Are you pursuing goals worthy of a human life?
Primary and secondary goals
To begin, I would make a distinction between primary and secondary goals.
Primary goals are those worthy of your life. These have to do with your purpose, your calling, the reason you have been placed on this planet. They often focus on caring for others beyond yourself.
Secondary goals are not sufficient for a human life. They have to do with your lifestyle, your interests, the pursuits you believe will make your life enjoyable.
Once I turn to concrete examples, you and I are unlikely to agree on which goals are primary and which are secondary, but allow me to try and illustrate this distinction.
Becoming a millionaire by the age of 30 is not worthy of your life, but within the context of your calling it may be a perfectly appropriate secondary goal.
Commitment to weekly participation in a community of faith can be worthy of your life when it contributes to your sense of purpose and calling, helping you to see why you specifically have been placed on this planet, and allowing you to serve others in some meaningful way.
Why does this distinction matter? It reveals your priorities, influences the investment of your time, and determines how you interact with others - both those you love and those who appear briefly along your journey.
Hypocrisy isn't striving for more than you can achieve in this lifetime
The people I find attractive are those who are pursuing a life larger than what they have yet learned to live. They may be teenagers or senior citizens. This is not about the size of your influence or Twitter following, it is about growth, learning, willingness to change, and a commitment to contributing to the lives of others.
The danger for some is that vision exceeds their reach and so they will call people to live lives they themselves have not yet lived and may never live. To some this smacks of hypocrisy.
Hypocrisy, for me, is more about the arrogance of self-deception and the façade one erects for the benefit of others. It contrasts with the humility of realizing there is more to life than we are capable of living fully, and that this is still worth pursuing and calling others to pursue.
When you pay $10 to tour the Vanderbilt mansion in New York, you cannot expect full access to the grounds and building. As the website notes, when it comes to the basement, you will see only a portion.
Yet somehow in our intrusive media culture we expect to be given full-access tours of people's lives. We accuse them of hypocrisy if they retain some privacy, and then accuse them of hypocrisy when we are granted access and see defects that detract from our surface impression.
All of us have elements of our lives that we are working to improve, but which in their current state detract from our overall purpose and image. Some level of impression management is appropriate and to be expected.
This is the distinction I make between parents who want their children to live better lives (in every sense) and those who call their children to live lives better than they are willing to live. The former provide loving encouragement, while the latter are hypocrites.
Each month my valediction reads: "Remember, I'm committed to your professional and personal success!" I have no qualms about helping clients pursue secondary goals, but am interested that such goals fit within a larger perspective that gives their lives meaning and purpose.
