On Finding My Purpose-How You Can Do The Same.

These past couple of months have been filled with a variety of learning’s and “light bulb” moments that have taught me so much about what my career, my health, my personal time and my relationships truly mean to me. I typically find it tough to talk about these types of things openly and what follows isn’t necessarily warm and fuzzy. It’s my own story on finding my voice and myself and defining what I value in all aspects of my life. I think Clayton Christensen, who I admire greatly and draw a lot of inspiration from says it best, “Because if the decisions you make about where you invest your blood, sweat, and tears are not consistent with the person you aspire to be, you’ll never become that person.” So why do so many people live a life with some perceived sense of purpose and never become the person they aspire to be? 

I personally think the answer lies in the way we treat our work and personal lives and that often times the decisions and trade-offs we make are not consistent with our purpose to begin with. I think separating these environments because sometimes we believe that they fundamentally cannot co-exist exacerbates this dilemma. When we do this we lose sight of our purpose or never find it to begin with. Of course, there are aspects of our lives best reserved to be kept separate from our work, but too often I feel as though we forget to share a little bit of ourselves, our experiences, our values, and our motivations with those we don't hold significant bonds too, yet spend thousands of hours with...our co-workers and extended networks. I frequently have found myself separating both my careers and my life outside of it far too much and heavily compartmentalizing these environments only to feel that when I experience a significant challenge in one it transcends into the other. All too frequently, we view work and our personal lives as totally separate entities each with their own purpose and motivations and with our own false notions that somehow both cannot fundamentally co-exist to create a better version of ourselves. I fear that this makes us completely lose sight of our purpose or never find it, creating significant challenges for us in all aspects of our lives.

There are significant opportunities we miss out on when we make a conscious or unconscious decision that each belong in their own world’s and I want to use this piece to challenge the very notion that our careers and personal lives are distinct entities. I want to help you find your purpose again or discover it for the first time. I hope it changes your life.

If you don’t believe in my argument there is also significant research in Social Neuroscience relative to the need for us to be constantly socially connected across all of our daily interactions that further accentuates the point. We spend most of our lives working and through our experiences in our careers and outside of them we have the unique opportunity to influence gazillions of people for better or for worse. I think it’s by sharing these very experiences that helps us find or lead with our purpose, making us significantly happier, healthier and richer individuals in all spheres of our lives. The only way to truly achieve this is to live a life with purpose and it starts with re-wiring how we approach our interactions with everyone we touch and everything we do.

Further, I believe our personal lives and work lives shouldn’t be taboo to discuss given that these may help us as we uncover our purpose. We ourselves create optical illusions for our brains as we put up barriers in terms of how we discuss our careers and our lives outside of them depending on the groups of people we are talking to, to be specific. Maybe that’s just me, but I suspect I may not be alone. Do you find yourself sometimes talking in jargon without getting real on how we feel with other you work with? Do you get angry and upset at actions our colleagues take against what we’d like them to do feeling as though they don’t understand your point of view? What about with a friend? A loved on? How many times have you personally shared your experiences and values directly with someone this week? How many times has a bad call you had at the end of the day transcended into how you feel the rest of the night hoping you could re-run it in your head and understand a colleagues perspective? Have you ever subjected someone to how you feel on any given day without giving much thought to it? Do you feel as though you can positively answer these questions and feel good about the answers you gave? I certainly can't and had very little knowledge to think through these questions when I entered the workforce. We never learn that these questions are an important part of developing a foundation for success and then defining our purpose, finding it and ensuring our priorities and every interaction we have are molded by it… and unfortunately in the end I've lost count on the number of times I've felt terrible and how much of a rut it's personally put me in.

I want to also address that the views expressed are extremely drawn out and long so if you do read on please forgive me as I recognize I am verbose and may make many errors as well. I don't expect you to read all of thus, but it helps me get my thoughts out and I hope it may help you too. Also, they are the accumulation of my own thoughts, conversations and my personal curiosity around the topic and not those of my employer or any particular relationship or affiliation. Additionally, there are many qualified and highly-regarded authors, business executives and influential leaders from all walks of life that spend a lot of time writing about and discussing this very topic. I owe intellectual credit to them on some of the perspectives that may reflect some of their published viewpoints of which I have drawn many of my own thoughts and inspiration from in writing about my own journey. A lot of their views are also included here for added context and validity.

It has taken me a while to gather and formulate my raw thoughts around what I truly wanted to write about because the personal learning’s have been far-reaching and immense, putting words to it when you truly try to sit down and write becomes quite a difficult endeavor. Many days I wake up feeling on top of the world excited to put pen to paper talking about the topic. On others, I feel as though everything I have could break at any given second…worried, nervous and scared for what I am truly doing with my life every single day.

The only way to truly feel at peace with the fear many of us encounter early on in our careers, or are encapsulated by or conflicted with, is if we guide ourselves with purpose, set our priorities and be present in all that we do. Applying this methodology in all our interactions treating all people in our lives as equal in the stories and experiences we share we can find or re-discover our purpose.

If I know one thing to be constant, that is that having guided my actions and decisions in the manner in which I describe below nowadays, I actually feel excited and quite content with being nervous and scared because my purpose has started to drive me. I couldn’t be happier and accepting of my situations, while feeling in control of my future, more so than in any month or year before. It’s an extremely strong body high to feel with your mind rushing every waking moment you spend tackling new challenges and discovering great new frontiers.

If you're not convinced with my thoughts or need harder scientific proof, let me offer you some evidence from science worth considering. The struggles I describe are rampant because when we separate our work and personal lives our brain activate different neural networks that nurture nothing but continued trade-offs with our lives in and outside of work. Groundbreaking science conducted by Matt Lieberman, a renowned psychologist, proves this to be true as well. In Social, a must read “high on your summer reading list” novel per me, Lieberman argues that our need to reach out and connect with others in all parts of our lives is a primary driver behind our behaviors. Sometimes we believe that pain and pleasure alone guide our actions. Yet, the research using fMRI at Lieberman’s UCLA lab shows that our brains actually react to social pain and pleasure in much the same way as we deal with physical pain and pleasure. Thus, our brains have developed extremely sophisticated mechanisms for securing “our place in the social world.” We have a unique ability as a species to read other people’s minds, to figure out their hopes, their dreams, their motivations, their fears and so much more, allowing us to coordinate our lives and constantly connect with others. It is our responsibility to use this gift so unique to our species.

However, Lieberman's research also shows that our most private sense of who we are and what shapes our experiences are reserved for the most important people and groups in our lives. We make all sorts of attempts to re-wire our brains to separate various groups as best as possible and restrain our self-impulses for the greater good. This may just be the wrong thing to do as Lieberman’s insights reveal that in restraining ourselves in this capacity, we literally shut down our social brains leaving the neuro-cognitive resources and their potential virtually untapped in many aspects of our lives. Whether that is in our schools, in the workplace, our sales meetings with customers, or even in our interactions with strangers, we are missing out big time and I really fear it's a widespread epidemic.

Believe it or not, our need to connect with other people is far more fundamental and more basic than our need for food or shelter. Our brain attempts to use our spare time to learn about the social world and other people and our relations to them trying to put in hours on hours to master the skill. There is even substantial research that shows that brain regions that support social and analytical thinking mostly function like a “neural seesaw” creating further divide for us in the workplace. We tend to rely more on our analytical capabilities when we interact with colleagues placing a premium on the analytical thinking and promoting our ability to solve complex problems with hundreds of analytical models than working on them through social problem solving. We do this often in our lives outside of work as well. Trying to run scenarios through our head and justify actions others take. Both our analytical and social capabilities are extremely important, but I would argue creating strong social networks helps us be far more happier, smarter and productive humans.

When we start deviating from the default pathways our brains require from us, we also create a divide in our ability to prioritize ingredients our brain needs to succeed in this capacity: prioritizing our relationships, our physical fitness, feeling listened to and heard are critical examples of these very ingredients. Yet, we constantly starve ourselves of these ingredients calculating trade-offs and next best alternatives rather than nurturing ourselves to put our thoughts through the mental models we should be, applying social reasoning to tasks and guiding them by our varying purposes in life to develop strong social networks. There is nothing to fear about if you haven’t started yet. You can rid yourselves of the optical illusions we fight with everyday.

A good recipe is an art- it is honed over time and perfected with practice. None of us are perfect, but we can all strive to be better versions of who we are today by promising ourselves that we will invest and prioritize for our futures than be maniacally focused on our short term priorities at the expense of investments that pay off in the long run. Short term priorities yield exactly what they imply. They help us achieve short-term gains that don’t lead us to be happy or fulfilled in what we do bouncing from one thing to another. If you're like me you may struggle as well to let the core ingredients our brains need to drive our careers, our relationships outside of and within them and everything else in between. We go from one networking event to the other. One job to the next. One interview to the next. One degree to the other graduate program. One date in the East Village and then off to another on the Upper East Side, before taking a flight and meeting someone else in another state the next day (that's probably just me- I rack up the miles and not too sure how else to date). Sometimes when we face deadlines during critical junctures or have urgent items that need attending to, being focused on the short-term is extremely important, but when it becomes all too frequent and quickly creeps into our daily lives we risk creating significant silos and a gaping hole that leave us with much to be desired.

While I am not an inspirational speaker nor have I had any breaking revelation or ideas on this that others don't experience or think through as well, I would like to describe putting my own personal and professional choices from the past couple of years into a model I started to follow in early January of this year. Hopefully, I will convince you that the most important thing you can do with your day is to make sure what comes out of your mouth, translates into your priorities and subsequently into every interactions you have are guided by the three core ingredients successful for a fulfilled career and personal life that tie nicely to the science as well: A Purpose, Defined Priorities and Presence. Then, if you so feel compelled, I'll urge you to ensure that in every interaction you have you share your experiences and contribute your voice. You share who you are with others. You speak up and you lead with your purpose and your voice and let that guide everything you do. You can draw on your experiences from both your personal and professional lives in a context that helps others view their own situations and impact so many other people for the better as a result. Never forget the power of our own experiences and leading with our stories, but more importantly I hope you decided to do that with everyone you meet and from all parts of your life. Where to start...

In the hustle and bustle of my business and leisurely travel, I continue to have the humble opportunity to meet people from all walks of life. Frequently, the conversations I hear in the back of long drawn out Uber Pools (we’ve all been there), crunched in the middle seat on flights, or hanging on to the subway pole of an unbound roller coaster, I take the time to listen to anxious students and those in similar shoes as myself discuss their own lives. My favorite place by far is observing "people chatting" is at small coffee shop in New Hope, PA situated on the beautiful Delaware River, where I listen to some of the most interesting and compelling conversations I have ever heard sipping on a latte or cappuccino taking in the sounds and the noises around me. I observe students and those in the workforce all spiffy and well-dressed zipping in and out of the shop sometimes finding myself cringing when I hear conversation similar to the words that came out of my mouth at one point. I am reminded of my own journey and my personal trials and tribulations with finding the right combination in my life.

The truth of the matter is, it takes a lot of time to learn these lessons and develop these experiences and we are certainly not prepared for it early on in our education. So when it comes to the art of defining our purpose, prioritizing our lives relative to it and being present in all activities we undertake, we tend to experience a lots of bumps along the way and we distance ourselves from our thoughts and conveying them in the context of our experiences to others. It's perfectly normal and you're not alone. And if you’re just starting your career and faced with stressful work demands, travel schedules and exciting cutting-edge opportunities, you may be a victim of how I treated myself finding it tough to be able to get yourself out of the rut I often times found myself in. We forget often what matters and prioritize work and tasks and meetings and calls and fitting in this and that and ohh one last email before we sleep, texting apologies to a friend that we couldn’t make it to dinner while we were in town or having deep regret that we didn’t get a chance to call a loved one back because it was past midnight as we hammered away at a presentation. We let others invade our calendars and organize our schedules to every waking second we have without dictating those terms on our own. We rarely lead with what we've experienced, our stories and our experiences dictating our lives by the plethora of tasks, not what truly matters.

I had the opportunity to travel by train the other day and for the first time in a while I was left with a big knot in my stomach that seemingly would not subside. I could feel the radiating sun beating through the window exacerbating the sweat under my blazer and I felt as though I had to quickly take my laptop out of my briefcase and start writing. When the thoughts kept pouring into my head the clouds covered the bright sky imposing a gray overcast of impending doom.... I felt a lot of anxiety and the fear kept setting in making me scared and nervous again. Yesterday, however, I felt scared that there are far too many people in the world like myself who have moved along in their lives, having a lot of successes in their name, great friends and colleagues, but without actually finding their voice and living their lives through purpose.

I for years talked and sometimes am still guilty of speaking in terms of my immediate priorities, which largely disregard why I set out to do what I wanted to in the first place....I lost my purpose in building my perceived successes. I defined myself by how much I needed to work and then how much time I needed to spend outside of it building relationships, often times never getting to them as I prioritized my career over them and continued to stress beyond belief never sharing my feelings or experiences with others. I’ve also struggled with my weight nearly all my life and with that comes a lot of insecurities that make you focus on areas that you are successful in hopes they will somehow miraculously override the areas you seem to be weak virtually all the time. You stress about it in the background and hide your feelings, think about all the ways in which you could be healthier, happier and carry less physical and emotional burden on yourself. It’s a horrible feeling to experience. As the sun beat down again on me from the muggy east coast summer and the musty smells of the Big Apple, I started breaking out in a sweat as the knot inside my stomach continued to twisted with every question I pondered. I wish I could just yell on this train or the subway or outside at the top of my lungs loud and clear and just say you’re prioritizing the wrong things! Don’t go down that route it won’t make you happy! Or does it really matter if you get some ridiculously over calculated score on your next practice exam for an exam? Does it?

Good educations, grades, salaries, relationships all are great metrics of success to hold us to but they are just data points at the end of the day. Too often, we treat these points as distinct entities and forget to draw or correlate our actions back to three fundamental ingredients that allow us to achieve all of the important things in our lives and build a healthy and sound foundation for a successful career and endured happiness. Granted, it is necessary that we establish metrics of success to achieve our goals, but the only way in which we will succeed with our goals in the long term is if we talk, act and deliver with purpose, define priorities and be present in all that we do. I am going to continue to say this because unless the mindset gets ingrained in our heads we will never fully live our lives in this way. Why? Because it’s extremely, extremely difficult to do. Often times, we may feel like slackers. We may feel as though we didn’t spend our day on accomplishing things that yield us immediate results. And if you’re like me, coming out fresh into the workforce, we’ve literally never been wired in this very capacity.

Many early career professionals (not limited to just early career professionals but I think this issue is extremely relevant in this specific group and thus I speak primarily to this group in this post) like myself continue down a path of defining our purpose, priorities and presence by actually not focusing on them at all. Yes, I'm going to be a bit provocative but I’d ask you to really think through how you spent your day today. I personally have run through many scenarios like this myself during the whee hours of the morning when my brain would spin, tossing around in bed or disturbed by dreaming in fear as if the world was ending and I had lost everything I had built or worked for achieving these past three years. I would find myself in bad moods often. Sometimes in tears for reasons I can’t put any thoughts or find answers for. I think, however, a lot of the reason behind it was feeling an ambiguous void and I kept thinking abut what I really was prioritizing and what I should have been. Over and over again losing sleep.

Focus is important, but when we don’t act in or express our feelings in ways that actually allow us to focus on our priorities we end up not focusing on what we are striving to become at all. We get embroiled with various thoughts in our heads without allowing the fundamental chemicals in our brain allow us to connect socially and find meaning and social connectivity in our work and professional lives. I found that in majority of what I did a lot of the fundamental P’s that I describe here didn't guide it. Rather, how I defined my purpose and the actions I took as a result were guided by a jaded mentality that success was defined by my next promotion, a bump in salary, more tasks, more time spent mastering various skills I would need to pursue higher education and get my next promotion. 

We require certain ingredients that trigger various chemicals in our brain that are critical to all aspects of our lives regardless of our setting; so when we allow the brain to play “neural seesaw,” we risk losing the ability to utilize default mechanisms critical to our longevity. Balance can be associated with an act of “tip toeing” and making sure the tower we are attempting to build doesn’t fall before we have had a chance to actually build the very foundation. Our foundation is important, yet when we don't spend time building it, it continues to shake and develop potholes and cracks only for us to continue to patch them up and move on. Our foundations is the north star and the navigation system to be able to solve issues both large and small and strengthen your learning’s and processes over time. I think a lot of the existing mentality around our work and personal lives speaks primarily to balance. A lot of people find balance in what they do and continue to balance year after year until they are left with big holes in their foundations because they haven’t built them from the start. What the heck do you mean by a foundation you ask? Quite simply put, our foundation is and should always be defined by our purpose. Always. Let me now attempt to hopefully give you context that focusing on this is critically important by putting my own life within the context of the model I discuss:

1. On Defining Your Purpose: I wonder how many people have actually thought long and hard about what their purpose is? The best advice I can give to anyone who is just entering the workforce or facing similar dilemma as me is to make yourself a charter. Let that charter define every action you take every single day. Have it up on your desk. Maybe right on a note taped your laptop. Keep it simple. My purpose is to challenge and disrupt the status quo and influence the people, projects, causes, companies and movements I get to be a part of by helping them remove obstacles and barriers that stand in the way of their success, happiness and their health and well being. I love helping people. I love mentoring. I love complex problems. I love complexity and finding new ways to approach complex problems. I love when my mind races for the right reasons. I love when I solve puzzles. I love taking on new white-space initiatives. I love when I see a smile on someone's face or am able to help someone through a difficult time. I love saving lives and finding innovative solutions to challenges in our healthcare systems. I live this through my work and now increasingly more through my social interactions as well every single day and I am so humbled and blessed to be able to do so. It’s an extremely strong body high to feel with your mind rushing every waking moment you spend tackling new challenges and discovering great new frontiers. Let me tell you a story...

At one point last year, I remember sitting in nervous trepidation at my primary care physicians office thinking about my own career and the work I did at the time helping providers transform how they engage with patients. I remember exactly how the conversation with the physician was going to go in the consultation room… you haven’t been here in a while, you haven’t paid attention to your health and you’re extremely obese and on the verge of not having much longer to live to accomplish your dreams. It was the latter that really got to me. I finally had the urge to really evaluate what I was doing to myself every single day and the actions and decisions I made. I found that I never prioritized my physical health, which made me a walking contradiction of my work life, but also carried over to how I felt (slouchy and unproductive) in other aspects of my life as well. I was a nightmare in the making. Making the decision to define my purpose and then make sure that all of my meetings and interactions support it has been more than amazing. Nowadays, I ask for clarity as well. Whether that is from my manager or from teammates, I want to make sure my time is best spent prioritizing what’s important to me and to my purpose. I’ve found that the results are incredible. I enjoy work more than I ever have before and trust me I’ve always loved what I do. I find that the conversations I have at work are much more richer than before and when I take the time to connect with people outside of a business setting it leads to immense opportunities and new frontiers I had not thought possible of before. I share my life updates more so with colleagues than before and open up on issues that are challenging for me seeking advice and offering my experiences to help them with their own hurdles.

2. On Defining Your Priorities: When it comes to defining your priorities look at your calendar of activities every day. I tend to look at my weekly activities on Sunday prepping for the week ahead ensuring in advance that my calendar is blocked with activities that help progress my learning, my health and in continuing to live and further my purpose. This is a pretty simple habit to implement. Don't spend your Sunday's just catching up on emails, spend it critically looking at your calendar and ensuring you have a good mix of activities. Let me tell you a story....

I’ve lost 55 pounds and counting of my weight this year and the impact it's had on my life has been immense. I feel more energetic, more alive and less stressed and in the driver seat of my physical and emotional health. Every single pound has been difficult to lose. But I've looked at every pound in the context of my purpose and ensured all of my activities help me accomplish that. As I mentioned, my weight has been a constant challenge for me. Being obese is no fun. I don’t think people set out to want to be obese, but circumstances and actions certainly lead to it. And when you don’t live a life with purpose or define your priorities every single day, the chances you slip in giving your brain the critical ingredients it needs and then subsequently the social connectivity it deserves everything can shatter in front of your face. The impact of losing weight has had on my life is immense. I feel more energetic and less stressed and in the driver seat of my physical and emotional health. Every single pound has been difficult to lose because it has required me to work on developing myself through the model I propose here. I have looked at every pound in the context of my purpose and ensured all of my activities and my priorities help me accomplish a critical pillar to my well-being.

3. On Being Present: The connected world has made us less connected than ever before. We text away. Refuse to take calls. Ping our colleagues on messaging systems. Use Slack as if it’s any different than other platforms that continue to hit us with messages without giving us an opportunity to be the social creatures we need to. Don’t multi-task. Give the people you are talking to your full attention. It is extremely difficult. Our phones keep buzzing away, our laptops continue to tell us our next meeting is quickly approaching and our minds get diverted to other tasks without paying attention to the people we are speaking with. If you’ve developed and wrote down your purpose and defined what’s most important to you then it becomes extremely important to make sure you are present in all of your conversations. Have an opinion. Contribute something. Ask questions. Ensure and validate that you are achieving what you need to with every interaction and allowing others to do the same. Being present allows us to contribute ideas that come from a proactive stance than a reactive. And when we come from a reactive stance all we continue to start with is the why we can’t do something. Similar to how Simon Sinek so brilliantly states people do not buy what we do they buy why we do it, it’s important to embody that mentality in your interactions as well. Ask the why’s and people will see you as a more credible and collaborative individual. Don’t worry about the how or the what or the process. Let me tell you a story...

Being present in my conversations these past few months has been a learning curve. I find myself shutting my laptop off if I need to be on the phone with someone. I ask people to call me versus slack or ping me. I’ve drastically reduced the number of emails I send and the ones I receive. Yet, I find myself getting more work done than ever before. I utilize video-conferencing when I can and make sure that I follow-up and ensure I thank people for the positive vibes and new ideas they give me. I do this in not only my work life, but also my personal life too. I pickup the phone and call someone on an Uber ride from an airport or on my way home from the office, rather than respond to my email. I speak up on trains with strangers if I see them crying or looking as though they are sad. I listen to others and give them feedback if they seem down without thinking it's not my problem. It’s been the most fulfilling part of what makes me, well me and fundamental to my purpose.

Doing all of these things is not an easy task and running our lives through this sort of model is difficult. Nor does it come to us overnight. But if we keep thinking about it in the context of our work and personal life and the actions we take, chances are it will eventually work. I’m a glass is half full kind of guy. Some people decide to muster that emotion and change the world for the better. Some, unfortunately for the worse. I challenge you to look at what you think your purpose is or start by telling your stories and finding it. Figure out how you actually spend your time. What I personally found was I was a contradicting nightmare and I am making every effort I can to change that. As I re-discovered and molded my own purpose I feel as though now, "Beyond me is infinite power, before me is endless possibility, and around me is boundless opportunity....." I hope you can find yours too.