Obligation or free choice?

Currently, the book I am learning from is The Power of Full Engagement: Managing Energy, Not Time is the Key to High Performance and Personal Renewal by Jim Loehr and Tony Schwartz. It's a straightforward and worthwhile read that offers relevant examples from a number of industries to challenge current thinking, or at least my thinking that time management needs to be at the center of what I do. 

In the book, the authors quote Viktor E. Frankl, a psychologist who survived Nazi concentration camps and wrote Man's Search for Meaning, which was first published in 1959. Frankl's writings include the idea, "What man actually needs is not a tension-less state, but rather the striving and struggling for a worthwhile goal, a freely chosen task." 

This point got me to thinking about which volunteer and donation experience have given me the greatest joy. They are not the experiences my parents or anyone else wanted me to have, or the experiences where I have had incidental involvement due to a sense of obligation. They are the experiences I have freely chosen! 

Sure, some of those experience have including striving and struggling. But in the end, free choice has given me great joy. 

I intend to carry the message through of free choice to future fundraising and volunteer efforts.

If the options are obligation or free choice to invest in your nonprofit's mission, what option do you choose? What option to you want to experience?

Photo credit above: http://www.flickr.com/photos/koonisutra/