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Marketing podcast with Tom Asacker
A few months ago I started a series of posts I’m calling Recover You. The series is focused on practices and habits that I believe lead to a healthier mind, body and spirit, a healthier business and ultimately a healthier economy. This is the final post in the series. You can catch the entire Recover You series here.
I have spent a great deal of time over the last decade or two trying to understand and sort out the role of purpose as it relates to work.
And you know what? – it’s a lot easier to consider in retrospect than to try to grasp by looking towards some far off horizon.
In this quest I think you can indeed consider what brings you joy the most, where your passion lies and even what legacy you want to leave behind, but until you succumb to the fact that what you are doing right now must be your life’s purpose you’ll always feel cheated somehow.
Now, this isn’t one of those you must live in the moment posts. What I’m saying is that I discovered my purpose in work when I finally realized that it’s the experience of what I’m doing and living my work with passion that defines my purpose. Giving in to that idea is how purpose finds you.
The struggle to find that perfect thing you were meant to be is what causes untold amounts of pressure while the very thing you were meant to do is experience what you’re actually doing more fully.
When you realize that one distinction you can start to change the world around you by building new beliefs. Every thing we do in business and in life is dictated by our beliefs and changing this one belief is how you change your existing reality.
I recently sat down with Tom Asacker author of several critically acclaimed books including his latest, The Business of Belief: How the World’s Best Marketers, Designers, Salespeople, Coaches, Fundraisers, Educators, Entrepreneurs and Other Leaders Get Us to Believe
Asacker first approaches how our beliefs dictate, right or wrong, every action we take. To me this notion also rules how we think about purpose and passion. Many people don’t find purpose in their work because they don’t think they can or should or that purpose must represent something much grander than what they are about today.
Asacker’s book also shows how marketers and others can use the power of belief for good and evil, but ultimately this short read is all about getting you to take charge of your beliefs so you can change your view of purpose and passion.
To me the missing piece in the struggle to bring purpose to the workplace lies in the words of Buckminster Fuller. “You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.”
So, in order to work more fully on purpose you must make your existing model of work obsolete.
I think every business owner should carve that quote into something permanent and persistently visible!
