All right, so how the hell do you actually find your life's purpose?
This is something that a lot of us, including myself, are constantly searching for.
And we're asking questions like, what should I do with my life?
Why do I feel so stuck?
Or like, what's my passion?
What's my purpose?
But ironically, the longer you keep waiting to find your purpose, the more years you'll spend feeling completely lost.
So in this video, I would like to present you with a five step roadmap that will hopefully help you reframe how you think about finding your purpose.
And this is based on a conversation that I had with Joe Hudson.
He is the somewhat secret executive coach behind some of the world's biggest companies, including Apple and Google and OpenAI.
And these companies pay him absolutely insane amounts of money to help their CEOs and their executive teams level up.
And Joe tells me that a surprisingly large proportion of what he talks about with his coaching clients these, like billionaire, CEO type people is often focused around this idea of life's purpose.
First of all, most of the times when people are just thinking, what's my purpose?
That's just self abuse.
Second of all, purpose isn't found in the future.
And then the third thing that's critical is that it's a series of experimentations.
And so that's the most important thing is to constantly be in that question of So maybe you're a few years into your job and you don't wake up excited for it anymore.
Or maybe you're doing something just because your parents or society or whatever told you it was the safe option to get to security or whatever.
Wherever you are right now.
I really hope that this five-step roadmap is gonna give you a little bit more clarity around how to find your life's purpose.
So let's dive straight into it.
All right, so we are starting with step number one, which is all about how to recognize if you are not currently living your purpose.
So Joe, a lot of people are, including me, are searching for this thing that we call purpose.
What does it look like when someone is living their purpose?
And how might someone watching or listening to this know whether they're doing it or whether they're not doing it?
It looks like this.
My wife and I were at the end of this week-long retreat and it's a hardcore retreat.
You've been to it.
It starts at 7.30 in the morning and it ends at like 10 o'clock at night.
We're working all the time, seven days straight, big emotions, lots of people having big issues, getting breakthroughs and everything like that exhausting.
And we're at the last day.
We're sitting in the hot tub recovering and i looked at my wife and i said to her you know, there was this thing, this transaction we could have made that would have made us like 70 million dollars.
And i was thinking about it and i'm really glad that didn't happen.
And she said oh, what would make that the case?
And i said oh um, because if we would have done that, we might not be doing this.
If we had 70 million, we might not have started this business.
We might not have done this because we did it because we needed to.
And she said, oh, yeah.
And then I looked at her and I said if somebody offered you a billion dollars for this business right now, would you sell it?
And our companies are worth nothing close to a billion dollars, right?
But the only thing is you couldn't compete, so you couldn't do any of this work again.
And we both went.
No, no, we didn't.
No, no, we wouldn't.
We wouldn't sell for a billion dollars.
If you have an idea that you want to pursue and you can't be bought off, then you're living your purpose.
This billion dollar thing.
I'm not going to lie.
I feel a bit weird about it because it's like how many people realistically are there in the world that would?
That wouldn't like sell what they're doing for work for like a billion dollars.
I have met some of them over the years who've used this question to be like oh yeah, I really feel like I'm living my purpose because, like you know, there's no amount of money you'd be able to pay me to stop me from doing the thing.
And I've always been a bit like skeptical.
I'm like, really?
Like really?
If someone paid you like a hundred million or like a billion dollars, you wouldn't stop doing a podcast or a YouTube channel or like working in this specific thing or like doing this specific thing.
And they're like, yeah.
And I'm like, damn, that's a level of living purpose that I'm just like, man, I can only aspire to.
So for this one personally, I don't take it too literally.
I don't imagine it like literally a billion dollars.
I treat this more as like a general feeling of like am I doing it for the money or am I doing it not for the money?
Because if you're doing something primarily for the money, then it's kind of unlikely that that thing is gonna be you living your true purpose.
Okay, so people might be hearing that and thinking, I mean, that sounds great.
I'd love for my work to be the thing that I would say no to a billion dollars to stop doing.
But if I think of like 99 of people who might be watching this video, including me, there are either like if someone offered to buy my business for a billion dollars.
There are aspects of it that I would sell off and aspects of it that I wouldn't.
And I imagine for people that I speak to in our audience, maybe it's like 95 100 of the work they would totally just stop doing if they had a billion dollars or if they were offered it or if they won the lottery.
How do we go from this starting point of like the work I'm doing is absolutely not the work that you couldn't buy me off for, to get to this point where you and your wife are chilling in a hot tub and like yeah, I'm glad we didn't sell for 70 million, because we actually we enjoy doing this?
Yeah.
So the first thing is you have to recognize that you're not living your purpose.
And so that's easy for most people.
I think most people can say, yep, I'm probably not living my purpose.
But admitting that to yourself and then taking the risk to take the step to live your purpose is something.
But for some people, they don't even recognize it, right?
They've just been in the...
The idea is that you're going to do high school and then, when you're done with high school, you're supposed to go to college.
And when you're done with college, you're supposed to get a job and it's supposed to be in a good career, and then get married and then get a promotion.
And that's what you're supposed to do to be happy.
And they've been told that and they think that they're doing the thing that's supposed to be happy.
And but what they don't realize it's it's life is far more like a great piece of music.
And you're not just like trying to get to the crescendo of the song.
You're not just trying to get to the end of the song.
You're actually enjoying listening to the music.
And so one of the greatest ways to tell that you're not living your purpose is that, somehow or another, you're living for a reward in the future.
Something in the future is going to pay off and tell you, oh, then now it's worth it.
But if you're living your purpose, life is like a song.
Life is like a dream come true that you never thought was possible, never even thought of, because you couldn't even imagine it's as good as this.
And so that's the recognition, to be able to recognize that if you're doing things like saying you should do things or have to do things, it's a great sign that you're not living your purpose.
If you're telling yourself I'm doing it because it's the safe thing, that's also probably a great sign that you're not doing your purpose.
You're not living on your purpose or living in your passion.
And so those are all great signs.
And then the first step is actually recognize that that's happening, that you're living for the crescendo.
You're not living for the music that's playing right now.
And so that is step number one, conducting a purpose audit.
It's to ask yourself whether or not you're actually living your purpose.
And we can ask ourselves these questions to get a feel for is that true for us or not?
Firstly, would you sell what you're doing for a billion dollars?
If yes, then you're probably not living your purpose to some degree.
But if not, then you probably are living your purpose to some degree.
Secondly, are you living for some sort of reward in the future?
Is that the basis of the work that you're doing?
And thirdly, do you feel like you should do something or is there a lot of pressure from your family or society more broadly to do a certain thing?
If you're feeling the should behind doing something, that thing is unlikely to be your purpose.
Broadly when we're doing a purpose audit as well, like we do have a felt sense, like right now.
If I were to ask you, are you currently living your purpose in terms of what you do for work, for example?
You probably have like a gut response to that.
Back when I was working as a doctor, I felt the gut response every Sunday evening when I would have the Sunday scaries, and every Monday morning when I wake up, you're like oh, I don't want to go to work.
It's like, it's just supposed to be noble and like help people and all that kind of stuff.
But I just had that feeling of like, ugh, associated with it.
And so that was probably a reasonable sign that I wasn't living my purpose.
Whereas for me, when I was teaching medical students like I had a teaching day or I had to run a physiology supervision or it was like a little course that I was running I would never have that feeling of like.
I would always have a feeling of like oh, this is gonna be fun.
I'm looking forward to this teaching thing.
And so that kind of told me that my own purpose is more found in teaching than it was in practicing medicine.
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Let's get back to the video okay, so now we come to step two, where we have to address the elephant in the room, which is the money problem.
What if someone's like Hey, I'm not really passionate about my job in accounting, but you know, I'm passionate about the money that it gets me at the end of the month?
And then I can use that money to do fun things and like support my family and stuff.
Where does that mode of operation sit in this conversation about purpose and passion?
Yeah, it's a great question.
First of all, there's nothing wrong with not living your purpose.
You're not going to be able to find that kind of happiness or passion or zest for life.
But it's really important that people don't beat themselves up just because they're not living their purpose, because that's not going to get them to living their purpose any faster.
So that's one thing.
So we're not calling some people good and some people bad for living their purpose or not.
I think the question to answer your question specifically, I'm passionate about the money.
Money is right now I'm looking at a computer.
500 different companies made money to make that computer.
These lights, the YouTube, you're making money.
I'm making money.
YouTube is making money.
The advertisers are making money.
There is infinite amount of ways to make money.
You can't look out your window unless you're in nature.
You can't look out your window and not see thousands of ways that people have made money. so if you're passionate about making money and then you say i have to do it in this one way then then you're then there's at least zero creativity but at most you're delusional because there's literally infinite amount of ways to make money in this world and so saying i'm not going to live my passion and my purpose because because of money is it doesn't make any sense but joe like you know you've got no idea how hard the how hard the job market is these days you know my degree is in think x and like ai and the recession and stuff and yes maybe there's like thousands of ways to make money but like all i've been trained for and all i know is this one way of making money and well i gotta kind of need it to pay the bills man Yeah, so do it to pay the bills as you find out another way to make money.
So one of the things that you'll learn about the way that your mind works is that if you are doing binary thinking, if you say it's either this way or that way, it's either keep my job or quit my job, or I either stay an accountant or I leave being an accountant, that means your mind is in fear.
Binary thinking says that you're making decisions out of fear.
And so that's what I would say is if you're not in fear, there's a thousand different ways.
And by the way, there's a thousand different ways to make money in accounting.
Just in accounting alone the company that you work at and how you do accounting for one company, how you do the accounting, finding ways for ai to do the accounting for you.
Are you innovating in accounting?
Are you accounting for a drug dealer or are you doing accounting for a company that's trying to save the world?
You're counting for ali abdul.
How close is the team that you love or do you hate them?
All of these things apparently have to happen because you need money.
And so to me, there's just infinite possibility.
And when you start thinking black or white, then you know that you're thinking out of fear.
And so fear is not going to get you to your passion.
I scared myself into living my passion.
I've never heard that.
So it's really requires you to at least be open to the concept that life can change.
And if you're not open to that concept, look around you, because there's no part of life that's not changing.
And so that is step number two, to think creatively about the money problem.
It's very easy for us to get fixated on oh, but I need to make money from the thing and have this very blinkered view of what that actually needs to look like, and then use that as a reason as to why we're not living on purpose, because I just gotta make the money.
But what I really like about what Joe says is that if we think a little creatively about this, like there are ways to make money following your purpose, almost regardless of what your purpose is.
Side question that's a little bit of a tangent here is, How are we defining our terms?
What is passion?
What is purpose?
Is it the same thing?
Is there an overlap?
I think there's lots of definitions for passion.
But if we're talking about, if you're passionate about what you do, then you're definitely living your purpose.
And if you're living your purpose, you're definitely passionate about what you do.
And so living your purpose is a felt sense.
It's not a, there's no way to like have a checklist and say okay, I'm doing X, Y and Z, and now I'm living my purpose.
As a matter of fact, I've seen people try to do that.
They make a checklist and they say okay, if I'm living my purpose, then you know I will be helping people and I'll be making X amount of money and I'll, you know, have this kind of a team, the size of a team, and et cetera, et cetera.
And a couple of them because they've been incredibly smart ceos have done it and then found out no, that's not not living their, their purpose, because purpose is a felt sense.
You know when you're doing it and you don't have to do it in the future or in the past.
As a matter of fact, you can't.
The only place you can actually feel if you're living on purpose is in this moment.
You can't find it in the future.
It's just right here, because it's a feeling and that's when the feeling happens.
And so yes, you feel passionate about it.
Yes, you feel like this is what I'm meant to be doing.
Right now, this is what I'm meant to be doing.
And that's the crazy thing about purpose is that Right now we're having a conversation and you can be doing it on your purpose, with passion, or you can not be doing it.
You could be doing it not on your purpose.
And you can feel into that right now in this moment.
And that's the best way to find what your purpose is.
All right, so we've got step one, which is to conduct a purpose audit.
We've got step two, which is to think creatively about the money problem.
Let's now talk about step three.
And so at this point maybe you've recognized that maybe you are not living your purpose.
But the next action step is not to try and just like quit your job and go and find that like elusive purpose thing.
Because there is one really important, major thing that you can do before you suddenly like blow up your life.
Yeah, so there's a couple of things that you want to just check out for a minute.
And so one of the things that I see when people are burnt out on their job and they feel like they're not living their passion, sometimes it's just more of the way that they're doing it and less of what they're doing.
And so there's been too much pressure that's been built up or they've stopped being themselves enough, where they've lost touch with the passion, and they have this dream that oh, if I go over there and do something else, I'll be able to be myself.
And oftentimes that just like that not being themselves chases them.
So, before you leave the thing that you're doing, one of the most effective things to do is to say what happens if I am unadulteratedly, if I am unadulteratedly, if I am completely 100 authentic in me, in this environment, and let's see what happens.
That's a really good first step.
And so the other way to say this is to say what if I know I'm acting from my purpose for the next 30 days at work?
Every meeting, every moment, I'm reminding myself, like if I'm being in purpose, what is it that I would do?
How would I listen?
How would I say the thing?
How would I interact?
How would I program?
How would I be a doctor?
Whatever it is.
That question is really important, because it is one of the best ways to start understanding what is important to you, what is your purpose, and it lets you see how people change when you act that way.
So what i mean to say is that oftentimes, when i talk to somebody and they do that, what they find out is oh, i have been living my purpose, i just wasn't being myself and so, and i had a whole bunch of pressure on me.
That was all in my head and i just made my purpose into.
You know a horrible thing that i didn't want anything to do with, and you can find this all the time with like, rock and rollers or artists, where they just struggle for 20 years to be the artist and then they like finally get to be the paid artist or the paid rock and roller, and then they're like oh, i gotta go play rock and roll, because it went from a release to an obligation and they went from being themselves to being something for somebody else, and so it just like all that passion evaporated, And so one of the first things that you do is you say hey, if I'm going to be authentically myself and I'm going to do it the way that I want to do it, let's see what happens.
And the second thing that that teaches you is that you'll find out 80 of the time the world will start rearranging to support how you want to do it.
Your mind will never think that that's true.
Your mind will be like no way will they support me.
If I say what I really think, or if I do the thing I really care about, or if I do it in the way that I care about, you'll see the world start bending, and that'll be this lesson.
So, even if you don't stick with what you're doing, you go off and try something new.
What happens is you've learned this lesson that oh, the most important thing is being in my purpose in the moment, because that's what makes the world provide the thing right.
And i don't mean to provide it in a magical thinking way, i just mean, If I am really into drumming and I drum in my neighborhood every day, the person who's really interested in guitar is going to hear me and they're going to say oh wait hey, you're drumming.
What's going on?
I play guitar.
I just mean that the people who like what you're doing will come towards you and the people who don't like will leave.
The opportunities will come towards you.
And so you have to be living that purpose for the world to rearrange itself to help you out.
And so that is step number three, to experiment with authenticity.
This is not about like hey, I'm going to quit my job and travel the world and find myself.
It's about saying that look, within the context and the confines of my current situation, let me try a little experiment where i act as if i'm living my purpose fully authentically, within what i'm currently doing.
Like what would it look like if i was showing up as my most authentic self in the context of my corporate accounting job?
Or in the context of my law medicine, you know, whatever the thing might be, let's try showing up authentically, let's try it out and let's treat it as an experiment.
And and the the most important part of that experiment is Every moment that you're doing your job.
What is it for me to do this from my purpose, on purpose.
How do I do that?
Because most of the time we're doing our job like a coma in an automatic pilot.
Okay, this is just the thing that I do, and now I do the thing and I'm not learning and I'm not growing and i'm not saying the thing that i want to say.
So it's that question is constantly in.
Okay, right now, if i'm in my purpose and you can, you can like at any moment.
Right now, anybody can feel what is it in this moment to not be living in purpose and what is it in this exact moment to be living your purpose, like what changes in your body and the way that you look at the world, and so that's the most important part of the experiment.
But yeah, that's the experiment.
Yeah, And then go to India.
There's this great timer.
There's plenty of them on web.
We use the one called Yap.
And so you can put it on your phone and it'll make a ding seven, eight, nine times a day.
And you put it on your phone and you have it remind you to just say how do you live on purpose right now?
And in that moment, just take 20 seconds and do it.
It doesn't matter even if it lasts for like a minute or two, just right there, right now.
This isn't a search in the future.
It's a search that you find in yourself in the moment.
And if you do that for two three, four weeks, your search for purpose will completely flip on its head and have a lot more alacrity.
Are there any stories that come to mind of anyone you've coached who was in this sort of situation, like sort of when they did this experiment, what happened?
Yeah, absolutely.
There's a great experiment.
So there was a person who wanted to quit her job.
She had, she is a brilliant engineer and a brilliant leader of engineers.
And she's in the autonomy space, which is vehicles that move on their own.
And she was in a job that she didn't like.
And she absolutely 100% was just like, I'm going to be myself in this job.
And simultaneously her boss wanted her fired, if I recall correctly, and her boss's boss wanted to promote her into her boss's position.
And at the same time somebody from like another big famous outside firm heard about what was happening and they went in and recruited her.
And so she could have stayed, could have replaced the boss, but could have left.
So she got all these opportunities simultaneously.
And the funny thing is, as soon as she got this opportunity in this new place she was offered.
You can have this really high position or you can have the position right below it.
And the way she describes it in like now she goes at that moment I wasn't in my purpose and I made the wrong choice.
Like I had learned it in this place where I didn't care anymore because I was like, I'm leaving.
It doesn't matter.
I'll just be myself.
And it started working.
And then I went into this place where I did care.
And all of a sudden I compromised on my purpose.
And that one mistake early on of not living in her purpose had consequences for years afterwards, because it put her in a position where she couldn't actually do the thing that she wanted to do for a couple of years.
So it was a totally fascinating example of How important it is to really be in that moment, being true to yourself in that moment, being passionate, doing the thing that your passion is leading you towards, despite the fear, despite the consequences.
And that's the most acute one.
And it was so cool to watch her.
You know, two years later be able to look at the whole thing and can see Oh, there I was living it.
I could feel it there.
I got scared there.
I was living it there.
I got scared.
So it's, it's sort of like in, if you're like dating someone, whether you're being authentically yourself versus like putting on an act and something about like when you, it's when you sort of care too much about the outcome, that's like, Oh,
The subconscious or conscious thing starts where you start acting like someone who's not you, because you care about the outcome.
But then that ends up being counterproductive because like well, they're going to fall in love with someone that you actually are not.
Correct.
That's exactly it.
It's just it's just not with a woman.
It's with the world.
Right.
It's you are instead of.
I'm going to abandon myself for a woman and then she's going to love me, but it's not going to be me.
It's.
I'm going to abandon myself for the world and then they're going to value me.
But they're not going to value me.
If you don't abandon yourself for the world, then they're going to value you and they're going to value what you do and what's uniquely awesome about you.
Yeah, and then that is a person living their purpose, like okay, so if someone, if someone's in a situation where they're like they're, they're about they're thinking you know what i'm like x minutes into this video, you know, i think i think this might be a good experiment to try, where i try and be authentically myself, but their mind will immediately come up with a long list of reasons as to why that is a terrible idea.
Correct.
Oh, yes.
I won't be safe.
People will get mad at me.
I'll lose my job.
Oh, yeah, they're infinite.
That's right.
So what do you do about that?
The first thing I do is point out that you've created a world that you can't be yourself.
Get out of the world.
You have two choices if that's the case.
The first case is that if I'm myself, there's a whole bunch of bad consequences.
It means you're in a world that's not suited for you, so leave.
Or say, you know what?
It's okay.
I am happy to live the rest of my life in a world that is not suited for me, that does not accept me, does not see me, does not understand who I am.
And convince yourself that you have to do it for X, Y, and Z reasons.
And it's okay.
There's no bad guy in that.
That's the choice.
Life doesn't give you a third choice.
Do the things that are scary and trust, or see if the world will start providing the people who actually like you for who you are.
Be yourself.
See if the world will provide the people who like you for who you are or continue to not be yourself and live in a compromise.
And it's a hard choice, but that's the choice.
Well, it's a hard choice until you do about three experiments and that gets really easy because you start realizing holy crap, this works.
I asked myself this question about six months ago.
I was like, okay, if I wanted to get more fulfillment from what I'm doing, what would I be doing?
And I was like, oh, easy.
I would just do more events in person, because there's just more vibes when you're doing stuff in person.
Yeah.
And so we're just like, all right, let's just run some events here in Hong Kong.
And we just like, booked a room, got a hundred people together and the events themselves didn't didn't make any money.
Um, and I, there was the, there was part of me that felt a bit bad.
I was like, wait a minute.
We're like we actually lost about a hundred pounds on that because actually we ordered some more food or whatever, whatever.
But then.
Pretty quickly I was like yeah, but like the vibes and the fulfillment that I got from that and the ideas and the energy I got from that, it's like totally worth it.
And now sort of the next phase of our businesses sort of stemmed from the fact that we did these events that on paper didn't seem to make sense.
Yes.
Totally made sense from the perspective of like.
This is actually just way more fun for me.
So I'm just going to do the thing regardless of whether it breaks even or even loses a bit of money.
Yeah.
So that's such a beautifully critical piece.
So I'll give you two examples of this.
I've worked with a lot of famous AI engineers.
And one of the things that I noticed all the time is, if they start burning out, it's because they're not actually doing the core research that they love doing.
They're not doing the IC individual contributor work that they love doing, that they fell in love with at the beginning.
And so oftentimes my advice is make sure how much time do you need?
30 of your time is doing that.
Make sure 30 of your time is doing that can figure out how to help you manage people more efficiently, all that other stuff.
There's lots of ways of telling everybody to like manage that.
Make sure you get that thing, that that that fuels your passion.
It's why i still coach one-on-one.
Right, i don't need to coach anybody one-on-one.
They it doesn't.
It's not as lucrative as all of the, the business and the teaching and all the people that are coming for the courses.
But It's like I get passion watching people's life change with real life closeness, not just by somebody who comes and goes in a course.
I get to live with these people over years and I get to watch them blossom and it's oh, I need that.
So I will do that because that's in my passion.
And every time I learn something in a coaching session, it turns into a teaching.
It turns into something I can share with everybody.
And so that's the most important thing is to constantly be in that question of how do I live in my purpose right now.
When I have done this work with people, I just did this work this morning.
We had a whole bunch of people and somebody was asking about living their purpose.
I said, right now, act from your purpose.
You saw the whole transformation in their face.
They settled down and then they went. wait, but, and you could see it.
It was like, oh, there was a deep fear of, oh, if I'm going to be myself, I'm going to be rejected.
And so that's one of the things that prevents us from doing it is what we see is okay.
I'm going to be myself.
I feel good inside of myself, but if I get rejected, that's going to feel really bad.
So I'm going to try to figure out how not to get rejected.
And now I'm out of myself again.
And so the practice of learning.
Okay, how am I going to live?
My purpose right now is the training ground for actually having a job, having a career that serves your purpose.
Because, like my friend that I was telling you about, or client I was telling you about, who was doing their purpose, got the new job and then, you know, didn't do the thing, and then it's they suffered for two years because they didn't accept the higher position like you have.
Once you're living your purpose, you actually have to be there doing that all the time for you to be successful in it.
All the time is a little strong, but you have to do that a lot of the time to be successful in it.
You have to continue what you're doing, saying that doesn't feel right.
Even if my sponsors want it, I'm going to do the thing that actually feels right.
I'm not going to do that, even though we're going to lose a little money, because I know that that's where I have to go.
I can feel that pull.
I can feel that calling.
You have to make those choices or it doesn't last.
It all falls apart.
And so you need to have that deep practice of being living your purpose from moment to moment, Because that's what's going to be required of you to actually make the thing that you want to do work.
I've had a few conversations with people about this sort of thing, and one Objection that sometimes comes up is something like Yeah, but who's to say that I should even trust my feelings?
Am I not just being ridiculous for having the audacity to want a job that allows me to be myself?
Like, isn't that just such a ridiculous way of thinking about things?
Because like, you know, I'm not some like fucking special snowflake.
Feelings are not facts.
Like just because I have a feeling that like, Oh, I want to want to be myself.
You know, that's just not, that's just not how the workplace works.
Like I gotta, I gotta be realistic.
Dot, dot, dot.
So the first there's two parts to that.
The first part is who am I to trust my feelings?
They're ridiculous.
Yes, they are ridiculous, and the things that you want right now, that you think you want, will not be the things that you want six months from now.
That won't be the things that you want a year from now, and out of all people, you know this.
Like there's a whole bunch of things you wanted and then you end up living where your dreams used to be, in your dreams, and you're like oh, check that out, i got everything that i wanted.
But Yeah, like now, I want something different.
That's how the world works.
And so absolutely.
Who are you and your feelings are ridiculous.
Yes, absolutely.
But the way that the human system works is we want something like walking, and then we want something like running, and then we want something like being the fastest person on the planet, or we want to like be our friend in a race.
The thing that we want that's right in front of us is our evolutionary call.
Little kids that go from zero to eight years old.
They only do is, they follow their wants and they evolve quicker than any other eight years that we exist.
Then we start thinking stuff and it gets in the way we have.
But they're just like, this is what I want.
This is what I want.
This is what I want.
Those wants actually fulfill our calling.
There's a secondary step to this is like sometimes we have wants that actually don't serve us, but they're actually not our true wants.
And there's a really easy way to move through that.
So I'll give you an example.
Let's say I want something like to eat a gallon of ice cream.
All I have to do is say, okay, what's the need behind that want?
And it's like, oh, I want to feel satiated.
And then I go, oh, what's the need behind that want?
Oh, it's because I want to feel like calm.
OK, what's the need behind that want?
Oh, I want to feel safe.
So you really want to feel safe.
You don't really want to eat the gallon of ice cream.
If I could just make you feel safe, the feeling of wanting the gallon of ice cream would go away.
And so there, maybe you need to take a look and really dive down and say what's the want really trying to get.
Because the first want is just a strategy and the second want, third want, fourth want is actually the real want.
But all of those wants are pulling us in a very particular direction, towards understanding ourselves better, towards the next want.
So that's one part of your question.
The second part of your question is I'm not a special snowflake.
So that's not the way the workplace works, because I'm not like, I'm not some diva where I have so much talent that people have to love me.
So my answer there would be you don't know what the workplace is like.
You know what your workplace is like.
So most of the times I hear people say that it's because they've experienced one type of workplace.
So they're yeah that's not how accounting works but they have not been an accountant for you know uh wavy gravy's uh ranch who had an accountant right and and they have not been an accountant for circ delay and they have not been like they don't know they they just know this is there's a particular kind of accounting that they've done in a particular environment And so they're saying they know the way the world works because they actually haven't seen very much of the world.
You know, they think the common is they run in circles so small they think they've seen it all.
And so so that's one of the issues.
And then the other thing that I would say is.
If what you're doing you're not actually that special at, you're not a snowflake, then you're not living your purpose, because if you're living your purpose and you're so passionate about it, you are one of those people who has found the thing that dovetails with them so well that they are a special talent at it.
And so, to summarize step number three for finding your life's purpose, before you quit your job or make drastic changes to your life, try being completely authentic in how you approach whatever you're doing for the next 30 days.
Ask yourself, if I were living my purpose in this work, what would it look like?
How would I show up?
How would I listen?
How would I speak?
How would I approach my work?
And the key thing behind this experiment is that it helps you figure out like is the problem here, what you're doing.
Or is the problem, shall we say, how you're doing it?
And generally people find that when you do show up authentically, the world does genuinely start to somewhat rearrange itself around you.
In that the right people and the right opportunities come your way and the wrong people and the wrong opportunities start to fall away.
Okay, so that was step number three.
We are now moving on to step number four.
But when I think of purpose I think more like there's some sort of grand narrative and some sort of ideal outside of myself that I'm working towards.
Because my sister-in-law her purpose, the thing that she really cares about, is to reduce human suffering.
And so she founded a nonprofit and actively reduces human suffering.
And I'm like think i care about anything that much to make.
Like to make that the thing is like, am i missing some sort of like um, caring component or something where i just i don't, i don't know what like my broad blah, blah blah, big narrative, grand vision thing is gonna be, and like working myself up into not trying to figure out like yeah what's, what's the thing that i care so much about that i would be excited to get out of bed in the morning to do it.
There's a couple of things in that.
The first thing is, when people start searching for their purpose, they're like oh, I'm not living my purpose.
They start searching for the purpose.
One of the things that they do is they think that the future holds their purpose and they put it out in front of them and they're like I have to go find my purpose.
And then they do a lot of thinking.
Is that my purpose?
Is that my purpose?
Is that my purpose?
But they're not actually like riding the horse.
They're not actually like seeing, feeling, knowing the thing that they're doing.
They're just thinking about it and thinking that, their head, all in their head, they're going to figure out what their purpose is without any experimentation.
There's a couple of problems with this.
First of all, most of the times when people are just thinking, what's my purpose?
That's just self-abuse.
It's basically saying, Why haven't you found your purpose yet?
What's your purpose?
Even though the out loud thing is what's my purpose?
It's like, you should have found it by now.
Why are you like, why isn't it there?
Why is this so hard?
There's a whole bunch of self abuse that comes with trying to find your purpose.
All right.
So step number four is to cut the self criticism.
This was one of the main things that I took away from this conversation with Joe this idea that, like there's all sorts of like self abuse that we tend to put on ourselves when we think that we're not living our purpose.
Because we're like, oh man, I should be living my purpose.
And like, why haven't I figured it out yet?
And, like you know, there's all these people who are like I figured it out and I'm not living my purpose.
Oh my God.
And all of this stuff is not actually helpful at all when it comes to actually figuring out how to find your purpose.
There's a friend of mine who's a neuroscientist.
Her name is Anne-Laure LeCunf, and she wrote a very good book called Tiny Experiments.
And in that, there is a wonderful chapter called The Tyranny of Purpose.
And that's this idea that a lot of us have escaped the sort of very traditional rigid, career focused path of thinking that our parents were probably super bullish on.
But we've replaced the whole like hey, just work for a corporation and work your way up for 50 years.
Like we've replaced that ladder with this other thing.
That's like oh man, I need to find my one true purpose.
And like, I'm a failure in life if I haven't figured out my one true purpose.
So, even though we like to think that we chose freedom in rejecting those traditional corporate roles, we've actually just traded that for this other equally restrictive thing around, like I must find my true purpose.
And so, with that said, we now come to step number five for how to find your life's purpose.
Purpose isn't found in the future.
Purpose is found right now.
You live your purpose in this moment.
And so, even if you are searching for your purpose, do it as if you're living your purpose.
Be on in your purpose as you're doing it, in the way being yourself, authentically being you doing your thing in your way, knowing like, being fully centered in yourself, in it.
That's more important than going and finding it.
And then the third thing that's critical is that it's a series of experimentations.
Steve jobs is famously, you know, talks about this, about how he was just, I was really into calligraphy and I was really into this meditation practice.
And and then.
This is how all those things that became the calligraphy became the fonts, and this design process that I was interested in became the colors of the Mac or whatever he had.
He talked about all of his wanderings, and then he talked about how all those wanderings ended up in his products.
And so it's the same with me.
You know, here I am doing this thing, but I can tell you how all my venture capital background affected this and how my music background and how my movie making background, all the things that I've done in my life, that I wandered around doing I found parts of myself.
I found things I wanted to do.
And now looking back, I can be living my purpose in all of those things.
All of them are telling stories.
All of them are waking up the mind.
All of them are different ways in which I can live my purpose.
The purpose isn't the one thing I'm doing.
It's how I'm doing it.
It's what I'm doing in a general sense, but it's not what I'm doing specifically.
Like I'm an accountant, you know, if my purpose is say, helping people understand, be financially abundant or financially sane, if that's my purpose man, there's 73 different ways I can think of right away that I could do that.
So it's really not about finding the thing.
It's about experimenting and living and growing and, and wandering.
And then everything shows up.
And my personal story on this was, I think it was interesting.
So I was doing international stock lending and I had three promotions and three raises inside of 18 months.
I was 24 years old.
I was making more money than any of my friends by a long shot.
And like in retrospect, I had no idea how much money I was making.
And so I was making all this money and I was miserable.
And in my mind, I said, I know what I want to do.
I want to be creative. play music, write movies and make movies.
That's what I wanted to do.
And so for seven years I worked my butt off to get to a place where I could be doing this movie thing, television show.
I'm in this television show.
I'm I'm the observing director to become the director of the next show or something, or your show down the road.
And and I'm sitting there observing and I look around and I'm like Oh crap, this is international stock lending.
It's exactly the same thing.
There's one person with the power.
There's a whole bunch of people who want to be doing their job, but they actually want to be doing a different job.
There's people who come to work telling me that a part of their soul has been taken out of them by having to come and do this work.
They're working long hours.
Nobody's happy.
Everybody is like physically not taking care of themselves.
And I, for seven years, ran after the thing that I thought I wanted, only to find out I was running towards the thing I was running away from.
And at that moment I said, you know what?
I'm just gonna say yes to anything that sounds good in the moment.
Any work that comes to me any way.
And I did crazy things.
I like helped with a welder and I remade cars and I did drywall and I did a big loan modifications for large buildings.
And I helped somebody start a venture business.
And I did all these crazy things.
And next thing I know, there was more opportunities coming towards me than I could say yes to.
So I just started saying yes to the things that were most exciting.
And it just kept on growing.
That's how all of a sudden I became a venture capitalist.
And so and a lot of luck.
But the luck happened because i was sitting there living in my passion day to day, and what happens when you're living in your passion day to day is people want to work with you.
It's hard to get a job because you don't want to be doing it.
You want to get a job like do the thing you want to do and everybody wants to work with you.
That's very true, like If I think of all the people I know who are like Oh man, I applied to 200 jobs and I got 200 rejections.
It's like like, now that I've seen what it's like to hire people, I'm like bro, let's just honestly pick like the two or three that you really really, really want to go for.
And then just go put in 100x the effort that anyone else would.
Take the hiring manager out to coffee or their direct reports.
Just find a way to get in there.
There's just so many ways.
If someone wanted to come with me, there's an infinite number of ways they could get it.
But none of them would involve applying on some generic job board or autofill the LinkedIn jobs application and just spam it and pray and all that stuff.
All of them would require you to be passionate about it.
You would only do those hundred things if you were passionate, if you were on your purpose.
And that's why those people succeed.
Whereas the person's like, but you know that job market today.
You don't really want to do it anyway.
So then is the thing to, quote, follow your passion?
Because that also, like you know, there's a pro follow your passion camp, then there's an anti follow your passion camp.
Like, where do you stand in the...
I think that the question of following your passion is a false dichotomy.
There's no follow your passion, don't follow your passion.
It assumes that there is a passion.
So the place where it gets wonky is that Somebody is like, my passion is being an artist.
And then they have this very fixed way in which they want to be an artist.
And it's like, I want to be an artist and I want to do black and white charcoal only.
And I want to do it at large scale.
And if you are deeply passionate about that, absolutely go ahead and do the thing.
But most people...
When they do that, what they're actually setting up is a rejection, like see, the world won't accept me if I'm living in my passion.
Because what I notice is people who are deeply living in their passion.
They're passionate about something broad and they're OK with the thousands of ways to get there.
There's a thousand ways to get to the broad thing that you're after.
You said your sister or somebody wants to contribute to the happiness of all beings.
I can think of a dozen ways to do that.
So most of the time when people are thinking about live your passion or don't live your passion camps, they're thinking about somebody saying I wanna be the charcoal black and white artist and I'm gonna do that thing.
And well, you're not gonna make any money.
How are you gonna live?
You're gonna have this miserable life.
But if you're broadly saying, I want to have an impact and I want to have a creative life and I want people to see beautiful things and I want it to affect them.
Do you know how many hundreds of ways you can do that and make money doing that?
Tons.
So to me, yes, live your passion, but not in the narrow way that most people define it.
And there's lots of little nooks and crannies in our ecosystem of people.
Oh, wow.
This person happens to be deeply passionate about, you know, a very specific arbitrage of insurance.
And he makes a ton of money.
It's a friend of mine.
And he makes a ton of money.
And he's really passionate about it.
But he's not passionate about that.
He's passionate about numbers.
He's passionate about winning games.
He's passionate about solving problems.
He's passionate about taking his finances and giving it away to his particular charities that he cares about.
And taking money from one place and putting it towards another.
And that's what he's passionate about.
He's passionate about the arbitrage.
But he loves his job.
But there's 10 other jobs he could work in, a hedge fund that would all do the same thing for him.
Yeah, that's a really nice way of looking at it.
I've recently we've got this lifestyle business academy thing where we're helping people start businesses.
And people always ask this, how do I figure out what my niche is based on passions and things?
And one way I find myself explaining it is being like, Like it's not in your interest to narrowly define your passion.
It's like...
What is a business?
A business is like a set of people with a particular problem and then you offer them the solution.
So you could be passionate about any of the characteristics of the set of people.
You could be passionate about any of the characteristics of the problem.
You could be passionate about any of the characteristics of the solution.
You could be passionate about is it like a software thing?
So you could be passionate about building software.
Suddenly you've got a zillion jobs available to you.
You could be passionate about coaching.
You've got a zillion jobs available to you.
You could be passionate about teaching.
You can be passionate about creative.
There's all these different permutations of things.
And I agree.
When someone feels like oh, it's sort of like this idea of I have this one passion, and that passion equates to a point by point weekly agenda of what I will be doing.
Now we're just defining passion so narrowly that maybe in that context you might not be able to make much money doing that.
One specific instantiation of that calendar.
But I love this idea of sort of broadening it up.
The other thing I notice is that the people who do achieve that very narrow this exact thing I want to do they are often the people that, once it becomes a job and an obligation, they lose all passion for it.
Because it wasn't really that specific thing they were passionate about.
Exactly.
Passion was actually something a little broader, but they were defining it so narrowly that they missed the forest from the trees, as it were.
Or their passion was really kind of being rebellious.
What they were really doing was being rebellious and saying see, I won't be accepted for X, Y and Z, And then they are accepted and then it loses all the the pull.
Yeah.
Okay.
So it's not always the case.
There are some people, you know, know great movie makers who just know that they're going to do that their whole life and they and they just totally dedicate to it so this is step number five to find purpose in the present so this final step is about understanding that purpose isn't something necessarily that you find in the future it's something that you are living right now in this moment And so instead of it being about trying to find one specific job or one specific career path that you're like, man, this is my purpose now.
Instead of that, it's much more about experimenting and wondering and trying to be authentically yourself in whatever you're doing.
And one of my key takeaways from this conversation with Joe is that your purpose is expressed in how you do things, not necessarily in what you are specifically doing.
Like Steve Jobs, didn't know that like, taking a class in calligraphy would lead to the fonts on the Mac, like 30 years later.
He just followed his natural interest.
He followed his curiosity and he said yes to the stuff that excited him.
And there's no reason why we can't operate in that same way.
I've seen this work in my own life over the years.
Like ever since I was in secondary school, There was like the thing that I was supposed to be doing, which was like the academic stuff.
And then there was the thing that I was curious about, which was initially web design and web development and learning, coding and learning like graphic design and illustration stuff.
And all of those things then came in handy when I got to med school and started my first business.
And again, even in med school, it was like there was the thing I was supposed to be doing, which was like getting through med school.
But then I was on the side doing these side quests, exploring various interests.
And there's no way I could have possibly predicted where I would end up.
But I feel like today I'm living my purpose way more than I was back, when I was following a sort of the yellow brick road of medical school and then being a doctor.
But that didn't come because I was like sitting around trying to be like, how do I find my purpose?
It's because I was actively exploring my curiosity and experimenting with things and saying yes to stuff that seemed exciting.
And so when you explore these things that energize you, you end up sort of crafting your life's purpose without really being conscious that you are in the process of crafting your life's purpose.
So I hope you got some value from the video.
You should definitely check out more of Joe Hudson's stuff if you like his style of coaching.
And if you enjoyed this video, then you'll probably really like this one.
And this is a video where I take you with me on a little journey through a day spent in Hong Kong and showing you how I personally use this thing called the think day method to figure out what I wanna do in my life.
And the idea is that within about four hours and a bunch of different journaling prompts and stuff, you can actually drastically change the trajectory of your life.
So that'll be linked in this video right over here.
Thank you so much for watching and I'll see you hopefully next time.
Bye-bye.
