Do you notice it, too: Social media are teeming with offers to help you find your destiny. If the mechanisms of supply and demand apply, there are probably a lot of people looking for just that. Very, very many even. They are obviously not where they should be. Studies show that only 15 percent of working people have an inner connection to their jobs. So for the others, their purpose is not there.
Find destiny.
Following the call of the heart.
Do what you love.
Why not?
Perhaps then there would be fewer disgruntled people at the bus stops in the morning, if more of us had something like a found purpose - together with the call of the heart. Presumably, many workplaces would then be places of joyful activity and not merely disguised slaughter benches for life, where, as the people used to say, the day is stolen from the Lord God. And then another one tomorrow.
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Then, for once, this grumbling sullenness would be off the air, this ghastly spirit of mischief that trickles out of so many pairs of eyes, stinks its way from workplaces into partnerships and families, and from there, warmed up anew, salivates back to the workplace.
Then many people would be freed from the clinging claws of permanent stress. Stress always arises when you are in one place but should be in another. In the car looking for a parking space while the meeting is already in progress. Still in the shower instead of being on the subway. In a terrible relationship instead of a happy one. Somewhere on the career ladder instead of ... hm ... where actually? Where, then? Where to?
Yes, on its way, to where the lighthouse stands in the port of destination.
The rusty hook in the vast majority of these identification finderies is that it helps to look in the wrong place. So, like the drunk guy who is looking for his lost house key under a lantern at night, which he has lost in a completely different place, but there is no light there.
Many of these determination finder operators hold the hand of the determination seekers after they have held up their own, and then lead them a few rounds around themselves. In the end, everything looks different, but only because the identification searchers no longer run with their heads against the wall, but stand with their backs to it. Because whenever I look at one of these programs, it's all about a huge misunderstanding: about work that you enjoy because you've "always wanted to do XYZ" or "be free with your time and make money from anywhere in the world" or "be successful doing what you love". Such things are already good, but have nothing to do with determination. At most with the strategic confusion of freedom with leisure.
In my mentoring sessions, I repeatedly encounter people who have had such experiences, with the result that they have the same discomfort afterwards as before, just packaged, served and garnished differently. They have found many things, but they have not found their destiny. At most, the realization that a few bite-sized bubbles rose to the surface in the lukewarm broth of the blablarium and that a fart in the bathtub was sold to them as a Jacuzzi.
Why? Because you don't find your destiny, you are found by it.
And that long before the epiphanic aberration of self-knowledge, which is often introduced with "actually I always wanted ...". The purpose is already in us, as there is a reason for each of us, why he or she is there. I know, many people don't notice it, but even the most perfect good-for-nothing, I'm firmly convinced, carries a buried diamond somewhere inside him that scratches him agonizingly with its sharp edges.
Destiny does not lie under the next best lantern in which an influencer gobbledygook sparkles; it lies in the darkness of one's own inner dragon's lair. From there it reliably announces itself. First as a voice, as a call, as a passion. But if you don't listen carefully or if you don't listen at all, the pitch changes. Then it becomes tinnitus. Or burnout. In any case, it's an annoyance with which you wait at some subway stop for your daily transport to the scene of your lifetime's death.
Every human being has something like a destiny inside him or her. Large, small, of international dimension or entirely private. In many cases, this can be experienced in professional activities. The Japanese call this Ikigaithe Japanese neuroscientist Ken Mogi has written a recommendable, easy-to-read book about it (Attention! By the way: a Venn diagram under the name Ikigai is circulating on the Internet in highest Google density. The diagram is good, but not (!) Ikigai. At Ken Mogi you can read why.
My goodness: How many people are used from childhood, reified and then later turned into human resources, i.e. into operating resources. Since eternal times. They stop living after "education" and then wait 50 years for burial.
Who finally, finally teaches them what they are here for in this world? And: Where do you listen, where do you look, so that they understand? Who will tell them what Antoine de Saint-Exupéry meant when he said something like, "You only see well with your ears." I'm afraid no one does. But wouldn't that be the basic requirement for education in the educational system?
No wonder that the longing for purpose is greater than ever before. Ultimately, this is nothing other than a deep human primal longing for spirituality - beyond organized religions, shabby esotericism and similar mumbo-jumbo. Perhaps for that which makes us human in the first place: the search for meaning, which we hope will one day be found. Shopping is not a suitable substitute for an unlived life.
That you have a job where you do what you love to do - yes, love - because of me always wanted to do - a thousand roses. But that is not the prerequisite for destiny. Destiny means: to have a task, to fulfill it and to be fulfilled by it. That can (also) be work.
The search for meaning, for truthfulness in one's own values - this is what makes stories so magical. Because with it we explain to ourselves and to each other reason, goal and hope in our existence: "King Arthur", "The Lion King", "Momo", "Ulysses", "Avatar (1!)". - so god knows you don't have to study philosophy for these messages to reach you.
John F. Kennedy said in his inaugural address, "Ask not what your country can do for you - ask what you can do for your country." And so, my fellow citizens* in the vast land of the soul: ask not what life has to offer, but ask what life wants from you. The answer is - right: your destiny. It has found you.
Are career ladders and destiny mutually exclusive? Not at all! But you mustn't confuse the two. Because otherwise, at midnight, it won't be your turbo carriage that turns into a rotten pumpkin, but the career ladder that turns into a robber's ladder leading down. Cinderella in reverse, so to speak.
Just like Cinderella, Arthur, Odysseus or Simba, all people in search of their destiny, their path, their inner story need mentors. For this very purpose, I have put together two programs with hectoliters of heart and soul and decades of experience that have already helped many people to write a real, a new success story for themselves, in their job, in founding or leading their company, their team or their brand. If you also want to find a story driven by a task, I will be very happy to accompany you as a mentor in the process. Apart from a customized accompaniment, depending on the task, this can be done quickly, super-intensively and compactly or via a structured process over a longer period of time.
1. the "PowerHour" - my powerful short mentoring with immediate effect. You can find all information and booking options here.
2. the "New Story Mentoring", the one-on-one program lasting about three months. There are currently two exclusive places available here again, and - so it is written - "the first shall be first!" If this is something for you, please send me a private message.
The special extra - built into all these efforts to create a new story - is that not only does your life improve in the process, but as a collateral benefit, so does everything else.
Your new story, the New Story, is about you and about all of us, telling of the unison in connectedness of opposites in a better future where we inspire each other instead of fighting. A future of enabling instead of today's present of hindering. A future of listening, of tuning in, of cooperation, of mutual support, of understanding, of heart building. In this future, we need to fill the vacuum of meaning within us, in our companies and in our society no longer by consumption and material growth, i.e. by the exploitation of resources, in vain. In this future, we engage with each other and toward each other, but never at each other.
This is the never-ending story about what life wants from us. However, it sounds different for each of us, but it always begins with: "Once upon a time...".
When you have that, you have found your purpose. It takes the very thing my grandmother, the old Story Dudette, wrote John F. Kennedy in the margin of his speech manuscript announcing the Apollo mission: "New Story. New Glory."