Umair Haque

 Beyond the allure of today's latest fads and fashions, beyond the advice I and others can give you about money, sex, and power and how to get it all, fast, here are four essential, timeless truths.
Life is shorter than any of us truly expect.
Human potential is vaster than any of us truly know.
Joy and sorrow cut sharper — and flee faster — than any of us can truly understand.
And so: the great truths of a life well lived have always been love, beauty, and accomplishment.
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None of us are here not to make a difference. Let me put it like this. The industrial age's great binge has left us with a kind of existential hangover. We don't know why we're really here anymore. Is it "money"? Is it "growth"? Is it "productivity"? Here's a not-so-secret: we are here, each and every one of us, to live. Wholly, fully, uncompromisingly. And we always have been. The mercilessly vicious cycle of working harder, get poorer, feel emptier, buy more...work harder — it's not just a recipe for economic stagnation: it's a formula for a kind of existential suicide, for billions of bleak seconds every second of human life squandered. So you're going to have to refuse, reject, and revolutionize it. You're going to have to pioneer building not just "an economy" or "a business" — emptier and emptier concepts — but lives worthy of the privilege of living. Remember my four timeless truths? The great challenge — that, for a moment, dazzled by the fools' gold of plenty, we forgot — is this: inspiring, elevating, and enabling people to craft lives that honor the truth of life.

http://blogs.hbr.org/haque/