Founder Story: Real
After I had spent a number of unhappy years in my job, I started to ask bigger questions about why that might be. Afterall, I had willingly chosen and found some success in the entertainment industry and loyalty programs. So what gives? Why was I so unhappy? And what do I need to do to fix it?
I started reading about it. I read What Color Is Your Parachute, Designing Your Life, Fire Starter Sessions, Start With Why, The Happiness Project, Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life, The Great Work of Your Life, and more. These books took me through ideas and exercises designed to extract and demonstrate just who exactly I was.
And that they did. Things started to reveal themselves. The passions I worked on and read about in my free time were indicating something a little different than the career path I was on. It started to become clear to me why I was unhappy.
First, I learned my interests were in philosophy, science, physics, the future, AI, the social sciences, spirituality, travel, art… Nowhere in there were loyalty programs at entertainment companies! How could this have happened? How did I get so far off course? And what do I do next? What did all of these fields have in common?
Over time, it started to become more clear. My purpose. My purpose was the pursuit of truth and knowledge. My soul wanted to create, innovate, invent, be original, visualize, synthesize. I wanted my efforts on this planet to lead to a stronger appetite for truth in the world. I wanted more curiosity, a richer understanding of reality and our role in it, a deeper desire to arrive at the proximate causes of things, more advocacy for and a greater prevalence of the scientific method and the truth it reveals. I wanted good ideas to spread and bad ideas to die. My list of interests... they weren’t the cause; they were symptoms of my purpose.
I was interested in the arts because of their unique method for sharing ideas. I found myself in entertainment because, well, it’s hard to make a living in the arts. Arts and Entertainment get thrown together because they’re so closely related. But at the end of the day, art is about sharing ideas, and is only entertaining by accident. Entertainment is about entertaining people, and only shares ideas on accident. Of course, not many things are strictly one or the other – art or entertainment. They’re all a blend. But that just made this subtle distinction even harder to see. It was a difference that may seem subtle, but for me, it was the world. It made the difference between a soul cleansed and a soul in anguish.
And that’s how I got involved in Bodhi Band, a tool for helping others discover the inherent truths of our world, and the most important truth of all… the truth about themselves.
Often when this happens… when you find yourself off path… you’re not off by a lot. Often you just need to take a step or two to the left and you’ll find yourself right where you need to be.
Find your values, then do your best to live them. Even if you miss your target by an inch or two, the best thing you can do for yourself… for your soul... is to try. It’s probably just a step or two to the left.