success

Defining The Good Life

If our purpose as humans is to have a Good Life, the ultimate question is...What is your vision of the good life?

Your Good Life. Your Best Life.

Only YOU can define your good life. Your BEST life.

But if you're like I was, you may have never truly thought about it, not in a deep enough way to lift you out of your stinking, shrinking thinking. Not enough to stave off the encroaching boredom, frustration, and near despair because your life just isn't as good as you want it to be. Until....

Author and Personal Coach Richard Leider, author of The Power of Purpose, explained what he found regarding purpose in work and life in a Fast Company interview 27 years ago. They're timeless.

If our purpose as humans is to have a Good Life, the ultimate question is...What is your vision of the good life?

Most of us have been conditioned to think that we measure the good life from the outside, what author and coach Richard Leider calls "consumerist terms." We think we experience the good life by the car we drive, the clothes we wear, the community we live in, the brand names we gravitate to. Not that these experiences are bad, but they are not all-fulfilling.

Four Factors of the Good Life

Leider decided to ask people for their definition of the good life while he was doing research for the books he was writing. * According to his 1998 interview, he found from this inquiry that a good life could be summed up with four factors.

You live in a place where you feel you belong.
You are with the people you love, and your relationships are working, including your relationship with yourself.
You've got the right work, meaning you're using your talents on something you believe in, in an environment that fits who you are.
You're doing it all on purpose. It fits your overall personal philosophy.

*One of his books The Power of Purpose, published just before that 1998 interview is now in its fourth edition, published earlier this year 2025 and subtitled To Grow and To Give for Life.

The Coming Home Moment

Do you feel like you've got all four? I didn't. I had to have a Coming Home moment - quite a few moments, actually - with myself and get brutally honest.

I couldn't say yes to all four. Not even close. I could only say yes to numbers 1 and 2 and only partially.

As for #1, I loved my marriage and home but hadn't built community. I didn't yet belong to myself either. And as far as #2, it echoed the first in that my relationship with myself needed the most work of all.

#3 wasn't even registering on my assessment. I had bought into limiting beliefs and I had once again busied myself in a demanding j.o.b. that wanted the best of me without investing in me. My expectation to have my talents utilized by people who were stuck in work that didn't utilize theirs was repeatedly disappointing me. Worse than the blind leading the blind, it was the undead leading the dying.

#4 had eluded me, disappearing into a fog on busyness. I had had my purpose once...no more than once. I have friends who will attest to it. They'd seen my on my path and told me that I shone brightly. They'd also seen me depart from my path and were uncertain how to help me regain my light.

That's pretty abysmal. I could only account for a small portion of the four factors, if that. What was I going to do about it?

Complaining wasn't working. I finally had to realize that I was erroneously waiting for external factors to be right. I finally realized that my Good Life is an inside job first!

I have started various endeavors that have come and gone, but the underlying factor in all of them was (and is) my desire to hold people in light. The EDG in EDG Coaching stands for Every Day Genius, something I believe all people possess in spades, and given the right environments, it doesn't just show up, this genius is downright brilliant!