Luciano Attolico interviews Filippo Passerini
4 May 2018
The 20 Principles of Lean Lifestyle Change
3 June 2019
“You have to trust in something – your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.“
Steve Jobs
Having a purpose is a specificity of man. We are the only species capable of reflecting on the reason for our existence. However, most of our daily activities are not infrequently devoid of any real, profound purpose. We often confuse the accumulation of knowledge or money, material objects, skills and career advancement as a purpose, but they are two different things.
The energy that a spiritual goal can release, a purpose all our own, is unique and comes from having served a cause greater than our short-term interest. What would you choose to do if you were given the opportunity to devote 10 or 20% of your time to develop a project of your own?
Even just thinking regularly about what really satisfies you can be a source of great inspiration and motivation.
“Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma – which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of other’s opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.”
Steve Jobs
Steve Jobs: an example of Lean Lifestyle
Most people spend their lives as if they were forced to act, tossed from one side to the other. Sometimes we don’t even stop for a moment, almost out of fear of what we might see, or to ignore what we are missing.
Paradoxically, it is easier to be constantly engaged in a world where everything goes fast, in a historical period in which we have never had so much information available, at such a high speed. It is not uncommon to experience a feeling of constant urgency and continuous distraction. The number of customers to satisfy, the fear of losing them, the emails to write, the phone calls to answer, the tasks to be carried out, the meetings to attend, the places to go… And us? We force ourselves to work more and more to avoid falling too far behind! But the feeling of perennial need that characterizes most companies limits inventiveness, creativity, quality, commitment and the ability to make calm and optimal decisions. For this reason it is essential to rediscover our inner voice, our desires, our hidden talents, the best part of ourselves, our deepest values, both at work and in private life.
“Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do”
Steve Jobs
Caring for our values helps us love what we do
Steve Jobs’ speech to Stanford students therefore clearly shows us how it is not the role we occupy in society that influences the sense of value, but the way we choose to approach whatever we do. If we don’t love what we do and we aren’t “fueled” by a deep purpose, being good and skilled at something will never give us enough energy and satisfaction.
We spend 80% of our waking time at the office and at work. But often during this time we run, we struggle and work more and more hours and not infrequently until late at night. We are so immersed in the race that we do not realize that we are participating in a race that is impossible to win, just like Sisyphus. Paradoxically, more and more turns into less and less. Current belief: the more hours I work, the more value I generate. False. Numerous studies on human productivity indicate exactly the opposite.
Combining well-being and performance is possible
I think that in the life of each of us there comes a time when we realize that we need to find a state of “deep well-being”. A condition that I rarely find in Italian and non-Italian companies, too often engaged in pursuing results and performance without questioning the way they work and the long-term consequences on people’s lives.
I am convinced that combining excellent results and high performance with profound well-being is not only possible, but mandatory nowadays. But in order to do so, we often need to change our lifestyle.
The depth of values, the focus on essentiality and simplicity, in other words the Lean Lifestyle® that Steve Jobs had adopted as a model of life, for himself, his company and his collaborators, is in my opinion a sustainable way to put us in a position to reduce, day after day, the distance that separates what we are from what we would like to be.
Periodically reflecting on the long-term consequences of your lifestyle, for yourself and for the people around you, makes you aware of the choices you are making on a daily basis and where they are taking you.
Having a Lean lifestyle means preserving and continually increasing the value of ourselves, those around us and the earthly resources at our disposal. Not wasting what has been given to us in the only life we have.
