While searching self development, you’ll often run into a fable about the lion and the gazelle.

“Every morning in Africa a gazelle wakes up. It knows it must outrun the fastest lion or it will be killed. Every morning in Africa a lion wakes up. It knows it must run faster than the slowest gazelle or it will starve. It doesn’t matter whether you’re the lion or a gazelle. When the sun comes up, you’d better be running.”

Many motivation speakers will use this to inspire people to get moving.

The best usage of this, in my opinion, comes from Eric Thomas. He puts a slightly different spin on to this quote, which inspired this article for the Living Accidentally series.

Lately, I’ve been noticing that a lot of what I am doing is just doing things to “stay alive.” I’m just looking for a job to get money just to get by. I’m exercising only because I know that I need to move to keep my body in general shape to “stay alive.” I know that once I stop moving, I’ll fall deeper into depression and have a harder climb to get out.

I’ve realized that living accidentally is just staying alive. It’s flat, straight, doing the bare minimum. In early stages of life, it’s easy to “stay alive,” but this isn’t actually “living.” When you’re simply “staying alive,” you’re living on accident. You’re doing just enough to get by, and not creating anything for yourself.

Staying alive isn’t living, but it is easy. Everyone can stay alive, but not everyone can live. After some time, the ironic thing about life is that staying alive actually starts to become difficult. The reasons to stay alive slowly erode as you realize that you need more to actually live.

The last part of the fable says that it doesn’t matter whether you’re a lion or a gazelle. That either way, you have to be running. This is very true. You need to keep running to survive.

But the spin is that we should all live like lions. While both are running, the lion is the one running TO something. The gazelle is only running FROM something.

In order to live your life with purpose, you have to run TO something. This is the key difference between the two and could completely change the way you view life. You have to have a lion mentality to not just stay alive, but to LIVE.

Which are you? The lion or the gazelle? Check out Eric Thomas speak about this here.