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I wanted to talk to you about the link between meaning, moral courage and gratitude. Just a few days ago, I was re-reading Viktor Frankl’s perennial bestseller Man’s Search for Meaning. In the book, Viktor Frankl says that life is not about seeking pleasure like Freud once said, and life is not about seeking power like Alfred Adler once said, but life is about searching for meaning. Frankl explains that meaning can come from work that’s in service of others in a meaningful way, it can come from loving or caring for someone else, or it can be found by finding moral courage through difficult times.
Practicing gratitude is not just giving gratitude to positive things but giving gratitude to negative things. True growth happens when people acknowledge and are grateful for the ways they’ve gotten through moments of difficulty. Finding courage through adversity results in greater hope, pride, optimism and self-confidence. This is especially true of entrepreneurs who consistently need to find meaning and courage through difficult times.
A few weeks ago, I found a tremendous moment of meaning. I was on the phone with my mother and we were talking about how my uncle’s health was slowly in decline. I told her that I would fly in, rent a car and drive my dad and her sister to go see him in the hospital. My mom was rather shocked that I would drop everything going on leading up to my company’s book launch to fly down and be with them, but nothing else mattered to me except being there for my dad. With both parents in their 70s, it was my time to step up to be there for the family.
I put my dad and his sister in a rental car, and we drove up to North Carolina to make the difficult decision about the remainder of my uncle’s life. Not only was it the perfect goodbye that our family needed, but it was an opportunity for me to show moral courage to my family, and for that I’m grateful. My family has seen me grow up and at my worst of times: spoiled, entitled, enabled, insecure and completely lost. But the hard conversations we navigated together and the mature decisions we made gave me the opportunity to be there for my family when they needed me most. I was able to demonstrate to my family the moral courage I possess, as I step up into leadership of the next generation of our family.
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Moral courage is the willingness to do things in the face of forces that would lead a person to act in some other way.
When difficult times are happening in your life, it’s easy to turn a blind eye. It’s easy to pretend like they’re not happening. But life requires you to stand up with courage and find meaning in the ways you’ve overcome adversity. See, giving gratitude for negative times like this develops the resilience needed to get through further trying times. So once you find meaning in one moment of adversity, it just gets easier after that. Life isn’t just about picture-perfect moments and moments of pleasure. It’s about true, meaningful connection through life’s adversity.
The truth is, your trauma is different from my trauma. Your suffering is different from my suffering, but we share similar emotions through that. And that’s when we connect the best. As a creative, I encourage you to look at your life and observe where you are sacrificing moral courage in favor of short- or quick-term gains. Where in life have you taken the easy path, and not the path that requires courage and bravery?
As an entrepreneur, you’re going to face many challenging times along the journey.
The key to leading your team is not to take the shortest path for overcoming those challenging times, where you would sacrifice your morals to win. But it’s to maintain integrity, even if the journey becomes a longer one. One of the things we can do as entrepreneurs is to clearly define our values. By knowing and defining your values, you can filter decisions through when times are tough. If times are tough and you sacrifice your values to get through them, you’re out of moral integrity. But if times are tough, and you hold strong to your core values to get through, you’re in complete alignment. Always know that entrepreneurship is a long path, so don’t sacrifice integrity in the short run.
As a creative person, you should actually know that when you take the path of bravery and courage, you will actually become inspired to perform your best work.
The pleasure you seek by getting that next promotion or your next social media like will pale in comparison to the meaning you will find by stepping up and doing what’s right. Go out and seek those moments of courage in your life and I can promise you a life of meaning. Life isn’t supposed to look pretty. It’s filled with hard times like this, and we get to choose how we respond to those events.
