Your Purpose & Superpower

Over the past few weeks, I’ve found myself engrossed in the work of Robert Greene. Green is a bestselling author of books on strategy, power, and seduction. Earlier this week, I spent a great deal of time listening to him discuss how to discover your purpose. I’ve gone through several exercises throughout my professional career, even a course of study, on this topic, but Greene’s way of discovery really makes sense to me. It also enabled me to look at how my purpose, or perhaps discovery and acknowledgment of an attraction, influenced my entire life. I’ll do my best to share that here.

As a child, we clearly and authentically respond to things we like or do not like. I like ice cream. I do not like peas. I like when Mommy does that. I do not like when Daddy uses that tone. It’s black and white, like and dislike. Soon, our parents begin to influence us. “You need to do better in math. You should play baseball,” etc.

We enter school and our teachers and peers begin to influence our decisions, likes and dislikes. The number of external influences expands exponentially. In college it’s our professors. We must choose a major in college, but we are unsure what we actually want to do. At that point few of us know what to choose, so we go with what our friends are doing, or what our parents are urging us to do. “You’re good in math. You should study finance. There are some great paying jobs out there, you know. Maybe you could be an accountant.”

We find ourselves in our mid-twenties and in a job we don’t really love. It’s not truly fulfilling. So, how do we know what our superpower really is? And how do we discover it out early on in life?

I believe I was lucky. I somewhat fell into mine and it worked out well for me in the career path I chose, but to be completely honest, my choice of career path had nothing to do with my understanding of what my superpower was.

As a child there were many things I deeply enjoyed. I loved fishing and hunting. I spent countless hours on horseback working cattle. It was dreamy to me. I loved sports – physical activity. I would camp anywhere, anytime. To be outdoors gave me tremendous satisfaction, but what drew me in like a mega magnet was storytelling.

We had no cable television. There were no cell phones, computers, or internet. The AM radio broadcast the Grand Ole Opry and Braves baseball. Otherwise, entertainment came in the form of storytelling. My grandfather and his buddies would sit out on the back porch in bib overalls, drinking white likker, and tell the most colorful stories you can imagine.

They could make you taste the blood in your mouth from a fistfight at a beer joint in 1958. You could feel the anticipation of treeing a coon during a hunt in 1945. I was completely mesmerized by their stories. I would sit and listen for hours, and the interesting thing is that I could commit them to memory after hearing them once, perhaps twice. I would listen intently, record them in my mind, and then add a bit of color and retell them to my grandfather. He thought that was just grand. He would belly laugh at me telling those stories, and I loved both the response and the attention.

Over time, I collected volumes of stories in my head. I could tell them anywhere, and I became quite astute at reading a situation, thinking of an apropos story, and stealing the show at a gathering. It became my thing.

Storytelling seemed to help me fit in at times. It seemed to make people like me and want to be around me to a degree. It was entertaining. Ultimately, I ended up in the Army and found that storytelling also paid tremendous dividends when I had to deliver a presentation or brief an operations order. I recall receiving accolades multiple times for my ability to explain the concept of operation for a given mission. I’d use no notes. I lay everything down and told a story of what was going to happen, what we were going to do, from start to finish on a mission. People could visualize it. They could see it unfolding. My briefing and presentation skills garnered me a lot of attention. My ability to write and deliver a speech was noticed and noted.

Later, I wanted to write books. I loved writing, but I was self-conscious of my poor grammar. I recall years ago sharing with my literary agent, “My grammar sucks. I’m very self-conscious of it,” I told him.

“Jimmy,” he said. “You can teach a monkey to use a comma appropriately. You can’t teach someone to tell a story like you can.” Thus, books, and songs, and poems, and articles, and short stories were born.

The rest is history I suppose. I became a professional speaker. My life revolves around telling stories, teaching, consulting, selling, advising, coaching, and the superpower within that success is the ability to tell a story.

As I said, it just kind of happened for me. The understanding came much later in life. I truly wish I had a clear understanding of it in my early twenties. That’s the key. How do we help our younger generations avoid winding up in a career that is a misfit? Working in a field that was influenced by external sources. How do we get them to reflect and find what they were drawn to at a very young age. Storytelling for me was a powerful experience during my childhood. I was consumed by it. That’s what we need to help them discover – what moves them.

Have you thought about your superpower? If not, it might be a fun exercise over the weekend. Have fun reflecting and whatever you do, keep moving!