There are numerous reasons for starting a business, including pursuing a passion, wanting to set your own hours and wanting to make more money. But if you’re not committed to a larger purpose, all those reasons may not be enough for your business to succeed.
What Is a Commitment?
A commitment can be defined in three ways:
1. It gives you purpose. Let’s define a commitment as a greater purpose for your life that drives you forward every day. Many studies have shown that purpose even leads to longer life for men and women alike.
2. It’s never finished. A commitment is not, “I want to own a successful business,” because that doesn’t give you lifelong purpose. A commitment will never truly be finished, and you’ll work towards it for many years.
3. It’s personal. Although having a purpose in your business is important, your commitment is personal. It will affect all areas of your life, including business, and it will impact how your business grows.
What’s the difference between a goal and a commitment?
A goal is defined as a result that you aim for, define, plan for and then achieve. You have many short-term and long-term goals in life, but a commitment goes beyond even the most long-term goal. It’s not something you finish doing, but something you constantly work towards.
How does a commitment help your business?
It helps you focus. A lack of focus can be extremely detrimental to your business, not only from day to day but on a larger scale. To succeed in your business and complete each day’s, month’s and year’s goals, you need intense focus more so than a long period of focus.
Warren Buffet’s “2-List” strategy for focused attention is a perfect illustration of focus: defining your priorities and eliminating the rest. You write down your goals, and then circle the top five. Then you don’t just prioritize these — you eliminate the rest.
Commitments help you make that list and then define your top five. If you’re hyper-focused on a commitment, you can be focused on each of your business’s projects and goals, because they all lead to the one thing you’re most focused on. If something doesn’t align with your commitment, you eliminate it.
Commitment helps you set and achieve goals
A commitment is lifelong; it’s something you may never fully achieve. But you can set goals along the way to get you ever-closer to your commitment. And your business’s goals and success are intertwined with your commitment.
My leadership coach, Jose Bolanos, who trains leaders to form “noble commitments,” describes goals as “islands on the horizon.” Before you reach a shore, you will swim from island to island, focusing on something closer on your way to the far-off mainland.
These islands are steps towards your commitment, and these become your goals. Commitments matter to your business goals because they define what those goals will be and give them a larger purpose.
As a business owner, developing goals for yourself and your business will be easier when you create them in the context of a commitment. Instead of defining your success according to money, which as we know can be fickle, defining it based on a larger purpose will help you stay afloat in difficult times, and redirect accordingly.
Commitment gives your business a higher purpose
As I said before, having a higher purpose is important to business. Businesses with purpose are more successful, outperforming the stock market by 42 percent, according to the 2018 Global Leadership Forecast.
Because in theory, your business should be an extension of you and your life, your personal commitment should inform your business’s purpose and help it succeed. If your commitment was, “I want to impact others,” your business’s commitment should reflect this and put it into action.
Commitment makes you a better leader
Compartmentalizing your life won’t help your business succeed. Who you are and what you do as an individual should and does affect your professional life, and by extension the lives of others.
Having a personal commitment that you connect to your business’s purpose will intertwine your personal development and your company’s growth. As you work on yourself as an individual, you will become a better leader, because your purpose will be directly connected to your business’ vision.
How do you find and define a commitment?
Defining a commitment comes from answering three questions:
1. What do you want? Discovering your commitment comes from defining what you want. A commitment is going to be terrifying (and if it’s not, you may be doing something wrong) and require you to change.
3. Who does it benefit? It’s fine if the answer is just you for now, but you’ll find as you go that your commitment, especially as it becomes part of how you run your business, will begin to impact many people. If impacting people is part of your purpose, then this answer is even simpler.
Don’t be tempted to turn finding a commitment into a journey of self-discovery. Your business (and you) need a commitment sooner. Instead, define a commitment quickly, start working on it and evolve it.
Summary. Of all the interview questions job applicants prepare for, the most obvious ones sometimes get the least attention. Yes, you came ready to share your biggest flaw, your greatest strength, a moment when you shined, and a concept you learned, but what do you do…
Sometimes the toughest job interview questions are also the simplest and most direct. One you should always expect to hear and definitely prepare for:
“Why do you want to work here?”
Like a similarly problematic interview question — “Tell me about yourself” — “Why do you want to work here?” requires you to focus on a specific answer without any clues, contexts, or prompting from the interviewer. It’s a blank space — but that doesn’t mean you can wing it and fill it with just anything.
How to Answer “Why Do You Want to Work Here?”
Drawing from my 16 years of experience as a communications coach as well as someone who’s sat on both sides of the interview table many times, I recommend three basic approaches:
Express your personal passion for the employer’s product/service/mission.
Explain why you would enjoy the responsibilities of the role.
Describe how you can see yourself succeeding in the role, given your skills and experience.
You can use any combination of these three approaches so long as you keep your answer concise. Here’s how to tackle each approach effectively along with sample answers to use as a guide.
1. Express your personal passion for the employer’s product/service/mission.
Employers want to know you’re passionate about what they do, whether it takes the shape of a product, a service, a mission, or a brand. You can also connect your passion to the company’s core values, which can often be found on their website. Showing you’re passionate about the position is particularly important if you’re applying for a role at a nonprofit where the mission matches your personal values.
But how do you convey this enthusiasm? CEO consultant Sabina Nawaz offers useful tips in her HBR piece, “How to Show You’re Passionate in an Interview.” As she writes, “When you’re passionate about something, it tends to spill over into other aspects of your life.” Identify those examples in your own life and share them during your interview. Expressing enthusiasm is not about “display[ing] the kind of full-throated, table-thumping behaviors companies tend to equate with passion,” Sabina explains. It’s about conveying “what matters most to you.”
And remember to be clear about why you are passionate, not just that you are passionate. Simon Sinek has schooled us all on the importance of “why,” and it’s no less important in a job interview than it is in a sales call or CEO keynote.
Sample Answers
Here are examples of responses that effectively connect passion to mission.
“For most of my adult life, I’ve strongly supported X because I believe that Y…”
“X is very important to me in both my professional and personal life because I strongly believe that…”
“I’m very passionate about X and would be thrilled to work for an organization that subscribes to the same core values…”
2. Explain why you would enjoy the responsibilities of the role.
It’s no secret that we work harder, better, and longer when we enjoy the work, and what employer wouldn’t want that dedication from their staff? But it’s your responsibility to make that connection between job and joy clear. That connection can be as simple as “X is something I enjoy,” but expressing how or why you enjoy it makes that point even more valuable and memorable.
Sample Answers
Here are examples of responses that connect job to joy.
“I always enjoy helping other people learn — from my tutoring work in school to the training experiences I had at my last job — which is why I feel so fulfilled working in L&D.”
“I’ve always loved to write and edit — from my days at the college newspaper to the web content I worked on as an intern — so I’m excited to see that writing is a big part of this job.”
“Analyzing data has always been fun for me — the challenge of using numbers to tell a story and convey an idea — and I look forward to the data visualization work we’ll be doing on this team.”
3. Describe how you can see yourself succeeding in the role, given your skills and experience.
While the interviewer is hiring you for who you are and what you can do now, they’re also interested in what you can achieve in the future. After all, they’re not just hiring you; they’re investing in you.
Express confidence about your ability to succeed and grow in the role. Use phrases like “Given my experience in X, I can see myself succeeding…,” “I look forward to using my skills to…,” and “I think I will contribute by….” The key is to describe how your previous experience has prepared you to hit the ground running.
Sample Answers
Here are examples of responses that paint a peek at what may be.
“I can see myself succeeding in this position because I’ve done similar work in the past and know what it takes to engage these particular consumers.”
“I’ve found I work best in a collaborative environment, so I look forward to working with several departments to align on and achieve our goals.”
“After learning more about this job, I’m sure I can help you find ways to manage projects more efficiently and effectively.”
Combining the Three Approaches: Sample Answer
Here’s a sample answer using a hypothetical marketing position for a health care company where writing, creativity, and collaboration are key priorities:
I want to work here because, with physicians in my family, I’m passionate about helping people address their health challenges and make smart decisions about their bodies and their lives. I also love copywriting and diving into editorial strategy — especially in social media — and enjoy brainstorming with colleagues to come up with the best creative ideas. When I think about the needs of this role and the integrity of the corporate mission, I feel incredibly inspired and can see myself contributing in a big way.
Key Tip: Be Specific
As you develop your answer, understand that the more specific you are, the more powerfully your answer will resonate. Conversely, the vaguer you are, the more generic — or even canned — the response will seem.
In the example above, the writer alludes to health care professionals in their family, focuses on copywriting and editorial strategy — not just writing — and mentions brainstorming, a more specific form of collaboration. These are all examples of specificity that make the answer seem more personal and unique.
What Not to Say
It’s obvious how you shouldn’t answer the “Why do you want this job” question, but it bears repeating. Don’t say you want the job because:
You like the salary
You like the perks or benefits
You like the title
You want to work remotely or in a particular location
You couldn’t get another job you really wanted
Before your next interview, practice your response to “Why do you want to work here?” out loud, not just in your head. And keep in mind that the best answer is less about why you want them and more about why they should want you. If you convey passion, enthusiasm, and optimism with specificity, you’ll connect to the interviewer’s wish list in a way that will leave them thinking, “This is why we want you to work here.”
There comes a time in some people’s lives when their aspirations for their children begin to rival or even exceed their aspirations for themselves. It’s happened to me since I’ve become a parent myself. As a result, I’ve been on a years-long mission to collect as much science-based advice as possible regarding how to raise successful kids.
Here are five of the most interesting and useful strategies I’ve found and highlighted recently. The science suggests that if you want to do right by your kids, you should probably do these things.
1. Make them do chores.
Researchers at La Trobe University in Australia recently set out to determine whether children who do chores at home would develop better working memory, inhibition, and other success-predicting behaviors.
They broke chores into three categories: self-care, other care, and pet care. Writing in the peer-reviewed Australian Occupational Therapy Journal, they said their studies showed that kids who did self-care and other-care chores were in fact more likely to exhibit better academic performances and problem-solving skills.
But pet-care chores did nothing either way for the kids’ later development. Why not? Maybe it’s because pet care chores aren’t as strenuous as other chores, or maybe because the kids didn’t really view the kinds of things you have to do to take care of a pet dog (walk it, feed it, etc.) to be work. The bottom line, however? Make your kids do chores. They might not love the idea to start with, but you’ve got science on your side.
2. Teach them to be polite.
This one focuses on three specific words: please, thank you, and you’re welcome. Teaching kids to say “please” when they ask for something can reinforce their tendency to be polite, which makes them more persuasive when they’re older. Teaching them to say “thank you” habitually encourages gratitude, which stimulates happiness and makes stress easier to deal with.
And teaching them to say “you’re welcome” reinforces confidence by emphasizing that the things they do for others are worthy of thanks. (This is especially true when you juxtapose “you’re welcome” with other things people say in response to “thank you,” like “no worries!” or “no problem!”)
3. Work on their emotional intelligence.
Children who develop emotional intelligence also develop “a higher chance of graduating, getting a good job, and just being happy,” according to Rachael Katz and Helen Shwe Hadani, authors of The Emotionally Intelligent Child: Effective Strategies for Parenting Self-Aware, Cooperative, and Well-Balanced Kids.
There are many things you can do to develop emotional intelligence (many more listed here), but at the outset, model your good thinking and use of emotions for them, ask them for their ideas, and try not to judge. Oh, and remember that kids are just that: kids. It’s unfair often to expect them to react and respond to things like adults would (or at least, should!).
4. Steer them toward video games.
Wait, what? Tell them to play video games? Yes, indeed. A new study out of Europe that used a “massive” amount of data determined that kids who spend an above-average amount of time playing them wind up with higher IQs than kids who spend their screen time watching videos or scrolling through social media.
Kids today spent a massive amount of time glued to screens, on average. This study of 5,000 children at least suggests that if they’re going to be using screens that much, the higher the percentage of that time they spend on video games, the better.
In short, passion turned out to be far more predictive of whether kids were successful; while mindset and grit might have predicted that young people would continue attempting to succeed, it was passion that best predicted whether they actually would. “For people who are the best of the best in their field, passion is absolutely the biggest factor. It’s the essential key to success,” one researcher said.
So, when kids are kids, let them explore different things to determine the ones that they’re truly passionate about. That’s where they’re most likely to become the absolute best in their field. Look, no matter what any of us does as entrepreneurs, chances are our kids will be a very big part of our legacies.
That’s why I’m so drawn into these little hacks, and it’s why I’ve compiled an entire free e-book full of similar tips and tricks: How to Raise Successful Kids (7th Edition). There’s always another study with another interesting bit of information to consider. I read and share as many as I can, so you don’t have to look for them.
When someone says they want to “strike it rich,” they often mean with a once-in-a-lifetime event. Think, a lucky investment, winning the lottery, or selling an idea on Shark Tank that catapults them into the pantheon of millionairehood.
While it’s not impossible to get wealthy off a one-shot, the truth is that most “new money” millionaires didn’t get lucky. Instead, they built their wealth with smart financial planning, expert advice, financial literacy and goal setting.
And if that’s news to you, you’re far from alone. While the rich aren’t sitting on some big, unknown money secret, they don’t often go out of their way to educate the masses.
But we do.
Without further ado, here are the 14 secrets that the wealthy don’t want you to know about money – and how you can make them work for you.
Getting Started
1. Setting goals is the secret to getting started.
“Wealth” is a subjective term. If you’re living on $25,000 a year, then $1 million and an LA mansion may seem incredibly wealthy. But if you’re living in LA on $1 million a year, then wealthy probably looks more like $100 million and a garage full of expensive cars.
This discrepancy in perception and values are part of why it’s important to determine what “wealth” means to you – and then set goals to get there. For instance, you may decide you want to change careers, start a family or become a millionaire by 35. Then, it’s about devising an action plan with annual achievements to make your to-dos been-dones.
2. Always align your spending with your goals.
As you’re building wealth (and after), keep your spending in line with your goals. Know what you care about, be it attaining a lifestyle, achieving feats or passing on wealth. Then, take care to avoid wasting resources on things and activities that have no value to you – and invest heartily in education, hobbies, passions and goals that do.
Whether that’s forgoing restaurants while you take night classes or skipping the new car to buy a rental property, spending money on the things that advance your goals pays off in the long run.
3. A solid savings strategy bolsters success.
A savings strategy buffers your finances and increases your liquidity. While the goal is to save 15-20% of your income every month, beginning with just 1% is better than nothing!
One great way to ensure consistent savings is to automate depositing a portion of each paycheck into your savings accounts. Adding extra funds when you get a bonus, raise, or even Christmas presents can help you build wealth even faster.
You’ll also want to have a smaller, separate emergency account to cover unexpected expenses. Aim to build anywhere from 6-12 months’ worth of expenses in your emergency fund – and when you use it, replace it!
4. Keeping up with the Joneses is a one-way ticket to Poorville.
You might think that a lavish lifestyle is a true reflection of wealth – and for many, it is. But plenty of “wealthy” people drown in debt to keep up appearances. Meanwhile, those with true wealth often live frugally, invest often, and spend under their means.
The reason is simple: the desire to appear wealthy sabotages your goals and puts your money to work in dead-ends. Shrugging off the desire to keep up with the Joneses and focusing on your own wealth-building, not trying to show off, is the best way to ensure you can afford all the fancy toys you want later.
5. Hire a winning team.
One of the biggest “secrets” about wealthy people is that they rarely know what they’re doing. What they do know is that they can pay someone else to handle their affairs and dispense advice.
For instance, a fee-only financial adviser can point you to new money-making strategies, which your financial lawyer can vet for legal consequences before your tax professional minimizes your burden to Uncle Sam.
While the upfront cost seems prohibitive, investing in a support system now increases your chances of success later.
Making Money Work for You – Not Someone Else
6. Using other people’s time (and money) helps you get ahead.
Two of the best ways to become wealthy are to become your own boss and use other people’s money instead of your own. As an employee, you work to enrich your boss; and using your own capital limits your success to how much you can personally front.
But starting or buying a business, often with capital raised from banks or investors, accomplishes both goals at once. And if owning a business isn’t your forte, you can still use borrowed funds to invest in real estate, the stock market, or someone else’s big idea.
7. Fees eat success for breakfast.
Every time you pay a fee to manage your money or service a debt, you’re funding someone else’s path to wealth. Whether you pay banking fees, high-interest debt, foreign transaction fees, overdraft fees, ATM fees, commissions on investments, mutual fund expense ratios…
The point is, there are a lot of fees out there, and the more you pay, the less you have. Thus, when possible, opt for no-fee accounts, low-cost index funds, and 0% APR credit cards.
8. Watch your credit card usage (or avoid them entirely).
Taking out a credit card encourages living beyond your means and paying interest to do so. As such, many financial experts advise cutting up your cards, avoiding them in the first place, or only using them to further your goals. (For instance, if you use them to cover bills and pay off the balance immediately to build your credit).
If you do use credit cards, look for rewards cards that pay out in cashback or air miles, carry fraud protection, and have extra perks like built-in travel insurance. And never, ever take out a high-interest store credit card.
9. Charity is good for the soul – and your wallet.
Donating money or supplies to charitable causes doesn’t just further noble goals; it’s also good for your finances. If you itemize your tax returns, you can deduct charitable contributions to qualified organizations. And the more you can deduct, the less you’ll have to pay come tax time.
Investing: The True Secret to Wealth
10. Your money should work for you.
One of capitalism’s unfortunate realities is that working hard doesn’t always equate success. If your only income is trading time for money, your earnings potential is capped at the number of hours you work in a week.
But the wealthy understand capitalism’s dirty secret: the true path to success lies in passive income. Whether that’s investing in stocks, buying real estate, or funding someone else’s business plan, anything that pays an “unearned” profit accelerates your earnings potential beyond the hours in a day.
11. Every minute you waste is one less minute you’re wealthy.
In investing, your most valuable asset is time. The earlier you start putting your money to work in the markets, the longer your capital can accrue compound interest. Even just $25 per week is better than nothing!
On a similar note, it’s important to distinguish between time and timing in the stock market. While one major investment can catapult you to riches, you’re far more likely to lose money than make it big betting wildly.
The wealthy understand that riding out an “unsexy” buy-and-hold strategy – making regular contributions into a diversified portfolio – is one of the most reliable ways to get rich.
12. Allocation is key.
When you invest in the stock market, how you allocate funds carries significant consequences. Typically, it’s a good idea to keep dividend-paying bonds, stocks, and mutual funds in your tax-advantaged retirement accounts, while individual securities reside in your brokerage account.
This strategy has three advantages. To start, it utilizes government-sponsored tax strategies and spreads your wealth to minimize impacts in retirement. At the same time, diversifying your holdings across accounts and assets helps ensure you’re not too heavily invested in one area.
13. Diversification gets you everywhere.
Investing in stocks, bonds, and mutual funds is a great way to kickstart your wealth, but it’s not the end of the road. As your wealth grows, expanding into illiquid or physical assets, such as real estate, gold, and even artwork, can help you secure your wealth.
Though these investments cost more upfront and are more difficult to offload, there’s a reason that being a real estate tycoon is equated with riches. And because these assets aren’t as susceptible to market swings, they can pay off even when other investments falter.
14. As your wealth and confidence grow, turn to private markets.
One of the greatest secrets of the ultra-wealthy is that the stock market gets your feet wet – but private markets hold the real wealth.
Business ownership, angel investing, and other private equity moves come with greater risk than stock market investments. But their potentially higher returns and diversification do wonders for your portfolio, especially if you’re hell-bent on generating true wealth.
Critique of the Gotha Program, Karl Marx. Part I: “Quite apart from the analysis so far given, it was in general a mistake to make a fuss about so-called distribution and put the principal
Are you exhausted from rushing through life doing the same monotonous things over and over again? Perhaps those things that were once meaningful now seem vacuous, and the passion has burned out. Do you feel that pleasures are short-lived and ultimately disappointing, that your life is a series of fragments punctuated with occasional ecstasies that flare up and then, like a firework, fade into darkness and despair? Perhaps you are lonely or pine for past loves. Or you feel empty and lost in the world, or nauseous and sleep-deprived.
Maybe you are still looking for a reason to live, or you have too many confused reasons, or you have forgotten what your reasons are. Congratulations – you’re having an existential crisis. Sometimes, the questions ‘Why am I here?’ and ‘What’s it all for?’ haunt you gently like a soft wingbeat with barely a whisper, but sometimes they can feel as if they are asphyxiating your entire being.
Whatever form your existential crisis takes, the problem, as the Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard (1813-55) saw it, was that living without passion amounts to not existing at all. And that’s bad for all of us because, without passion, rampant waves of negativity poison the world. Kierkegaard thought that one of the roots of this problem of a world without passion is that too many people – his contemporaries but, by extension, we too – are alienated from a society that overemphasises objectivity and ‘results’ (profits, productivity, outcomes, efficiency) at the expense of personal, passionate, subjective human experiences.
In his journal, Kierkegaard wrote: ‘What I really need is to be clear about what I am to do, not what I must know … the 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 this truth, this passion, was what Kierkegaard thought could unite an existence, overcome melancholia, and help you to become more fulfilled. Kierkegaard had some ideas about how to harness the anguish of what we have come to think of as an existential crisis. Reading Kierkegaard won’t necessarily solve all problems, but it can help you understand some of the sources of your malaise and to see new possibilities for your life.
Sometimes, Kierkegaard is called the first existential philosopher because of his emphasis on the individual and subjective experience. Existential philosophers stress freedom of choice and responsibility for the consequences of your choices, and certainly one of the quintessential existentialist philosophers, Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-80), found this vein of thinking in Kierkegaard’s writing. For existentialists, it’s up to you to decide the kind of person you want to be and how to live your life meaningfully.
But these choices leaven despair because of the pressure that comes when you realise you’re free and responsible and have no one else to blame, no excuses for your behaviour. Anxiety, or despair, Kierkegaard wrote, is the ‘dizziness of freedom’. Despair is a kind of vertigo we get when overwhelmed with possibilities and choices. Kierkegaard described it as a similar feeling to standing on the edge of an abyss. You might be afraid of falling, but anxious when you realise that jumping is a possibility.
We are forced to make choices all the time, whether we like it or not. Consider toothpaste: there are so many types and it’s difficult to choose the one that’s best for your teeth. Whitening or stain-removal? Cavity protection, anti-plaque or enamel repair? What’s the difference? Why isn’t there one that does everything? It’s hard to know what the outcome of choosing one over the other will be. While choosing the wrong toothpaste probably won’t devastate your life, when you face more profound choices –
Such as what to study at college, whom to marry, whether to end a relationship, which career to pursue, whether to try to save someone who is drowning, if you should turn off a loved one’s life-support system – the closer you come to the edge of the abyss, the dizzier you will feel about your possibilities and responsibilities. Sometimes you live in ignorant bliss about your options but, once you become aware of them, wooziness is inevitable. As Kierkegaard wrote in TheConcept of Anxiety (1844):
He whose eye happens to look down into the yawning abyss becomes dizzy. But what is the reason for this? It is just as much in his own eye as in the abyss, for suppose he had not looked down.
Sometimes, the dizziness of your freedom is so overwhelming that you might feel compelled to step back, to shrink from making a choice. Making no choice, or letting someone else choose for you, can feel easier. The greater the stakes, the deeper the abyss, and the further you have to fall if you misstep. But your personal growth depends on your ability to handle big choices yourself and not to shirk them. For Kierkegaard, bravely facing up to our choices and learning to channel our anxiety in constructive ways is vital: ‘Whoever has learned to be anxious in the right way has learned the ultimate.’
During his lifetime, Kierkegaard made authorities nervous because he was an iconoclast who encouraged people to think for themselves. He challenged readers to break themselves free from the brainwashing of churches and community groups that preached what to do and what to believe, particularly the Lutheran Church of Denmark, with which he was at loggerheads for much of his later life. Kierkegaard also might have been deeply suspicious of today’s social media and advertising that tells us where to spend our money and time in the elusive pursuit of happiness. In a criticism that seems to have pre-empted online trolls, he proposed that ‘the crowd’ or the public is ‘untruth’ because it enables people to be anonymous, irresponsible, cowardly, and creates an impersonal atmosphere.
Kierkegaard was a Christian, ‘albeit a maverick Christian’, as the philosopher Gary Cox put it, because Kierkegaard emboldened people to develop a personal relationship with God instead of unreflectively assuming what the clergy sermonised. For Kierkegaard, living the truth is infinitely more important than objectively knowing it. At Kierkegaard’s funeral, the archdeacon who gave the eulogy told the huge crowd not to misunderstand or accept what Kierkegaard had written because he went too far and didn’t know it.
But you don’t need to be religious to glean practical wisdom from Kierkegaard’s work. He inspired many atheist philosophers. Sartre, as I’ve mentioned, deeply admired Kierkegaard. He called him an ‘anti-philosopher’ because Kierkegaard sought ‘a first beginning’ by pushing back against boring and abstract philosophies, such as G W F Hegel’s and Immanuel Kant’s, which were very popular during Kierkegaard’s time.
Kierkegaard wrote in unconventional ways. He was witty and came up with quirky pseudonyms such as ‘Hilarius Bookbinder’. Kierkegaard wrote pseudonymously not because he wanted to hide his authorship – pretty much everyone knew which books he’d authored – but to distance himself from his work; to challenge us to question the ideas he presents; to take responsibility for interpreting the text’s meaning; to inspire us to come to our own conclusions; and to create our own subjective truths. The strategy is called ‘indirect communication’. The effect of Kierkegaard’s work is that, instead of dictating and moralizing, he provokes – because you can’t tell if he’s being serious or not – and invites readers to dance with ideas.
Kierkegaard uses indirect communication in one of his most famous works, Either/Or (1843), a fictional collection of letters and essays written by different characters and presenting different points of view: aesthetic, ethical, and religious. These three views, or phases, provide a possible framework for how to endure and overcome an existential crisis. The phases are not rigid steps, but rather offer a scaffolding of possible experiences on an existential journey to reinvigorate our passion for life.
Think it through
Enjoy the aesthetic elements of your life
Kierkegaard suggested that the first mode of living is the aesthetic sphere. Aesthetic living is fun and impulsive, focused on sensual satisfaction, like a child who is discovering the world with awe and wonder. The aesthetic sphere is a beautiful phase of life, passionate and sparkling with possibilities. Consider the thrill of falling in love, the delight of seeing your all-time favourite musician live in concert, the elation of sharing a delicious bottle of wine or meal with a good friend, or the exhilaration of skinny-dipping on a whim. These experiences can be intoxicating, extraordinarily interesting, and make you feel like your life is transformed if you submit to them.
Don Giovanni – the protagonist of Mozart’s opera Don Giovanni (1787), a legendary seducer who is also sometimes known as Don Juan – is, Kierkegaard suggested, the ultimate archetype of the aesthetic mode because he lives for immediate sexual gratification and sensuality. Don Giovanni is a player. He is handsome, seductive and exciting. Women find him irresistible: he has slept with more than 2,000 women whose names he records in his not-so-little black book. Don Giovanni seeks pleasure above all else, and dances through his hedonistic life.
How can you live aesthetically? Make your life as interesting and enjoyable as possible. Fall in love a lot. Rotate crops – meaning that, if you’re bored with your life, don’t be afraid to leave behind what doesn’t serve you and start planting seeds for fresh projects and new relationships that energize you. Be impulsive. Live for and in the moment. Cultivate arbitrariness for the sheer pleasure of it: go to the theatre but watch only the middle of the performance; pick up a book and read a random passage. Enjoy experiences in disruptive ways, different than what others are spoon-feeding you. Practise the art of remembering the joys of your past. Practise the art of forgetting unpleasantness by focusing on the silver linings of your misfortunes. Burn the candle of your life at both ends.
Make existential commitments to live ethically
However, an aesthete’s actions can be self-sabotaging, because, as Kierkegaard pseudonymously writes:
As when one skims a stone over the surface of the water, it skips lightly for a time, but as soon as it stops skipping, instantly sinks down into the depths, that is how Don Giovanni dances over the abyss, jubilant in his brief respite.
Don Giovanni gets his comeuppance in the end when a ghost in the form of a statue of the Commendatore, the father of one of his conquests and a man whom Don Giovanni has killed in a fight, drags him down to hell. You might not be dragged to hell by a ghost, but living purely in the aesthetic mode – though it might offer temporary respite – puts you on the fast track to a further existential crisis.
Why is this? The answer is that the aesthetic lifestyle demands a high price. Aesthetic living can be a source of existential despair when you become overly dependent on its distractions to fill the voids in your life. The aesthetic mode is dangerous when you live in a state of immediacy and instant gratification, constantly overindulging in such pleasures as social media scrolling, shopping, television, busyness, alcohol, drugs, serial romancing or casual sex. At a certain point, these activities cease to offer the enjoyment they promise, and the world turns grey.
Wallowing in such distractions only entrenches your alienation more deeply and pushes you more squarely into dungeons of unhappiness. As soon as you’ve satisfied one pleasure, you’re chasing the dragon of newness for the next high. Sometimes you’re so excited about taking risks on new possibilities, so in love with starting new projects and relationships, that you’re constantly flitting from one to the next, never finishing anything. Constantly on the move, you are like an ocean wave, surging powerfully, cyclically, with raw primal energy.
But waves froth and fizzle away indefinitely. If you’re constantly and busily churning through life, your existence amounts to a sum of moments without any real cohesion. Excitement fades and leaves in its wake disappointment and loneliness. The aesthete in Either/Or is envious of insects that die after copulation because they are able to indulge in the pinnacle of sexual ecstasy and then escape life’s greatest anticlimax – the ‘petite mort’ becomes a real one. An aesthetic life will inevitably leave you morbidly tired.
Kierkegaard’s aesthete is plagued with such soul-crushing tedium and torturous despair that he is numb. Because he isn’t truly engaged in life, he lives as if he were dead. Living void of passion makes him feel both chained by his anxieties and also cast adrift, like a spider plunging and flailing around, unable to grasp hold of anything:
What is to come? What does the future hold? I don’t know, I have no idea. When from a fixed point a spider plunges down as is its nature, it sees always before it an empty space in which it cannot find a footing however much it flounders. That is how it is with me: always an empty space before me, what drives me on is a result that lies behind me. This life is back-to-front and terrible, unendurable.
So if living aesthetically can only be a short-term solution to an existential crisis, how can you go beyond that and live ethically? Stop skimming over life like that stone. Slow down and do what you can to carve out pockets of time for reflection. Cultivate the space to become less robotic. And stop using aesthetic activities as a distraction from facing up to your existential despair.
‘Despair!’ Kierkegaard’s pseudonym writes. Despair is the entry price for transitioning from the aesthetic to the ethical sphere. Learning to love despair is an adventure in moving to a higher mode of self-development. Don’t hide from your existential crisis because choosing despair means choosing yourself. To cosy up to your despair is to choose against being beholden to your animalistic, aesthetic impulses, and towards becoming a definite and solidly grounded individual. Choosing yourself means making meaningful commitments, such as dedicating yourself to a vocation. It means setting goals and sticking to them. Dodging commitment means you’re simply hovering over life, not truly living, and as empty of substance as those waves.
To choose despair also means to choose humanity. In the ethical mode, you recognize that you live in a world with other people, that they matter, and that every choice you make must reflect a responsibility towards them. You act with honesty, open-heartedness, understanding and generosity. You focus more on what you can give to others and less on what you’re getting out of them. To cultivate your humanity, go people-watching for an hour and consider the beauty in each individual. Appreciate every person you meet in their particularity – their tasks, challenges and triumphs. Join a club and build a community of friends. Act more charitably. Help people. Commit to making the world better for others.
Choosing this kind of despair also prepares you for marriage in a way that a life of seeking sensual gratification is unlikely to. Getting married – ideally to your first love, in Kierkegaard’s analysis – reflects an ethical decision because marriage is a serious, definitive and life-changing choice. Marriage calls for a more sophisticated awareness of your existence than a life driven purely by sexual instincts. Sure, you can always get divorced, but Kierkegaard’s ethicist suggests getting married helps people take love more seriously than an aesthete would, by focusing on creating a relationship that’s stable and constant. In the ethical sphere, you actively rejuvenate the love with your partner, instead of skipping to the next relationship for thrills and a confidence boost as soon as your first one gets tough.
Face your existential abyss bravely because, Kierkegaard suggested: ‘Anxiety is the organ through which the subject appropriates sorrow and assimilates it,’ and ‘indeed I would say that it is only when the individual has the tragic that he becomes happy.’ The key to the ethical sphere is to use your despair to galvanise you to overcome your sorry dark states, refresh your enthusiasm for living, and arouse your appetite for something more meaningful in your life.
You develop yourself by being patient with existence, seeing the beauty in stability, and recognising that you are your own source of happiness and creativity. You don’t need to seek excitement constantly from new external stimuli as the aesthete does. You don’t need a dance floor to dance, to enjoy life; your dance floor is inside of you, wherever you are. You nurture the ethical attitude by living intentionally (not accidentally, like the aesthete), and living each day as if it were your Judgment Day.
Leap to faith
The ethical mode can help stabilise you, but it might not be enough to resolve your existential crisis. Living ethically might even be another source of existential calamity because fulfilling your social duties can be onerous. Kierkegaard’s ethicist says of the duty of marriage: ‘Its uniformity, its total uneventfulness, its incessant vacuity, which is death and worse than death.’ Marriage doesn’t make love stay. People change and break promises, making any commitment insecure. Given how many other people are unjust and immoral, being ethical might also throw you deeper into despair. And sinking too heavily into reflection can thwart your enjoyment of life. Philosophers tend to be guilty of overthinking, and Kierkegaard’s aesthete quips: ‘What seems so difficult to philosophy and the philosophers is to stop.’
The only way truly to conquer an existential crisis is with a leap. A leap is what Kierkegaard calls an ‘inward deepening’, which recognises that the world is uncertain, but you can make a bold choice about the kind of life you want to lead. A leap is beyond the realm of feelings (aesthetic sphere) and commitments (ethical sphere). A leap is an act of will to transform your life. It’s the decision to design an existence to which you can enthusiastically devote yourself and that will uplift and sustain your being.
Kierkegaard’s leap was guided by the commandment to ‘love thy neighbour’. In Works of Love (1847), written under Kierkegaard’s real name, he proposes that universal love, or agapē, is the secret to happiness because it overcomes the fleetingness and insecurity of aesthetic and ethical relationships. Love is Ariadne’s thread of life because, as long as you love, as long as you commit yourself to being a loving person, you’ll be safe from being hurt and alone. Kierkegaard thought that this sort of unwavering faith reflects a supremely developed human being.
Perhaps you live in the aesthetic or ethical modes of life, and you’re perfectly happy and see no need to leap. Or perhaps you inhabit these realms and find comfort in your melancholy. But the rub with existential despair is that, once you have caught a glimpse of it, intentionally or not, it’s extraordinarily difficult to unsee it. If that’s you, Kierkegaard’s ideas might be a way to help you find your footing. But the only thing that will alleviate an existential crisis is to find the truth that is true for you, the subjective truth, the propulsion to leap that lies in the innermost depths of your heart. If you’re not sure what your subjective truth is, Kierkegaard suggested: ‘Ask yourself and keep on asking until you find the answer.’
Ultimately, though, a passionately lived life isn’t about an either/or choice. You can’t be all frivolous or all serious all the time. A fulfilling life is about enjoyment and ethical commitment and leaping. Your life needs some of the sort of energy, pleasures and possibilities that Don Giovanni’s life exhibits (though not necessarily indulging these in the ways he does), otherwise the world would be very dull. And the world is boring without him. You also need something of the ethical: you need to acknowledge how your choices affect other people and to take responsibility for your actions, otherwise you’ll end up alone and sad.
You also need a leap to find that thing that you can devote yourself to that unites the splinters of your life, even if, for you, that isn’t a leap into religious faith. The point is to see these different dimensions of life, the ruts you might be falling into, the potential sources of ennui and malaise that stem from the way you live your life. But, ultimately, it’s up to you to choose how you juggle these spheres and how you spark your own fire to bind the fragments of your life together into a coherent synthesis. That’s the point. It’s for you to shape your life.
Dennis Marcellino (1996). Why Are We Here?: The Scientific Answer to this Age-old Question (that you don’t need to be a scientist to understand). Lighthouse Pub. ISBN978-0-945272-10-6.
Scott Campbell, Paul W. Bruno (eds.), The Science, Politics, and Ontology of Life-Philosophy, Bloomsbury, 2013, p. 8.
Michael Chase, Stephen R. L. Clark, Michael McGhee (eds.), Philosophy as a Way of Life: Ancients and Moderns – Essays in Honor of Pierre Hadot, John Wiley & Sons, 2013, p. 107.
Further reading
William James and other essays on the philosophy of life, Josiah Royce
J. M. Keynes (1936), The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, Chapter 12. (New York: Harcourt Brace and Co.).
Bulow, Jeremy I.; Geanakoplos, John D.; Klemperer, Paul D. (June 1985). “Multimarket Oligopoly: Strategic Substitutes and Complements”. Journal of Political Economy. 93 (3): 488–511. doi:10.1086/261312. S2CID154872708.
Gordy, Michael B.; Howells, Bradley (July 2006). “Procyclicality in Basel II: Can we treat the disease without killing the patient?”. Journal of Financial Intermediation. 15 (3): 395–417. doi:10.1016/j.jfi.2005.12.002.
Kaufman, George G.; Scott, Kenneth E. (2003). “What Is Systemic Risk, and Do Bank Regulators Retard or Contribute to It?”. The Independent Review. 7 (3): 371–391. JSTOR24562449.
Dorn, N. (1 January 2010). “The Governance of Securities: Ponzi Finance, Regulatory Convergence, Credit Crunch”. British Journal of Criminology. 50 (1): 23–45. doi:10.1093/bjc/azp062.
Kothari, Vinay (2010). Executive Greed: Examining Business Failures that Contributed to the Economic Crisis. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.[page needed]
Craig Burnside, Martin Eichenbaum, and Sergio Rebelo (2008), ‘Currency crisis models‘, New Palgrave Dictionary of Economics, 2nd ed.
R. Cooper (1998), Coordination Games. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Krugman, Paul (1979). “A Model of Balance-of-Payments Crises”. Journal of Money, Credit and Banking. 11 (3): 311–325. doi:10.2307/1991793. JSTOR1991793.
Morris, Stephen; Shin, Hyun Song (1998). “Unique Equilibrium in a Model of Self-Fulfilling Currency Attacks”. The American Economic Review. 88 (3): 587–597. JSTOR116850.
Banerjee, A. V. (1 August 1992). “A Simple Model of Herd Behavior”. The Quarterly Journal of Economics. 107 (3): 797–817. doi:10.2307/2118364. JSTOR2118364.
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