Margie Warrell - Stop Playing Safe

Our brains are hard-wired to avoid risk. We have an inbuilt antenna on constant alert for potential threats that might disrupt our status quo (even if it's a miserable status quo). It's why we're still here and many species that roamed the African plains 100 000 years ago are not. But we're not just talking physical safety. We're talking emotional safety too. Embedded into our psychological DNA is a deep, instinctive desire to avoid social rejection or humiliation and steer well clear of situations that might dint our pride or wound our ego. Our ego is as thirsty as it is fragile.

It's why so many people spend so much of their lives not taking the very actions that would change what they don't like about their lives. Why they stay in jobs they hate or in relationships that leave them lonely. It's also why people in leadership roles often make over-cautious decisions and instead act to shore up their power and protect their pride. I'm sure you've witnessed this as often as I have.

It's also why, before we move any further into this book, it's important for you to identify what you care about more than protecting your ego or your short-term comfort. If you can't do that, you'll never risk it.

For the sake of what will you be brave?

That is, why should you bother pursuing challenges that stretch you? Why stick your neck out, have that brave conversation or make that big ask? Why risk losing the comfortable familiarity of your life right now?

To answer this question, you need to reflect not just on what you want in your career–business–life, but who you want to become by what you do each day.

In today’s superficial selfie culture, where so many get sucked into a daily wrestling match with their fear of being left out or left behind, connecting to a deeper purpose that transcends the trivial and temporary has become ‘mission critical’. Only when we connect to a cause that transcends our ego’s need for status can we evolve to something higher.

Psychiatrist Viktor Frankl, the only member of his family to survive the Nazi concentration camps, devoted his life to understanding man's need for meaning and the power of purpose.

Frankl bore witness not only to the murder of his extended family, but to the death of thousands of men who were unable to survive the barbaric conditions in which they found themselves. However, he also saw men whose resolve to live enabled them to fight off despair, defy death and survive long enough to bear witness to the brutality and deprivation forced upon them.

His experiences in World War II and thereafter led him to believe that the power of the human spirit can only be fully unleashed when our purpose for living transcends merely surviving.

A clear sense of purpose enables you to focus your efforts away from distracted busyness and zero-calorie, self-absorbed activities that do not feed the soul, towards those activities that do. Nowhere is this more important than in how you employ your skills, talents and time throughout your work, and indeed your life.

You have everything — yes, everything — it takes to achieve whole new levels of fulfilment in your work and to positively impact the lives of everyone around you, directly and indirectly. But doing so will require you to make a deep commitment to refuse to give in to the myriad fear-laden forces that pull so many clever, creative and capable people into the crowded ranks of mediocrity.

It's conditional on you daring to take a risk — to lay your pride and vulnerability on the line for the sake of a nobler cause. To make your own personal pledge not to let fear hold the reins in your aspirations, in your conversations and in your daily actions.

What you don’t have right now — position, power, status, skills — pales in comparison to all that you do have. Stand tall in your worth and embrace your one-of-a-kind brand of brilliance. There are things that will never be done if you do not do them. So if not now, then when? And if not you, then who? Your journey to this point in time has landed you in the perfect place to make the difference your difference makes.

Back in the 1960s Viktor Frankl said that ever more today people have the means to live but not the meaning to live for. The trendline has not improved. Studies have found that once we earn enough to have our basic needs fulfilled, extra money adds only incrementally to our happiness. What a tragedy it is that so many people spend so much of their lives desperate to be doing something other than what they are doing.

Little wonder that a study in the Harvard Business Review reported that more than 90 per cent of employees would be willing to trade a percentage of their lifetime earnings for greater meaning in their work. When asked for the specifics, 2000+ respondents — workers across all ages and salary groups — said that they would forgo an average of 23 per cent of their future lifetime earnings in order to secure a meaningful job until they retire.

We all need a ‘reason for being’ that transcends the superficial, that taps into the deep human yearning to leave the world a little better off for our time here; to have lived a life that mattered even if our name was never put in lights and our story never etched in history.

As a boy, my dad spent several years living in a corrugated-iron shed at the water's edge along the south-east coastline of Australia. (It's a pretty but little-known place, without even its own postcode, called Nungurner, if you care to look it up.) Dad fondly recalls those years, living barefoot and subsisting off the land and lake, among the happiest of his life. Every day my ‘nana’ would cook the fish they caught in a camp oven on the sand beside their shed. Every night, they slept in the rafters since, when the tide came in, their sand floor became the lake.

When Dad was 13 his parents bought a small dairy farm and a few years later, at 16, he left school to work on it. He spent most of the next 50 years milking cows — every morning and evening — and only just making ends meet and raising his seven kids (I'm number two). A man of deep faith, Dad often prayed to God to help him find if there was a deeper purpose to his life beyond being a humble ‘dairy cocky’ as he called himself. He said it was not until his 50s that he realised he'd been living his purpose all along — being a loving husband and father, and a generous member of his local church and rural community.

Now well in his 80s, Dad is back living by the water's edge just a few steps from the ‘red shed’ he lived in as a boy. Whenever I visit my parents, it's near guaranteed that Dad will tell me at some point during my stay — often over one of the many pots of tea we share or out fishing in his old boat — that he feels like the richest man in all the world. While Dad is far from wealthy in a material sense, his gratitude and love for his life and family connect him to a more meaningful sense of wealth than money alone can ever buy.

Given most of us live with creature comforts that our parents, much less grandparents, could not have imagined, the answer to a more rewarding life cannot be found by chasing more money, but by finding greater meaning. As Lynne Twist, author of The Soul of Money, shared on my Live Brave podcast: ‘Living from a space that more is better just leaves us on a chase with no end and a race without a winner.’ If we think that money is the answer to meaning, then even too much is never enough. After all, there'll always be someone with a bigger yacht.