Imagine for a moment that you are attempting to perform an important task. Maybe you are changing the oil on your car, or preparing a special dinner for a partner or family member. As you dive in to your task, though, you realize you’re missing something – something important. You can’t seem to find the car manual, and you’re not sure what’s a filter or a gasket or a cylinder and where they are or if you need to know. You misplaced the recipe, and you barely remember that you need some cooking oil but not what kind, what herbs and spices you were supposed to use, or how long the chicken needs to cook. So you’re stuck, just as you’re getting started. What can you do?
At this point, a likely option is to outsource the task to an expert. We’ll take the car over to Jiffy Lube, or call in to our favorite restaurant for take-out. Shell out a few bucks, and problem solved, task completed. The mechanic and chef know a bit better than we do about how to accomplish what we had begun.
Outsourcing will work for a lot of things we don’t have time to do. But what if the “task” you’re trying to perform is your life?
Unlike preparing a meal or maintaining a car, the work of your life isn’t something you can just hand over to another person. There is no expert on your life except you. While some people know us well, and have insight into our lives, no other person is responsible for how my life turns out except for me. I simply cannot outsource my life to an expert.
So what if we are unsure or confused about how we are supposed to do this work of human life? There’s no manual or recipe, after all! Maybe some people have an innate sense of how to proceed, or are content to kind of fumble along. But most of us probably wouldn’t mind a little guidance now and then on how all the pieces of life fit together into one great work.
What if there weren’t a manual or recipe – something you followed step-by-step – but something more like a field guide available for your life? Something that described what paths you might take, things to watch out for, sights not to miss, explorations for the novice, the intermediate, and the seasoned explorer? Something like this would be quite useful at any level of life experience.
That’s exactly what The Art of Life Framework™ we’ve developed provides – the essentials of human experience. Just like the periodic table of the elements describes and organizes the essential chemical properties of nature’s building blocks, the Art of Life describes and organizes the various essentials of human experience, the most important (hence, essential) facets of what goes into making a life a human life. Just like a field guide helps you make connections between the disparate things you observe out in the wild, the Art of Life shows how the often disconnected areas of our experience relate back to one another, while offering further paths to explore if we want to deepen or expand our experience.
In future posts, we’ll offer some concrete examples of how this works, not simply for individuals but for companies and other organizations, and how understanding these essentials can have broader effects on our common social life as well.