Avoiding Heart Attacks on Mondays - Your Passion & Purpose

The real voyage to discovery consists not in seeking out new land, but in seeing with new eyes. Marcel Proust.

It all comes down to Passion and Purpose

Find your market. Understand your market. Profile, personalize, customize, and embrace your market. Address all of its particular pains, find that pleasure spot, offer them a solution, and you’re rich. Simple, right?

The fact is, you don’t know who your market is, or how to offer them a solution, until you determine two things: your Passion and your Purpose.

Passion unlocks the door to your destiny, and widens your opportunities. When you’re aligned with a passion, you wake up in the morning feeling exhilarated, ready to take on Google, Facebook, and even your neighbors with one hand tied behind your back.

That sounds too good. Now how do I start?

Nature has made you the perfect example for some unique characteristic only you will ever have. Through the six degrees of separation, your body has very small percentages of Shakespeare’s, Lincoln’s, Ford’s, and Iacocca’s atoms. Your gifts, however, come from a combination that is truly, universally, uniquely yours.

I'm going to guide you through a quick exercise:

When thinking about Passion, you should ask yourself “What do I like the most?” “What do I care about?” Write all your answers down. Keep them close.

Once you have the answers written, answer another set of questions, starting with “What are my gifts?”

 Find them, and write them down on another piece of paper.

Now compare both lists. You’ll see most of what you’re passionate about intersects with something you’re talented at.

Your results should necessarily relate to your daily activities. Of course, for most people, employees, business owners, and marketers alike, the list represents a dream life; one to be obtained in retirement, if ever.

This simple exercise helps determine your Purpose. Your Purpose is the universal component binding all your actions towards a greater destiny.

When the answer is not yet clear, you can apply the same exercise to determine your Purpose. Just simply follow “What are my gifts?” with “How do I apply them?”

The Rubber Band Effect – Transition Period

The main difficulty to be faced in your path to Purpose is your own comfort zone. In a natural act of self-defense, individuals retract, adapt, absorb, and allow their minds to believe their environment is “safe”, their paycheck offers them enough to get by, or that dreams don’t pay the bills.

If you were to draw a circle of your comfort zone, with you in the middle, where would your Passion be? Which one of the items you listed is included inside your circle?

When reaching for your true calling, you have to be prepared to get out of your comfort zone. Accepting the fact that your current environment is not going to deliver any dreams is the beginning of your path.

In transitioning to a Purposeful life, getting past the barrier of your comfort zone, imagine a rubber band: when you stretch a rubber band, one end wants desperately to break free so it can come back to its relaxed stage. However, once you held that rubber band stretched to its maximum for a couple of minutes, it will never get back to its original form.

Heart Attack Monday

It is a medical statistic that heart attacks happen 4 times more often on Mondays, from 7am to 8pm, than anytime during the week. It is exactly like the bumper sticker says: “I ran out of sick days, so I called in DEAD”.

There are many examples of highly successful individuals who answered their Purpose’s calling, and by doing so, contributed immensely to their fields: Bill Gates quit Harvard to go play with computers on his mother’s basement. In our own field, inside our own community, it starts with Mike Dillard – what if he had decided to stay at PF Chang’s and waited for a promotion? Ferny Ceballos and Raymond Fong were both well paid engineers; they could have settled and waited for a promotion as well.

What are you afraid of?

Fear is the only thing that can stop you from living your dreams. Be courageous, get out of your comfort zone, and conquer your fear.

People with purpose and passion live a different kind of life; while others just make a living, they make a difference!

Are you making a living or making a LIFE??