What is the Significance of Your Life?

Men Living with Meaning

What is Significance?

Søren Kierkegaard Jean-Paul Sartre

Fyodor Dostoyevsky Friedrich Nietzsche

"Existence precedes essence…”

A human exists first before they have meaning in life

“What matters is to find a purpose, to see what it really is that God wills that I shall

do; the crucial thing is to find a truth which is truth for me, to find the idea for

which I am willing to live and die.”

Finding one's values, beliefs, and purpose in a meaningless world

“Man is a mystery. It needs to be unravelled, and if you spend your whole life unravelling it, don't say that you've

wasted time. I am studying that mystery because I want to be a human being.”

Self-analysis may give an individual meaning and differentiates humans from

other mammals

Making free choices regarding fundamental values and beliefs changes

the nature and identity of the chooser

“If a man has character, he has also his typical experience, which always recurs.”

5W1HI keep six honest serving-men (They taught me all I knew); Their names are What and Why and When And How and Where and Who.

Rudyard Kipling, The Elephant's Child

What Why

When

HowWhere

Who

Defining Significance

What

Significance: from the Latin significantia -

“meaning, force, energy”

Joshua Cristall (English, c.1767-1847). Hercules Dragging Cerberus

Why

“Those who have a 'why' to live, can bear with almost any 'how'.”

~ Viktor E. Frankl, Man's Search for Meaning

When

Calavera oaxaqueña by José Guadalupe Posada

“Cowards die many times before their deaths; The valiant never taste of death but once. Of all the wonders that I yet have heard,

It seems to me most strange that men should fear; Seeing that death, a necessary end,

Will come when it will come.” !

William Shakespeare Julius Caesar

Act II, scene 2, line 33.

How

Values Congruence Strong Sense of Identity Strong Sense of Purpose

Understanding of Communication Self-Actualizing

Emotional Management Personal Development Map

Natural Rights Individualism

A Network of Similar Minded Individuals

Where

Furthermore, we have not even to risk the adventure alone; for the heroes of all time have gone before us;

the labyrinth is thoroughly known; we have only to follow the thread of the hero-path. And where we had thought to find an abomination, we shall find a god; where we had thought to slay another, we shall slay

ourselves; where we had thought to travel outward, we shall come to the center of our own existence; and

where we had thought to be alone, we shall be with all the world.

!

~ Joseph Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces

Who

What is the Status Quo?

"In order for evil to flourish, all that is required is for good men to do nothing.” ~ Edmund Burke

Significance = Choosing Your Own Meaning

• Life has meaning under all circumstances, even the most miserable ones.

• Our main motivation for living is our will to find meaning in life.

• We have inalienable freedom to find meaning.

Viktor Frankl