Men Living with Meaning - Personal Development for Men - Against the Status Quo - The Significance of Your Life Michael J. Emery discusses the need to plan to live with significance. The intentionality that moves against the status quo and into greater experiences of self awareness.

1. What is the
Significance of Your Life?
Men Living with Meaning

2. What is Significance?
Søren Kierkegaard Jean-Paul Sartre
Fyodor Dostoyevsky Friedrich Nietzsche
"Existence precedes essence…”
A human exists first before they have meaning in
life
“What matters is to find a purpose, to see
what it really is that God wills that I shall
do; the crucial thing is to find a truth
which is truth for me, to find the idea for
which I am willing to live and die.”
Finding one's values, beliefs, and
purpose in a meaningless world
“Man is a mystery. It needs to be
unravelled, and if you spend your whole
life unravelling it, don't say that you've
wasted time. I am studying that mystery
because I want to be a human being.”
Self-analysis may give an individual
meaning and differentiates humans from
other mammals
Making free choices regarding
fundamental values and beliefs changes
the nature and identity of the chooser
“If a man has character, he has also his typical
experience, which always recurs.”

3. 5W1HI keep six honest serving-men
(They taught me all I knew);
Their names are What and Why and When
And How and Where and Who.
Rudyard Kipling, The Elephant's Child
What Why
When
HowWhere
Who
Defining Significance

4. What
Significance: from the Latin
significantia -
“meaning, force, energy”
Joshua Cristall (English, c.1767-1847). Hercules Dragging Cerberus

5. Why
“Those who have a 'why' to live, can bear with
almost any 'how'.”
~ Viktor E. Frankl, Man's Search for Meaning

6. When
Calavera oaxaqueña by José Guadalupe Posada
“Cowards die many times before their deaths;
The valiant never taste of death but once.
Of all the wonders that I yet have heard,
It seems to me most strange that men should fear;
Seeing that death, a necessary end,
Will come when it will come.”
!
William Shakespeare
Julius Caesar
Act II, scene 2, line 33.

7. How
Values Congruence
Strong Sense of Identity
Strong Sense of Purpose
Understanding of Communication
Self-Actualizing
Emotional Management
Personal Development Map
Natural Rights
Individualism
A Network of Similar Minded Individuals

8. Where
Furthermore, we have not even to risk the adventure
alone; for the heroes of all time have gone before us;
the labyrinth is thoroughly known; we have only to
follow the thread of the hero-path. And where we had
thought to find an abomination, we shall find a god;
where we had thought to slay another, we shall slay
ourselves; where we had thought to travel outward, we
shall come to the center of our own existence; and
where we had thought to be alone, we shall be with all
the world.
!
~ Joseph Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces

9. Who

10. What is the Status Quo?
"In order for evil to flourish, all that is required is
for good men to do nothing.” ~ Edmund Burke

11. Significance = Choosing
Your Own Meaning
• Life has meaning under all circumstances, even the most
miserable ones.
• Our main motivation for living is our will to find meaning in life.
• We have inalienable freedom to find meaning.
Viktor Frankl