Beyond Business: Embracing Purpose in Entrepreneurship

Many individuals find themselves stuck in the routine of clocking in and out, devoid of passion or fulfillment. But what if we dared to envision a life beyond the confines of a JOB? Whether you're a seasoned entrepreneur or a budding business owner, the pursuit of purpose is universal.

Throughout this episode, we'll explore the secrets to creating a career that's not just about making money, but about feeling fulfilled and inspired every day.  Drawing from my own experiences and insights gained from mentors like Tony Robbins and Shawn Dill, we'll navigate the journey from job mentality to career fulfillment.

So, if you're ready to break free from the shackles of routine and embrace a life of purpose-driven entrepreneurship, join me on this transformative journey. Together, we'll unlock the secrets to lasting fulfillment and create the ultimate endgame of your dreams.

Tune in and be part of the transformative journey! If you find value, share, subscribe, and leave your comments. I'm Dr. Ryan Wakim, teaching you to exist today, expand tomorrow, and create your ultimate end game.

Introduction (00:10)
Understanding Career vs. Job (00:33)
Deriving Purpose from Work (01:56)
Balancing Fulfillment and Ambition (04:09)
Impact of COVID on Career Choices (07:00)
Aligning Values with Career Path (09:06)
Balancing Purpose with Ambition (12:51)
Taking Inventory and Course Correction (14:45)  
Conclusion and Call to Action (17:23) 

Transcript

0:02

Hey everyone, welcome to season two of the Endgame podcast, where I bet you didn't know what you didn't know. I'm Dr. Ryan Wakim, successful entrepreneur and your Endgame coach. Sit back, relax, tune in. As we discuss today's important topic, Beyond Business, Crafting a Life of Purpose. Starting off in today's topic, you know, this is a topic near and dear to my heart. It's something I've really strived for in my career. And I use the word, the term career, even a bit tongue in cheek here, which is as a board certified psychiatrist, as someone who went through medical school and residency and built a business around mental health care, especially post COVID, this is a moment in time where the idea of a career or a JOB is, is really never more pronounced. And what I mean by that is. There are many individuals who are coming out of professional schooling or trade schooling, or even right out of high school who are looking for a job. And I really want to make a key distinction here as we think about, you know, beyond business and entrepreneurship and beyond this idea of. Purpose part of that, especially if you think about in your professional life or in your business life is the idea of whether or not you're getting up every morning and you're clocking in and you're working through the day at a J. O. B. And you're clocking out and you're doing that a bit on autopilot, right? And so that is a job. And I would encourage you or implore you to be thinking about what would your life look like if you weren't just working at J O B, by the way, you could be a founder. You could be a entrepreneur. You could be a business owner, healthcare, business owner, small business owner, big business owner, and you could still be punching a clock and working at J O B. And I will tell you in my, you know, through my training and also my career, what I think I've done or thought about maybe more than most and really tried to do differently is to not have a job always thought or always believed and again, really preached on the idea that if you derive fulfillment and purpose from what you do, Now, whether that is taking care of patients or it is exactly what you went to school for, there's so many of us that go to school for something and end up doing something completely different or go to school for something, end up doing that something and then, you know, pivot at some point in one's career. And that's because when you can find purpose and fulfillment and you can layer that with skill set, now you're talking about a career. Now, you're talking about. Deriving purpose and fulfillment day to day from your skill, from your craft, from your work, that isn't just a J O B, right? If you wake up every morning, you punch a clock, you work your hours, you punch out, and you're performing a job, the chances that you derive purpose from that, just even using that verbiage, the chances you derive purpose from that, the chances that you're deriving happiness and recharging your batteries and really living life to its fullest, that's Are pretty low. And so this topic is really important. Uh, not just has always been to me, but also a lot of my mentors. When I think about the training I've done with Tony Robbins and Sean Dill, and a little bit with David Meltzer, if you were to think about their career path, it's very similar, which is they were trained to do one thing and they maybe did that for a bit and maybe we're really good at that for a bit, but then we're able to evolve into a career path. That was full of, and really built on a foundation of. Purpose and fulfillment. And when you can do that in your career, you will derive more happiness. You will stay in that career longer and you'll ultimately thrive. And again, I think if you are someone who has a job, you're surviving. Right. And I talk about this a fair bit, this concept of whether someone survives or thrive, it's very apparent in mental health and conditions and treatment, but it's also apparent in day to day with work, with jobs, with careers. And so I really, this topic is incredibly important to me. It should be incredibly important to you because when you wake up and you have purpose and fulfillment and you love what you do, Number one, when you love what you do, you're going to be good at it. And you're going to surround yourself. You're going to have an aura about you where people are going to come to you. Right. You can even be not the best person at that particular skill set, but if you do it with energy and love and passion and fulfillment, You will be much busier than the person right next door to you that maybe is a better technician of whatever that skill set is. So deriving purpose and fulfillment and living a life and working a career through that lens will only stand to serve you. Oh, and by the way, you will be happier if you do that, or you will be happier if you can find that. And I can't tell you what that is again for many people that may actually be what they went to school for. But for a whole lot of people, it's not. And, you know, I'm one of the lucky few where. What I went to school for, I was ultimately able to find a career path within medicine with, you know, within mental health that really met all of my needs, really recharged my batteries, really derived a lot of fulfillment and purpose and therefore happiness for me. And because of that, I was, you know, Good at it. And because of that, I've been successful. And that's a really important foundational point for anyone running a business, owning a business, founding a business. If you can, again, layer your skillset with that, which you find fulfilling and purposeful, that is where rubber meets the road. That is where happiness derives. That is where careers are built that are exceptional careers that you don't just quit, that you don't just change. To something else that you don't just punch a clock in and out. So it's important because if you want to live a long, happy life, you certainly want to spend all of those hours at your job, happy and fulfilled. In deriving purpose. So by the way, that spills over into your personal life. We talk all the time about the personal and the professional and the intertwined between, you know, you clock, you kind of shift out of one into the other and then back and forth. And with working from home post COVID, that's never, truer words have never been spoken in the intertwined has never been deeper, but now is a moment in time and candidly, this is what COVID did for a lot of individuals, which is it, it allowed people to take a step back. And think about, is this really what I was meant to be doing? Is this really what I enjoy to do? And that's, you know, led to the great resignation and led to a lot of labor force issues and certain job types and certain industries, because people who were performing those JOBs before with, you know, with the fear and the scarcity around COVID made a conscious decision to change and to find something or to The side hustle or the thing that they found more enjoyable, purposeful, fulfilling, and derived more happiness from. And so it's, it's actually caused a little bit of an issue if you are a business owner and you're trying to hire certain skill sets and for certain jobs, but at the end of the day, those individuals took a chance, but took a chance in a direction where they're likely to find more happiness. And by the way, that. Feeds into when you're posting for positions. Again, if you're own a business and you're posting for quote unquote positions or quote unquote jobs, you're going to get quote unquote candidates that are people looking for jobs. Right. And so when you think about your job description and your postings and your candidates, words matter, the language there matters. In fact, if you think about one of my mentors, Sean, when they post a position, they're posting for someone who's going to come play hard and be a team and really. Fit in to the culture. They're not looking for a certain skill. Even they're looking for a person, they're looking for certain personality traits and certain characteristics with the understanding that when they join the team, they'll find their place on the bus with the right guidance and. Mentorship, you're really looking to hire people. You're not looking to hire skill sets. You're not looking necessarily to hire for a job. And so that's a totally different mindset shift from what we do day to day, both either as the one who is the employee or the employer, but also as the one maybe posting for the position or looking for. Someone new to join the team. And so if you can think through that lens, if you can begin looking through the lens of career in a way that is what is purposeful for you and what can you give to your, your team members that derives them purpose. It will ultimately serve everyone much, much better. One of the ways you, if you're challenged with this idea and maybe looking for, how do I determine what's right for me? Or, you know, I have these skill sets, I have this certain degree, I've spent time in this certain job or work or work type. Or industry, how do I know where I fit in or, or how can I find that thing or things that I find more pleasure in? So first and foremost, take a step back, you know, do what other individuals have done post COVID and think about, you know, are you truly deriving energy? Are you happy? Are you getting fulfillment from what you do? And that's likely not a black and white answer. You probably are getting some fulfillment from what you do. You're probably getting, you know, some purpose, but you're maybe not getting enough, or maybe there are certain aspects of the job that you do right now that doesn't feel like work to you. And that's a good question to ask yourself. Does this feel like work? If it feels like work, it's probably a job. If it doesn't feel like work, it's probably a career and a mindset in a, in a really value and purpose driven skill or talent or engagement with those, with others. So ask yourself, you know, does it feel like work? Take a step back, take an inventory. What is, we've talked a lot about mission, vision, values, and developing those maybe for your business or another core aspects of your life. Have you thought about what are your core personal values? Have you thought about what is. What do you find to be, not just personal, you know, personally purposeful and fulfilling, but if you think about what values drive purpose for you, and then how does that matrix with your skill sets, right? Because again, if you can layer the two together, if you can mesh the two together, your personal values, what you derive to be purposeful. With a talent or a skill or a, a passion or an artistic side. If you can do that, if you can blend the two together, you'll never work another day and you'll, you know, you'll never have another job in your life. You will shine with that. And when you shine with that, people. Will be naturally attracted to that. And so you also won't have to pay per click and spend a bunch of money on marketing. You won't have to go out there and try to convince people that you're good at what you do, or that you like what you do, or that you do what you do, it'll, it'll be a law of natural attraction. You will, you will garner that business. You will garner that career just by putting yourself out in the world in a way that is. Through the lens of purpose and fulfill another key thing to think about as you're looking through or kind of taking count of your values and what might be that, that blend of both purpose and fulfillment, but also skill and talent. The other thing, the other balance here oftentimes is, you know, what is purposeful or fulfilling and how do you balance that with ambitions? And this is a common issue among. Kind of career pathers or entrepreneurs where yes, there might be an instance where you have, you've found that blend, you have a skill set or a talent you found, which you really enjoy, drives you purpose and energy you've blended the two together. You're now successful, maybe you started something you didn't think necessarily it would be all this successful and it is now you're suddenly you're multiple locations or way bigger than you could have ever imagined. Maybe way quicker. And then you have to start straddling the line of what is your core value around this new thing? Right? And I urge you to ask that question because there's a tipping point to this as well, which is. You find that perfect thing. Again, law of natural attraction, everything's going swimmingly. You haven't worked a day in your life in the last 10 years, but now you're overextending yourself. Now you're getting, just to say, frankly, maybe you're getting a little bit greedy. Maybe what was. Purposeful and fulfilling and really aligned with your values to this point is suddenly again, tipping into or bordering on no longer aligning with your values. And again, maybe getting greedy, maybe getting overly ambitious, maybe overextending and and I preach a lot or talk a lot about. Stretching outside your comfort zone. And that's really important to be successful, but you also have to know when to rein it in or you have to know, or you have to at least be able to take a pause. Right. And actually this is, I've learned some hard lessons in my career and in my entrepreneurship and in my life around the tipping point between fulfillment and ambition and making sure that I take inventory of where I am. And this is an exercise we've talked about, whether that's at the very end of a year, very beginning of the year. Kind of doing a look back and a look forward and taking inventory because in the day to day, you're going to miss it, right? You, things will snowball and this purposeful, fulfilling talent, skill, new thing will get bigger than you imagined, quicker than you imagined. And the days will start blending into weeks and months. And so. When you can put some hard stops or some, you know, timeouts or some breaths and manually enter those into your, you know, whether that's a quarterly kind of assessment or again, worst case, a yearly assessment, at least then you can do yourself the favor of taking inventory and figuring out where are you in alignment or disalignment with your. Values, right? And how that then translates into your ambition, which is good to have ambition. I'm not, I'm not here to tell you to not have ambition, but you want to make sure that your ambition is aligned with your core values and that that is collectively still creating purpose and fulfillment and happiness for you, wherever you sit in that vision. So, you know, again, a really important thing here is not just finding the blend between a skill set purpose, but then also taking account of that. Overtime to make sure that that purpose and fulfillment doesn't tip into greed around overambition or overstretched or overwhelmed, which obviously then begins to drain you and take away your purpose, your happiness and your fulfillment. So actionable items here, a couple of things, again, making sure you have hard stops in your life around a calendar quarterly. At least once a year, biannually, it would be a compromise so that you can take account for where you were, where you're going, and then making sure that your blend between skill and purpose is still there. And then furthermore, this idea of fulfillment and purpose and where is that in balance with. Ambition and beyond and being careful to not get overly ambitious, overly extended. Because if you enter into the life of never having another job, but then you find yourself back in a job, I really hope for you, you would have taken account of that before you find yourself back in a job in conclusion. You know, again, it's critically important that we look at what brings us happiness. And more importantly, what brings us purpose and fulfillment. In our lives, it's important to align those values and really, you know, take account of those values on the front end to align those values, to blend it with your skill sets and talents so that you no longer have to punch a clock and work a JOB. As you do that, be careful to go from a job to a career in a life full of happiness and fulfillment and purpose and never having a job back into having a job and through the path we've just discussed. And if nothing else, you can always take a deep breath and take account. At least twice a year, you know, I guess at least once a year, please. Twice a year for those more ambitious folks, maybe quarterly so that you can continue down the right path to find purpose and fulfillment and derive happiness from what you do to give back to those around you and never work another day. Thank you for listening. Please like subscribe, share, come back. Once again, I'm Dr. Ryan Wakim, successful entrepreneur and your end game coach. I'm here to teach you how to exist today so that you can expand tomorrow and create the ultimate end game of your wildest desires. Talk to you soon.