Our world is filled with endless choices.  Do we focus on social media or personal relationships?  Do we eat low carbs or low fat, or both?  Do we take the red pill or the blue pill?

But it has become increasingly clear to me over the years that we might not need to choose between as many of those options.  Things are often not so black and white.  I see more and more examples of “grey-ness.”

Although at first this may seem as though it would add to confusion, there’s another way of looking at it.  It also means that compromises and win-win situations are much more likely to occur than we may have previously thought.

One of my favorite examples of this is the realization that we don’t need to choose between being successful and living a deeply meaningful life that makes a significant, positive impact on the world around us.  

In fact, it turns out that the two are quite interdependent.  By focusing on what we can do to be of service to others in the short time we have on this planet, we actually dramatically increase the likelihood that we will be successful in our businesses or careers, especially as leaders.

I was recently reminded of this when I read a fantastic blog post by Skip Prichard .  In the post, Skip interviews Jeff Klein, who is an executive team member of Conscious Capitalism Inc., and the author of Working for Good: Making a Difference While Making a Living and It’s Just Good Business: The Emergence of Conscious Capitalism & The Practice of Working For Good.

Jeff summarizes his thoughts on the benefits of “working for good” as follows:

Purpose is among the highest motivations for human beings. If your work is infused with purpose, then you are inspired and energized to bring all that you have and all that you can to the work.

Love and care similarly bring out the best and most in people. If you care about and for the people you work with and if they care about and for you, your connection to them is deep, and you are motivated to serve and support each other.

When people are aligned and alighted in purpose, supporting and serving each other — and others who they come in contact with (including customers and other stakeholders of the business) — the business is alive. It attracts attention and fosters relationships built on trust and loyalty, which leads to resilience and sustainability.

This is very good for business!

In his blog post, Skip goes on to share some of Jeff’s very valuable insights into how we can make daily progress toward living a life that allows us to consistently and successfully “work for good.”

I highly recommend that you take a few moments to read this post (you can see the full post here). 

Thanks for reading this post!  As a gift, I’d like to give you this excellent eBook for FREE!  

Just CLICK HERE, and I’ll send you this eBook, featuring chapters from John Spence, Jeff Klein, Charlie Kim, Michael Carroll, Ted Prince, David Marquet, and Ben Lichtenwalner.

Would you like an incredibly simple yet powerful tool for excelling as a leader and living a happier life?

Try focusing more of your energy on doing things that make life meaningful instead of on trying to make life more pleasant.

We could never make every moment of life pleasant.  It’s an exercise in futility.  No matter how hard we try, there will always be ups and downs, sickness, loss, old age, and death.  Thus, from a logical standpoint, trying to make our lives more pleasant is not the best place to focus our energy.

Also, deep down, we know that pleasantness doesn’t result in greater happiness. We know that there are countless wealthy people, living the most pleasant lives we can imagine, who have to take medication to deal with the emptiness and depression they feel.  In fact, there is now over ten years of research from the field of positive psychology demonstrating very clearly that our happiness has little to do with how pleasant our lives are.

But, we humans can easily becomes creatures of habit, conditioned by our surroundings to behave in certain ways. In our modern culture, we are bombarded with the idea that we’ll be happier if we have more stuff or make our lives more pleasant.  As a result of this conditioning, it’s easy to start believing that it’s true.

Unfortunately, when we get caught in the trap of thinking that life will be better if we make it more pleasant, there are numerous negative ramifications.

One ramification is focusing too much on money at the expense of people.  This can result in great short-term success, but never in long-term success.  If we don’t care for our people – customers, vendors, and employees – our success will not be sustainable.

Focusing on pleasantness also results in avoiding tough conversations that we need to have.  According to my friend, John Spence, one of the top executive trainers in the world, this is one of the biggest issues faced by businesses today.  Many businesses simply aren’t talking about the things that are tough to discuss, but really important to the success of the business.  Avoiding these conversations helps keep life pleasant in the short term.  But, in the long term, the consequences of avoiding tough conversations are often detrimental.

Over time, focusing on making life pleasant in the short term results in leadership failures and dissatisfaction with our lives.  But it doesn’t have to be this way.  We can gradually end the habit to seek out pleasantness and form the habit of creating a meaningful life.

If you want to excel as a leader and live a deeply meaningful and happy life, simply shift your focus to how you can better serve the people around you instead of how you can make your own life more pleasant.

The first step is to make a clear distinction between what we need in our lives, and what we simply want.  I’ve found that the more I replace things and activities I simply want with efforts to be of greater service to those around me, the happier I have become and the more excited I am about waking up to start my day because it is filled with increasingly greater meaning.

Assuming that we’re taking care of our basic needs, we can start shifting our focus away from making life more pleasant to creating a life of meaning by asking this question every day, several times a day: What can I do to better serve the people around me?

If you try this for a month, I believe you’ll see a significant, positive shift in your life.

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It seems that on almost a daily basis I see or hear the words “leader” and “manager” used interchangeably.  In fact, I sometimes catch myself using them interchangeably, too.

But, when we look closely, it becomes clear that “leader” and “manager” are not necessarily synonymous.  A leader doesn’t necessarily need to be in a management position.  And there are many people in management positions that are certainly not leaders.

Confused?  I hope to clarify below.

What is a manager?

The first definition of “manager” that appears when I search with Google is “A person responsible for controlling or administering all or part of a company or similar organization.” For a person to have such responsibilities, they almost always have a title like “manager” or “supervisor” or “director”.  But having a title doesn’t make someone a leader.  If a person has a title but no one is willingly following her or him, then she or he is not a leader.  She or he is just a manager.

What is a leader?

We are only a leader when we are influencing people’s behaviors in a way that results in them willingly following us.   The ability to influence people’s behaviors doesn’t require a title or management position.  The two leaders who were arguably the most influential in history, Jesus and Gandhi, had no title at all.  But they influenced billions of people’s behaviors and billions of people willingly followed them (many still do).  Gandhi’s leadership ended the oppressive British rule over India, liberating hundreds of millions of people.

These two leaders also built their influence in exactly the same way.  They both focused on loving and serving the people around them and they had impeccable character.  I believe that there is no better way to build influence than this.  When people know that we truly care about them and want to help them, they are much more willing to follow us.  When they see that we consistently do the right thing in a caring way, even when it is very difficult to do, we inspire our followers by our example.

What are some ways you are leading by example, whether or not you have a title?

How focused are you on serving your people in ways that help them grow as human beings and achieve greater personal and professional success?

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