. My goal was not to interview famous people but to identify
ordinary people who had found
extraordinary happiness. What
I discovered were five clear themes of what it means to live a happy and
meaningful life (and to die with a smile on your face). In my new book,
The Five Secrets You
Must Discover before You Die, I share the five true paths
to finding meaning in life and show how we can live these
secrets.
The first
secret I learned from these interviews is
Be true to
yourself. Each one of us is on a unique human journey and
the path to true happiness is to be true to ourselves. This means knowing
what brings us happiness and focusing our life on what matters to us. It
means reflecting on a regular basis as to whether our life fits our soul.
In our daily lives it means knowing what brings us joy and ensuring that
we fill our life with the right elements. It also means following our unique
destiny. One of the people I interviewed was a Latino woman who talked about
the importance of following our “destina.” The idea is that each
of us has a path that is most true to us, which is not so much a destination
as a way we are meant to be in the world. For example, I am a teacher and
philosopher by nature and when I stay close to that path I experience true
joy.
Being
true to self often means drowning out other voices that would ask us to live
their dreams instead of ours. Ron, a gifted chiropractor, told me the story
of how he planned to become a medical doctor but when he visited a chiropractor
shortly before starting medical school he discovered a profession that connected
to his true self. “Others told me I was crazy but I knew it was my
path.” He told me that to follow your heart you must have the
“discipline to listen and the courage to follow.” This means asking
if the life we are living is true to our deepest sense of self and it sometimes
requires a step of courage to follow our soul. Are you being true to yourself
right now?
The second
secret I learned is to Leave No
Regrets. It seems to me that what we fear most as we age is
not death, but rather to come to the end of our life feeling that we never
truly lived. The saddest words ever spoken at the end of life are “I
wish I had…” Tom, a native healer, told me that the great fear
at the end of life is “the great incompleteness; that you did not do
what you came here to do.” One of the most interesting things I discovered
in talking to 235 wise people is that almost no one regretted risks they
took that did not work out and most said they wished they had risked more.
When I asked these people about major crossroads in their lives, many of
them talked about taking risks-sometimes large and sometimes small-which
wound up bringing great happiness. One of the keys to moving towards what
we want instead of what we fear is to focus on the best possible result and
not the worst. Are you going for what you truly want in your life or acting
with fear?
Become
Love was the third secret I learned from these people.
Not surprisingly, the greatest source of happiness for people and the largest
place of regret had to do with people. What I discovered is that those who
made people a priority in their lives and who developed deep personal
relationships found true happiness. Many of them told me that
“things” rarely brought true joy whereas family and friends brought
lasting happiness. One way to focus on relationships is to get intentional
goals for our personal relationships just like we do in our careers.
Yet the
most interesting thing I uncovered is that being a loving person, the choice
to give love, is even more important in determining happiness than getting
it. These people talked to me about the importance of choosing love and kindness
as your way in the world. They taught me that when we choose to be a loving
person we find a deep sense of meaning in life.
The fourth
secret was to Live the
Moment. One of the most common things people told me was how
fast life goes by and how important it is to enjoy each moment. One woman
told me “when you are young you think sixty years is an incredibly long
time but when you get there you realize it was only a moment.” Among
the secrets they shared were how important it is to live in the present,
to fully enjoy whatever experience you are having (and not to wish you were
somewhere else), and to live with gratitude focusing on what you are grateful
for rather than what you don’t have. They told me that we have no power
over the past and little power over the future. Many of them said that whenever
you find yourself saying “I will be happy when or I will be happy if”
that it is important to remember that happiness is a choice we make inside.
One woman told me: “You have to stop judging your life and start living
your life. Stop keeping score trying to decide if you are winning. Instead
live each day fully and stay in the moment.” Are you living with gratitude
right now, focusing on enjoying your life rather than judging
it?
The fifth
and final secret was to Give More Than
You Take. When I asked people what gave their life the greatest
meaning, people told me again and again people that being of service and
knowing that you made things better because you were here was by far the
greatest source of meaning. I learned that whether in career or personal
life, that it is what we give not what we take that gives life meaning. Many
of them also reminded me that we have little control over what we get from
the world every day (whether people will love us, whether we will win the
lottery, etc.) but we have complete control over what we give to the world
(whether we choose to be kind, charitable, and to give to others). These
people reminded me that everything we take from the world dies with us, but
everything we give to the world gets recycled. A wise woman named Susan told
me that “when we are young we cry for ourselves but as we age we learn
to cry for the world.” Indeed all the spiritual traditions remind us
that true happiness comes from focusing on being of service and in the process
joy finds us. Are you focused on giving or getting each
day?
What
I also discovered is that it is not enough to know the secrets, we must live
them. One man told me “many of us know what is important but it is not
enough to know, you have to put these things into practice.” These people
taught me a great deal about how to live the secrets as well and I share
many of their techniques in the book. One of my favorites was sixty-four
year old Joel who told me about how he reminds himself each day to live the
moment. “When I wake up the first thing I do is say a prayer thanking
God and the universe that I get to live one more day and I pray that I will
treat it as a gift. At night, just before I go to bed, I have a time of
meditation and remember all the things that I am grateful for that day and
ask for one more day.”
Someone
once told me “if you want to live a happy life; ask someone who has
lived one.” This past year I had the privilege to sit at the feet of
235 of the wisest people I have ever met and I was amazed how clear they
were on what mattered, what didn’t matter, and how each of us can create
a life of meaning and happiness.
The
Five Secrets You Must Discover Before You Die by John Izzo,
Ph.D. Published
by Berrett Koehler; January 2008;$15.95US; 978-1-57675-475-7 Copyright ©
2008 by John B. Izzo Copyright © 2008 John B Izzo John Izzo, Ph.D. is the bestselling author of Second Innocence and host of the public television series The Five Things You Must Discover Before You Die. Holding advanced degrees in religion and psychology, Izzo has spoken to over one million people on four continents about living more purposeful lives. More information about Mr. Izzo can be found at www.theizzogroup.com.
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