What makes your purpose your own?
One of the biggest inflection points in my life was my awakening to living a purpose-driven life. It was my Junior year of college when I met my professor turned mentor, Dr. J. Gerald Suarez. His class on systems thinking was less about management and decision making than it was about life. He was the first person who taught me about living a life of purpose and inspired me to carve my own path rather than following the one set out in front of me.
That was ten years ago, and I’ve only just started to discover what my purpose may truly be.
So many people simply trudge through life each day in a wake up, go to work, go to bed, and repeat routine. But more and more people are waking up to the knowing that life can be so much more than this. But how many people claiming to be living purposeful lives are truly satisfied? How many can say they know what their purpose truly is?
I talk a lot about purpose with two of my closest friends, Allie Armitage and Vlad Tchompalov. The three of us, along with with our friend Yasha, started our first business in Dr. Suarez’s class ten long years ago. Coincidentally, all three of us have since jumped into the world of freelancing after careers spent with other companies after college. We support each other every other week in a mastermind group that we have at our favorite coffee shop, Vigilante Coffee just down the road from our alma mater, University of Maryland.
This past January, I asked Allie and Vlad to join me for a weekend retreat down at Lake Anna, Virginia to reflect upon the last year and set intentions for the year ahead. As we sat in front of the fireplace sipping wine on the Friday evening of our retreat, we offered our reflections on 2017. I was surprised all three of us had the same feelings — we felt the year was just OK.
Objectively, the three of us are living lives that many dream of having. We do what we love doing, we do it on our own terms, and we’ve crafted lives of immense freedom and flexibility. Yet despite all of this, none of us were satisfied. We felt we had come up short on what we could have achieved in 2017. Clearly, something was off with the relationships we all had with success.
The following morning, we knew what we had to focus on — our relationships with success. Blessed with the facilitation talents of Allie, she beautifully guided us through a meditation into a journaling session where we put pen to paper and dove in to how we each defined success in our lives. After 30 minutes of writing, we reconvened to share what had come up for each of us.
“I want to be of service to others and leave the world a better place than I found it,” I shared.
“I want to leave an impact on this planet that lasts beyond my lifetime,” Vlad exclaimed.
“I want to live a life aligned with my inner purpose and help others do the same,” Allie offered.
We had all said practically the same thing.
Something wasn’t clicking. We are three distinctly different people. Surely we weren’t put on this earth to do the same thing. Something was missing.
Over the course of the weekend, what was missing slowly became clear. Layer by layer we dove into our purpose and each of us ended in places we hadn’t expected. We stumbled upon pieces of ourselves that we knew were there but had never realized why.
Vlad — a coder, UX designer, and photographer — discovered that he loves to deliver wonderment, magic, and delight to others.
The reason: growing up as an immigrant, he felt as though he was an outsider. What got him through was the inspiration of successful scientists and entrepreneurs, many of whom were immigrants themselves. People like Elon Musk made such an impact on Vlad because they inspired in him a wonderment about the universe that Vlad now seeks to inspire in others.
Allie — an emotional intelligence facilitator and coach — discovered how her purpose is to help others live an intuitive life.
The reason: Growing up naturally sensitive and empathic, the opinions and criticism of others had a deep effect on Allie. She felt conflicted about what she was supposed to do in life, and lost sense of where her thoughts and emotions ended and those of others began. Allie ultimately found grounding and transformed her life by turning her attention away from rationalizing what she heard from others and leaning instead into her own intuitive voice.
As for myself, I always knew I was passionate about business and entrepreneurship. It was the driver of making the decision to become a freelance systems consultant. But not until that weekend did I realize that my passion for business really stems from the agency it’s given me in my life.
Growing up in the closet, I often felt trapped in a life that I knew I didn’t want, but I saw no alternative path. Becoming an entrepreneur gave me the ability to create a life in which I could set my own terms because I wasn’t reliant upon others to open doors of opportunity for me. My passion to help other entrepreneurs stems from my desire to empower others to have agency over their lives, as business did for me.
After the dust settled from that amazing weekend, I realize that each of our purposes had something in common after all.
The way in which we want to serve others is the way in which we had been served ourselves.
So much has been written about living a purposeful life. A quick Google search returns content about the shift from living a reactionary life of habit and routine to living an intentional life of growth, discovery, and giving. But that’s just the beginning. Living a life of service isn’t enough. Purpose should speak deeply and directly to our own set of experiences in life.
This all came full circle for me yesterday at the end of our regular mastermind session. In a moment of gratitude, Allie explained how important relationships are to her in her journey towards her purpose. She described those most important relationship as an equal balance of giving and receiving.
It’s no coincidence, I thought, how that parallels the purpose her relationships are helping her to achieve. For a truly meaningful purpose is one that gives to others in the way that we have or have wanted to receive ourselves.
