I love what Emily Esfahani Smith says. She is someone I can always count on, much like Brené Brown, to speak very authentically, with a powerful, conscious heart. Emily Esfahani Smith is a researcher and author. The findings that she speaks about are much of what I have noticed in my own explorations and trials and tribulations of experiencing meaning in life. I am grateful also for the interviewer who goes in rapid pace to ensure that Emily covers a lot of ground in useful depth of her knowledge in this area. I truly hope you enjoy this amazing interview.
I ran into this very nice talk, and included some great quotes below:
“…for a life to be meaningful, you cant keep looking at the life. You have to see how that life is placed in larger, broader context.”
“…a life that is rich in happiness and rich in meaning….theologian Frederick Buechner I think would label that: finding your calling.”
“Your calling, Buechner says, is that place where your deep gladness, and the world’s deep hunger, meets. Your deep gladness is about you, about what makes you engaged and alive.”
“Finding your calling is discovering what it is that makes you feel alive. And then taking those gifts and skills and moving them out into the world to feed the world’s hunger.”
“…the tension we feel between what we want and what the world needs, is in fact something we don’t want to eliminate, but instead we want to encourage and cultivate.”
“When the world pushes and presses and prods and occasionally pummels you, it is in those moments that you can begin to imagine something different. You need the world and all its adversity, just as desperately as the world needs you.”
“To lead a happy and meaningful life, is to understand the tension that exists between what we want and what the world needs, and to recognize that tension as the gift that it is.”
