“Story is the way we orient ourselves in the world. Story is how we figure things out, bring order and meaning to the events around us. The story we hold to at any given time shapes our perceptions, hopes, and expectations; it gives us a place to stand…what story are you telling yourself—or letting others tell you?” – John Eldredge, Resilient
Posts Tagged With: purpose
How Bad do You Want This?
Angélique Letizia once again encourages us to align with our dreams, our purpose, rather than letting others tell us what we are meant to be:
Why not you?
So what if they don’t believe in you?
Who cares if they say your dream is delusional?
The real question is: Will you believe in yourself when no one else does?
Here’s what happens when you begin to align with your dream:
You set out on a path that feels less like a gentle walk and more like walking through a gauntlet of projections, doubts, mirrors, tests disguised as detours, and polarity in its rawest form.
It will ask you:
How bad do you want this?
Can you hold the vision through the dark?
Will you keep going when all seems lost?
Because fully aligning with a dream means confronting the polarity paradox, where expansion requires you to face both resistance and revelation.
You’ll encounter Champions, those rare souls who see your vision before the evidence shows up. They cheer you on because they genuinely wish you the best. Treasure these people — they’re rare.
Then there’s the shadow side of the Champion; what I like to call the Phantoms, because their overzealous show of support is a false light projection. Their smiles mask jealousy, and their energy carries a quiet hope you’ll fail. And if you don’t fail? They’ll still linger close enough to ride your coattails.
Then come the Naysayers.
The Positive Naysayers mean well. They may sincerely love you, but they prioritize your safety more than your evolution. They’ll say things like:
“Don’t get your hopes up.”
“Are you sure that’s realistic?”
“Can you make money doing that?”
They’re not trying to hurt you; they’re just speaking from fear.
But love offered through fear is still fear, and fear will always hold you back.
Then there are the Negative Naysayers. They mock, minimize, and criticize.
Often behind your back. Sometimes, to your face in the form of passive-aggressive jabs.
These experiences are initiations, invitations to strengthen your discernment and align with a bold, unapologetic narrative.
Because before the dream expands, you must expand. You must face your own shadow and your own light.
You must look yourself in the eye and ask:
Am I fully ready to claim the life I was born to live?
The dream doesn’t just require faith; it demands perseverance, fortitude, energy, and conviction.
Because to reach the gold, you have to walk through contrasts on both sides of the polarity spectrum.
Meaning, you don’t just meet your purpose, you also meet everything that stands in its way.
So, if you’re waiting for a sign to pursue your dream, start a business, form a partnership, launch a new brand, or make a bold new move.
This is your sign. DO IT.
Because that dream burning in your heart wasn’t given to the naysayers —
It was given to you, the one who holds enough light to carry it through the dark.
Keep Shining ⭐
Angélique Letizia is the Founder & CEO of Starr Films. © Angélique Letizia
Categories: What You Can Do
Tags: Angélique Letizia, Angelique Letizia, dreams, life, motivation, path, personal-development, personal-growth, purpose
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Where are our Sages?
Being a “mentor” or “life coach” appears to be a popular career choice. I don’t know if it’s a generational trend, or a sign of some underlying needs. I tend to think it’s the latter, but I do know our fiction is full of these mentors, or Sages, that seek to pass on their guidance. The role of the Sage is not a new one, it’s part of the ancient tradition of one generation passing on to the next their wisdom.
Perhaps a lack of that transfer of wisdom is the cause of the growing trends. Fiction, though, has been reminding us all along of this lost responsibility of each generation. John Eldredge, on writing on the stages of a man’s life in The Way of the Wild Heart, explores the Sages of fiction:
What is Your Story?
Kira Day writes we all have a Story far deeper than what we appear to have on the surface. She challenges us to find our own Story, and those of the people we meet:
Often times the things folks do to make money – isn’t the same things they do to make them feel alive.
Yet…
We continue to put so much emphasis on what folks do for work, assuming that that’s where their ‘value’ is.
But is that ever a persons full story?
I know one CEO who has told me, “You can take my title but don’t take my cello.”
And another successful financial stocks trader who confided, “Money aside, art has my heart.”
People are multi-faceted.
And so it makes sense that we have multi-focuses & multi-passions.
And yet…
Todays society loves simplifying or pigeon holing folks into these slivers of themselves:
💰“The finance guy.”
👷♀️“The engineer.”
⛹️♂️“The basket ball player.”
Even though we all know that titles never tell the whole story.
In earlier societies individuals excelled in multiple disciplines…creating a culture of true polymaths, largely promoted by the societal structures & economic systems of their times.
For example…
During the Renaissance, the concept of the “Renaissance man” emerged. It was epitomized by figures like Leonardo da Vinci, who was simultaneously a successful painter, scientist, & engineer. This era valued a well-rounded education, encouraging exploration across various fields. Enabled by an economic system that facilitated multifaceted pursuits known as a form of patronage economy. Allowing individuals the freedom to explore diverse interests without the constraints of financial instability.
For example, the well known astronomer Galileo Galilei secured patronage from the Medici family. That led to his contributions in physics, astronomy, and scientific thought.
Peter Burke, Professor Emeritus of Cultural History at Cambridge, noted that this all changed with the rapid growth of knowledge, causing a social change that favoured topic specialization. Despite this trend, Burke emphasizes that polymathic individuals remain essential for synthesizing information across disciplines.
He stated, “It takes a polymath to ‘mind the gap’ and draw attention to the knowledges that may otherwise disappear into the spaces between disciplines.”
A true missing talent today in a world built on silos that is proving to be a challenge.
This is one of the reasons that when I meet folks for the first time it can be an intense experience.
Because I want to know the full story of a person.
I want to hear about the stuff outside of roles.
About the violin lessons that led to an obsession with chord G – and what it all means mathematically.
These are the stories that interest me.
And the things that we can’t skip over.
Because I do believe that somewhere deep within our hearts, we are all polymaths.
So while yes, life professions are great:
What’s in your back pocket?
The human heart speaks a language that is more vibrant than our word labels can ever truly articulate.
And one that may just be the key to solving some pretty pressing challenges in our world today.
Passion forward.
Kira Day is the Founder/CEO of The Passion Centre, Inc. © Kira Day
Categories: What You Can Do
Tags: creativity, Kira Day, passion, polymath, purpose, Story
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Dump the Resolutions, and Define Your Purpose and Impact for 2025
We are approaching the time when millions make resolutions and goals for the new year. That arbitrary turning of the calendar marks a time of new beginnings. What follows is often failure.
If you set goals – getting healthy, finding a new career, learning your purpose – without a plan, your probability of failure is quite high. It’s not enough for most people to say, “I’m going to do it” and poof, your goal manifests amazing success. You need a plan.
Your plan should start with a Past Year Review. You can’t move forward without first looking back. Tim Ferriss describes one approach to accomplish this (and see a similar approach from Sienna Colonese):
- Grab a notepad and create two columns: POSITIVE and NEGATIVE.
- Go through your calendar from the last year, looking at every week.
- For each week, jot down on the pad any people or activities or commitments that triggered peak positive or negative emotions for that month.
- Look at your list and ask, “What 20% of each column produced the most reliable or powerful peaks?”
- Based on the answers, take your “positive” leaders and schedule more of them in the new year. Get them on the calendar now! [Or as Neah of Neah’s Way speaks to, what activities will let you experience awe again like when you were a child?] Book things with friends and prepay for activities/events/commitments that you know work. It’s not real until it’s in the calendar. That’s step one. Step two is to take your “negative” leaders, put “NOT-TO-DO LIST” at the top. These are the people and things you know make you miserable, so don’t put them on your calendar out of obligation, guilt, FOMO, or other nonsense.
Next, use the findings of your Past Year Review of 2024 and set your Objectives for 2025. Most of this is a summary of of Ryan Michler’s plan in Sovereignty, which goes into much more detail.
- Pick a timescale. Here we will use 12 week Objectives.
- Employ Specificity, that is, don’t say “I want to be healthy.” Rather, describe what exactly healthy means for you, and what metrics you will use to get there. Don’t think small. Neah says ask yourself, “Who do I want to become? What do I want to become? What motivates me?” Then, “What happens if I don’t do this?”
- Use the Four Quadrants to define your Objectives:
- Calibration: Take care of your well-being first, particularly things that are getting in the way of your Objectives, including mindset, and mental and emotional health.
- Connection: How do your Objectives improve relationships with all the people you interact with?
- Condition: This is focus on your physical health. Your health can no longer be an afterthought. Being sick or dead will interfere with your Objectives.
- Contribution: How do your Objectives make an impact on other people?
Defining your Objectives with this level of Specificity is half the battle. This isn’t set it and forget it. You need Tactics that help you stay on the correct route to achieving your Objectives.
- Set thirty and sixty day checkpoints.
- Review your objectives at these times and make necessary adjustments.
- Define two additional Tactics for each Objective. For example, if you want to read six books in ninety days:
Primary Tactic: Read for thirty minutes every day.
Secondary Tactic: Read for two hours every weekend.
One of your most important Tactics is the After Action Review. This doesn’t just come at the end of the Objective period. Use this after a project, after difficult conversations, and especially at the end of every day. It only takes a few minutes to ask these questions:
- What did I accomplish?
- What did I not accomplish?
- What did I do well?
- What did I not do well?
- What will I do moving forward?
Get yourself an old-fashioned notebook or journal, or a device if you must, and skip mindless New Year’s resolutions. Take control of your life. No more letting others push and pull you along. Don’t wait until December 31st. Use the whole month.
Make 2025 the year you Find Your Purpose, Find Your Story.
Categories: What You Can Do
Tags: goal-setting, goals, health, impact, motivation, new year, personal-development, purpose, resolutions, review, Ryan Michler, Sienna Colonese, tim ferriss
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Never Settle For Less
“What’s the world’s greatest lie?” the boy asked, completely surprised.
“It’s this: that at a certain point in our lives, we lose control of what’s happening to us, and our lives become controlled by fate. That’s the world’s greatest lie.” – From The Alchemist – Paulo Coelho
The end of the year is always the perfect time to ask this question:
Have you found your Purpose?
Coelho calls it pursing your Personal Legend. I call it finding your part in the Story.
You Purpose is what you are gifted to do. It’s why you are in this world. It may be simple, it may be complex. It may be your career, or it might not be.
Chances are you know what it is. There is also a chance you gave up on it. You have excuses, rationalizations, reasons. All of them are fake. Many forces in the world conspire to tell you the Lie. Other forces remind you it is a lie.
“’Someday’ is a disease that will take your dreams to the grave with you.” – Tim Ferriss
I like re-reading The Alchemist this time a year. It’s a modern classic. It will implore you to take stock of where you are in your Story. Or, perhaps, it will remind you to start writing – and living – your Story. Never, ever, stop fighting for what your meant to be.
Never settle for less.
“You can settle for a less than ordinary life. Or do you feel like you were meant for something better? Something special? I dare you to do better.” – Captain Pike to Jim Kirk, Star Trek (2009)
Categories: What You Can Do
Tags: Paulo Coelho, Personal Legend, purpose, Story, The Alchemist
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Dump the Resolutions, and Define Your Purpose and Impact for 2024
We are approaching the time when millions make resolutions and goals for the new year. That arbitrary turning of the calendar marks a time of new beginnings. What follows is often failure.
If you set goals – getting healthy, finding a new career, learning your purpose – without a plan, your probability of failure is quite high. It’s not enough for most people to say, “I’m going to do it” and poof, your goal manifests amazing success. You need a plan.
Your plan should start with a Past Year Review. You can’t move forward without first looking back. Tim Ferriss describes one approach to accomplish this:
- Grab a notepad and create two columns: POSITIVE and NEGATIVE.
- Go through your calendar from the last year, looking at every week.
- For each week, jot down on the pad any people or activities or commitments that triggered peak positive or negative emotions for that month. Put them in their respective columns.
- Once you’ve gone through the past year, look at your notepad list and ask, “What 20% of each column produced the most reliable or powerful peaks?”
- Based on the answers, take your “positive” leaders and schedule more of them in the new year. Get them on the calendar now! [Or as Neah of Neah’s Way speaks to, what activities will let you experience awe again like when you were a child?] Book things with friends and prepay for activities/events/commitments that you know work. It’s not real until it’s in the calendar. That’s step one. Step two is to take your “negative” leaders, put “NOT-TO-DO LIST” at the top, and put them somewhere you can see them each morning for the first few weeks of 2024. These are the people and things you know make you miserable, so don’t put them on your calendar out of obligation, guilt, FOMO, or other nonsense.
Next, use the findings of your Past Year Review of 2023 and set your Objectives for 2024. Most of this is a summary of of Ryan Michler’s plan in Sovereignty, which goes into much more detail.
- Pick a timescale. Here we will use 12 week Objectives.
- Employ Specificity, that is, don’t say “I want to be healthy.” Rather, describe what exactly healthy means for you, and what metrics you will use to get there. Don’t think small. Neah says ask yourself, “Who do I want to become? What do I want to become? What motivates me?” Then, “What happens if I don’t do this?”
- Use the Four Quadrants to define your Objectives:
- Calibration: Take care of your well-being first, particularly things that are getting in the way of your Objectives, including mindset, and mental and emotional health.
- Connection: How do your Objectives improve relationships with all the people you interact with?
- Condition: This is focus on your physical health. Your health can no longer be an afterthought. Being sick or dead will interfere with your Objectives.
- Contribution: How do your Objectives make an impact on other people?
Defining your Objectives with this level of Specificity is half the battle. This isn’t set it and forget it. You need Tactics that help you stay on the correct route to achieving your Objectives.
- Set thirty and sixty day checkpoints.
- Review your objectives at these times and make necessary adjustments.
- Define two additional Tactics for each Objective. For example, if you want to read six books in ninety days:
Primary Tactic: Read for thirty minutes every day.
Secondary Tactic: Read for two hours every weekend.
One of your most important Tactics is the After Action Review. This doesn’t just come at the end of the Objective period. Use this after a project, after difficult conversations, and especially at the end of every day. It only takes a few minutes to ask these questions:
- What did I accomplish?
- What did I not accomplish?
- What did I do well?
- What did I not do well?
- What will I do moving forward?
Get yourself an old-fashioned notebook or journal, or a device if you must, and skip mindless New Year’s resolutions. Take control of your life. No more letting others push and pull you along. Don’t wait until December 31st. Use the whole month.
Make 2024 the year you Find Your Purpose, Find Your Story.
Categories: What You Can Do
Tags: goals, impact, new year, purpose, resolutions, review, Ryan Michler, tim ferriss
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Your Story, Your Purpose
“And we shouldn’t be here at all, if we’d known more about it before we started. But I suppose it’s often that way. The brave things in the old tales and songs…But that’s not the way of it with the tales that really mattered, or the ones that stay in the mind. Folk seem to have been just landed in them, usually – their paths were laid that way, as you put it. But I expect they had lots of chances, like us, of turning back, only they didn’t. And if they had, we shouldn’t know, because they’d have been forgotten. We hear about those as just went on – and not all to a good end, mind you; at least not to what folk inside a story and not outside it call a good end…But those aren’t always the best tales to hear, though they may be the best tales to get landed in! I wonder what sort of a tale we’ve fallen into?” – Samwise Gamgee, The Two Towers
This is perhaps J.R.R.Tolkien’s most famous passage about finding one’s Story, their Purpose. Often people don’t realize they are missing their purpose until thrust into a dire situation. That’s when one learns the true “measure of a man” (or woman), or one becomes Theodore Roosevelt’s Man in the Arena:
“It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.”
For most people, they know they are meant for something bigger. They know they have settled for what the world told them they should be doing, not what they were meant to be. Like when Captain Pike dares Kirk to be better:
“You can settle for less than an ordinary life, or do you feel like your meant for something better, something special?…I dare you to do better.”
Why do so many stories in our books and films feature the longing for something more? For something missing? Because this speaks to the longing in all of us. We are part of a greater Story, but we feel like we keep arriving forty minutes too late. John Eldredge writes in Epic:
“Notice every good story has the same ingredients. Love. Adventure. Danger. Heroism. Romance. Sacrifice. The Battle of Good and Evil. Unlikely heroes. Insurmountable odds…Things were once good, then something awful happened, and now a great battle must be fought or a journey taken…It’s true of every fairy tale, every myth, every Western, every epic…Have you ever wondered why?”
You are the answer. This is in everyone. For every vapid exhortation to “find one’s truth,” most let others define their truth. Never stop fighting until you achieve what you were gifted to be. Don’t let the world tell you what to be, or what to do. They want you compliant and ordinary. C.S. Lewis wrote, “There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal.” Indeed. Too often we give up, give in. This is a war against you. Many forces want you to fail.
Still, the choice is yours.
I’d rather go down fighting in the arena.
One of the themes of the Watchers of the Light series is exactly this: Find your Story. Find your Purpose.
This is the tale we all find ourselves in. The one storytellers write about. The daily war of finding our purpose, our place in the Story, and what we were gifted to do.
You only fail if you do not fight for that purpose and your place in the Story.
Categories: What You Can Do
Tags: C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, purpose, Story, Watchers of the Light
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Our Universe: Designed for Humanity
Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson declared, “The universe is a deadly place. At every opportunity it’s trying to kill us.” When astronomers look out to the universe, some are struck by all the dangers it poses to life, especially to human life. In every region of the cosmos beyond Earth, they see gravitational disturbances, supernova, gamma-ray bursts…asteroids, comets, and solar and stellar flares that can easily destroy us.
This dark, doomsday perspective perspective makes sense for astronomers and others who’ve embraced the beliefs expressed by their predecessor Carl Sagan. His message — that the universe is all there is or was or ever will be — shapes their perspective…
What if all that appears so deadly and dangerous is actually what makes life, especially human life and its flourishing, possible? What if the cosmos is not all there is or was or ever will be? Such a perspective would alter the significance of everything about it and within it. – Dr. Hugh Ross, astronomer
When astronomer Hugh Ross first began writing about anthropocentric or theological science in 1991, many were surprised the universe appeared designed for Earth to exist. Not just Earth —but only Earth — and the human life on it. This was contrary to the alleged “great demotion” of humanity’s place in the cosmos, as naturalism evangelists like Carl Sagan preached. Some probably thought science would prove Ross wrong.
It didn’t.
In fact, the years since have become a golden age of astronomy. Discovery after discovery pointed to Earth’s uniqueness, but more importantly, that everything about the structure of the universe prefaced the coming of humans.
Ross has previously documented this growing body of evidence in books like Why the Universe the Way it Is, and Improbable Planet. His new Designed to the Core continues pulling this research together — and this is cutting edge science from around the world.
It’s the implications, however, that should give the chaotic peoples of this world pause. What if there was truly purpose to this existence? What if the reason no aliens have been discovered — and the constants of physics continue to rule out billions of worlds — is because Earth was the point of the universe’s coming into being?
As biologist Michael Denton writes in is recent book, The Miracle of Man, some may disagree with these conclusions, but the science is not in dispute. Those who disagree do from a place of philosophical bias, not a scientific one.
Why cling to a depressing view of the universe, where nothing ultimately matters, where chance decides everything, if the evidence points elsewhere?
Materialistic naturalistic philosophies have infected many fields. They have handcuffed science. Humanity doesn’t matter, if you follow these beliefs to their logical conclusion. Yet lives of millions contradict this every day, and like never before, so do the heavens.
From distant galaxies, to the Sun, and Earth itself; from the instant of the Big Bang, to the quantum and the atomic, it all has fingerprints of being designed to the core.
Categories: Uncategorized
Tags: Astronomy, design, galaxies, Hugh Ross, physics, purpose, space, teleology
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Don’t be a writer. Be a Storyteller.
Tell your story. Tell that of others. Don’t be a writer. Be a Storyteller.
Consider a tombstone — a monument to one’s life…the inscription typically focuses on the years when a person was born and subsequently passed away, a person’s life is actually represented by the ‘dash’ in between (i.e., 1964-2042).
This dash represents the essence of our lives — the succession of joys, sorrows, successes, failures…If you could write the story of your dash, how would it read? Would it be full of regrets for the things you did or didn’t do? Or would it be a tribute to all that you attempted to do, be, and accomplish while you were alive?
– Anthony Paustian, writing in A Quarter Million Steps.
Find Your Purpose. Find Your Story.
Darrick Dean 