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Go Beyond Passion and Success
ALMOST WITHOUT FAIL, when I ask people to tell me their highest goal, they give me what a company would call a purpose, a part of its organizational vision. People are often magnanimous, saying they exist to improve the lot of others, to leave the world a better place or simply to serve. Sometimes they refer to their own personal development. One person, for example, told me her highest goal was to adapt.
If I keep asking the question in different waysââThatâs good, but what goal do you have that supports you in living out that purpose?â or âWhat allowed you to get past that difficult time that you had last year?ââmost people eventually begin to get at their highest goal.
Few people say their highest goal is something materialâthe very nature of the question goes deeper than a desire to win the lottery or own a beach house. Still, very few people talk about the highest goal that probably has been with them from the beginning of their life and that has been supporting them in everything they do. I suspect that is because we are conditioned to talk about our highest goal in terms of our potential contribution, rather than about the force that helps us to make that contribution.
Your Early Experience of the Highest Goal
Researchers tell us that all of us have a defining experience of the highest goal early in our lives, usually around the time of puberty. We each have an experience that we are great, that we have a connection with everything, that we have potential. That is the moment of exultation captured by Walt Whitmanâs âSong of Myselfâ:
I celebrate myself, and sing myself,
And what I assume you shall assume,
For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.
This experience, if we accept it and remember it, can catapult us beyond the socialization and comparisons that deter us from living the purpose of our lives. This experience, this earliest awareness of the highest goal, can be the starting point for living with a conscious connection to it.
A friend of mine shared an experience that this illustrates: When she was about eleven, her family was on a tour of Italy. One day they were visiting the St. Paulâs Outside the Walls Church in Rome. She was a bored kid, who, in her opinion, had been through too many churches on the trip. But as she went into a side chapel dedicated to Mary Magdalene, she experienced energy and a feeling of connection that she remembers to this day. Curiously, she didnât tell anyone about this until later in her life when she happened to be talking to a scholar of Mary. That conversation opened her to a consciousness that was her highest goal and that she could see had been part of her life since that day in Rome.
I urge you now to remember and contemplate a time when you experienced the nature of your highest goal. You have had such an experience, maybe more than once. Do you remember it? Push yourself a little here, because it is worth it. Recall a time, probably in your early life, when you had an epiphany about your own potential, about who you really are in a powerfully positive sense, about your connection to all beings and all nature.
Perhaps Iâm using words that donât quite fit for you. Remember Iâm talking about the experience of the highest goal itself, which is personal and diverse. Some people get a sense of themselves and this connection when they see something in nature, such as mountains or an ocean, for the first time. Sometimes they have this deep feeling about who they really are in a religious setting, in a sports competition, as the result of a powerful dream, or after great exertion. But often itâs simply a gift that is given to us early in our lives. It just happens when we least expect it.
Once you start thinking about it, you may be able to think of several times when you have had such an experience. Concentrate on the earliest, most powerful one you can remember. Look beyond the nature of your experience to focus on what it told you about the highest goal. Please take some time to reflect on it, jot some notes about it and/or talk to someone about it. If you can resurrect this memory and nurture it in terms of your own highest goal, you have something extremely valuable for the journey we are taking in this book.
I remember walking barefoot along a gravel road in Wisconsin. I was ten years old. It was a beautiful summer day, and I was walking toward a beach on a lake. I recall this sensation of connection with everything. I experienced the wholeâfrom the bright sun, vast blue sky and tall trees to the pebbles under my feet and the grasshoppers leaping up as I walked forwardâas being part of me. I felt huge. I knew that I was put on earth to do something great. I also felt a sense of sadness because this life would have to end sometime. I began to get a sense of change and the flow of great forces that I was a part of. All this happened in moments, but the experience was powerful and touched every part of my being.
Of course, I put aside that experience as society kept telling me what to do and who I was. Just like my friend who felt the highest goal as a connection to Mary Magdalene, I didnât talk to anybody about what had happened. But I remember it now.
Most people seem to forget the memory of their early connection to the highest goal, but the memory is still there. You only need to concentrate to bring it up. A great many people have told me about recapturing this memory: One fellow remembered his father telling the young boy forcefully that he was great. A woman recalled helping with the birth of a calf on her auntâs farm, and afterward she got a sense of the meaning of her life. Still another slipped out of her home early in the morning when she was two and a half years old. She walked into an Episcopal Church down the block, and she discovered, as she put it, âthe existence of grace.â
After a seminar in which I urged people to remember their childhood moments, a woman came up to tell me she remembered a time walking in the mountains when she was an adolescent. She suddenly felt the connection and energy I am talking about. In her case, it gave her a sense of the control she had in a difficult family situation. She said that unlike her older sister, who was tormented endlessly by their parents and ended up embittered by her childhood, she was able to make choices that kept her free. To this day, she goes to the mountains for renewal and always remembers the power she has. It has helped her deal with stress and problems with relationships, as well as take advantage of opportunities that present themselves.
What happened to you? Do you remember an experience of connection? If so, donât forget it now.
Obstacles to Grace I: Sub-Optimizing
Most people forget their youthful experience of greatness and purpose or at least put it aside somewhere deep in their memory. It happens to all of us: We sub-optimize.
By sub-optimizing I mean that we may have an experience of the highest goal in our lives, but we quickly pull back to the lesser goals that society calls success. We often get frozen in our accomplishments, which may be great, but not the highest or optimal that we can attain. In other words, we settle; we sub-optimize.
In every moment we have a choice: Will we act from our highest goal or recede to something less? For instance, sometimes in meetings I speak my truth no matter what the consequences for me. On other occasions I pull back to a comfortable silence and miss chances to make a real contribution. When the latter occurs, I always feel sad, but I try to learn from it.
Sometimes we keep doing the same thing that brought us success in societyâs terms. When this happens early in a career, I call it the tragedy of early success. Some peopleâathletes, entertainers, entrepreneurs, artists, writers, and scientists, for exampleâhave tremendous success early in their careers. The media lionize them, and these initially successful people keep trying to do the same thing over again. But they can never get beyond that early success. They develop no further and sub-optimize their lives. It is something that can happen to all of us.
Obstacles to Grace II:
The Cruel Grip of Socialization and Comparison
Of course, the most powerful obstacles to living in resonance with the highest goal come from the media, our schools, our parents and friendsâour society. All of them tell us to chase a successful life that will be admired by others.
That influence invades our dreams and our deepest thoughts. It holds us with a cruel grip. We buy into the game that society convinces us we should be playing, even if it draws us away from who we are at core. We miss some of our greatest moments. We rationalize them away. We canât put them together into a consistent way of living our lives because we allow ourselves to be distracted by the picture of success and the good life that these forces of society offer us.
We constantly compare ourselves with others. And when we do this, we lose control of our lives because we are no longer living from our core. We are living according to someone elseâs idea of what life should be or what we should be doing. We lose the power that comes from doing what is right for us.
Beyond Passion and Success
Over and over my students tell me that they yearn to have passion in their work, but they just donât know how to find it. This must be true for many people, because books on finding your purpose and bringing it out into the world seem to proliferate in bookstores everywhere. Still, people complain they havenât been able to find their passion the way others have.
I trace the difficulty and anguish to the human propensity to make comparisons. Instead of diving into who they are and what that means for their work, people look to those who seem to be successful and seem to have passion in their lives. Instead of discovering how they resonate with the highest goal and applying that to their life, they put themselves down and sink into frustration when their life isnât the way othersâ lives seem to be.
Once I got so tired of hearing this wail about lack of passion that I told my class that it was overrated. I thought I would give them some peace because they wouldnât have to keep worrying about other people who had the passion that they didnât. They could just concentrate on themselves and what was really happening in their lives. They could begin to build on their own experiences.
But my âmagnanimousâ gesture didnât seem to help. They filled their papers and presentations with diatribes on the importance of passion. They told me in many ways that I had let them down. Like all of us, these students desperately wanted something in their lives, but they didnât know how to get it.
The studentsâ angst about passion represents something we all feel, particularly when we act in accordance with the way we have been socialized to act rather than from what is right for us. We get our dream job and then find out it just doesnât give us fulfillment. We take a class or enter a course of study that we think is sure to give us what we need to be a success and find that it has just brought us new questions about what we want to do with our life. We donât get as much pleasure doing the things that we have staked our lives on. We get excited about something for a while, but then it becomes humdrum and doesnât give us sufficient reason to get out of bed. We feel inferior when we see other people who seem to have such energy for life, while we wake up too many mornings without any zest. Or, even worse, we start thinking that life has passed us by, that it is meaningless, and that weâll never make the contribution or have the life we imagined when we were younger.
Taking Your Own Path
The alternative is so close at hand: If we focus on our highest goal, our passion comes to us effortlessly. We know at some deep level that we have a distinctive contribution to make. But, as Carl Jung said, we make the mistake of going outside to find direction:
Your vision will become clear only when you look into your heart. Who looks outside, dreams. Who looks within, awakens.1
The highest goal is part of the human quest. Eastern traditions call life purpose âdharma,â or right livelihood. Indiaâs The Bhagavad-Gita, for example, focuses almost entirely on dharma and the search for it. In it Lord Krishna says to his pupil Arjuna, âBetter oneâs own dharma, however imperfect, than the dharma of another perfectly performed.â
In this society we almost never follow Krishnaâs advice. Too often, our parents, teachers and the media train us to define happiness in terms of external rewards.
We take one of the two paths in life shown in the figure below. Doing someone elseâs dharma well starts when you do what society says to do, even though it is not something you like. Over time, you get experience with it and get good at it. So you get opportunities to do more of this work. You get promoted. You become the boss, the partner or a top executive. Everyone honors you and wants you to do more of something that isnât right for you. And you experience your life getting more and more meaningless and unsatisfying.
The path of doing your own dharma starts with doing what you love and what is meaningful to you. In time you gain both experience and skill. You get very good at it. And, because of that, you get more opportunity to do the kind of work that represents who you really are. Even though you might get the trappings of successâmoney, fame, promotions, and awardsâthe work itself remains its own reward. Your life keeps getting more and more fulfilling. And your satisfaction gives blessings to your friends, family, community and the world.
TWO ALTERNATIVE LIFE PATHS
|
Do what you donât like, but should | Do what you love and find meaningful |
Get experience doing this | Get experience doing what you love |
Become great at doing what you dislike | Become extra good at you doing what you love |
Gain opportunity to do more | Gain more opportunity to do what you love. |
Live life empty of meaning | Live life full of purpose and meaning |
Mahatma Gandhi taught that only service done with joy can have meaning. Here, Iâm calling this joy a resonance with the highest goal. If you have that, your service will have meaning beyond what you can imagine. Specifically, Gandhi said
Service can have no meaning, unless one takes pleasure in it âŠ
Service which is rendered without joy helps neither the servant nor the served.
But all other pleasures and possessions pale into nothingness before service that is rendered in the spirit of joy.2
Remembering Your Own Highest Goal
Sometimes this idea of the two possible paths in life upsets people. Students who have already accepted jobs that they know are not fulfilling wonder if they have made an unalterable error. People who are already working at something that doesnât give them joy and meaning can wonder if it is too late to do anything about it. Yet even when they want to go in a new direction, they donât know their highest goal, so they feel lost.
All of this confusion comes from not holding onto your own highest goal. We all glimpse it from time to time, but only if we are attentive to this guiding star when it appears can we steer by it. I know this from my own experience.
When I was twenty, I wasnât used to doing much on my own. I had done well as a student. But I was treated by my family...