Success
Thomas
Thomas was working in a bank in Europe. He was a young, passionate professional who loved philosophy and economics. When I worked with Thomas on his Spotlight Value—a concept I will introduce later in the book—it was something like “getting promoted to associate manager in the bank.” As he was describing his chosen Spotlight Value to the Happiness Team, it was clear there was no spark behind that value. His Perfect Day exercise felt uninspiring and inauthentic. We pushed him. “Go back to your Value Galaxy and tell us what an unbelievable future would look like in a year from now. What would be amazing to achieve?” Thomas smiled and replied immediately, “It would be doing research on something at the intersection of ethics and economics. But that’s a dream.”
That evening, Thomas got some homework to do. He had to come back with a list of think tanks or research institutes aligned with his domain of interest. He did it. In the next Happiness Team meeting, he gave us a long list of institutes, think tanks, and other academic organizations that produce the type of output he was so excited about. We could all feel the excitement in his voice when he talked about them. When he finished, he closed with something like, “But this is all make-believe. I don’t have a chance of getting to any of those places.” “No!” We all said, “No!” It was too good to give up on this apparent surge of energy, motivation, and meaning. It was clear that Thomas had convinced himself that being an economics scholar in one of those organizations was a fantasy. The rest of us, living outside of Thomas’s head, were not convinced at all.
With the team’s encouragement, Thomas wrote applications to their internship programs, detailing how passionate he was about working for them. He had to make a tough decision to give up on the secure financial future that the banking career offered him, but after doing enough thinking about the nature of the paths ahead of him, he chose the passionate one. Thomas not only got accepted for an internship but was also sponsored for a visa to the United States, where he lives now. Thomas got promoted twice in the last year and is now publishing essay after essay in the field he is so passionate about. When I met him at a conference recently, he was thriving. He met a girl that he loved, and they moved in together. He was traveling to the most beautiful parks across the United States, pursuing his love for nature and hiking. He showed me a list of his next Spotlight Values: starting his independent research center, starting a family, and even a specific sports car he desired.
Ashley
Because having no central productive purpose is destructive to an adult human psyche, I asked Ashley to return to her Value Galaxy and identify the creative activity she found most interesting. She didn’t have to. She knew exactly what it was, although she hadn’t realized it. It was a little value at the edge of her Value Galaxy that said “directing and editing videos.” I will never forget the moment when Ashley’s face suddenly lit up as if a light had been turned on. She began sharing how she always loved movies and how she knew every director and every directing technique from the last six decades. She recalled that when she thought about studying film in college, her mother squashed the idea so fast that she suppressed this passion and never considered it an option for a serious career. Five minutes into talking about her love for film, Ashley realized that this issue, the lack of passion in her creative value domain, was the root cause of the mayhem and confusion in her life. Once Ashley started taking evening film classes and reconnected with her true passion, her life dramatically changed. Her work at the software company was fun again because she clarified the type of value that the job represented in her life at that point in time.
Ashley is thriving. She has not yet transitioned to becoming a full-time film director, but she has already directed several short films. She recently decided to take a part-time job as a freelance programmer, allowing her to spend more time completing the screenplay she is writing. Ashley is on track and passionate about her pursuits, and the lack of meaning and emptiness she felt about her life faded away, making way for an elevated sense of being and self-worth. The key to that change was the realization that one of her most important value domains was impoverished.
– from Secrets of a Passionate Life by Tal Tsfany