Finding your purpose is not enough. Finding your passion is not enough. Having a community definitely helps, but not enough.
Sustainability is the balance between all three.
I’ve worked with so many people whose life mission is helping individuals with mental health, disability, or many other life-challenges. Despite finding their purpose, so many of them aren’t HAPPY. Their long hours filled with stress and emotional sympathies never resolve to something else. Something just as important. Something personal.
Something that brings them joy.
When I came home from my first year of school and described all the successes of the year, as well as all the future possibilities, my father was not really as enthusiastic as I had anticipated. He asked if I had found a passion yet? I said, "yes"…(I had recently discovered a love for learning to play music). He was genuinely more pleased with this report than my Report Card.
It took me a long time to really understand "why."
Success is a grind. It’s stressful. It's often "all-consuming." Most of all, it’s highly contingent on EXTERNAL factors.
Purpose is something to do for others. Passion is something to be for ourselves.
Community is about sharing both of them with the world. Community is rocket fuel to magnify our purpose and passions. The foundation of growth cycles.
Mental health workers burn out at alarming rates. People who find their purpose in teaching burn out at an alarming rate. Nurses and primary care doctors burn out at alarming rates.
Business owners with businesses that consume themselves with making products that are golden representations of purpose burn out and fail in their sustainability at alarming rates.
To build sustainable businesses we must first have sustainable lives.
We need to trade time spent on purpose to make time for time spent on passion. We need to trade time on both of these to make time for community.
Only when there is balance between all three can there be sustainability. Failure, burnout, depression are all symptoms of an imbalance.
We’ve been told for very long now that all our personal and professional challenges will work themselves out as soon as we discover our “Why.”
In reality, that’s only one-third of the solution.
Are you and your business burning out on your "Why?"
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