"Life is Awesome When We Develop A Purpose and Live Meaningfully!!!".

 A  meaningful life is a construct having to do with the purpose, significance, fulfillment, and satisfaction of  life. While specific theories vary, there are two common aspects: a global schema to understand one's  life and the belief that  life itself is  meaningful.

While there are benefits to making meaning out of life, there is still not one definitive way in which one can establish such a meaning. Those who were successful in creating a meaningful life enjoyed benefits such as higher levels of positive affect, life satisfaction, etc.  When faced with a stressful life situation, finding meaning is shown to help adjustment. Meaningfulness in life is intrinsically related to positive psychology's goal to expand the good life for the normal non-disordered person. It is with a meaningful life that one is able to find connections to people, places, things and leave a mark on society; it renders a good life a meaningful on.

Here are 8 amazing tips on how to live a meaningful life:

1. Focus on the Important Things. We all have some things that are more important than others. ...
2. Find Your Life's Purpose. ...
3. Give to Others. ...
4. Be Aware of Your Actions. ...
5. Find Some Courage. ...
6. Focus. ...
7. Simplify the Life. ...
8. Express Yourself.

People measure their success in terms of meaningful actions. You will find that everyone is obsessed with life meaning – starting from philosophers and scientists to the ordinary man. And while there is no single or final answer to living a meaningful life, there are several things you can do to get closer to this goal.

Here are 8 amazing tips on how to live a meaningful life:

1.   Focus on the Important Things

We all have some things that are more important than others. Pinpointing this is something you must do on your own, since there is no general definition as to what’s most important in your life.

Once you determine the top 5 things that you find to be essential to your happiness, use them to live the life as you want it. If you prioritize your family, focus on spending time with them. If you like singing, turn this into your hobby or job. In other words, pursue your passion in life. The world is your limit.

2.   Find Your Life’s Purpose

If someone put a gun to your head and said ‘give me one reason for you to live’, what would this reason be? What do you stand for? What is your life’s purpose? If you want to make your life meaningful, you need to find its meaning first. Otherwise, you cannot really set a meaningful goal.

3.   Give to Others

Of course, this does not mean that you should base all your life actions to helping the rest. You are the focus of your life, but giving to others will give your life more purpose and meaning. So, focus on the things you find important, but make sure to help others. This will increase your and their life satisfaction. Sometimes, something as simple as lending a friendly ear or shoulder to cry on can give your life more meaning.

4.   Be Aware of Your Actions

What can you improve or change? Review the actions you take on a regular basis to learn what made you stray from your goal or imagined path. Focusing on details will help you accomplish more, as long as you are prepared to make some changes.

5.   Find Some Courage

You need to be courageous to live, but living a meaningful life requires a lot more courage. After all, you need to make many changes to achieve this, try new things and put yourself out there.

Once you determine the essential actions to improve your way of living, you can easily find courage. Don’t be afraid to be different or try something new – you can rarely achieve your biggest goals without a bit of a risk.

6.   Focus

Rather than micromanaging 20 goals and focusing your attention on them all, focus on one thing at a time. This does not mean that you will leave the rest of your priorities behind. It solely means that you will dedicate all your energy in making sure they are all achieved, step by step.

You can easily achieve this. Make a habit of creating a list of goals you will do over the day or the week, not further. This list should consist of things that are achievable and realistic to avoid failure. If you learn how to do things at their time, you can achieve more.

7.   Simplify the Life

This may sound strange, but in order to make your living meaningful, you have to make the life simpler. The life is more meaningful if you spend your time doing things that fulfill you, so get rid of all those things that cause stress and frustration and basically, simplify your way of living.

8.   Express Yourself

You are who you are and there is no one else like you. Accept yourself for who you are and be authentic. Instead of fearing and struggling from fear of rejection and criticism, embrace this in a way that allows you to be who you truly are. If you aren’t yourself, your life cannot really have a meaning. Finding your life’s meaning is a journey that never ends. It is not something you will find and be done with it, but you must maintain your living meaningful every step of the way. After all, you may find something to be meaningful today, but this does not mean that you will find it meaningful tomorrow. Seeing that you are the one giving meaning to things, it is your job to pursue them.

How can I make my life more meaningful?

Seven Ways To Make Your Life Meaningful:

1. Follow your aspirations. Sometimes we confuse aspirations with personal goals, but they are completely different. ...
2. Be passionate. ...
3. Live by your code of ethics. ...
4. Cultivate compassionate. ...
5. Be kind. ...
6. Be in service to a greater cause. ...
7. Strive for a better future.

What a person needs is not a relaxed state, but rather to strive and struggle for a worthy goal. ~ Victor Frankl

Most of us want to lead a happy life. That’s natural, because pleasure is more attractive than pain. But should happiness be the ultimate goal in life – as the Positive Psychology movement proposes?

There is an easy way to find out. All you need to do is to answer a simple question:

What were the three most significant moments of your life?

The three most significant moments in my life were the birth of my son, the death of my mother, and my promotion to 1. Dan Blackbelt in karate. Non of these three moments could be described as pleasurable. Giving birth is incredibly painful – until you look into your baby’s eyes. The death of my mother was a time of both grief and joy, and the promotion to Blackbelt was the toughest three hours I’ve ever spent in my life.

Although these three key experiences weren’t pleasurable at the time, they gave my life meaning. Now, when I look back, I experience satisfaction and a sense of joy. It’s the joy that comes from living a meaningful life.

Is your life meaningful?

Seven Ways To Make Your Life Meaningful:

1. Follow your aspirations. Sometimes we confuse aspirations with personal goals, but they are completely different. Aspirations are the answer to the question: “What do I want to give the world?” Whereas personal goals are the answer to the question, “What do I want the world to give me?”

2. Be passionate. Whenever you do something that you are passionate about, it gives meaning to life. Sometimes it can be difficult to balance work, relationships, and passion. But a life without being passionate about something can feel empty.

3. Live by your code of ethics. Every person needs a personal ethical code to have a meaningful life. An ethical code is a set of values that you uphold, even if the consequences might be painful for yourself.

4. Cultivate compassionate. Compassion happens when we stop being the center of our concern, and open to the suffering of others. If we focus on ourselves as the center of the universe and our thoughts revolve around how we were, how we will be, or how others see us – our life will ultimately feel meaningless. Compassion is a way of looking beyond our own needs, to those of others.

5. Be kind. Kindness is not just a feeling, it’s an emotion that leads to action. Kindness gives warmth to a life. Each kind interaction triggers a feeling of connection and pleasure. Actually, kind action is something that gives meaning to your life AND makes you feel happy!

6. Be in service to a greater cause. A great way to give depth and meaning to your life is to do volunteer work. Whether you coach a basketball team for streetkids, or help out with the elderly, or raise money to alleviate world poverty, whenever you step in to serve a greater cause, you give your life meaning.

7. Strive for a better future. Striving for a better future can take many forms, but it always entails developing as a human being. If you strive for a better future, you subscribe to life-long learning. New skills make us more effective in the world, both for our own life, as well as for the cause we serve.

So what about happiness? How do meaning and happiness intersect? My take is that happiness is the by-product of a meaningful life. On its own – as a life goal – happiness can feel shallow. But once you focus on leading a meaningful life, you will feel fulfilled and experience not only fleeting sensations of happiness, but a lasting sense of joy.

What’s your take on this?

Is happiness a worthy life goal? What are your tips for a meaningful life?

What makes a life worth living?

Happiness. ... But happiness is usually the result of having a meaningful  life, not what makes life worth living in itself. There are people whose lives are meaningful even though they may not be very happy, for example when struggling with a challenging job while raising a special needs child.

Here are some possible answers to the question of what makes life worth living: (1) nothing; (2) religion; (3) happiness; (4) love, work, and play. Evidence from psychology and neuroscience supports the fourth answer.

(1) Nothing. A few despondent philosophers such as Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, and David Benatar have cast doubts on whether life has any intrinsic meaning, and some people are driven to suicide by depression and negative events in their lives. But most people, fortunately, are able to find lots of reason to value their lives, and in surveys most people report themselves as pretty happy. So nihilism is not a plausible position.

(2) Religion. Surveys also indicate that many people report that religion and spirituality are major sources of meaning in their lives. Unfortunately, however, these sources are bogus if there is no evidence to support claims for particular religious beliefs. Religious faith may be reassuring, but cannot objectively tell you whether you should adhere to Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, or some other religion. Faith cannot even tell you what version of Christianity (Catholic, Baptist, Morman, etc.) or Islam (Shia or Sunni) you ought to adopt. Hence religion and vague spiritual ideas like "everything happens for a reason" cannot provide a sound basis for living.

(3) Happiness. Psychological research has identified many ways in which people can increase the happiness in their lives, as in Sonja Lyubomirsky's fine book, The How of Happiness. But happiness is usually the result of having a meaningful life, not what makes life worth living in itself. There are people whose lives are meaningful even though they may not be very happy, for example when struggling with a challenging job while raising a special needs child. On the other hand, happiness can be cheaply achieved by slacker serenity, a mindless bliss resulting from having minimal goals, access to drugs, or unlimited time for meditation. You can have happiness without much meaning, and meaning without much happiness; so happiness is not the meaning of life.

(4) Love, work, and play. make life worth living. Love includes friendships and family relationships as well as romantic ones. Work includes diverse productive activities such as community volunteering in addition to wage slavery. Play includes all forms of entertainment such as reading and watching movies, not just games. Surveys and other psychological studies indicate that love, work, and play do indeed enable people to have lives they value. Neuroscience provides a deeper understanding of how brain processes generate needs for relatedness, autonomy, and competence that can be satisfied by the successful pursuit of love, work, and play. Such satisfaction yields happiness, but even the pursuit is enough to give life meaning.

What gives meaning to your life?

Some say that  life does not have  meaning or that it does not need  meaning. Everything a person does gives them purpose to whatever degree. Whether it be your job, friends, family, desires or even religion you get  meaning from these things. In turn you also add  meaning to people's lives around you.

Some say that life does not have meaning or that it does not need meaning. Everything a person does gives them purpose to whatever degree. Whether it be your job, friends, family, desires or even religion you get meaning from these things. In turn you also add meaning to people's lives around you. While not every person needs to have a very specific thing they were put on this planet to do, every person still has purpose and meaning. My life gets meaning from every experience, every step, every breath. I will touch people's lives and I will be touched by them. While I can make plans I cannot know for certain where my life will lead me, and in that uncertainty is a sort of meaning also. If someone had no purpose then they would not be interacting with the rest of the world or they simply would not exist. Take a toaster for instance. It's purpose is to toast bread. If a toaster still existed but it did not have its said purpose then it would no longer be a toaster; it would be scrap metal. Though humans are many things I would like to think that we are not merely scrap.

What does it mean to live a meaningful life?

When people who had a purpose, in other words  meaningful goals which have to do with helping others, their  life satisfaction is higher – even when they feel personally down and out – than those who  did not have any  life purpose. ... Having meaning in our  lives, in effect, is being a “giver.

Although we might think happiness – or the pursuit of it – will make us feel better about ourselves and our lives, research indicates that it’s actually finding greater meaning in our lives that, at the end of the day – or our lives – is more fulfilling. In Emily Esfahani Smith’s fascinating article, “There is More to Happiness than Being Happy” 

..., , “While happiness is an emotion felt in the here and now, it ultimately fades away, just as all emotions do; positive affect and feelings of pleasure are fleeting. The amount of time people report feeling good or bad correlates with happiness but not at all with meaning. Meaning, on the other hand, is enduring. It connects the past to the present to the future.” We wholeheartedly agree, and have devoted our professional careers to helping to make that a reality shared by as many people as possible.

The Pursuit of Happiness

In the days of yore, our nation’s Founding Fathers included in the Constitution a concept that had been unthinkableb in all easrlier generations of all nations: "the pursuit of happiness." But by today’s standards, in those days it didn’t take much to make someone happy: Freedom to worship however they wanted – or not, the right to bear arms in order to protect themselves from the French and the British – especially since there was no real militia, a roof over their head, food to eat, wood for a fire, maybe a little money from selling crafts made on the side. These things that we take for granted today were huge for the people who founded our country. Today, like yesterday, we are happy when our needs, wants and desires mesh. But the pursuit of happiness has become connected to what might be termed “selfish” behavior. In our consumer-driven society, it takes ever more goodies to make us happy. And happiness is, as mentioned above, fleeting. It is present-centered, present hedonism. The pursuit of happiness is, in effect, being a “taker,” in this new tech-centered existence.

Our Search for Meaning

Paradoxically, while negative events may decrease happiness, they may increase the meaning in life. Traumatic or emotional experiences can build character and teach us hard lessons that make us more compassionate and give us a deeper understanding of ourselves and others. When people who had a purpose, in other words meaningful goals which have to do with helping others, their life satisfaction is higher – even when they feel personally down and out – than those who did not have any life purpose. “People who thought more about the present were happier, but people who spent more time thinking about the future or about past struggles and sufferings felt more meaning in their life, though they were less happy.” Having meaning in our lives, in effect, is being a “giver.” Working through past grief, abuse, and failures should not just lead to regret and resignation, but rather resilience, resolve and even post traumatic growth. Especially when helping desperate others handle their suffering, we become hardier, and in doing so build up our grit potential. A survivor of the horrors of being interned in Auschwitz Concentration Camp, Viktor Frankl, focused each day on finding meaning in his existence and in the future he would find when the nightmare was over. It is worth reading his classis, Man's Search for Meaning.

Happiness versus Meaning

According to researchers, "Happiness is not generally found in contemplating the past or future…” We add that it’s about living in the present and doing things that bring us temporary pleasure. In Time Perspective Therapy, these folks are present hedonists; living moment to moment, day to day, seeking pleasures and novel sensations. In their best scenario, they “make time” for friends, fun and fantasies. Back to the researchers: “Thinking beyond the present moment, into the past or future, was a sign of the relatively meaningful but unhappy life." We beg to differ a bit. In our clinical work, we’ve found that in general, those with past negative orientations are unhappy because they are stuck in the negative experiences or traumas of their past; we call this past negative. Folks who focus mainly on the good old days are past positive. Future-oriented folks are the go-to people who get things done, who are achievement oriented; however, in the extreme, they may become workaholics. While we agree they feel their lives are meaningful, their future-mindedness can cause them to miss out on present hedonistic fun. How can we find balance – happiness and meaning – in our lives?

Living a Meaningful Life

. "Take a Picture Today, Feel Happy Tomorrow for Greater Good", she lists several suggestions to capture everyday events today that you'll be happy you did in the future; here are a few ideas:

• Take a Photo a Day – or once a week – no matter what you are doing. At the end of the year, you'll have a ready-made yearbook. This helps us find greater meaning in our lives that we may have lost track of due to the many activities and stress of day-to-day life. 
• Capture the Context in Your Photos – don't crop out the environment. In the future, the environment will be as interesting as the subject.
• Start a Day in the Life album – chose a day and take a picture of what you are doing each hour. A typical day may not seem fascinating now, but it will in coming years.
• Keep a Gratitude Journal – write down three good things that happened each day for a week or longer. You likely enjoy reviewing the all the positive things that occur each day.

Finding balance in our lives – seeking happiness as well as meaningful experiences – is what our book, The Time Cure, is about. If you are stuck in the rut of thinking about all the bad things that happened to you, you’ll discover how to replace those past negatives with past positive experiences and start making plans for a brighter future. If you are present fatalistic and think your life now isn’t worth much and can’t be fixed up better, find out how to have some fun and happiness by practicing selected present hedonism while working towards a future positive. And if you are so future- oriented that you don’t have time to be happy in the moment, learn how to stop your pursuit of endless goals, take time to smell the flowers, to be more self-compassionate, to make someone else feel special, and to share your aloha with others.

How to Live a Meaningful Life

Are you tired of living a routine every day? Do you want to dispose of all the things that bring you down and live your life to the fullest? Most of us do. Good news: it is possible to live a meaningful life, no matter your age or the difficulties you're facing. Anyone can learn to develop purpose and meaning.

Developing a Sense of Purpose

• Figure out what activities leave you energized. There are other types of activities that make us feel alive. These are activities that we look forward to, that we focus on completely, and finish having more energy than when we started. These are also the activities that we give our best energy to and that we try to make the highest quality. [1]
• Energizing activities are often our hobbies, like working on machines, collecting items, writing, gardening, cooking, and so on.
• The important thing to remember about these activities is that they require movement on our part—it does not mean watching TV or other screen-watching.
• Determine what activities leave you feeling neutral. Some activities we engage in because they don’t require us to do anything, like sitting and watching TV. These activities don’t drain us, but they don’t energize us either. If your life is predominantly full of draining activities, you look forward to these neutral activities so that you don’t have to do anything else.[2]
• Neutral activities can also include surfing the internet, playing games on your smart phone, and other activities that involve watching screens.
• These activities don't require brainpower, but they don't leave you feeling refreshed.
• Decide what activities drain you. In order for life to have meaning, it needs to have purpose. Take a look at the activities that you engage in on a daily basis and evaluate how many of those activities make you feel worn out after you finish them. These are also the activities that you dread doing, having to give yourself a pep talk to get going.[3]
• These activities are also ones that you find yourself rushing through and not caring as much about how well you do them.
• For example, if you hate your job, each shift can be considered a draining activity.
• Create a plan to balance your energizing, neutral and draining activities. Make a chart that displays your energizing, neutral and draining activities. Look at the chart and examine how balanced it is. Do you need to add more energizing activities? To live a meaningful life, the answer is most likely yes. Start by taking small steps toward achieving a better balance among these three activities. Write out a plan with a larger and larger amount of time blocked off for energizing activities every week.
• Over time, you will stop looking forward to the neutral activities and instead see them as a waste of time. [4] This is because you are slowly developing a new habit and your mind, will, and emotions are being encouraged to grow.
• You will start to look forward to the energizing activities instead of the neutral ones because your sense of purpose is increasing.
• You can write this plan on a piece of paper, or just add energizing activities to your weekly planner.
• Decide if your career lines up with this plan. You are probably already thinking about your job and whether or not you should keep it if it is a draining activity. The choice is up to you. You have to take stock of things, like how much your family suffers because of your attitude toward work, and if you would be able to find another source of income if you quit.
• For example, if you have a family who is tired of watching you come home every day without any energy, you may want to think about getting a different, less draining job; cutting back your hours instead of quitting; or finding a new source of income altogether, like starting your own business selling the product you make (or the service you perform) with your energizing activity.
• You can also consider going back to school while you still have your old job if you feel that a different career would make your life more purposeful and meaningful.
• The important thing, though, is to find a balance among energizing, neutral, and draining activities.
• Be willing to explore new pursuits. Being open-minded about trying new things is also important when considering how much of your life is purposeful and meaningful. Trying something that you have never tried before is the perfect way to discover energizing activities. Doing so can also help you discover a purposeful existence.
• You can try new activities that are easy to learn about on your own through the internet, like blogging, cooking, and gardening.

Becoming More People-Oriented

• Take stock of who is in your life. Another important component of living a meaningful life is sharing it with others. Studies show that loneliness increases stress hormones and affects immune and heart functions. Lonely people drink more alcohol and exercise less than people who aren’t lonely. And the truth is that you can be lonely even when you surround yourself with people. The key is to have real connections with others..
• You can take advantage of the relationships already in your life by taking more of an interest in them.
• Repair damaged family relationships. Everyone is stressed by discord in their family circles, whether they acknowledge this or not. Part of having a meaningful life is freeing yourself from long-term family drama, whether family members are living or not. For example, your father might have treated you badly and you are still angry at him, even though he died 5 years ago. Forgiving him is important for you, not for him.
• Take advantage of family members who are still living and repair any broken bonds. This might mean apologizing or extending forgiveness. You might be able to break the ice in a longtime strained relationship with a gesture like doing something for them that you know they need, or giving them a gift you know they love.
• Make an effort to deepen friendships. Also take advantage of the friendships in your life. If you have settled into a routine of taking your close friends or spouse for granted, get out of that rut by taking an interest in their lives. Ask them questions about what they do or what they think about things. Such questions develop connections with people, which is what you need to reduce loneliness. [6]
• If you don’t have any friendships in your life, it may be time to go find some friends. Join a group at your church, attend classes or groups at your community center or gym, or find a group of people who share an interest in your most energizing activities.
• Don’t just surround yourself with people; make connections with them.
• Be a listening ear. Being able to listen well also connects you to other people. You can’t make strong connections to others if you are talking the whole time; that is what therapists are for (and even then, you should to listen to their advice). Listening helps you build trust with another person because it shows that you support them.
• Join groups or classes. Find people in groups or classes in your community where you can make real connections with people. For example, many community centers have weekly classes open to the public where you can connect with others on topics anywhere from sewing to cooking to karate. And local gyms have a smorgasbord of athletic classes—things like spinning, kickboxing, yoga, water aerobics, and more are usually on the daily list.
• You may be able to find a group interested in the same things that you are at the community center or on websites like MeetUp.com, but if you don’t, you can start one yourself.
• Donate your time. Volunteering is another way to add meaning to your life. It not only is a good place to meet like-minded people to increase your social connections, it is actually good for your body and mind. Volunteering is known to boost self-confidence, fight depression, give you a sense of purpose, and even keep you in physical health..
• Most cities have volunteering websites. For example, in Nashville, Tennessee, in the U.S., there is an organization called Hands on Nashville that provides sign-up sheets for nearly all the organizations in that city that need volunteers.
• You can also go to places that look like they take volunteers, such as soup kitchens, church feeding events, and so on.
• Find people who accept you for who you are. Pay attention to the relationships in your life. Even though you forgive an estranged family member or friend, if they constantly make fun of or criticize you, maybe it’s better that you peaceably go your separate ways, at least in daily life. Likewise, if you are codependent with a family member or friend, that relationship is probably toxic and needs to be cut off or at least adjusted. You are looking for relationships that encourage and energize your life, just like you are looking for activities that do the same.
• You can identify co-dependent relationships by things like a fixation on rescuing them, constantly giving and rarely receiving, fear of being abandoned, and the capacity to do anything to hold onto the relationship.[9] Such behavior is not healthy in a relationship, and will certainly drain purpose and meaning from your life.
• On the other hand, people who encourage you in your interests and whom you feel energized after leaving—and greatly look forward to seeing, just like the energizing activities—are people you want in your life. They will give your life meaning.

Expressing Yourself

• Be willing to be true to yourself. You also need freedom to express yourself if your life is going to be full of meaning and purpose. This means discovering your passions, your preferences, and then doing them without being afraid of rejection. You will find out what your passions are when you rank your daily activities by how energizing they are in the first part (above), but you can also find your passions by following your curiosity and stopping work on things that aren’t energizing to you.
• Even if you don’t gravitate toward writing or drawing, it is useful to explore these mediums so that you can create a visual of your thoughts on paper or canvas (or digitally, if you find that the computer medium comes more easily).
• Work on overcoming fears. To express yourself, you have to resist giving in to a fear of rejection or judgement. You’ll need to face these fears so that you can live a meaningful life that is free from the dictates of others.
• One thing you could do is play the internet card game Rejection Therapy, an amateur version of exposure therapy that trains you to ask strangers for things you know they will say no to.[11] The purpose is to desensitize your mind to rejection so that you aren’t afraid of it anymore.
• Or you can just dive right in to your most energizing activities and refuse to obey the negative voices of your friends and family.
• Choose a way to express yourself. Once you know what you want to do and are choosing not to be afraid of expressing it, you need to find a way to express yourself. This can be through art, through writing, through producing a product, even though wearing different clothes. The important thing is to be who you know you are, not what others suggest.
• Express yourself more often. Now that you know how you want to express yourself, do so more and more frequently, until you are comfortable expressing yourself all the time. It might take weeks or months, but eventually you will stop being afraid of being yourself, no matter who you are with.
• Just be sure that you aren’t causing harm to others as you express yourself. For example, your parents or your kids might be embarrassed of you, but that is ok; but ignoring the needs of your family or friends to pursue your interests is selfish and mean.