Contentment and Discontentment
tl;dr: Two sides of the same coin, contentment and discontentment are. Balancing them.
There’s a saying in a famous Jewish text, Chapters of the Fathers, that goes as follows:
“Who is rich? He who is content with what he has.”
The Tao Te Ching echoes this, challenging those who are discontent.
“Craving the desirable loses contentment. The natural person desires without craving and acts without excess. By not doing, everything is done.”
“A man can achieve his own happiness only by pursuing the happiness of others because it is only by forgetting about his own happiness that he can become happy.”
Seems simple enough, right?
Just be happy with what you have and stop wanting/craving more, right?
Well, it’s not simple and it’s particularly not simple when your WhyOS is “A Better Way.”
Starting with Your Why
The WhyOS is something that was introduced to me by my friend, Matthew Woodget of Go Narrative.
It’s a really powerful exercise that combines a self-assessment, an interview, and a more comprehensive diagnostic. If you have read this blog for more than a few weeks, you’ve heard me praise Simon Sinek’s talk “Start with Why” and this WhyOS exercise shares similar roots, but instead of an organizational Why, it’s a personal Why.
There are 9 different motivating Whys, you can see them listed in the chart below. The point is to discover the hierarchy of Whys for yourself, so you can determine what your core motivation is.
The end result was to lead to the creation of a Personal Why.OS statement, which is:
To seek a better way and challenge the status quo to uncover clarity
That felt right and is consistent with the way that I’ve lived my life until now.
But…and here’s the thing.
I’ve been struggling in how to square that circle of “never being content with the status quo” and the idea of “contentment is the key to happiness.”
It’s really difficult for me to look at a situation and think “how can this be done more effectively and more efficiently?”
Wasted time, in particular, irritates me since we all share it as a limited, expiring commodity.
But that same drive is causing me dissatisfaction.
Open to suggestions.
There’s got to be a better way, right?
If you’d like to learn more about your Personal Why OS, reach out to Matthew. He does a great job, quickly, that delivers a ton of value and insight.