Purpose adds no value to life!?

Talking about self-affirmation,?the reflection on what matters most to you, your personally relevant values.?And remember,?this is an important component of the definition of purpose in life.?

So purpose in life is really who am I??What is myself all about??And what do I value the most??You put those two things together and you start developing this purpose in life.?So that's why we're talking about both of these things, and?I would say that this real key prime It's considering what you value most.?That's kind of what primes or prompts the idea of having a purpose in your life.?

What matters to you, who relies on you, who inspires you, what causes do?you care about, what are you grateful for, what gets you out of bed in the morning.?And very importantly, how do you want to be remembered??This is a really important one in Psychology,?we call this mortality salience.?It's so important, and?related to that I want to invite a special guest, the Grim Reaper.?Yeah, I know.?I know what you're thinking.?You may go wow, the Grim Reaper.?Are you kidding??

And this is the thing that we fear the most,?why should we value this person as part of our purpose??Well, he might say because I'm the one who brings meaning to your lives.?Let's unpack that just a little bit and figure out why the Grim Reaper may?say that I am one of the most important pieces of a person's purpose.?So just think about if the Grim Reaper said look,?in econometric thinking we know that if you have $5,?each dollar of those $5 is more valuable than?if you have $10,000 thinking about each dollar.?

If you're walking on the street and somebody asks you for?some money on the on the street, and you only have five dollars and?they're asking you for a couple of dollars, that's a big deal.?If you have $10,000 and you're asking you for a couple of dollars, that's not so?much of a big deal.?Now just think about that in terms of life.?Let's say there was no Grim Reaper.?Let's say there was no death.?Let's say we lived forever.?

How would we live our lives??Would we live our lives differently if we live forever than?if we lived a finite period of time??

Well, I think the answer is pretty obvious.?If we live forever we would just kind of assumed that eventually something would?get done with that person who's having a hard time.?If we could live forever maybe we would just not really worry about every?individual day being important, every individual minute.?

?I'd like you to start thinking about what might happen if you were to die today or?tomorrow.?I know that's not something that you necessarily want to think about when I?ask my friends okay, what would you want on your headstone, for example??They don't even want to think about it, but?that's exactly what I want you to do now.?You know Marcus Aurelius, he was a stoic philosopher.?He also happened to be probably the best Roman emperor that ever existed.?He said do not act as if you're going to live 10,000 years.?Death hangs over you.?

While you live, while it's in your power, be good.?So in other words he's saying look, we don't live 10,000 years.?We don't live forever.?We live for this brief time, and yet so?often it's kind of like we sleep walk through this life as if it is forever.?So what the Grim Reaper is saying,?what Marcus Aurelius is saying is live every day to the fullest.?In fact, one of the stoic disciplines was actually to assume you might die that day.?

So imagine Marcus Aurelius is waking up in the morning, he's eating his granola and?his field mouse, because I guess that's what Romans ate a lot.?So he's eating that for breakfast and he's going, you know,?dear I'm going to die today.?And Mrs. Aurelius turns to him and says, would you stop that??You always say you're going to die every single day and yet you come home alive.?And he might say well, I do that so that I'll live a bigger life today.?So I appreciate the day that I was alive today,?and I'm going to put everything I possibly have into that day.?

That is purposeful living, that is living a big life.?And that's why the Grim Reaper is so important.?That's why thinking about your death oddly enough creates more life.?So, for example, Steve Jobs was dying of pancreatic cancer when he gave?the commencement address in 2005 to the Stanford graduating class.?And this is what he said.?Imagine how much he must have shocked the graduating students at Stanford who had?everything ahead of them, you would think.?And he said death is very likely the single best invention of life.?It's life's change agent.?

Can you imagine being a student at that time and?he's talking all about death and how important death is??Well, he understood that because he knew he is going to die pretty soon,?and he started realizing how valuable life was, every single day.?People who are in hospice for example, start changing their life,?in the way that they think.?They say man, I wish I had lived my life the way I am right now,?appreciating every single minute, every single hour.?I wish I had done that during the regular part of my life.?So this is such an important thing to be thinking about your death.