Chapter 5: Follow Your Passion and Uncover Your Purpose
“The quickest way for a tadpole to become a frog is to live every day happy as a tadpole.” – Brian Smith
What’s the point of Emotional Wealth? Sure, by focusing on become emotionally rich, we’re able to create an ecosystem of confidence, gratitude, positivity, and self-growth. But why do we really care? What’s the culminating event, feeling, or mindset we’re really after?
Emotional Wealth gives your life meaning, passion, and a purpose.
Understanding the components of emotional riches grants us the wherewithal to step outside of our comfort zone and truly appreciate and live life. It’s through the act of stepping outside of our comfort zone that we send ourselves down the path to finding our passion, and therefore our purpose.
In this regard, Emotional Wealth gives your life direction.
Your passion, resulting in your purpose, solidifies the foundation of your emotions, upon which the remaining three principles of wealth will be built. Your purpose gives your life a “true north,” an unwavering focus and direction that allows you to build a life you want and deserve.
Everything in the following sections – as well as in life – will become simple, if you collect, and then spend, your emotional riches on the pursuit of your passion and purpose. It’s as simple as stepping outside of your comfort zone, and saying “yes” to the things that resonate with your purpose, and saying “no” to the things that don’t.
And it’s through this process of yesses and noes that you further hone in on and understand what your true north is, and ultimately, what your life means.
Turn Your Passion Into a Process
Uncovering your passion and finding your purpose sounds like a daunting task, and in a sense, it is.
It’s important, then, to turn your pursuit of your passion into a process, and then focus on the process. I’m sure you’re tired of hearing it, but your Emotional Wealth, and therefore life in general, is all about the experiences you have and the people you meet.
Your passion finds your purpose, and your purpose in life will be an ever-evolving journey of self-discovery. It should be an ongoing process. One where you are constantly aiming for a target, and as soon as you get close to hitting it, it rises, giving you a higher target to hit. In a sense, your pursuit of your passion is your purpose.
Tying together everything you’ve learned about your Emotional Wealth, it’s through a reliance on those principles, gained through real world experimentation, that you’re able to slowly but surely uncover your true north values.
What’s important is that you’re constantly seeking reference experiences - by yourself, with others, and through others. Through these reference experiences, we begin to understand what resonates with us and what doesn’t. We’re able to ask ourselves the question behind the question: why does one thing resonate with us over another? In this way, we begin to understand our emotional framework.
Once we have an understanding of our emotional framework, we can add to that framework through the remaining three principles of wealth. Your framework can be made up of one unwavering belief, a few pillars of emotional understanding, or a mosaic of emotional strength. It doesn’t matter which, because you are the architect of your life, and nobody else.
We all need a passion, we all need a purpose, and we all need a true north direction. It’s only by getting off your ass, however, that you’re able to build your emotional framework and find the path you’ve been looking for. Hey, it’s pretty hard to steer a parked car, no?
In this way, your path to your purpose shouldn’t be a straight line, but should be more of a funnel. As you turn your Emotional Wealth into momentum, you’ll start out in one direction, potentially only to pivot entirely into another direction. Then, you might very well pivot back.
It’s almost like someone at the beach with a metal detector. Your purpose is buried deep down inside you, and you have to traverse back and forth in life, until you uncover it.
Look at the chart below, which I refer to as a Passion Funnel:
When you start your search for emotional riches through networks, friends, family, knowledge, understanding, experiences, and magic, with the ultimate goal of discovering your passion and purpose, it’s going to start off rocky.
Your traverses – or “bounces” – through life, both back and forth, will be wide; to an outsider, they’ll seem somewhat directionless. But don’t worry, you know otherwise.
As you continue your search, adding reference experiences along the way, your life’s bounces will become more refined, and will have a more dedicated direction.
You’ll begin to live life with more intention, and use your increasingly greater understanding of the world and your framework, to bounce with purpose. Each bounce will further define the structure and boundaries of your emotional framework. You’ll know what you like, what you don’t, and where you want to ultimately end up.
You might start your journey with the intention of becoming a businessperson. As you work your first job, you realize that a traditional 9-5 isn’t the lifestyle for you. Looking for a way out, you decide to pack up and leave for a trip abroad. Once there, you meet a programmer and discover an interest in web development.
You have no background in programming, but you jump at the opportunity to learn, soaking in the foreign culture all the while. Ready to head back home, you take your expanded knowledge back, and begin pursuing a career in web development.
While looking for freelance web design work, you meet a passionate person looking for a website for her new nonprofit, which aims to help developing countries. You really resonate with this person and her mission, and you realize all along that the thing that’s been driving you isn’t business, or travel, or even web development, it’s the desire to help people.
Boom! You’ve uncovered your passion. You then translate that passion into the purpose of increasing the living conditions in third world countries. And who knows, this passion and purpose might lead you to yet another iteration!
The point, however, is that through your discovery process, you uncovered more about yourself than you ever thought possible. You find your true north, which, at the moment, is being expressed through a nonprofit. That might change, but your emotional framework will remain unwavering, and will clear a path to your passion and purpose, throughout the rest of your life.
A second way to discover your passion is to not think about your life linearly, but think about it spirally. Your life has a central point – either a hobby, passion, or purpose – that acts as your anchor. And like everything in the natural world, life is cyclical; it’s always trying to remain anchored to its center.
As we get farther away from our life’s center, our passion wanes and our life increases its resistance as it tries to divert itself back. When people talk about the “cyclicality” of life, this is what they’re saying: there’s a natural balance to everything, and regardless of if you’re a human or a plant, it’s your natural inclination to move back toward center.
If you look back at your life, or even look forward, you’ll see that it hasn’t been a straight line so much as an oscillating one, moving around and around a central and all-important point. So, rather than the traditional linear success, those who have a deep understanding of their life’s center have spiral success.
It’s an upward spiral around a passionate center that results in a successful life that gives deep meaning to the person living it. Rather, lets say, than someone who seems linearly “successful” by society’s standards, but have moved so far away from their center that their success provide them with no greater purpose:
What’s that central point for you? If you think hard about it, you should be able to identify a common theme, or a set of principles and values, that have been governing your life. Identifying these principles and values uncovers your center and therefore the drivers of your life. Those drivers are the “why?” behind each one of your actions, and every one of your thoughts.
Finding this central point will show you the driving force of your passion. Much like the passion funnel, you’re then able to live your life with increasingly more intention as you further identify and follow your central point. This way, you can move through life with purpose and direction, and have deeply meaningful experiences along the way.
For me, I’ve always loved to write, and sometimes I’ve even been good at it! My mother will even tell you that when my parents moved me into the San Diego State dorms, I defiantly told her that I’d “never work in an office.” Oh, how I love blissful ignorance.
I declared a major in journalism, but I quickly realized that writing was more of a hobby than a career choice. Ultimately, I didn’t want to live my life as a sports beat writer, following a sports team from city to city. So, when society to told me to get a “more practical major,” I switched to Finance, and graduated with a minor in Economics too.
I did end up working in an office. In fact, I’m in an office as I’m writing this. But, no matter what job I took, what city I lived in, or who my friends were, I always seemed to write. It was the idea generation and connections I made through my articles and blogs that really brought me consistently back to writing.
That’s the center from which my passion spirals outward and upward. If I had all the money in the world, I’d still be waking up early, heading to a coffee shop (the more pretentious the better), and sitting down to write. No matter where I’ve been, where I am, or where I’m headed, I always come back to writing and what it represents.
In this way, I’ve been able to identify my central point, and build a passionate life around it.
Your center becomes your true north, and gives your life intentional direction. Moving closer and closer to your center pushes you closer and closer to your passion and purpose.
You should never do anything that doesn’t resonate with your passionate center, or push you further down your passion funnel.
A Summation of Values
In reality, your true north principle or value, isn’t so much one value as it is a summation of them.
Through your Emotional Riches, you identify core values and principles, which are relied on to make every decision in your life. Following your passion funnel or emotional center will uncover your passion, purpose, and true north, yes, but it’s important to think deeper.
What is it about your passion that drives you? What is it about your purpose that gives your life meaning? Why do you so willingly follow your true north?
At the root of each of these, you’ll find a set of guiding beliefs. Think of it this way: if your passion and purpose are the roads on a map, and your true north a compass, then your core values and principles are the map itself!
Your passion and purpose might change (i.e., you might change the road you’re taking), your true north might adjust from time to time, but your core principles will remain as steadfast as the terrain on a map.
Only a cataclysmic event – or mindset shift – will change the shape of the mountains, or the directions of the rivers.
This is the value of Emotional Wealth. This is what it means to be emotionally rich. It’s an understanding of yourself and your surroundings so deep, that you can rely on them without question.
Building your emotional framework in such a way becomes a set of boundaries and a gate keeper, that know exactly who and what you need in life, and who and what you can do without.
It’s a true passion, that turns into a purpose, that points you true north, that gives you the emotional wherewithal to make a lasting impact on this world.
Remember, wealth is not the person who has it, but the person who lives it!