TED Talk Tuesday: How to Know Your Life Purpose in 5 Minutes
In our 2nd installment of TED Talk Tuesday, we bring you a great personal exercise regardless of whether you’re in business or not. Adam Leipzig explains that knowing 5 things with certainty can open up your eyes to your greater life purpose.
I can hear the skepticism starting to creep onto this page, but at the end of the day, you can pull at least one useful thing out of this talk (trust me). Key takeaways at the bottom.
Adam Leipzig: How to Know Your Life Purpose in 5 Minutes
Lessons Learned:
This is a stop-and-reflect kind of TED talk that preaches passion and generosity. Leipzig maintains that knowing these 5 questions can identify your life purpose.
- Who are you?
- What do you do? – What are you best at?
- Who do you do it for? – Ex. family, parents, friends, wife, husband etc.
- What do those people want or need? – Why do people come to you for that thing you do?
- What do those people got out of it? – How do they change as a result of what you do for them?
Personally, I’m not profoundly moved by these 5 questions. I think they require more thought than how Leipzig made them out. Knowing what you love to do and how it helps other people is certainly valuable, but what I really found relatable was the last 2 minutes of the talk.
I’ve been asked countless times what I do (as I’m sure you have, too), and I’ve made the mistake of telling people “online marketing,” and just saying that makes me feel awkward and small inside. I’m sure if you told people, “I sell office supplies,” you, too, might question your greater purpose.
Bottom line: If there’s 1 thing you can take away from this TED talk, it should be to identify what the greater, more external purpose is of what you love to do. When you can do that, not only will it make your work/hobby sound more interesting to other people, but you may just start to walk into work with more energy and purpose.
In case you missed our previous TED Talk Tuesdays, check them out below:
- Seth Godin: This is Broken
- Steve Jobs: How to Live Before You Die
- Mike Barwis: Find Your Catalyst
- Gary Vaynerchuk: Do What You Love (No Excuses)
- Simon Sinek: How Great Leaders Inspire Action
- Ric Elias: 3 Things I Learned While My Plane Crashed
- Nilofer Merchant: Got a Meeting? Take a Walk
- Rory Sutherland: Life Lessons From An Ad Man
- Richard St. John: 8 Secrets of Success
- Matt Cutts: Try Something New For 30 Days
- Arianna Huffington: How to Succeed? Get More Sleep
- Dan Cobley: What Physics Taught Me About Marketing
- Sergey Brin: Why Google Glass?
- Jason Fried: Why Work Doesn’t Happen At Work
- Adam Garone: Healther Men, One Moustache At a Time
- Ed Gavagan: A Story About Knots and Surgeons
Want to check out more awesome TED talks? Stop by our Best TED Talks for Online Business Owners resource.
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