5 questions you must answer

If you’re a human being (and if you are reading this I can say with near perfect certainty that you are) there are only 5 questions you must ever answer.

The trick is that you must answer them at every moment and never ever stop.  Your sense of personal happiness, satisfaction, and fulfillment depends on doing so honestly and always with greater degrees of intention and introspection.

The 5 questions are:

1. What is real?

2. How do I/we know the answer to #1?

3. How do I/we want to feel?

4. What should I/we do?

5. What is the clearest, most accurate, way to think systematically about numbers 1-4?

It’s true, right?  You’re constantly searching for answers to all of those.  Given the content of my most honest and vulnerable conversations with people I can attest that we all are.

Rarely can we boil something so complex as human life down to such a simple formula, but in this case I assert that we can.  These are perennial questions we can never escape, and with which we are all charged the responsibility of engaging in all times and places.  By whom or what I don’t know.  Answers vary, and that inquiry itself brings us to the first of the 5 questions.

By the way, do you realize that these 5 questions are the very definition of a particular field of study?  It’s called “philosophy”.

At one point I thought of calling myself a “philosophical coach”.  But that felt a little flat and lacking in intrigue or mass appeal, and so I settled on “Metaphysical Leadership Mentor”.  But, it’s incomplete, because, as my clients well know, my approach is more broadly philosophical, touching on all 5 of the above questions, and ultimately bringing us to the ongoing and unending responsibility of the human condition itself.

A bit more technically, the discipline that we know as philosophy has come to include 5 branches, each of which deals with one of the above questions:

1. Metaphysics: What is real and what is it like?

2. Epistemology: What do we know and how do we know that we know it?

3. Aesthetics: What is beautiful, desirable, and valuable?

4. Ethics: What, then, should we do?

5. Logic: How do we think clearly, accurately, and systematically?

Those topics are vast, and contain ever-expanding commentary created by those among us engaged in pursuing the unattainable answers.

100% of other disciplines are practiced in response to those 5 perennial questions.

So, how do you answer them?  What is the result of your answers?  And, most importantly, what kind of space do you intentionally set aside to contemplate your approach to doing so?

That’s what I do.  And it always makes a positive difference because, as a very wise ancient once noted, “The unexamined life is not worth living.”

I’m here to help you with that examination and those 5 questions.

Also, if you want to take a deeper dive, this video is a great place to start.  Many of my friends, clients, and colleagues have been enjoying this series.