Linking Your Deepest Passion, Purpose, and Actions

to Make a Difference in the World

Anthony Silard
ATRI A B OOKS
New York London Toronto Sydney New Delhi Hillsboro, Oregon
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Discover Your Passion
A man can be short and dumpy and getting bald but if he has fre,
women will like him.
Actress Mae West
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W
ill you help me? my brother asked. I really want to get into
business school this year. I hate my job and need a change.
It was music to my ears. My brother rarely asked meor anyone
else in our family for that matterfor help with anything. He had
not been accepted to Columbia Business School the year before, so I
knew it would be a challenge. I asked to see his essays from the pre-
vious year.
I can tell you why you didnt get in last year, I said a few days
later as we started the late-night phone calls that would go on every
night for three weeks until he fnished his applications. I hate to
break it to you, but they dont care as much as you think they do
about what youve done. These admissions ofcers receive thousands
of applications, and every applicant has had great internships, done
impressive volunteer work, been in this or that club, had this or that
job. All those facts become meaningless to them.

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While its true they want to see that youve accomplished some-
thing in your life, what they care about most is not what youve done,
but why youve done it. They care how you felt during those critical
points in your life when you had to make tough decisions, and how
those decisions shaped you as a person.
Achievements Go, Passion Stays
Almost every admissions ofcer or employer Ive ever worked with
has told me that the Number One quality they look for in an appli-
cant is passion. Essays that clearly reference an applicants inner
motivation (often called Statements of Purpose), letters of recom-
mendation, and interviews have come to play a more prominent role
in college admissions over the last century because they provide a
much clearer window into an applicants passion than do grades or
standardized test scores.
Why do interviewers care so much about passion? Because while
your achievements fade into the past, your passion stays with you. In
any area of life, passion is essential. Whatever you pursuewhether
its a career, or professional degrees, or relationships, or hobbies, or
personal goalsdiscovering and then cultivating what you are pas-
sionate about is the key to your ultimate success.
Imagine that the events that have taken place in your life are
interspersed along the banks of a river as it winds its way down-
stream. The river is your passion for something greater than
yourself. Your passion, like a fowing waterway, has guided your life
decisions and winded through all your past accomplishments.
Admission ofcers and job interviewers know that this same river
will lead you toward everything you will accomplish at their
company or university and beyond. Passion is the prime indicator of
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how far your river will take you and how the achievements you accu-
mulate along the way will refect on them. They also know that while
its possible to train someone with passion to have specifc skills, the
converse is not true.
Soul Opens Any Door
What are you passionate about? What is the thread that weaves your
story together and makes it meaningful and inspiring? Soul diva
Aretha Franklin said, If a songs about something Ive experienced
or that couldve happened to me its good. But if its alien to me, I
couldnt lend anything to it. Because thats what soul is all about. Do
you take contracts, pursue career opportunities, and build relation-
ships that tap into your passion, or do you just belt out any old song
that comes along? If you dont sing your own songs, people will stop
listening.
Have a heart-to-heart conversation with yourself and identify the
river of passion that has carried you to where you are today.
Visualize the inner motivation thats guided you past both the rocky
cliffs that tested your resolve and the warm meadows where you
stopped to bask in the sun and enjoy being alive.
Current research in the feld of narrative therapy indicates that
narrating your life story in your own words enhances your comfort
with the past, your sense of personal responsibility, and your inner
resolve for self-initiated change. Once my brother recognized that
his passion for being a creative entrepreneur and launching educa-
tional companies to help children study better was the thread that
wove his past experiences together, he wrote application essays
that were not just impressive, but moving. He was accepted to
Columbia the second time around. Why did this strategy work for
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him, and why will it work for you? Simple: there is a tremendous
shortage of genuine passion in the world. Like any commodity in
short supply and high demand, passion is highly marketable and
holds tremendous leverage.
When you discover your passion, you make The Connection with
your deepest motivations. Once you share your passion with oth-
ersas I encouraged my brother to dothey too will make The
Connection, and will desire to help you become stronger and con-
tinue on your path.
So dont waste any more time. Discover your passion and share it
with the world. Tell your story and others will be unable to resist
you. When you fnd your true voice, all kinds of resources you never
imagined will come your way. The alternative? Neglect your inner
calling and you will not truly live; instead, you will merely exist. Oth-
ers will observe you going through the motions, will not connect
with you or your dreams, will instinctively know you wont add
much value to their lives, and will treat you accordingly.
Speak with passion and your words will strike like thunderbolts to
the core of the existence of other human beings. You will inspire
them out of their slumber to believe that they, too, can feel alive
again. You will help them make The Connectionwhich is the
greatest thing you can do for another person. This is why every suc-
cessful fundraiser or salesperson I know speaks from and to the
heart, with passion as the bridge that connects them with others.
Speak with reason and appeal to peoples minds and they may agree
with you. But they wont give you money. To open doors and answer
the question posed by hip-hop lyricist RakimHow can I move the
crowd?youve got to have soul. And soul comes from your recog-
nition of your life story and what you have learned from the
struggles youve faced in each chapter.
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Return to the Source
Its no coincidence that the word passion is derived from the Latin
verb patire, which means to suffer. What has motivated you more
in your life: your desire not to suffer (or see others suffer) or your
desire for happiness? Consider the life trajectories of extraordinary
leaders like Malcolm X, Nelson Mandela, Martin Luther King, Jr.,
and Mahatma Gandhi. What do you think woke them up each
morning? A desire for happiness? To walk in the sunshine, enjoy the
day, eat delicious meals, and go on relaxing vacations? Alternatively,
was it a relentless drive to prevent the further suffering of their fami-
lies and communities from the racial oppression they themselves
had experienced? Their sufferingand the suffering of the people
they loved and cared aboutenabled them to frst make The Con-
nection and then to enable others to also make The Connection.
This is how they became some of the greatest leaders to ever grace
our planet.
Passion from suffering is the hallmark of Christianity: the Passion
of Christ refers to his suffering and crucifxion. The same is true for
almost everyone else. Just about every individual Ive ever helped to
understand his or her inner motivations derives their passion from
the tragedy theyve experienced in their lives. A former client in her
late forties exemplifes the pain-to-passion connection. Deidre spent
a large part of her childhood racked with the suffering she and her
mother experienced while taking care of her father as he withered
away from an incurable cancer.
Deidre is now a doctor in a major hospital. She has dedicated her
career to the advancement of cancer research so fewer families will
suffer as hers did. In every possible way, passion is the bridge that
takes you from pain to change.
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Many people fnd this hard to believe, but I am actually grateful to
my former step-father for the physical abuse I experienced. I often
say: If it werent for him, Id probably be working on Wall Street,
driving a red sports car, having my third affair, and pondering the
absence of any relationship with my children. Instead, Im helping
people to access the power in their lives that they deserve, so they
never feel the powerlessness that I felt while growing up.
Can you recall some defning moments in your life when you felt
profoundly hurt and, to this day, feel a stifing discomfort with what
you experienced? You may have grown up with a father who was
never around or who left your mother for another woman; your pas-
sion may be to become the father he never was so your children
never experience the suffering you went through. You may have had
parents who were so full of themselves that they left you feeling
empty; your passion may be to make your children and friends feel
like there is something worthy and meaningful in them.
It is 100 percent possible to create a new defning moment in your
life. In this watershed moment, you can make The Connection to
your deepest passion. How? By making a commitment to helping
others avoid the suffering you experienced for many years. Yet this is
only possible if you frst acknowledge that suffering. Embrace your
pain, capture the lesson it has shown up to provide, and you will
transform your life.
Pain Changes Your Perception
Fyodors father, a retired military surgeon and violent alcoholic,
served as a doctor at a hospital in one of the poorest neighborhoods
in Moscow. After returning home from work each day, his father
took a nap and ordered Fyodor to stand at his bedside, remain
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absolutely silent, and swat fies from around his head. Against his
parents orders, Fyodor spent many hours of his day visiting with the
hospitals patients and listening to their tales of suffering.
Both of Fyodors parents died before he turned twenty. At the age of
twenty-eight, Fyodor was sentenced to hard labor at a prison camp
in Siberia for belonging to a liberal intellectual group. Heres how
he described this experience: In summer, intolerable closeness; in
winter, unendurable cold. All the foors were rotten. Filth on the foors
an inch thick . . . We were packed like herrings in a barrel. In this suf-
focating environment, he had the frst of many epileptic seizures.
After Fyodor became one of the worlds greatest existentialist
writers, he declared, There is only one thing that I dread: not to be
worthy of my sufferings. Meditate on Dostoevskys words for a
moment. They suggest a transformation in how you can relate to the
pain youve experienced in your life. Consider the question about
yourself that he raises: Are you worthy of your suffering? In other
words, have you done something with your pain? If you were abused
as a child, or had a difcult breakup that sent you reeling, or were hit
by a car and seriously injured, or are living with cancer, have you let
your pain get the best of you or have you channeled it into
something positive in your life?
The English romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley wrote, Our
sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thought. Do you sweep
your saddest thoughts under the carpet and hope theyll go away, or
do you try to understand what theyve shown up to tell you? If you
are pursuing a Vision you deeply identify with, there is meaning in
your suffering just as there is meaning in your happiness. Both are
merely the travel companions on your journey. At any moment, you
can make the decision to no longer be shackled by your pain.
Instead, you can become worthy of it.
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Adversity Is the Precursor of Change
The problem with fghting or ignoring the pain within you is that its
within you. The enemy is not out there; its looking back at you in the
mirror. Fortunately, most of us are more intelligent with our physical
pain. If you cut yourself, you clean the wound. You know that if you
ignore it, it wont heal well. We all need to learn how to apply this
same self-nurturing to our emotional wounds. Swabbing the cut on
your leg while glossing over your deeper emotional scars is like
painting the outside of your house for all to see while leaving the
inside in utter disarray.
When pain is collectively experienced by a group of people, it
generates a joint passion to pursue a common agenda. This is why
our vocabulary contains the word feminist, but not masculinist. If
men earned 70 percent of what women earned, had been barred
from voting for centuries, and were consistently underrepresented in
political ofces, boardrooms, and professional schools leading to the
highest-paying professions (e.g., engineering, computer science,
business), the word masculinist would make its way into our lexi-
con with surprising velocity. In whichever form it takes, group
discrimination is a sure-fre way to provide that group with some-
thing concrete to rally around and feel passionate about.
The same is true for the individual. Almost every signifcant
change youve ever made in your life has most likely followed a
period of intense suffering. Think about it. Something or someone
hurt you. You didnt want to experience that pain again. To protect
yourself, you changed.
Recall the last time you were deeply hurt in a relationship. Have
you ever endured a breakup so devastating that your emotional pain
manifested in physical ways: you couldnt hold down food or sleep;
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you woke up early in the morning unable to get the other person off
your mind; your body felt as if a truck had just run you over and
then backed up again to check what happened. In the aftermath of
this breakup, you probably retreated from relationships. You needed
time to refect on what you were truly looking for. You had the very
human desire to avoid feeling that pain again. In short, pain changed
the way you perceive what you most value.
Now remember the last time you were going out with someone
you didnt feel very strongly about. Oh well, you thought after the
breakup. I guess it didnt work out. A few weeks later, you were dat-
ing again. You couldnt be bothered to analyze how you approach
relationships. No pain, no change.
The same is true in your career. If you get fred or receive a nega-
tive performance review from a job you deeply care about, you frst
feel devastated, but then begin to think profoundly about how to
improve your work. Yet if you are fred from a job you dont care
much about, you brush it off and quickly fnd another job. Business
as usual yields Vision as usual.
Im not suggesting that you become a stoic or go through undue
pain so you can make changes in your life. This would be unnecessary
and masochistic. But lets face it: we all suffer in various ways. Instead
of running and hiding from your sufferingwhich only causes it to
return even stronger and in a more negative form, such as anger or
resentmentrecognize that some suffering is necessary to become a
whole person and fnd the right path. Why? Because it puts a fre in
your belly to change what caused your suffering in the frst place.
Another reason its much more helpful to acknowledge your suf-
fering than to sweep it under the carpet is that you only suffer from
what you care about. The rest doesnt affect you. In other words, your
suffering is a window into your heart and what you deeply value. Once
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you make this realization, what you value will become unsheathed
and begin to crystallize. This is how your suffering enables you to
make The Connection.
So become living testimony to the words of the English romantic
poet Lord Byron: Adversity is the frst path to truth. Instead of
belittling the adversity youve experienced, own it. Embrace your
pain in its entirety as an inextricable part of who you are, as a key
ingredient in your search for truth, and as a critical element in the
inimitable composition that makes you a complete human being. In
so doing, you will convert the suffering you have experienced into
your fuel for self-change, and you will make The Connection.
Discover Your Fuel for Change
There is a scene in Rocky III in which Mr. T, who made his world
acting debut as boxer Clubber Lang, is felding questions from the
press before the big fght with Balboa. One of the reporters asks the-
mohawked actor, Whats your prediction for tonights fght? Mr. T
glared into the camera with steely, menacing eyes, and calmly
replied: Pain.
As the commencement speaker at a high school graduation, I sur-
prised many students when I started my speech by saying, Instead
of your usual cheery graduation speech promising you the world, Im
going to tell you that theres only one thing I can guarantee you will
experience from this day forward: Pain. Although I didnt try in vain
to duplicate Mr. Ts intimidating glare, the jaws of more than a few
parents still dropped. I then continued: The single factor that will
most determine your future success is what you do with it. Since
suffering will play a vital role in your life whether you like it or not,
you might as well embrace it.
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This is a revolutionary concept. It means you can choose to benet
from every single event that transpires in your life, no matter how nega -
tive, difcult, or unhealthy it appears at the time. A life-threatening
illness can give you the resolve you need to start taking care of your
health and to go for what you really want in your life. The death of a
loved one can motivate you to stop working your life away and spend
more time caring for those who are still around. A spate of hostile
insults directed toward you can ignite your desire to teach others
how to get their points across without abandoning compassion.
The next time someone betrays your trust, cheats on you behind
your back, treats you like yesterdays meatloaf, or takes you to the
cleaners fnancially or emotionally, remember the sage words of the
ffth-century Roman theologian Saint Augustine: God judged it bet-
ter to bring good out of evil than to suffer no evil to exist. You have
the choice every day of your life to either give in to your suffering or
to bring good out of it. Stagnation or positive actionwhich will
you choose?
Before you make your decision, consider these words: You only
fear what you feel powerless against. If you have zero power to do
something with your pain, then you are squarely under its control. If
you lost someone important to you, you have no power to bring
them back. Yet you do have the power to learn from what they expe-
rienced in their life and apply this learning to the way you live from
this day forward.
Rather than allowing your suffering to debilitate you for even one
more precious moment of your limited time on this earth, welcome
it as yet another tool to help you embrace your complete life experi-
ence. This mental reengineering will provide you with an inner
strength unlike anything youve ever known before. You will access
unprecedented power to truly experience the only remaining
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moment available to you for the rest of your lifethe present
momentand take the necessary risks to live the life you desire.
Stop for a moment and take a look within. What consistently
causes you distress in your life? Which thoughts of what you want
but dont have keep foating back into your mind to torment you like
a long, slow, aching pain? A relationship that didnt work out? A par-
ent who doesnt believe in you? An important career goal you just
cant seem to achieve? A coworker who is always putting you down
or upstaging you? If you refuse to learn from your pain and then
transform it into your passion, it will become a chronic theme that
plays throughout your life like an irritating song you hear over and
over again on the radio and cant get out of your mind. Instead, make
the decision to embrace your suffering and learn what it has shown
up to teach you.
MAKE IT HAPPEN:
Using your journal or a piece of paper, try the exercise below:
1. Write down one thing in your life that causes you pain.
2. Sit with the source of your suffering for a while, whatever
it may be. Clear your mind, take a deep breath, relax, and
see it for what it truly is.
3. Ask yourself, What can I learn from this pain? Try to
discover what your suffering has shown up in your life
to teach you. Write down the lessons that come to mind
from this source of pain.
4. Now ask yourself: What can I do differently so I will not
continue to experience it? Write out what comes to your
mind.
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5. Also ask yourself, How can I prevent others from experi-
encing this form of suffering? Once again, write out what
comes to your mind.
6. Write down some new ways of acting that are likely to
prevent you or others from experiencing this type of suf-
fering. If they feel right enough, integrate them into your
Vision Statement or Action Plan (you will learn how to
design an Action Plan in chapter 10).
7. Repeat this exercise for the most important sources of
suffering in your life.
Dont Let Someone Elses Passion
Spoil Your Own
Theres an old saying: Dont let someone elses pain spoil your own. Nor
should you allow someone elses passion to spoil your own. One persons
passion is anothers drudgery. Instead of running from whatever youve
been through, slow down enough to sit with it and try to understand it.
Then transform it into your passion for what you want to change in your
Self, your family, your school, your company, or the world.
Make the decision right here and now to stop shunning a natural
emotion that, like every other emotion you feel, has shown up to
teach you something about your distinctly human experience. Keep
these thoughts in mind, especially when you feel hurt by a comment
your partner makes, receive the raw end of a deal, or are rebuked by
a coworker: I will not avoid my suffering any more than I will avoid
my happiness. Instead, I will own it, and thank it for providing me
with the inner fuel to make positive changes in my life.
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Every time you feel sad or depressed, and are holding back tears,
do not cry for your pain but for your essential humanness. Sit with
your pain long enough to understand it, but not so long that it con-
sumes you. If your pain goes undetected, it will take the form of
ulcers, episodic illnesses, nausea, and drowsiness (what you experi-
ence when you dont want to be awake). Make the effort to
understand your pain and it will no longer intimidate or control you.
Instead, it will feel like an old friend whom you dont always love to
see, but respect and know how to handle.
Like that old friend, process your pain in doses. Dont sit with
your pain in the sense of, I will focus every waking moment on this
pain at the exclusion of everything else in my life until it goes away.
Instead, sit with your pain meaning, I will not just take a superfcial
view of my pain, but will try to deeply understand it. At the same
time, I will recognize when I have absorbed enough and am in
danger of losing my center. At those times, I will let my pain go, and
will return to it when Im ready to continue processing it.
The Question That Determines Your Future
Its compelling that the word passion literally contains the word
pain within it. Imagine pain so extreme it would be almost unbear-
able. What if your six-year-old son was abducted from a Florida
department store and brutally murdered? What would you do?
If you were John Walsh, you would start the television show
Americas Most Wanted. You would put over one thousand fugitives
behind bars. You would lobby the federal government to sign into
law various Missing Childrens Acts, increased penalties for sex
offenders, and a national Amber Alert system to recover abducted
children. In Walshs words, Id like to be remembered as the father of
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a murdered child who fought back. As someone who tried to make a
difference in honoring his sons name.
Walsh channeled his pain into a passion to make the streets safe
for other peoples children. Benefcial for society? Tremendously.
Brought immense meaning into his life? Without a doubt. This is the
power of passion.
Your future success also hinges on how you answer one critical
question: What will I do with my pain? You are certainly free to mope
around the house, wallow in your room, and let your mind digress into
the barren wasteland of No one understands me and Why me?
thoughts. After the death of his son, Walsh most likely went through
such a period before he discovered his lifes calling. Alternatively, you
can take a page from Walshs book. You can sit with your pain long
enough to understand it, and then design strategies to diminish the
chances of it recurring in your life and in the lives of others.
Pick a situation and ask yourself if you are working with your
pain or if your pain is working on you. If your father is always critical
of you, you have every right to feel hurt and languish in self-pity. Yet
you also have the right to ponder what he experienced in his life
thats made him so critical. Once you accept that you will not change
him, you will be ready to convert the suffering youve incurred
because of his critical nature into a burning motivation to help those
who do want to change to become less judgmental and more accept-
ing of others.
The One Passion That Will Inspire You
for a Lifetime
Passion is the desire to change something in your life and/or the
lives of others. The link between passion and suffering is easy to
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understand when you realize that what you want to change caused
you suffering, which is why you want to change it.
Now wait just a moment, you may be thinking. Suffering may
be connected to passion, but its not the only source of my passion.
I feel passionate about eating ice cream. No physical abuse or child
abduction went into that formulaI just love ice cream! Yes, its
true that while suffering is the largest pathway to passion, its not the
only one. In fact, there are some things that we may enjoy so much
we are willing to suffer after following our passion for them. This is
why many people are willing to endure an increased waistline and
less mobility after an ice cream sundaebecause their passion for
the mint chip and hot fudge is so strong.
Marcel Proust once wrote, There are many kinds of pleasures.
The real pleasure is that for which you will forsake all the
others.
[EN#]
The nineteenth-century French novelist makes an excel-
lent point about priorities: in the end, there is only one true
priorityor life pleasure, or passionthat trumps all the others.
While your passion for ice cream may be strong, it is most likely not
the passion that will keep you going for a lifetime, nor is it the pas-
sion that will inspire others to join your cause. I once listened to a
talk by Ben Cohen, the co-founder of Ben & Jerrys, and I can assure
you that his greatest passionwhich has inspired thousands to join
or invest in his companyis not to eat or sell ice cream, but to
construct a socially responsible business that makes a lasting social
impact on the world.
Passion for ice cream, or chocolate, or sports, or money, are
almost always related to either the bodys sense pleasures or the egos
need for approval, rather than a compelling desire to make the world
a better place for others. Lets return once again to the prodigious
French novelist to shed light on the true nature of passion. Proust
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also sagely observed: Happiness is benefcial for the body, but it is
grief that develops the powers of the mind.
To develop a passion that will become your one Unanswerable
Question (which you will identify in chapter 4) and guide you for
a lifetime, you must fnd something you yearn for that goes beyond
your bodys sense pleasures or your minds ego. Why? Because
once your physical sensations or ego are placated, this passion will
cease to motivate you. (If you dont believe me, eat as much ice
cream as you can for half an hour and then refect on your passion
for ice cream.) Your lifes passionto become sustainablemust
emanate from the heart.
The Roots of Com-passion
This conceptthat the strongest form of passion does, in fact, come
from our sufferingnaturally leads to a question I have been asked
hundreds of times in my conferences: If I havent suffered a lot in
my life, does it mean I cant have any passion? My response is that
the good news is your passion doesnt have to come from your own
suffering. Ive observed in many of my clients that the fip side of an
easy, sheltered childhood can be a lack of passion to change anything
in the world. (If you are content with the cards the world has dealt
you, after all, why change the deck?) Ive also had the privilege of
working with many others who have learned the life-changing lesson
that they are connected to every other human being theyve ever
encountered by a universal life force, and that this synergy can give
rise to an incredible passion.
We are all connected. When someone else suffers, you suffer too.
If this werent the case, you would never cry during a movie. The
same is true with joy. Watch someone smile, and before you know it,
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you smile. When a friend laughs, you laugh. Witnessing either joy or
suffering in others is how you make The Connection. The passion
created inside you when you observe others suffering comes from
compassioncom(with) and passion (to suffer). Compassion doesnt
mean to suffer with, which would bring you down and render you
unable to sustain your caring for another person, but to be with
someone in their suffering.
There is so much suffering in the world already that there is no
good reason to add any more of your own to the mix in the hopes of
fnding your passion. Instead, spend enough time with someone who
is suffering to understand at least some of what they are experiencing.
You will become emotionally moved, which will impel you to work
toward preventing their future suffering or the suffering of others
from the same afiction.
Youve already experienced this feeling of compassion many
times. Recall when you watched a family member or friend experi-
ence devastating pain after they were emotionally hurt by another
human being. Think back to when you visited people living in
poverty and made the profound realization that they arent any
different from you. Remember a time when you passed someone on
the street, looked into their eyes, and saw through them to their suf-
fering. Recall those moments when you questioned why you are so
fortunate and felt compelled to make the lives of others better in
some concrete way.
You may have had one of these experiences and then forgotten
about it and gone on with your life. Bring it back into your mind and
your long-dormant passion will return.
Can you recall the times in your life when you stumbled over the
truthwhen you realized your true inner calling, or the kind of
person you want to spend your life with, or what family truly
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meanseven if only for a brief moment? Most of the time, we let
these moments pass us by because our ego doesnt allow our soul to
fully absorb whats holding its attention. Our ego diverts us back
to our worries about what we have to do tomorrow, or our insecure
need to regain our traction on the hamster wheel to nowhere weve
been sprinting on at work, or our impulsive desire to follow up with
as many people as possible in order to feel as if we know everyone
while in truth we know no one.
Due to our constant preoccupations, it can be all too easy to turn
a blind eye to that faintly perceptible feeling inside instead of letting
it grow. Heres my simple advice: go back to those moments in your
life when you actually felt something. Remember those feelings, give
them room to freely evolve, and learn what they came into your
heart to teach you. This is your passion.
Freedom Is Not Free
I hope youve accepted by now that the issue is not the pain youve
been through. The issue is how you relate to the pain youve been
through. Befriend your pain, or the pain youve seen others experi-
ence, and you will receive a tremendous gift: a sense of purpose.
Never again will you count the minutes on the clock until you can
leave work or class. Gone will be the days when you felt lost and
confused about your lifes mission. You will wave good-bye to all
the negative vices and self-recriminations that stem from an inner
aimlessness.
Best of all, the day you confront your pain and convert it into
your passion will be the last day you have to work. You will never
again have a job. You will no longer even have to ponder, What will
I do in my career? Instead, you will have a calling. Your greater
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purpose will evolve out of a deeply rooted inner passion you wont be
able to shake even if you try, and it will drive you to achieve spectac-
ular results.
Why is it so important to discover your passion? Because you
have something unique and unrivaled to contribute. You can
discover it and integrate it into your lifes purpose by asking yourself,
What have I been through, or seen others go through, that I could
dedicate myself to preventing? and What about the world agitates
me and makes me feel uncomfortable? Make your resolve concrete
by asking yourself, What would wake me up in the morning and
make me want to walk through the doors of my ofce, school, hospi-
tal, or studio and do something with my life?
Make this metamorphosis happen in every area of your life
starting today. If you feel your ex-husband betrayed you by leaving
you with two children to raise so he could chase after a younger
woman, dont subordinate your pain by going on a dating spree.
Instead, process whatever pain you can handle and ask yourself
the hard questions about why your marriage didnt work. Consider the
qualities you were looking for when you met your ex-husband. Then
envision the qualities you will look for now to fnd a man whom you
are more compatible withand who will stand by you when the
going gets tough. The choice is yours: you are certainly free to play
the victim role and complain about your pain. Alternatively, you can
feel it, heal it, and transform it into your passion.
I visited the Korean War Memorial in Washington, D.C. and was
struck by an inscription that read: Freedom is not free. As I men -
tioned earlier, to develop your own Vision for your life and
relentlessly pursue it is the only freedom I know of. Like anything of
import, its not free. The cost is to drill down to the core of your
sufferingbecause confronting the pain that lingers inside you is
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precisely what will liberate you from it. You will then be able to dis-
cover your passion for what you want to change in the world.
But why go through all this pain to confront even more pain
thats better forgotten? you may be thinking. Id rather focus on
what makes me happy. I realize what Im asking you to do isnt
easy. Lets face it: Confront my suffering probably isnt the first
thing you want to put on your to-do list. Yet its worth your time to
fight the natural human tendency to avoid thinking about the pain
youve experienced. Why? Because once you integrate these peri-
odic self-dialogues into your schedule alongside Meet Mary for
tennis, your lifes missionlike a mountain lake after the sediment
has drifted to the bottomwill start to become clear. Where you
once saw an abundance of time and a scarcity of opportunities,
you will see the opposite. Most importantlyfor you and the rest
of us you share this planet withyou will make The Connection.
You will find a sense of meaning in the brief amount of time you
have left on this earth, which will guide you toward thoughtful,
compelling action.
MAKE IT HAPPEN:
1. You entered this world and youre going to leave it. What
will be different about the world when you check out of it
that will be attributable to your actions? In other words,
what will be the impact of your life?
2. Write a paragraph about what makes you uncomfortable
about your community and/or the world. Put into words
what makes you feel like saying, This is not as it should
beand Im going to do something about it!
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3. Revisit the thoughts youve had while reading this chapter
about what truly drives you and what you want to dedi -
cate yourself to changing in the world. Write down these
thoughts and save them.
4. After fnishing Part 1, integrate this profound inner learn-
ing into your Vision Statement. As you will soon learn,
your Vision Statement must refect what you are most
deeply passionate about in order to become sustainable
and motivate you for years to come.
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