Time, money, meaning.

What do we need to lead a fulfilling life?

👋🏼 Hey, I’m Anna! Welcome to my weekly newsletter, where I share insights and ideas across career, business, personal development, creativity, productivity..and everything in between.

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I didn’t know what ‘having meaning’ meant until I was 33 years old.

Throughout my twenties a deep sense of purpose was a foreign concept to me, and instead of seeking to understand it I chose to spend my time riding camels in the Sahara desert, shouting rounds of cowboy shots at the club and getting swept up in the #girlboss movement to start my own business.

Back then, finding meaning wasn’t high on my agenda.

But everything changed last year when, after a series of stressful life events, I hit pause on my business and life commitments. For the first time I experienced pure and utter nothing-ness by choice. No meetings, no responsibilities, no deadlines…and thanks to the personal finance gurus whose Youtubes I’d devoured, I had a healthy amount of cash and no immediate need earn more.

I opted out of the hustle and grind, and opted in to reading fiction at my local wine bar with a Pinot Noir on a Tuesday afternoon. I took cuttings from my Mum’s garden and nurtured them as my own plant-babies. I spent $80 on spare ribs and made four-hour-slow-cooked-ragu for a mid-week dinner. I solo picnicked at Edinburgh Gardens for hours on end.

I was living the dream!

But after the fourth (or was it tenth?) picnic, I woke up feeling like a stray plastic bag floating in an increasingly dirty patch of ocean.

Adrift, lost, nowhere.

I had all the time in the world and enough money, but nothing meaningful to spend it on.

Meaning is more valuable than time and money.

First things’s first. I want to acknowledge that being able to take time out without money-stress is a privilege not many of us have. Especially during this financial crisis when the weekly grocery shop costs more than I paid for my 2007 Subaru Forrester, and we’re forced to sell off a kidney just to make our monthly rent and mortgage repayments.

That being said, my time off helped me realise something profound that I could never have learned any other way.

That having an open calendar and a full bank account won’t stop me from feeling bankrupt. That my rich life isn’t about collecting coins and saving seconds, it’s about spending them in the most meaningful ways I can.

In fact it’s meaning that fills me up until I’m bursting at the seams. It’s purpose that lets me live my life in colour.

Finding my meaning.

After the realisation that what I always believed to be true - that an abundance of time and money is the secret to a happy life - was in fact a lie, I became Frodo Baggins and embarked on a journey of discovery (minus the pointy ears) to answer the hardest question on earth.

Why am I here?

To try and figure it out I swapped Netflix binges for self development books and pulled myself out of the scroll hole to attend events full of a diverse crowd outside my regular circle. I viciously unfollowed social media accounts that made me feel bad about myself. I took up therapy and learned how to hear my gut.

Then I listened intently to what it had to say.

Little by little my meaning - to write - emerged. It popped up in my immense pleasure from intellectually sparring with family about ideas I was working on. It came in the form of the kick I got from the daily writing prompts I’d programmed ChatGPT to create. It was in noticing witty one-liners in the dialogue of Succession, and my raging jealous desire to be in their writers’ room. It was the voice deep in my head telling me to stop producing and start creating.

Finding yours.

You may know your purpose. It might be lurking in your business or career, or hidden deep within your creativity. It could come from your activism or charitable work. You might find it in the little ladybug on your tenderly grown vege patch. It may appear when you look at your kids and the whole world just seems to make sense.

Or perhaps you’re a late bloomer like me and you have absolutely no clue. That’s normal too. In fact many of us spend decades dancing on the edge of meaning before we realise that perhaps, it has been there all along.

“The meaning of life is to give life meaning.” ― Viktor E. Frankl

Until next week,

Anna

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✍🏼 Next week’s post

I’m kicking around a few ideas for next week, do any of these topics resonate with you? (reply to this email or comment to let me know)

• How I’ve created my own four day work week

• A successful founder needs ideas, execution and taste

• The danger of a ‘can’t wait’ mentality

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