Can a successful professional cultivate an intellectual life?

Recently, our friends at the Houston Institute, conducted a study interviewing leading professionals at the heights of their fields who, at the same time, continue to cultivate rich intellectual lives—many of which are non-liberal arts majors. What do busy and practical CEO’s, lawyers, scientists, and investors have to say about leisurely engaging in ideas, books, and thinkers? In fact, a lot. Here are three surprising insights that can help you improve your own life today.

1. Solitude brings joy

Solitude can be uncomfortable and feel isolating. It demands time, silence, focus and space from others which, as a result, non-surprisingly causes a majority of people to choose not to pursue an intellectual life. But at what cost?

Without some solitude, how can one answer the question why are we here? How should I live? What is my responsibility to others?

Without some solitude, how easy does it become to start drifting? To lose a sense of purpose?

Without some solitude, how easy is it to find others ready to have a deep conversation? To truly connect with another on a deep level? How can I deeply connect with others when most people rather talk about something else, like food or exercise?

With some solitude, we can find those answers to life’s question, we can find and maintain a sense of peace and purpose, we can satisfy our desire for connection through deep conversations. The rewards are great and lead to a quiet joy with enduring insights.

2. Faith cultivates wonder

Having faith stimulates desire for seeking a deeper understanding of life’s mysteries.

Faith—by making ancient and timeless yet often striking and awe-inspiring claims about the deepest aspects of reality such as life, death, eternity—stimulates wonder and investigation into reality. If my religion says there is a heaven, do I really have an immortal soul? If my religious says I was created by a loving act of God, does God love in the same why I do?

Wonder, in turn, leads to seeking and ultimately to seeing and understanding and satisfaction, consequently serving as a remedy to the quiet desperation of boredom, ambivalence, and mediocrity in the modern age.

It can happen in different ways. By encountering challenges to the tenets of their faith, many are motived to seek out deeper answers in apologetics. By encountering death of loved ones, others are moved to revisit questions about death and eternity. In all cases, facts about life and teachings of the faith, if taken seriously, invariably serve as roads into philosophy, theology, and literature.

3. Fear of death causes distraction

We live in a world of noise and distraction. Sometimes, it seems like we are purely anesthetizing ourselves with vapid television series, bodily pleasures, and endless novelty. Rest and relaxation, of course, are good but complete cessation of activity, as if little more than a vegetable, is neither of them. Rather, shouldn’t rest and relaxation be activities that renew us for our duties or serve as choice-worthy activities in themselves? Shouldn’t they be opportunities to cultivate ourselves, especially what is best and most of all us, our hearts and minds?

However, there is reluctance and uneasiness to read books and consider existential question. What is the reason? Many professionals say this: people are afraid to think deeply because they fear death.

Perhaps thinking deeply will dispel us of our “fanciful assumptions” about the length of our lives. Perhaps it will require us to make unsavory lifestyle changes.

By becoming acquainted with the sweetness of solitude, the wonder of faith, and reality of death, perhaps we too can cultivate a robust and lively intellectual life for ourselves, even in the midst of a busy professional life, that will assuredly lead to deep and enduring happiness, as other professionals have already found.