the connection by anthony silard - ch. 1

Linking Your Deepest Passion, Purpose, and Actions to Make a Difference in the World

Anthony Silard

AT R I A B O O K SNew York London Toronto Sydney New Delhi Hillsboro, Oregon

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Discover Your Passion

A man can be short and dumpy and getting bald but if he has fire,women will like him.—Actress Mae West

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W ill you help me?” my brother asked. “I really want to get intobusiness school this year. I hate my job and need a change.”

It was music to my ears. My brother rarely asked me—or anyoneelse in our family for that matter—for help with anything. He hadnot been accepted to Columbia Business School the year before, so Iknew it would be a challenge. I asked to see his essays from the pre-vious year.

“I can tell you why you didn’t get in last year,” I said a few dayslater as we started the late-night phone calls that would go on everynight for three weeks until he finished his applications. “I hate tobreak it to you, but they don’t care as much as you think they doabout what you’ve done. These admissions officers receive thousandsof applications, and every applicant has had great internships, doneimpressive volunteer work, been in this or that club, had this or thatjob. All those facts become meaningless to them.

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“While it’s true they want to see that you’ve accomplished some-thing in your life, what they care about most is not what you’ve done,but why you’ve done it. They care how you felt during those criticalpoints in your life when you had to make tough decisions, and howthose decisions shaped you as a person.”

Achievements Go, Passion Stays

Almost every admissions officer or employer I’ve ever worked withhas told me that the Number One quality they look for in an appli-cant is passion. Essays that clearly reference an applicant’s innermotivation (often called Statements of Purpose), letters of recom-mendation, and interviews have come to play a more prominent rolein college admissions over the last century because they provide amuch clearer window into an applicant’s passion than do grades orstandardized test scores.

Why do interviewers care so much about passion? Because whileyour achievements fade into the past, your passion stays with you. Inany area of life, passion is essential. Whatever you pursue—whetherit’s a career, or professional degrees, or relationships, or hobbies, orpersonal goals—discovering and then cultivating what you are pas-sionate about is the key to your ultimate success.

Imagine that the events that have taken place in your life areinterspersed along the banks of a river as it winds its way down-stream. The river is your passion for something greater thanyourself. Your passion, like a flowing waterway, has guided your lifedecisions and winded through all your past accomplishments.Admission officers and job interviewers know that this same riverwill lead you toward everything you will accomplish at theircompany or university and beyond. Passion is the prime indicator of


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how far your river will take you and how the achievements you accu-mulate along the way will reflect on them. They also know that whileit’s possible to train someone with passion to have specific skills, theconverse is not true.

Soul Opens Any Door

What are you passionate about? What is the thread that weaves yourstory together and makes it meaningful and inspiring? Soul divaAretha Franklin said, “If a song’s about something I’ve experiencedor that could’ve happened to me it’s good. But if it’s alien to me, Icouldn’t lend anything to it. Because that’s what soul is all about.” Doyou take contracts, pursue career opportunities, and build relation-ships that tap into your passion, or do you just belt out any old songthat comes along? If you don’t sing your own songs, people will stoplistening.

Have a heart-to-heart conversation with yourself and identify theriver of passion that has carried you to where you are today.Visualize the inner motivation that’s guided you past both the rockycliffs that tested your resolve and the warm meadows where youstopped to bask in the sun and enjoy being alive.

Current research in the field of narrative therapy indicates thatnarrating your life story in your own words enhances your comfortwith the past, your sense of personal responsibility, and your innerresolve for self-initiated change. Once my brother recognized thathis passion for being a creative entrepreneur and launching educa-tional companies to help children study better was the thread thatwove his past experiences together, he wrote application essaysthat were not just impressive, but moving. He was accepted toColumbia the second time around. Why did this strategy work for


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him, and why will it work for you? Simple: there is a tremendousshortage of genuine passion in the world. Like any commodity inshort supply and high demand, passion is highly marketable andholds tremendous leverage.

When you discover your passion, you make The Connection withyour deepest motivations. Once you share your passion with oth-ers—as I encouraged my brother to do—they too will make TheConnection, and will desire to help you become stronger and con-tinue on your path.

So don’t waste any more time. Discover your passion and share itwith the world. Tell your story and others will be unable to resistyou. When you find your true voice, all kinds of resources you neverimagined will come your way. The alternative? Neglect your innercalling and you will not truly live; instead, you will merely exist. Oth-ers will observe you going through the motions, will not connectwith you or your dreams, will instinctively know you won’t addmuch value to their lives, and will treat you accordingly.

Speak with passion and your words will strike like thunderbolts tothe core of the existence of other human beings. You will inspirethem out of their slumber to believe that they, too, can feel aliveagain. You will help them make The Connection—which is thegreatest thing you can do for another person. This is why every suc-cessful fundraiser or salesperson I know speaks from and to theheart, with passion as the bridge that connects them with others.Speak with reason and appeal to people’s minds and they may agreewith you. But they won’t give you money. To open doors and answerthe question posed by hip-hop lyricist Rakim—“How can I move thecrowd?”—you’ve got to have soul. And soul comes from your recog-nition of your life story and what you have learned from thestruggles you’ve faced in each chapter.


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Return to the Source

It’s no coincidence that the word “passion” is derived from the Latinverb patire, which means “to suffer.” What has motivated you morein your life: your desire not to suffer (or see others suffer) or yourdesire for happiness? Consider the life trajectories of extraordinaryleaders like Malcolm X, Nelson Mandela, Martin Luther King, Jr.,and Mahatma Gandhi. What do you think woke them up eachmorning? A desire for happiness? To walk in the sunshine, enjoy theday, eat delicious meals, and go on relaxing vacations? Alternatively,was it a relentless drive to prevent the further suffering of their fami-lies and communities from the racial oppression they themselveshad experienced? Their suffering—and the suffering of the peoplethey loved and cared about—enabled them to first make The Con-nection and then to enable others to also make The Connection.This is how they became some of the greatest leaders to ever graceour planet.

Passion from suffering is the hallmark of Christianity: the Passionof Christ refers to his suffering and crucifixion. The same is true foralmost everyone else. Just about every individual I’ve ever helped tounderstand his or her inner motivations derives their passion fromthe tragedy they’ve experienced in their lives. A former client in herlate forties exemplifies the pain-to-passion connection. Deidre spenta large part of her childhood racked with the suffering she and hermother experienced while taking care of her father as he witheredaway from an incurable cancer.

Deidre is now a doctor in a major hospital. She has dedicated hercareer to the advancement of cancer research so fewer families willsuffer as hers did. In every possible way, passion is the bridge thattakes you from pain to change.


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Many people find this hard to believe, but I am actually grateful tomy former step-father for the physical abuse I experienced. I oftensay: “If it weren’t for him, I’d probably be working on Wall Street,driving a red sports car, having my third affair, and pondering theabsence of any relationship with my children.” Instead, I’m helpingpeople to access the power in their lives that they deserve, so theynever feel the powerlessness that I felt while growing up.

Can you recall some defining moments in your life when you feltprofoundly hurt and, to this day, feel a stifling discomfort with whatyou experienced? You may have grown up with a father who wasnever around or who left your mother for another woman; your pas-sion may be to become the father he never was so your childrennever experience the suffering you went through. You may have hadparents who were so full of themselves that they left you feelingempty; your passion may be to make your children and friends feellike there is something worthy and meaningful in them.

It is 100 percent possible to create a new defining moment in yourlife. In this watershed moment, you can make The Connection toyour deepest passion. How? By making a commitment to helpingothers avoid the suffering you experienced for many years. Yet this isonly possible if you first acknowledge that suffering. Embrace yourpain, capture the lesson it has shown up to provide, and you willtransform your life.

Pain Changes Your Perception

Fyodor’s father, a retired military surgeon and violent alcoholic,served as a doctor at a hospital in one of the poorest neighborhoodsin Moscow. After returning home from work each day, his fathertook a nap and ordered Fyodor to stand at his bedside, remain


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absolutely silent, and swat flies from around his head. Against hisparents’ orders, Fyodor spent many hours of his day visiting with thehospital’s patients and listening to their tales of suffering.

Both of Fyodor’s parents died before he turned twenty. At the age oftwenty-eight, Fyodor was sentenced to hard labor at a prison campin Siberia for belonging to a liberal intellectual group. Here’s howhe described this experience: “In summer, intolerable closeness; inwinter, unendurable cold. All the floors were rotten. Filth on the floorsan inch thick . . . We were packed like herrings in a barrel.” In this suf-focating environment, he had the first of many epileptic seizures.

After Fyodor became one of the world’s greatest existentialistwriters, he declared, “There is only one thing that I dread: not to beworthy of my sufferings.” Meditate on Dostoevsky’s words for amoment. They suggest a transformation in how you can relate to thepain you’ve experienced in your life. Consider the question aboutyourself that he raises: Are you worthy of your suffering? In otherwords, have you done something with your pain? If you were abusedas a child, or had a difficult breakup that sent you reeling, or were hitby a car and seriously injured, or are living with cancer, have you letyour pain get the best of you or have you channeled it intosomething positive in your life?

The English romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley wrote, “Oursweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thought.” Do you sweepyour saddest thoughts under the carpet and hope they’ll go away, ordo you try to understand what they’ve shown up to tell you? If youare pursuing a Vision you deeply identify with, there is meaning inyour suffering just as there is meaning in your happiness. Both aremerely the travel companions on your journey. At any moment, youcan make the decision to no longer be shackled by your pain.Instead, you can become worthy of it.


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Adversity Is the Precursor of Change

The problem with fighting or ignoring the pain within you is that it’swithin you. The enemy is not out there; it’s looking back at you in themirror. Fortunately, most of us are more intelligent with our physicalpain. If you cut yourself, you clean the wound. You know that if youignore it, it won’t heal well. We all need to learn how to apply thissame self-nurturing to our emotional wounds. Swabbing the cut onyour leg while glossing over your deeper emotional scars is likepainting the outside of your house for all to see while leaving theinside in utter disarray.

When pain is collectively experienced by a group of people, itgenerates a joint passion to pursue a common agenda. This is whyour vocabulary contains the word feminist, but not “masculinist.” Ifmen earned 70 percent of what women earned, had been barredfrom voting for centuries, and were consistently underrepresented inpolitical offices, boardrooms, and professional schools leading to thehighest-paying professions (e.g., engineering, computer science,business), the word “masculinist” would make its way into our lexi-con with surprising velocity. In whichever form it takes, groupdiscrimination is a sure-fire way to provide that group with some-thing concrete to rally around and feel passionate about.

The same is true for the individual. Almost every significantchange you’ve ever made in your life has most likely followed aperiod of intense suffering. Think about it. Something or someonehurt you. You didn’t want to experience that pain again. To protectyourself, you changed.

Recall the last time you were deeply hurt in a relationship. Haveyou ever endured a breakup so devastating that your emotional painmanifested in physical ways: you couldn’t hold down food or sleep;


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you woke up early in the morning unable to get the other person offyour mind; your body felt as if a truck had just run you over andthen backed up again to check what happened. In the aftermath ofthis breakup, you probably retreated from relationships. You neededtime to reflect on what you were truly looking for. You had the veryhuman desire to avoid feeling that pain again. In short, pain changedthe way you perceive what you most value.

Now remember the last time you were going out with someoneyou didn’t feel very strongly about. “Oh well,” you thought after thebreakup. “I guess it didn’t work out.” A few weeks later, you were dat-ing again. You couldn’t be bothered to analyze how you approachrelationships. No pain, no change.

The same is true in your career. If you get fired or receive a nega-tive performance review from a job you deeply care about, you firstfeel devastated, but then begin to think profoundly about how toimprove your work. Yet if you are fired from a job you don’t caremuch about, you brush it off and quickly find another job. Businessas usual yields Vision as usual.

I’m not suggesting that you become a stoic or go through unduepain so you can make changes in your life. This would be unnecessaryand masochistic. But let’s face it: we all suffer in various ways. Insteadof running and hiding from your suffering—which only causes it toreturn even stronger and in a more negative form, such as anger orresentment—recognize that some suffering is necessary to become awhole person and find the right path. Why? Because it puts a fire inyour belly to change what caused your suffering in the first place.

Another reason it’s much more helpful to acknowledge your suf-fering than to sweep it under the carpet is that you only suffer fromwhat you care about. The rest doesn’t affect you. In other words, yoursuffering is a window into your heart and what you deeply value. Once


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you make this realization, what you value will become unsheathedand begin to crystallize. This is how your suffering enables you tomake The Connection.

So become living testimony to the words of the English romanticpoet Lord Byron: “Adversity is the first path to truth.” Instead ofbelittling the adversity you’ve experienced, own it. Embrace yourpain in its entirety as an inextricable part of who you are, as a keyingredient in your search for truth, and as a critical element in theinimitable composition that makes you a complete human being. Inso doing, you will convert the suffering you have experienced intoyour fuel for self-change, and you will make The Connection.

Discover Your Fuel for Change

There is a scene in Rocky III in which Mr. T, who made his worldacting debut as boxer Clubber Lang, is fielding questions from thepress before the big fight with Balboa. One of the reporters asks the-mohawked actor, “What’s your prediction for tonight’s fight?” Mr. Tglared into the camera with steely, menacing eyes, and calmlyreplied: “Pain.”

As the commencement speaker at a high school graduation, I sur-prised many students when I started my speech by saying, “Insteadof your usual cheery graduation speech promising you the world, I’mgoing to tell you that there’s only one thing I can guarantee you willexperience from this day forward: Pain.” Although I didn’t try in vainto duplicate Mr. T’s intimidating glare, the jaws of more than a fewparents still dropped. I then continued: “The single factor that willmost determine your future success is what you do with it.” Sincesuffering will play a vital role in your life whether you like it or not,you might as well embrace it.


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This is a revolutionary concept. It means you can choose to benefitfrom every single event that transpires in your life, no matter how nega -tive, difficult, or unhealthy it appears at the time. A life-threateningillness can give you the resolve you need to start taking care of yourhealth and to go for what you really want in your life. The death of aloved one can motivate you to stop working your life away and spendmore time caring for those who are still around. A spate of hostileinsults directed toward you can ignite your desire to teach othershow to get their points across without abandoning compassion.

The next time someone betrays your trust, cheats on you behindyour back, treats you like yesterday’s meatloaf, or takes you to thecleaners financially or emotionally, remember the sage words of thefifth-century Roman theologian Saint Augustine: “God judged it bet-ter to bring good out of evil than to suffer no evil to exist.” You havethe choice every day of your life to either give in to your suffering orto bring good out of it. Stagnation or positive action—which willyou choose?

Before you make your decision, consider these words: You onlyfear what you feel powerless against. If you have zero power to dosomething with your pain, then you are squarely under its control. Ifyou lost someone important to you, you have no power to bringthem back. Yet you do have the power to learn from what they expe-rienced in their life and apply this learning to the way you live fromthis day forward.

Rather than allowing your suffering to debilitate you for even onemore precious moment of your limited time on this earth, welcomeit as yet another tool to help you embrace your complete life experi-ence. This mental reengineering will provide you with an innerstrength unlike anything you’ve ever known before. You will accessunprecedented power to truly experience the only remaining


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moment available to you for the rest of your life—the presentmoment—and take the necessary risks to live the life you desire.

Stop for a moment and take a look within. What consistentlycauses you distress in your life? Which thoughts of what you wantbut don’t have keep floating back into your mind to torment you likea long, slow, aching pain? A relationship that didn’t work out? A par-ent who doesn’t believe in you? An important career goal you justcan’t seem to achieve? A coworker who is always putting you downor upstaging you? If you refuse to learn from your pain and thentransform it into your passion, it will become a chronic theme thatplays throughout your life like an irritating song you hear over andover again on the radio and can’t get out of your mind. Instead, makethe decision to embrace your suffering and learn what it has shownup to teach you.

MAKE IT HAPPEN:Using your journal or a piece of paper, try the exercise below:

1. Write down one thing in your life that causes you pain.2. Sit with the source of your suffering for a while, whatever

it may be. Clear your mind, take a deep breath, relax, andsee it for what it truly is.

3. Ask yourself, “What can I learn from this pain?” Try todiscover what your suffering has shown up in your lifeto teach you. Write down the lessons that come to mindfrom this source of pain.

4. Now ask yourself: “What can I do differently so I will notcontinue to experience it?” Write out what comes to yourmind.


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5. Also ask yourself, “How can I prevent others from experi-encing this form of suffering?” Once again, write out whatcomes to your mind.

6. Write down some new ways of acting that are likely toprevent you or others from experiencing this type of suf-fering. If they feel right enough, integrate them into yourVision Statement or Action Plan (you will learn how todesign an Action Plan in chapter 10).

7. Repeat this exercise for the most important sources ofsuffering in your life.

Don’t Let Someone Else’s Passion Spoil Your Own

There’s an old saying: “Don’t let someone else’s pain spoil your own.” Norshould you allow someone else’s passion to spoil your own. One person’spassion is another’s drudgery. Instead of running from whatever you’vebeen through, slow down enough to sit with it and try to understand it.Then transform it into your passion for what you want to change in yourSelf, your family, your school, your company, or the world.

Make the decision right here and now to stop shunning a naturalemotion that, like every other emotion you feel, has shown up toteach you something about your distinctly human experience. Keepthese thoughts in mind, especially when you feel hurt by a commentyour partner makes, receive the raw end of a deal, or are rebuked bya coworker: “I will not avoid my suffering any more than I will avoidmy happiness. Instead, I will own it, and thank it for providing mewith the inner fuel to make positive changes in my life.”


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Every time you feel sad or depressed, and are holding back tears,do not cry for your pain but for your essential humanness. Sit withyour pain long enough to understand it, but not so long that it con-sumes you. If your pain goes undetected, it will take the form ofulcers, episodic illnesses, nausea, and drowsiness (what you experi-ence when you don’t want to be awake). Make the effort tounderstand your pain and it will no longer intimidate or control you.Instead, it will feel like an old friend whom you don’t always love tosee, but respect and know how to handle.

Like that old friend, process your pain in doses. Don’t sit withyour pain in the sense of, “I will focus every waking moment on thispain at the exclusion of everything else in my life until it goes away.”Instead, sit with your pain meaning, “I will not just take a superficialview of my pain, but will try to deeply understand it. At the sametime, I will recognize when I have absorbed enough and am indanger of losing my center. At those times, I will let my pain go, andwill return to it when I’m ready to continue processing it.”

The Question That Determines Your Future

It’s compelling that the word passion literally contains the word“pain” within it. Imagine pain so extreme it would be almost unbear-able. What if your six-year-old son was abducted from a Floridadepartment store and brutally murdered? What would you do?

If you were John Walsh, you would start the television showAmerica’s Most Wanted. You would put over one thousand fugitivesbehind bars. You would lobby the federal government to sign intolaw various Missing Children’s Acts, increased penalties for sexoffenders, and a national Amber Alert system to recover abductedchildren. In Walsh’s words, “I’d like to be remembered as the father of


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a murdered child who fought back. As someone who tried to make adifference in honoring his son’s name.”

Walsh channeled his pain into a passion to make the streets safefor other people’s children. Beneficial for society? Tremendously.Brought immense meaning into his life? Without a doubt. This is thepower of passion.

Your future success also hinges on how you answer one criticalquestion: What will I do with my pain? You are certainly free to mopearound the house, wallow in your room, and let your mind digress intothe barren wasteland of “No one understands me” and “Why me?”thoughts. After the death of his son, Walsh most likely went throughsuch a period before he discovered his life’s calling. Alternatively, youcan take a page from Walsh’s book. You can sit with your pain longenough to understand it, and then design strategies to diminish thechances of it recurring in your life and in the lives of others.

Pick a situation and ask yourself if you are working with yourpain or if your pain is working on you. If your father is always criticalof you, you have every right to feel hurt and languish in self-pity. Yetyou also have the right to ponder what he experienced in his lifethat’s made him so critical. Once you accept that you will not changehim, you will be ready to convert the suffering you’ve incurredbecause of his critical nature into a burning motivation to help thosewho do want to change to become less judgmental and more accept-ing of others.

The One Passion That Will Inspire You for a Lifetime

Passion is the desire to change something in your life and/or thelives of others. The link between passion and suffering is easy to


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understand when you realize that what you want to change causedyou suffering, which is why you want to change it.

“Now wait just a moment,” you may be thinking. “Suffering maybe connected to passion, but it’s not the only source of my passion.I feel passionate about eating ice cream. No physical abuse or childabduction went into that formula—I just love ice cream!” Yes, it’strue that while suffering is the largest pathway to passion, it’s not theonly one. In fact, there are some things that we may enjoy so muchwe are willing to suffer after following our passion for them. This iswhy many people are willing to endure an increased waistline andless mobility after an ice cream sundae—because their passion forthe mint chip and hot fudge is so strong.

Marcel Proust once wrote, “There are many kinds of pleasures.The real pleasure is that for which you will forsake all theothers.”[EN#] The nineteenth-century French novelist makes an excel-lent point about priorities: in the end, there is only one truepriority—or life pleasure, or passion—that trumps all the others.While your passion for ice cream may be strong, it is most likely notthe passion that will keep you going for a lifetime, nor is it the pas-sion that will inspire others to join your cause. I once listened to atalk by Ben Cohen, the co-founder of Ben & Jerry’s, and I can assureyou that his greatest passion—which has inspired thousands to joinor invest in his company—is not to eat or sell ice cream, but to construct a socially responsible business that makes a lasting socialimpact on the world.

Passion for ice cream, or chocolate, or sports, or money, arealmost always related to either the body’s sense pleasures or the ego’sneed for approval, rather than a compelling desire to make the worlda better place for others. Let’s return once again to the prodigiousFrench novelist to shed light on the true nature of passion. Proust


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also sagely observed: “Happiness is beneficial for the body, but it isgrief that develops the powers of the mind.”

To develop a passion that will become your one UnanswerableQuestion (which you will identify in chapter 4) and guide you fora lifetime, you must find something you yearn for that goes beyondyour body’s sense pleasures or your mind’s ego. Why? Becauseonce your physical sensations or ego are placated, this passion willcease to motivate you. (If you don’t believe me, eat as much icecream as you can for half an hour and then reflect on your passionfor ice cream.) Your life’s passion—to become sustainable—mustemanate from the heart.

The Roots of Com-passion

This concept—that the strongest form of passion does, in fact, comefrom our suffering—naturally leads to a question I have been askedhundreds of times in my conferences: “If I haven’t suffered a lot inmy life, does it mean I can’t have any passion?” My response is thatthe good news is your passion doesn’t have to come from your ownsuffering. I’ve observed in many of my clients that the flip side of aneasy, sheltered childhood can be a lack of passion to change anythingin the world. (If you are content with the cards the world has dealtyou, after all, why change the deck?) I’ve also had the privilege ofworking with many others who have learned the life-changing lessonthat they are connected to every other human being they’ve everencountered by a universal life force, and that this synergy can giverise to an incredible passion.

We are all connected. When someone else suffers, you suffer too.If this weren’t the case, you would never cry during a movie. Thesame is true with joy. Watch someone smile, and before you know it,


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you smile. When a friend laughs, you laugh. Witnessing either joy orsuffering in others is how you make The Connection. The passioncreated inside you when you observe others suffering comes fromcompassion—com (with) and passion (to suffer). Compassion doesn’tmean “to suffer with,” which would bring you down and render youunable to sustain your caring for another person, but “to be withsomeone in their suffering.”

There is so much suffering in the world already that there is nogood reason to add any more of your own to the mix in the hopes offinding your passion. Instead, spend enough time with someone whois suffering to understand at least some of what they are experiencing.You will become emotionally moved, which will impel you to worktoward preventing their future suffering or the suffering of othersfrom the same affliction.

You’ve already experienced this feeling of compassion manytimes. Recall when you watched a family member or friend experi-ence devastating pain after they were emotionally hurt by anotherhuman being. Think back to when you visited people living inpoverty and made the profound realization that they aren’t any different from you. Remember a time when you passed someone onthe street, looked into their eyes, and saw through them to their suf-fering. Recall those moments when you questioned why you are sofortunate and felt compelled to make the lives of others better insome concrete way.

You may have had one of these experiences and then forgottenabout it and gone on with your life. Bring it back into your mind andyour long-dormant passion will return.

Can you recall the times in your life when you stumbled over thetruth—when you realized your true inner calling, or the kind of person you want to spend your life with, or what family truly


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means—even if only for a brief moment? Most of the time, we letthese moments pass us by because our ego doesn’t allow our soul tofully absorb what’s holding its attention. Our ego diverts us backto our worries about what we have to do tomorrow, or our insecureneed to regain our traction on the hamster wheel to nowhere we’vebeen sprinting on at work, or our impulsive desire to follow up withas many people as possible in order to feel as if we know everyone—while in truth we know no one.

Due to our constant preoccupations, it can be all too easy to turna blind eye to that faintly perceptible feeling inside instead of lettingit grow. Here’s my simple advice: go back to those moments in yourlife when you actually felt something. Remember those feelings, givethem room to freely evolve, and learn what they came into yourheart to teach you. This is your passion.

Freedom Is Not Free

I hope you’ve accepted by now that the issue is not the pain you’vebeen through. The issue is how you relate to the pain you’ve beenthrough. Befriend your pain, or the pain you’ve seen others experi-ence, and you will receive a tremendous gift: a sense of purpose.Never again will you count the minutes on the clock until you canleave work or class. Gone will be the days when you felt lost andconfused about your life’s mission. You will wave good-bye to allthe negative vices and self-recriminations that stem from an inneraimlessness.

Best of all, the day you confront your pain and convert it intoyour passion will be the last day you have to work. You will neveragain have a job. You will no longer even have to ponder, “What willI do in my career?” Instead, you will have a calling. Your greater


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purpose will evolve out of a deeply rooted inner passion you won’t beable to shake even if you try, and it will drive you to achieve spectac-ular results.

Why is it so important to discover your passion? Because youhave something unique and unrivaled to contribute. You candiscover it and integrate it into your life’s purpose by asking yourself,“What have I been through, or seen others go through, that I coulddedicate myself to preventing?” and “What about the world agitatesme and makes me feel uncomfortable?” Make your resolve concreteby asking yourself, “What would wake me up in the morning andmake me want to walk through the doors of my office, school, hospi-tal, or studio and do something with my life?”

Make this metamorphosis happen in every area of your life—starting today. If you feel your ex-husband betrayed you by leavingyou with two children to raise so he could chase after a youngerwoman, don’t subordinate your pain by going on a dating spree.Instead, process whatever pain you can handle and ask yourselfthe hard questions about why your marriage didn’t work. Consider thequalities you were looking for when you met your ex-husband. Thenenvision the qualities you will look for now to find a man whom youare more compatible with—and who will stand by you when thegoing gets tough. The choice is yours: you are certainly free to playthe victim role and complain about your pain. Alternatively, you canfeel it, heal it, and transform it into your passion.

I visited the Korean War Memorial in Washington, D.C. and wasstruck by an inscription that read: Freedom is not free. As I men -tioned earlier, to develop your own Vision for your life andrelentlessly pursue it is the only freedom I know of. Like anything ofimport, it’s not free. The cost is to drill down to the core of your suffering—because confronting the pain that lingers inside you is


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precisely what will liberate you from it. You will then be able to dis-cover your passion for what you want to change in the world.

“But why go through all this pain to confront even more painthat’s better forgotten?” you may be thinking. “I’d rather focus onwhat makes me happy.” I realize what I’m asking you to do isn’teasy. Let’s face it: “Confront my suffering” probably isn’t the firstthing you want to put on your to-do list. Yet it’s worth your time tofight the natural human tendency to avoid thinking about the painyou’ve experienced. Why? Because once you integrate these peri-odic self-dialogues into your schedule alongside “Meet Mary fortennis,” your life’s mission—like a mountain lake after the sedimenthas drifted to the bottom—will start to become clear. Where youonce saw an abundance of time and a scarcity of opportunities,you will see the opposite. Most importantly—for you and the restof us you share this planet with—you will make The Connection.You will find a sense of meaning in the brief amount of time youhave left on this earth, which will guide you toward thoughtful,compelling action.

MAKE IT HAPPEN:

1. You entered this world and you’re going to leave it. Whatwill be different about the world when you check out of itthat will be attributable to your actions? In other words,what will be the impact of your life?

2. Write a paragraph about what makes you uncomfortableabout your community and/or the world. Put into wordswhat makes you feel like saying, “This is not as it shouldbe—and I’m going to do something about it!”


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3. Revisit the thoughts you’ve had while reading this chapterabout what truly drives you and what you want to dedi -cate yourself to changing in the world. Write down thesethoughts and save them.

4. After finishing Part 1, integrate this profound inner learn-ing into your Vision Statement. As you will soon learn,your Vision Statement must reflect what you are mostdeeply passionate about in order to become sustainableand motivate you for years to come.


the connection by anthony silard - ch. 1

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