Creating a Life While Creating a Living

- Excerpt from "From Worry to Wealthy" by Chellie Campbell

"Plato said, 'The unexamined life isn't worth living.' But I say the unlived life isn't worth examining."-overheard at an AA meeting

What are you working for? What is the legacy you want to leave behind? What do you want to look back and congratulate yourself for at the end of your life?

You may not know the answer today, and that's okay. Your whole life is about figuring that out.

When people ask me how to determine the "right" goal for themselves, not sure which choice before them is best, I just say, "Your best guess for today will do."

Goals aren't about achievement of a dream. It looks like they are at first, but that's an illusion. The joy of the achievement lasts about a minute and a half. The movie star that wins the Academy Award for Best Actor hugs the Oscar, giddily thanking everyone they ever met in their whole life, and parties all night in celebration.

Then they go home, go to sleep, and the next morning what is it they want?

Another acting job.

They just want to continue their work, their art, their craft. It's the daily doingness-the process of inventing and pursuing their goal-that creates joy in their life. The acknowledgment and applause is wonderful but it is a by-product, not the thing itself. The thing itself is the work - the daily exploration of human behavior, mood, friendships, enmities, glories and disasters. It's the process that matters in the end. That is what you experience every day. That is what creates a happy person-not the celebration of one moment of achievement of a goal. There is no goal where, when you achieve it, you stop becoming.

The importance of every goal is that it is a path leading you through this existence in a particular direction. You choose the initial direction, but life will take over and lead you on through byways and highways you can't determine at the beginning. Years later you will look back and, with a sense of child's wonder, will exclaim, "Ah, so that's what I was doing there-that's the lesson I was learning." Your job is to pick a path and begin, but it doesn't matter what you choose - life knows what you need and will guide you there.

When I rejected acting because it wasn't nourishing my soul any longer, I took a bookkeeping job and found I loved that. Then I became the owner of the bookkeeping service, and enjoyed that. When I saw people got value from my consultations, I started teaching Financial Stress Reduction Workshops. Then I started writing books. All the time I was just "following my bliss" as Joseph Campbell said. I took each next step as it appeared because it seemed logical, felt good, made me money, made me happy and helped others.

Now so many years later I can look back and see the underlying theme-that what most empowered me and made me happy was working with a small creative team to invent a common good that empowered everyone. The thing I enjoyed most about acting was rehearsal. It was the process of creating that was enjoyable-after the show was set and we just did endless repetitions of it, I was bored. I had to move on.

The bookkeeping job was with a small, dynamic, growing company filled with creative, happy, intelligent people-another small creative team with a goal to help our clients and ourselves to prosper and grow. The bookkeeping service was the same. Then when I started teaching workshops, I immediately rejected the Tony-Robbins-motivational-big-room-seminar-48-employee model and decided that small, interactive master-mind groups of 8-12 people was the way to go.

I didn't see how all those pieces fit together until I looked back at them when I was in my sixties. So don't worry if your life doesn't seem to make sense or your choices are erratic and your goals changeable. You are being led by Life to your highest good and greatest bliss.

What feels good to you today? What feels empowering and creative and exciting?

Those are the signposts Life is giving you. Go do that.

Chellie Campbell is the creator of the Financial Stress Reduction Workshops, and author of The Wealthy Spirit, Zero to Zillionaire, and From Worry to Wealthy. She has been prominently quoted as a financial expert in the Los Angeles Times, Good Housekeeping, Lifetime, Essence, Woman's World and more than 50 popular books. She can be reached at Chellie@chellie.com

Next Week: 10 Native American Commandments