Finding Purpose at the bottom of the Pool

I believe that what is needed is to meet the unfelt needs, the sensed desires that have no name. When something comes forward to meet those needs, it springs large and wide, and reshapes the world. Forming a business or being a rock star is about finding the right needs to fill, the ones that you are uniquely able to answer to, the ones you are uniquely equipped to address. It's not enough to be really good at what you do; if you're not meeting someone's needs, they will have little use for your contribution. But it's also not enough to simply respond to what you think people are looking for. It doesn't just require both, it requires you to find the precise mixture of the two at which your talents can leap out, and your audience can leap forward, and you can deliver what they've been wanting, white-hot and pumping at a million gallons a minute.

If you looked at your talents as a concave pool, bending from the things you are least talented at (the edge) to the areas of your greatest skill (the depths of the middle), and you were running your hand along the bottom, feeling for the one thing which could explode into massive contribution, I think it would feel like a small chink, a flaw, a line, that you'd easily miss if you were going too fast.

And that's why most of us miss the opportunity to deliver a profound contribution; we're running our hand too rapidly over the inner surface, missing it over and over. But if we were to slow down, feeling every inch, it might take our entire lives to find.

What I'm saying is that some of us don't give enough thought to our area of contribution, while others are always thinking, hesitant to take action before they find a match that's exactly perfect.

But if we hope to find it in our lifetime, I think we have to commit, diving into the deepest areas, plunging our heads and hands in, hoping that we either find that moment of perfection by an act of grace, or that at least, we'll get close enough to it on our first try, that our second try will bring us closer, or even bring us to it, sliding along the surface of our self until it clicks in finally and ultimately and in absolute perfection.

I think that's the feeling that most of us are looking for, the "click" that lets us know we're at the point of maximum possibility, maximum contribution between ourselves and the world.

And I think the only way to get there is to aim and plunge, aim and plunge again.