Trading Comfort for Meaning
Imagine you wake up one day and realize that what you are doing is not what you were meant to do. The road you have been traveling has come to a fork and you need to make a choice. Do you take the road that brings more financial return but doesn’t bring the meaning you crave? Or, do you seek meaning and risk your financial future?
Many people look at the life I had for the past decade and wonder why I would ever give up my secure income and 15 years of industry knowledge to pursue my purpose, to do what my soul tells me to do. It wasn’t the easiest decision, but when the time came to make it I was at peace. For most of my life I felt an emptiness that’s hard to explain. No matter what I was doing there was always a piece of me that felt I wasn’t complete.
Steve Jobs gave a commencement speech at Stanford in 2005 and in that speech he talked about connecting the dots. Jobs said that you can only connect the dots looking backwards. During your journey things will happen that you don’t understand, but you need to trust that there is a reason and there will come a day when it all makes sense. For me, it wasn’t until I was sitting at a table with a dozen entrepreneurs in Nicaragua that I finally figured out how all the puzzle pieces fit together. That day was June 18, 2014. I was delivering a workshop with these entrepreneurs that were part of EO (Entrepreneur’s Organization). After only two days they starting talking about how, together, they could change an entire country. It was in that moment that I realized my purpose. I had previously been focused on helping socially minded people become more successful, but I had this backwards. My purpose is to help successful people become more socially minded.
I had worked my whole life to be “successful,” but that wasn’t the success I was seeking inside. Changing the world by redirecting people’s definition of success is what I am here to do. It’s the road I have decided to take to find more meaning in my life. We have so much pent up desire to have deep conversations about who we know we can be, to find out tribe. The only problem is that there aren’t enough opportunities to have these conversations. This needs to change. In my experience, expressing yourself and taking the road filled with more meaning is extremely rewarding. Let’s redefine success together and begin to feel human again.
To the Age of Humanity!
Larry Kesslin 