Saw this on Reddit and had to laugh.

If you’re like me, the journey to finding alignment between expressing a meaningful life purpose and growing a business has been arduous. On the one hand, you crave that deeper sense of meaning and contribution that comes from living your life on purpose. On the other, you need to make a living, support your family, and pay the mortgage – not to mention your desire for financial and time freedom. Too often these things seem diametrically opposed.

So how do you do it? How do you live your life guided by a deep sense of purpose and, at the same time, have a meaningful and prosperous career? Although it took me years to find the answer, I ultimately realized how anyone can find that alignment. In this article, I’m going to show you how. But first, I need to debunk an all too common myth about money.

Do What You Love and the Money Will Follow? Not Even Close

“If you do what you love, then the money will follow.” I know you’ve heard that one before. Is it true? Nope. I admit that it sounds great. I know it sells a lot of books and tapes. But you’re doing yourself a huge disservice if you think that doing what you love will bring in the dough.

So what is the secret to financial prosperity? The answer lies in how you answer three simple questions:

1. Do you operate in a large and growing market opportunity?
2. Does this market perceive that you have unique capabilities that it desperately needs?
3. Do you meet those needs efficiently and in a repeatable manner?

Financial prosperity is pretty simple. If you can answer “yes” to all three questions above, then your business is financially successful. If not, then your business is struggling financially, and it will continue to struggle, until you can.

Why do your answers to these three questions determine your financial prosperity? As I share in the business strategy guide, these are related because the goal of any strategy is to efficiently acquire new energy (e.g. money, resources, clout) from the surrounding environment, now and in the future.

To get new energy, an organization must develop and integrate its capabilities with opportunities in the marketplace. If you’ve completed the business purpose exercise earlier in this series, then you already have you a good sense of what your unique capabilities are. In addition, the business execution guide will show you how to operate efficiently and adapt to market changes. What remains is the market opportunity itself and it’s a critical piece in creating purpose, meaning, and money in your life and work. Let’s see how it all comes together.

The Sweet Spot

The path to achieving purpose, meaning, and money together is finding the sweet spot between your life purpose, your business purpose, and the market opportunity. In a nutshell, the market opportunity is where the money is; the business purpose is your capabilities to address that market opportunity; and your life purpose is how they tie together in a personally meaningful way. If you can find that sweet spot, you’re going to be one of the lucky few who live a purposeful, meaningful, and prosperous life. As you know already, that’s not always easy to accomplish.

Not having them aligned, however, is even more challenging and dissatisfying. For example, imagine that you’re living your life on purpose but you don’t have a real business or serve a real market opportunity. Like a yogi or philosopher, you probably have a high sense of meaning but not enough money to pay the bills (unless you have a benefactor or you’re supported by institutions like ashrams or universities).

Or imagine that your life purpose is actually aligned with your business purpose but there’s no real market opportunity. What happens then? You’re frustrated. You know your life purpose and the business you’d love to pursue, but there’s no market demand for it. Like a cowboy born 200 years too late, you suffer because you’re mismatched to the current environment.

On the other hand, if you know your life purpose and sense the market opportunity but don’t have the business to operate in, you’re probably feeling a deep sense of longing, wondering, and searching for the right strategy, team, capital, and systems around which to build a business or career. Like an entrepreneur who senses the future and is driven by a clear purpose but hasn’t yet found people to buy into the vision, you walk around depressed until things seem to finally start to click.

Or finally, like a lot of highly intelligent, capable, and driven people, you make the mistake of pursuing opportunities based only on the money. When you take this approach, you end up in soul-draining jobs, devoid of a sense of purpose and meaning. Plus, most often the money is not enough because it doesn’t fill the hole in your soul.

So the sweet spot occurs when you have alignment between all three elements: you’re on purpose in your life; you’re on purpose with your business; and the timing is right to serve a growing market opportunity. If you can find this sweet spot, then that’s when you get to “do what you love and the money will follow.”

If you’ve already completed the Life Purpose, Business Purpose, and Core Values exercises (they’re free, registration is not required, so what are you waiting for?), then you now have an excellent foundation to find alignment among all three. Here’s how you do that.

3 Keys to Find Sweet Spot

Key #1: It’s Not What You’re Doing But Who You’re Being That Really Counts

To begin, first look at your life purpose and business purpose statements and ask yourself, “Can I apply my life purpose in this business?” Before you answer, I want to point out something that may not be obvious straight away. It’s this: YOU CAN APPLY YOUR LIFE PURPOSE DOING **ALMOST** ANY WORK.

For example, let’s say that “child poverty” is a hot-button issue from your life purpose statement that you reframed into “safe and happy kids.” But your career is in accounting and it may seem like your life purpose and business purpose are hopelessly misaligned. Not true. Can you see how you can use your business purpose within accounting to help you fulfill your life purpose? One way would be to bring forward your passion and desire to help families manage their money so they can raise safe and happy kids. Not only would this shift in perspective increase your joy and satisfaction in your job; if authentic, it would also become a powerful differentiator in the marketplace.

I say **ALMOST** any work because this shift in perspective only works under two conditions. The first is that your business must be ethical. You’ve got to provide a high quality product or service, for a fair exchange of value, and be honest and trustworthy in your dealings. If not, you may have short term gains but at the cost of not making a real contribution to others and losing your peace of mind.

The second is that you must find the work you do interesting and stimulating. Continuing with the last example, if you find the work required to do accounting boring, dull, or soul-crushing, then it’s not enough to only change your perspective. You must also change the work itself. If the work meets these two conditions of integrity and personal interest, then you can apply your life purpose doing just about anything that suits you.

When I tell people – especially successful people in career transitions – that they can apply their life purpose to just about any kind of work, I often hear: “Yeah, but I really want to make a BIG difference in the world.” I went through a long period like this in my own life and so I feel like I understand where they’re coming from. What I’ve found true for me is this: Purpose and meaning is where you choose to find it. Put another way, you can let yourself off the hook about changing the world. The world doesn’t need you to change it. The world needs you to change you.

To help drive this point home, I’d like you to take a virtual walk with me to a certain park bench in Santa Barbara. It’s located next to the dolphin fountain at Stearn’s Wharf. The bench looks unusual because it has a hand-painted tile mosaic that shows a scene of a smiling elderly man standing near a snack truck on the pier and surrounded by families. There’s a dedication that reads:

“The Popcorn Man — Everett Nicholin, 1890-1980, gave character and personality to Stearn’s Wharf and to the community of Santa Barbara. He will always be remembered by those who had the opportunity to know him and to appreciate his presence.”

Right there is the secret to aligning your life purpose with your business purpose. It’s not what you are doing but who you are being that creates impact, meaning, and deep satisfaction. Presence. Contribution. Kindness. Authenticity. These characteristics hold true regardless of whether you spend your days running a company, raising a family, or selling popcorn at the beach. If you can see how to apply the purpose of your life in almost any work that is ethical and interests you, then that should create a sense of freedom in the business or career with which you choose to engage.

Key #2: Meet the World Where It Is, Not Where You Think It Should Be

One of the challenges of aligning your life and business purpose with a growing market opportunity is that your life purpose is a reflection of how you think the world should be, while a successful business must meet the world where it is today. Put another way, if you want to change the world, become a martyr or start a non-profit. But if you want to run a successful business, then you need to be meeting the needs of the marketplace as they exist today, and with a sound business model – one that operates efficiently and repeatably over time and that leverages your unique capabilities.

This can seem tricky. You’ve got to somehow meet the world where it is today, provide value in your interactions, and simultaneously feel like you’re moving yourself and others towards the positive future you desire. The solution lies in understanding and committing to your core values. Once you’re clear and committed to what’s most important to you, you sacrifice what’s not as important. For example, if financial prosperity is really a core value for you, then your focus must be on developing your business to meet the world where it is today. But if being a change agent is your core value, then you’ll sacrifice the money and commit fully to creating change in the world, despite being broke. Life is ultimately about choice. Knowing your core values makes those choices clearer and helps you to accept the sacrifices, whatever they may be.

Key #3: Get Out in the World and Muck About

A lot of people, especially big Innovators, want to see the roadmap for their life laid out far in advance. They spend inordinate amounts of time thinking about this, planning, dreaming, and trying to craft a linear path from point A to point Z. Once they’ve figured it all out, they tell themselves, then they’ll launch with gusto.

You already know that life doesn’t work that way. Life doesn’t want you sitting around plotting and scheming. Life wants you out there in the mix, mucking it up, learning, growing, experiencing, contributing, connecting. When you do this — acting from right where you are to express your purpose, live by your core values, and add value to others through your work — then life starts responding.

Opportunities open up. Connections occur. Learning and insight happens. One small step leads to the next small step. It’s only upon looking back on what seemed, at the time, like a circuitous and sometimes desperate route, that it all starts to make perfect sense. Standing on the mountaintop, you can look back down and see how each step of the climb ultimately brought you exactly where you want to be.

The Story of Samantha

To help bring this all home, I’d like to share a story about another friend of mine whom I’ll call Samantha. Samantha is 35. She’s highly intelligent, creative, and capable. Her defining characteristic is that she is incredibly dedicated to shifting global consciousness. In fact, in the past decade, she started two different businesses with the mission of shifting global consciousness. Neither business panned out, however, and burdened by debt, she chose to put her dream on hold to take a job with an online advertising agency.

It turns out that the clients absolutely loved Samantha’s work and so did the agency. Within six months of starting, Samantha was making more money than she had in the prior six years. And within a year after that, she was offered a partnership in the firm. That’s when Samantha came to me looking for advice. Should she accept the partnership and say good-bye to her vision of changing the world? Could she do both? Should she give her vision one more solid try? Perhaps you’ve been in a similar predicament. Here’s what we did to help Samantha find the sweet spot.

For your reference, Samantha’s life purpose is to use her talents of ideating, writing, and authentic messaging to help herself and others experience more holistic living, balance, and community. Her core values are expansion, prosperity, and health. She didn’t yet have a business purpose statement.

First, I asked Samantha if she could use her talents of ideating, writing, and authentic messaging in her agency work. She replied, “Absolutely, that’s why I’m so successful there. The clients love my work because I’m not afraid to call BS when I see it and I craft amazing messages . . . it’s almost like I’m not working at all.”

Then I asked her which opportunity, the agency or starting her own company again, most closely aligned with her core values of expansion, prosperity, and health. “As much as I hate to admit it,” she said, “the agency seems more aligned. I definitely feel expanded. I am prospering. And even my health is better because I’m not so stressed out.”

Then I asked her about where the world seemed to be now: “Is there more opportunity today in helping companies figure out their branding or in trying to shift global consciousness?” She just laughed at that one. No need to even answer.

“Tell me,” I said, “Is it possible for you to do work that is aligned with holistic living, balance, and community from within the agency? That is, can you be balanced and holistic in your approach and help your clients do the same while simultaneously building communities?” She had to think about that for a bit but then the light bulb went on. “You know what,” she said, “All of our branding efforts are moving towards building online communities. I never thought about it like that before. And many of the types of clients we work with are actually seeking to make the world a more balanced place in their own way. So yeah, I guess I can see it that way.”

Then I asked her the hardest question of all: “Samantha, does it take more courage to express your purpose and values within the agency or by starting your own business?” She replied kind of sheepishly: “You know, it takes way more courage to express them within the agency. It feels like there’s so much pressure to not express them and just get the work done. I don’t always own up to what I believe in and that makes me want to start my own thing with more aligned customers and employees.”

“OK,” I said, “I get that. I would also ask you to really examine if that’s true. But let me ask you something else first: “Can you see how it’s possible to help shift the world by actually meeting the world where it is today? That is, by working with real companies, selling real products, with real payrolls from within the agency? Can you get that that’s where the real work might be and that your role is to help bring more holism, balance, and community into that work?” “Yes,” she said, “I’m totally surprised to say it because I haven’t thought of it that way before, but yes, I do.”

In essence, Samantha was able to see that working within the agency was actually her sweet spot for purpose, meaning, and money. Samantha’s next step is to do a business purpose statement that really calls out the unique approach of her agency and the types of clients they can and want to help the most. If they do this correctly, it will create a powerful brand differentiator in the marketplace, attract more aligned clients, and also allow Samantha to more fully apply her life purpose within her work. It turns out, as it always does, that Samantha is getting exactly what she’s been committed to, just not in the way she envisioned it. Such is life.

Would you like your mind to feel like this?

Three Types of Intelligence

In order to make a good decision, you obviously need to rely on your intelligence, which as we all know takes different forms – cognitive, emotional, social, and so on. While intelligence has been mapped by different theorists in different ways, I’m going to refer to three primary types of intelligence:

1. Cognitive intelligence. This refers to your ability to reason, categorize, analyze, and process information in a linear way. It is generally associated with the left hemisphere.
2. Emotional intelligence. This is your ability to recognize and express different emotions. It is generally associated with the right hemisphere, but extends throughout the entire nervous system, as has been shown by psychoneuroimmunology.
3. Creative intelligence. This is your ability to synthesize, intuit, and generate creative solutions to complex problems. Generally, creativity is associated with both right-hemisphere and whole-brain processing. For the purposes of this discussion, creative intelligence integrates cognitive and emotional intelligence from both hemispheres and other systems that permeate the whole body.

The notion of a specific hemispheric brain location for different types of intelligence is a common but simplified version of the truth. Much cutting-edge research over the past two decades has shown that intelligence isn’t just located in the brain. Neurons exist all throughout the body and, in addition to the brain, are especially concentrated in the gut and heart. In addition, psychoneuroimmunology has shown that emotions are processed and generated holistically throughout the whole mind-body system. This means, for example, that the biological and energetic “signature” of emotions is often located in multiple parts of the body and – even beyond that – in the body as a whole.

Therefore, if you want to greater clarity on particular issue or situation, it’s not enough to work from just the left-brain, linear mind alone, as our culture tends to encourage us to do. You need to bring your whole self — right-, left-, and whole-brain and whole body — into the equation. In essence, what I’m referring to is whole-brain decision making or the process for quickly and powerfully accessing and integrating all three types of intelligence to solve a particular situation or problem you’re faced with.

The Process of Perception

Through your senses, you are constantly perceiving signals and events occurring in the environment. Your cognitive intelligence does something very important with these signals. It creates patterns out of the signals and events occurring in your environment and, from these, it makes stories. The stories fall into one of three basic categories. This event or signal is good; it’s expected and desired; you want it to occur. This event or signal is bad; it’s not expected or desired; you don’t want it to occur. Or, you’re indifferent to the signal or event.

For example, bring your awareness to an object in your environment. Let’s use the computer you’re using to read this. As you bring your awareness to your computer, just pay attention to what your brain does for the next minute or so. Notice that it begins to tell stories! What kind of stories? Positive, negative, or indifferent. “Wow, I really love my Macbook pro.” “Damn, I really want a new computer. This thing sucks, it’s so slow.” “Is my power adapter still acting hot? I better check it out.” “I’m spending way too much time reading online. I need to get to work.” “This is bullshit, what’s the point?” The stories are infinite in their variation and always happening. That’s what the cognitive mind does. It’s a great signal processor and storyteller.

While your cognitive mind is telling stories, your emotional intelligence is right there with it creating feelings based on the content of the story. Feelings also can be grouped as positive, negative, or neutral. And when it’s a neutral story, you can’t discern much feeling at all.

You already know from firsthand experience that emotional intelligence is deeply connected to the physical body. That’s why when you’re feeling a strong negative emotion, you feel it like “a knife in the heart,” “tight shoulders,” “a stiff neck,” “a headache,” or you’re “sick with worry.” It’s also why when you’re feeling a strong positive emotion, you also feel it in your body, such as the common feeling of having butterflies in your stomach, for example.

If you find yourself saying something like, “Stories? What stories? I’m not telling any stories. I see things for how they really are,” then there’s something you need to know. Most of our stories occur outside of our conscious awareness. So how can you tell if there’s a story or not? Whenever you have a strong, emotional reaction to something, it’s a sure sign that there’s a powerful story at work, even if you’re not exactly sure what it is.

While stories and feelings are happening at the level of your cognitive and emotional intelligence, it is your creative intelligence that provides the source of creative action. When you make decisions habitually without fully accessing your creative intelligence, then your actions tend to be dull, unconscious, or rote. But when you fully access your creative intelligence — exactly what you need to resolve a complicated or challenging situation — then your actions tend to be fresh, inspired, and even brilliant.

Why You Get Mentally Stuck

In order to make effective decisions in complex situations, it’s very helpful to first have the awareness of what’s causing or contributing to a lack of clarity. Critically, it’s not enough to simply understand something with your cognitive intelligence alone. You also have to process it with your emotional intelligence, and then access your creative intelligence, which synthesizes awareness from your cognitive and emotional intelligence to find a solution that transcends both.

What causes the cognitive and emotional intelligences to get out of alignment? I’m sure you already have a sense of it. Your cognitive intelligence gets misaligned because of the stories it’s telling and your emotional intelligence gets misaligned because of the feelings it’s generating. It is these two things — your stories and your feelings about them — that make it hard to fully see, understand, and accept what’s happening in the environment, find creative solutions, and take decisive action.

You get mentally stuck because your cognitive, emotional, and creative intelligences get misaligned.

How to Get Mentally Unstuck and Access Your Creative Genius

So how do you align your emotional and cognitive intelligence to access greater creativity and inspired action?

You begin with your cognitive intelligence. The cognitive mind needs data or information to work with. So the first step in any effective decision-making process is to first attempt to know and understand the relevant facts about the situation. The more facts you know, the more insights you can generate. What do you do if you don’t have or can’t get quality data? Well, sometimes you just have to run with what you’ve got. But however meager or robust the data may be, it’s important to first recognize exactly what it is you’re dealing with.

Once you have the relevant and available facts, the next step is to make sure that you’re seeing the information clearly. This requires that you separate the situation or problem from any stories that you’re cognitive intelligence is telling about it. There are the facts and there are the stories about the facts. You need to be able to discern the difference.

There’s a secret here. If you look at any event with a big enough perspective, you’ll see that nothing is good or bad. It’s only your story that makes it so. For example, your divorce is a fact. Your alimony and child support payments are a fact. But was your divorce the best or worst thing that’s happened to you? It’s only your story that makes it so. By separating the facts of the event from your story around the event, you free up a tremendous amount of energy and can access the much broader and powerful perspective.

The next step in attaining greater clarity is to really feel the feelings that are being created by the situation or event. Most of us tend to try to avoid, medicate, or numb out from our powerful feelings. But the truth is that you can’t transform anything unless you first feel it fully.

Just as no event is inherently good or bad, no emotion is inherently good or bad. Emotions are just energy. By simply allowing yourself to really be present to what it is that you’re actually feeling within your physical body, without judgment or condemnation, you allow that energy of emotion to flow where it needs to. When you do that, you create freedom and space for something new to emerge.

Now that you have the facts, your story about them is reframed, and you’re in touch with your emotions, the next step in the process is to access your creative intelligence. This is where the clarity resides. You accomplish this by allowing yourself to step fully into what it is that you want to be, do, or have next. When you do this, you tap deep into the inspiration and genius of your creative intelligence.

In a sense, you’re creating an internal environment where you can more easily access your creative power. The result is a cohesive, whole-brain decision. It doesn’t matter if it’s an issue that you’ve been dealing with for the past week or the past decade. Clarity happens instantly when all of these “circuits” are aligned. It’s pretty awesome.

Now that you know all this, you don’t have to think about it or remember it. I’ve made it easy for you to reach a greater state of clarity any time you need to. Below you’ll find a link to my free Clarity interactive tool. Just click on the link, follow the instructions, answer the questions, and you’ll be guided step by step to find the clarity you seek.

The entire exercise takes about 15 minutes to complete and the result should be a clear, powerful insight that is translated into immediate action steps. While the exercise is anonymous and will not be shared with others, you can enter the email address where you’d like to receive your completed work.

Clarity occurs when you align your cognitive and emotional intelligences to access your creative intelligence.

How Can You Tell If You’ve “Got It?”

For me, the feeling I get when an epiphany or crystallizing insight suddenly “hits me” is one of the most sublime, awesome, and electrifying things I’ve ever had the pleasure of experiencing. How about you? While those kinds of lightning-bolt intuitive hits are easy to recognize, they are also very rare. Creative intelligence also works in more subtle ways. You can tell when you tap into it by noticing if you have an increase in energy and a new, more powerful perspective on your situation.

Even if the subtle shifts aren’t as electrifying as the big jolts of insight, you’ll find that they certainly add up over time. In fact, the more in tune you become with the subtle signs from your creative intelligence, the easier it becomes to access it. Celebrate these subtle shifts because it is a sustained improvement in energy and perspective that ultimately leads to dramatic, life-changing breakthroughs.

One final thought. Each of us is faced with an accelerating amount of change in our lives, so it’s natural to feel unclear, stuck, or overwhelmed from time to time. When this happens, I encourage you to be easy on yourself. You’ll usually find that when you feel unclear, stuck or overwhelmed, there’s actually some powerful new quality of expression within you that’s ready to come forth into the world.

If you’re ready to break through on a complicated work-life issue, then launch the Clarity exercise, access all of your intelligence, and find the breakthrough you’ve been seeking.

==> Launch the Clarity exercise

“Vision without action is a daydream. Action without vision is a nightmare.”
~ Japanese Proverb

Most of us already know that vision and goal setting is a critical component for creating the life we want to live. Most of us are also so busy in our daily lives that it feels incredibly challenging to actually invest the time in doing vision and goal setting the right way. As a result, we postpone it and tell ourselves something like: “I’ll craft my vision and goals next quarter, once I’m over this sales hump.” But the quarter comes and goes and all that remains is another excuse.

One of the key differences between highly effective people and everyone else is that effective people actually take the time to get clear on their life vision. They also make a realistic plan of action to achieve it. After all, success isn’t attained through some grand sweeping gesture. It’s attained by doing the real work each day towards a powerful future vision.

If you’re sincere about setting your vision and action plan for the next phase of your life, then I have just the thing for you. It’s a free interactive online tool called “Vision and Action.” It will take you through a series of questions and will create a vision and action plan statement for you based on your answers.

How Clear is Your Vision?

A few weeks ago, a struggling entrepreneur said to me: “I don’t believe in setting a vision. My life takes so many twists and turns, so many ups and downs, that I could never predict it. Besides, I think that setting a vision is an attempt to give myself more power and credit than I really deserve. It sort of sets me apart from the bonds of fate. I mean, shit that is outside my control happens all the time so what’s the point?”

You may be thinking something similar so I want to address it up front. If you set a clear vision for your life, will you achieve it just as you describe it? Absolutely not! According to an old saying, the plan is useless but the planning is priceless. This is quite true for your life vision. Yes, there are countless variables outside your control but so what? What a vision really does is clarify where you choose to focus your energy, effort, and attention. In essence, your life vision helps you articulate to yourself exactly what you want and why. Then it’s up to you to take action in pursuit of that vision and adapt to the curve balls, challenges, and opportunities along the way.

How Backwards is Your Plan?

One of the best ways I know to craft your vision and action plan is to do it backwards. Backward planning means just what it sounds like: You begin with the end in mind and then plan backwards. In other words, if you want to get from point A to point B, you envision yourself already at point B and then sequentially trace your steps back to point A. This generates the action plan that you’ll follow in pursuit of your vision.

Then, like highly effective people, you act each day with laser-like focus to achieve your short-range goals, which build into your mid-range goals, and so on until, step by step, your reach your destination. And from that new destination, you repeat the process by setting a new vision and backward-planning a new set of goals.

Personally, I’ve always found backward planning really hard. Something about looking backward and thinking things through to the appropriate level of detail just doesn’t come naturally for me. The good news is that my own struggles with this process inspired me to create the “Vision and Action” tool. I don’t have to “plan;” I just have to sit down and answer some questions on my computer and the plan is created for me.

The free online “Vision and Action” tool automatically builds this plan for you. It’s presented in four sections:

1. Set your 5-Year Vision
2. Set your 1-Year Goals (your 1-year goals lead to your 5-year vision)
3. Set your 1-Month Goals (your 1-month goals lead to your 1-year goals)
4. Set your 1-Week Goals (your 1-week goals lead to your 1-month goals)

Of course, you’ll want to start by setting your vision first. You then complete each section in sequence until you’ve built an action plan that takes you towards your ultimate destination.

How Are You Getting It Done Each Day?

Creating the life you really want takes sacrifice, focus, and discipline. The “Vision and Action” plan does not cover how to execute on your action plan each day. However, there are many effective time and task management programs on the market today. Mastering some system to keep your mind clear and your actions on target each day is essential to high productivity and success. If you’re struggling with managing your tasks and staying on target each day, check out Simpleology or GTD. You’ll find that your Vision and Action plan aligns perfectly with these or most any other daily task management system.

The Easy, Effective Way to Craft Your Vision and Action Plan

Worthwhile things take time. You should plan for about an hour to complete the entire “Vision and Action” plan. Since you probably don’t have an hour to invest in your future right now, your first and immediate step should be to set a time in your calendar when you’ll return to this page and complete your personalized “Vision and Action” plan. Go do that now.

A key part of effective action planning is to update your plan as you complete each week, month, and year, so when you launch the program, you can create an account to save your work and return to it later. While the exercise is anonymous and will not be shared with others, you’ll be asked to enter the email address where you’d like to receive your statement of Vision and Action.

One final note about the “Vision and Action” exercise. I take a holistic (whole-person) approach to vision and goals so the questions you’ll be asked to answer reflect that. If you don’t feel a topic is relevant to you, you can skip that question. That’s about it. Onward and upward!

==> Launch the Vision and Action interactive exercise

The following is an excerpt from Organizational Physics – The Science of Growing a Business.

If you’re a growth-oriented CEO, entrepreneur, or department manager, then you’re naturally under pressure to lead your business to greater levels of performance. You also need to do this in a fast-moving, turbulent, evolving marketplace. A lot is riding on your judgment and leadership and there’s little room for error. There’s time pressure, money pressure, market pressure—not to mention work/life balance pressure—that can all add to the difficulty of achieving success.

Complicating matters is that there are never enough time and energy available to accomplish everything that needs to get done. Using limited resources, you must drive success, build powerhouse teams, set the right priorities, and execute fast. And because the right plan is only as good as your team’s commitment to implementing it, you have to ensure constant buy-in and continually lower any friction that gets in the way.

That’s a tall order. If you’re honest with yourself, you’ll admit there are countless times when you’re feeling stressed, doubtful, unclear, or simply stuck. Sometimes your job can feel so thrilling, you can’t imagine doing anything else. Other times it feels so frustrating that you want to quit, move to Tahiti, and take up painting. All in all, you’ve chosen a career path filled with adventure, danger, excitement, and the opportunity to manage one mini-crisis after another.

As a wise leader, you have learned to trust in your own experience. But you also keep an eye and ear open for valuable insights and perspectives. In this regard, there are countless management theories and organizational practices that you can choose from. There are top-down, bottom-up, agile-iterative, data-driven, design-first, customer-oriented, outcome-based, decentralized, centralized, democratic, autocratic, process-driven, lifecycle-stages, and X-Y-Z management theories. If you ask a dozen entrepreneurs, CEOs, and management experts which is the best model, you’ll hear as many different answers.

When you’re faced with a myriad of challenges, opportunities, constraints, and choices, how can you decisively lead your organization where you want it to go? When can you trust your past experience and when does it cast blinders on your ability to see clearly? What’s the right approach for your particular situation? How do you maximize your organization’s performance and your personal satisfaction, now and in the future?

The answer, as with all things, is to first understand what’s really going on. For example, a good doctor understands how the body really functions. Rather than focusing on symptoms, s/he will work to understand the systemic causes of a disease. Similarly, if you understand how your business and team really work beneath the surface, you can get at the underlying causes of what’s making them fail or succeed.

The purpose of Organizational Physics is to do just that—to explain how your business really works and to provide you with a complete system for improving its performance. What I’m proposing is a universal approach to solving any business problem or condition. You can use it to support your company’s overall success, boost the effectiveness of your teams, select and implement your chosen strategy, and even help yourself and others maximize their job satisfaction. It’s an all-encompassing approach to individual and organizational transformation.

But how is it that, without ever having met you, studied your business, or probably even worked in your industry (not to mention the fact that every business is unique), I could possibly tell you how your business really works and how to improve it? The reason is that I’m not relying on any context-specific business theory—but rather synthesizing certain principles of general management theory with a totally different discipline: the field of physics.

Physics is the study of matter and energy and their interactions. Its aim is to understand how nature at its most basic level really works. You can say that physics is the most fundamental of all sciences because physical laws can explain many observable facts in biology, medicine, chemistry, engineering, and other disciplines. It is so pervasive in its applications that it also applies to your situation, regardless of how unique it may seem.

At its core, physics provides us with a universal lens, language, and sequence to follow to understand nature’s underlying properties, patterns, and behaviors. For example, Einstein’s famous physics equation E=MC2 provides a lens, or a way of looking at the world, that is both elegant and enlightening. It also provides a language that translates beyond geographies, cultures, and culture-bound languages. A physicist in Beijing and one in Paris can communicate effectively using only the language of their discipline. Finally, physics provides a sequence to follow. If you repeat certain conditions in this way, then this will be your result, regardless of the time or place.

All systems—whether electrical, biological, or social—have common patterns, behaviors, and properties that can be understood and give us greater insight into their behavior. What if it were possible to apply the laws of physics to better understand the performance of your organization? Not only would we reveal the underlying patterns driving organizational performance, but we would also have a common lens, language, and sequence to use to improve that performance.

The premise of Organizational Physics is that it is both possible and extremely productive to do just that. There are indeed some basic laws of nature that determine the performance of any organization. Put another way, certain classic laws of physics apply not only to physical systems such as stars, toasters, and space ships, but also to complex adaptive systems such as individuals, families, companies, and countries. In a word, we call these complex adaptive systems “organizations.” If physics is the science of matter and energy and their interactions, and “management” refers to principles and methods used to lead organizations, then Organizational Physics is the translation, or the common ground, between the two.

In my work with high-tech companies, CEOs, entrepreneurs, and organizational leaders, I have found that this translation is not only interesting—it’s essential. Technological advance continues unremittingly, yet most of our existing management paradigms are lagging behind the times. To many, it seems that the world is at a dangerous tipping point—that we keep running faster and faster while heading in the wrong direction. Without a management system that takes this into account, organizations will have a harder time orchestrating positive outcomes. We’ll be stuck in the tower of Babel of conflicting management theories that just don’t decode quickly enough for our new era. This book argues that the models of physics offer answers to the question of how to keep up—in ways that are powerful, practical, and universally valid.

There are Six Laws of Organizational Physics. These laws determine an organization’s performance and can help you improve it. They can be found within core branches of physics, including systems theory, thermodynamics, and motion, as well as the most fundamental principle of evolution: adaptation. Think of it this way: If you want your organization to thrive rather than fail, move swiftly in a chosen direction, adapt successfully to change, and behave in a certain way, then the answers all reside within these laws.

Below is a brief explanation of each law and why—as an entrepreneur, manager, or leader—you should understand its implications.

1. An organization is a complex adaptive system.
Organizations are complex in that they have many interconnected and interdependent elements, subsystems, or parts. They are adaptive in that they shape and respond to changes in the surrounding environment. They are systems in that they respond as a whole organization, not just as a collection of parts. To understand how something really works, it’s not enough to break it down into its components. You must look at it in the context of the complete system. Viewing an organization as a complex adaptive system provides valuable insights into how it functions in its totality.

2. An organization is subject to the first law of thermodynamics.
The first law of thermodynamics states that, at any given point in time, a system has a finite amount of energy. If an organization is to get new energy, it must get it from its environment. For a business, energy is any usable source of power such as money, resources, and market clout. Its environment includes the surrounding system of customers, social norms, regulations, and economies in which it operates. If there’s high integration between an organization’s capabilities and the opportunities in the environment, then the organization can receive an abundance of new energy and be successful. If there’s no integration between them, then there’s no new energy created for the organization and—just as a man on a desert island without food and water—it will soon perish.

3. An organization is subject to the second law of thermodynamics.
The second law of thermodynamics indicates that everything falls apart over time. This is due to entropy, which is disorder or disintegration. All systems are subject to it; none can escape it. An organization’s available energy first flows to manage and counter the disintegrating force of entropy. If entropy in the system is high, then it costs the system a higher amount of its available energy to maintain itself and get work done. Therefore, it has less energy available to drive integration forward in its environment. To get an immediate, intuitive grasp of this principle, just imagine a business with a great market opportunity but which also suffers from high internal friction, politicking, and infighting. It takes a tremendous amount of energy to get any work done and the business can’t capture the external opportunity as a result. How an organization manages its available energy is what ultimately determines its failure or success. Learn how to work with Laws #1-3 to drive greater success and satisfaction.

4. An organization must shape and respond to its environment and do so as a whole system, including its parts and sub-parts.
In physics, a chaotic system is one that seems random in its behavior but is actually driven by some basic repeating patterns or forces that exist from the macro- to the micro-level. In this regard, an organization is like a chaotic system. It has patterns or forces that exist all throughout the organization, from the smallest tasks and behaviors to the largest enterprise. These forces can be mapped in many ways. One of the most effective I know is placing them along two basic parameters or axes: (1) how the organization shapes and responds to its environment; and (2) how the organization manages its individual parts and the whole.
Later you will learn how these parameters explain four primary forces within an organization and how these give rise to individual and collective behavior. They are called the Producing, Stabilizing, Innovating, and Unifying forces. Each of these expresses itself through a particular behavior pattern. If one or more of the forces are absent, the organization will perish. Understanding them allows you to work at the root causes of what’s happening in the system and use them to create desired change. Learn how to work with Law #4 to build and manage powerhouse teams.

5. An organization is subject to the conditions in its environment.
The driving principle of evolution shows that it is not the strongest or most intelligent that survive but those that are best adapted to their environment. Therefore, the greatest mistake an organization can make is to misread its environment. If it does so, it will cease to get new energy and it will fail. Because the environment is always changing, the organization must always be adapting to maintain integration. Successful adaptation requires a constant realignment among the organization’s capabilities to execute (Execution Lifecycle), its markets or customers (Market Lifecycle), and its products (Product Lifecycle). How an organization manages this alignment is the basis of its strategy. Learn how to work with Law #5 to choose the right strategy.

6. An organization is subject to the laws of motion.
Newton’s three laws of motion reveal the principles of movement for physical objects in the universe. The laws explain inertia, acceleration, and reaction. The laws also help us understand and work with the principles of organizational change and momentum. Namely, they explain why an organization will tend to behave the way it does unless a force of change causes it to do something differently. They explain how the mass of an organization naturally resists change and how every action performed in the business creates an equal and opposite reaction that must be managed. How an organization manages its mass determines the speed of its execution. Learn how to work with Law #6 to execute fast.

As you deepen your understanding of each law, you’ll be able to spot it everywhere around you—your family, your social circle, your community, your government, and beyond. In other words, you’ll find that these laws hold true regardless of the time, place, or type of organization. Too often, management theory presupposes that work and life are separate things. They’re not! Soon you’ll become skilled at quickly spotting the principles everywhere—and when you can do that, you’ll be able to see them at work in your business too.

You’ll also find that, in this process, you’re becoming a more astute and powerful leader. You can now be placed in any situation and instantly understand what caused it to get that way, as well as predict and prevent future problems. You’ll have deeper insight into why people and teams show up the way they do. Finally, you’ll better understand certain principles of strategy, finance, and product development to bring the entire organization together to execute fast and well.

I’d like to share a caveat about using physics as a management methodology. I’ve tried to align the laws of Organizational Physics as closely as possible to the laws of classic physics, but there are differences and interpretations. This is natural. Physics studies the nuts and bolts of the physical world—and human organizations are much more than that.

There’s an old joke about two physicists in a classroom. They’re at the chalkboard, on which one of them has written a complicated formula in three steps. Step 1 is a proven known. Step 3 is also a proven known. In between them, Step 2 reads: “Then a miracle occurs.” His partner looks at the board and says, “I think you need to be more specific here in Step 2.”
So let’s not forget that countless unknowns exist and that any framework, even one as authoritative as physics, is just that—a framework. Your own drive, skills, experience, capabilities, resources, and support systems are what make any theory come alive.

Although the laws of Organizational Physics apply to most situations and organizations of all sizes, our methodolgy was created for leaders, entrepreneurs, and managers working with start-up to expansion-stage technology-based companies. This is so for three reasons:

1. My own background is in building expansion-stage technology businesses. I’ve done this successfully as an entrepreneur and as a coach to other successful entrepreneurs and management teams. This is an audience that I know well and I can speak firsthand to their challenges and opportunities. My work as a coach and consultant motivates me to share my methods with all those who can benefit and expand the reach and impact of Organizational Physics around the world.
2. The speed and disruptive change of technology-based markets make this industry willing to try on new methods and require it to produce results quickly. This is a perfect proving ground filled with bright, passionate early adopters who appreciate cutting-edge thought leadership. It is this sector that drives forward innovations that are later adopted by other industries.
3. The world is now struggling with complexity in profound ways. It’s not just “too much information” and noise, but an inability to integrate all the data in a cohesive way and to make wise decisions based on it. It’s becoming clear to many that government won’t save us, but rather a cadre of agile, innovative organizations woven together by a passion for technology, ecology, and creating better ways of living and working. I am passionate about building World 2.0 with this group.

That said, even if you’re not involved with a high-tech company, you will still gain powerful insights into how your organization functions, as well as clarity on the concrete steps you can take to be a better manager and leader. Just read it with a filter on and apply the lessons to your own organization.

Striving to find the underlying principles that govern how something performs is not a new quest. It’s been around since before the first man looked at fire and thought, “How does it work?” And ever since the advent of the scientific method and the printing press, our shared comprehension of how things actually work continues to increase at a staggering rate. As our collective knowledge grows, we continue to ask, “How does it really work?” and new discoveries are made.

So with that spirit of discovery in mind, I invite you to think of the organization you’d most like to improve and ask yourself, “Hmmm, I wonder, how it really works?” Then dive into the world of Organizational Physics for the answers.

What does this insight have to do with values? Quite a lot, actually. When your values are clear, then decision making gets easier. More than that, you’ll usually find that you’re getting exactly what you’re most committed to in your life. For example, I have a friend who I’ll call Sam who has had financial problems most of his adult life. He’s in debt, afraid, and desperate about his finances. One day I asked Sam to prioritize his core values and here’s the list he came up with: 1) health, 2) friends, 3) autonomy, 4) travel, 5) time freedom, and then 6) money.

Can you guess what Sam’s life looks like, how he spends his time and energy? It shouldn’t be a surprise. First, Sam is in phenomenal shape. He competes in triathlons and usually spends two to three hours each day training. He’s got the best equipment money can buy. Second, he has a rich social network of friends and often hosts dinner parties at his home. Third, Sam loves to work alone and be creative. Fourth, even though he’s broke, he seems to still be able to get away twice a year to travel to exotic locations. Fifth, he refuses to take a job or work for a large company because that would limit his time freedom. And sixth, he always seems to have just enough money, somehow, some way, to support his priorities.

I did this exercise with Sam because I wanted to show him that he’s a very powerful dude. He’s getting exactly what he’s committed to. He doesn’t need to change a thing. It’s Sam’s life and Sam can live it the way he chooses to. If he wants a change, then it doesn’t come for worrying or complaining. Nor does it come from mere positive thinking. It comes from setting new values or commitments and taking new actions in support of those priorities.

Taking a few minutes to clarify what you really value helps you to prioritize your time and energy. It can help you be more peaceful and self-accepting of your current life conditions because it shows you exactly what you’ve been committed to most. It can also instill a desire to set new priorities and take new actions that lead to change. Finally, it guides you to find opportunities that are aligned with what you value most. If that’s money, great. If it’s something more, then that’s great too.

Ultimately, each of us needs a measuring stick with which to judge priorities and opportunities and your values are the ultimate measure. There’s really only one caveat when it comes to values. They’re non-negotiable. That is, it’s not enough to identify them and put them in your nightstand drawer — they need to become the fulcrum for how you prioritize and make decisions. You don’t compromise what you value the most; you sacrifice what you don’t value the most.

Clarify Your Core Values

When you’re ready to clarify your core values, complete the Core Values interactive exercise below. The exercise will take you through a series of questions and will create a core values statement for you based on your answers. While the exercise is anonymous and will not be shared with others, you’ll be asked to enter the email address where you’d like to receive your statement of core values. It should take 10 to 20 minutes to complete.

==> Clarify Your Core Values: Launch the Core Values interactive exercise

If you value having a proven, scientific framework for growing your business, then you’ll want to attend this 1-day intensive in which Lex Sisney teaches the Organizational Physics business growth methodology.

Learn more…

Like a rifle scope, your business purpose reveals what the business should focus on and guides its success.

To clarify a common misconception, the primary purpose of a business should not be to provide returns for its shareholders or to make a profit. Providing returns for shareholders or making a profit is a byproduct of producing results for customers efficiently over time. In a free market economy, if you are not producing results for your customers, you’ll have no shareholder value or profits. In fact, you’ll soon be out of business. (In a monopoly, or protected economy, a business can survive for a time without producing real results for its customers. But this is temporary and unsustainable).

While the ultimate purpose of any business is always the same, as you know, the devil is in the details. Crafting a statement of purpose for your business is really a matter of clarifying those important details. This includes gaining a deep recognition of who your customer really is, what the customers’ pain or need is, and how you solve that need. It also encompasses how you measure solving the customers pain, how you sell or distribute your solutions, who you compete with, what makes you unique, and why what you do is truly important. When the business has a clear purpose, it creates a higher sense of meaning for those doing the work, provides sound boundaries for decision making and strategy, and points the way towards an effective and authentic external market position. Allow me to explain a bit more about each of these benefits.

The Business Purpose Creates a Higher Sense of Meaning

I want you to do a thought experiment with me. First, imagine that your business purpose is to exploit a niche in the marketplace, grow to $30M in sales, and sell the company to a strategic acquirer for $100M within three years. While that may sound incredibly exciting, notice that it’s also devoid of any deeper sense of meaning or purpose. When things go wrong in pursuit of your strategy (and they will), there’s nothing holding the ship together. Even if you have a great product and team now, when the market shifts, financing dries up, or some other company beats you to the punch, rather than digging in and fighting through the hard times, the crew will disembark for a new ship.

Next, imagine that your business purpose is to solve the needs of your customers, express powerful values, and help your customers achieve their goals. That is, you stop thinking about your customers as some abstract concept or as a means to an end, but as real people with real problems that you can actually help solve. You and the crew take pride in this work and you do it very well indeed. Notice that, in this scenario, there’s a much deeper sense of meaning around the business. Everyone involved has bought into the bigger picture. Now, when the hard times strike, you’ve got a crew that’s in it for the long haul.

The reason for the difference around “meaning” between these two scenarios is that a sense of meaning doesn’t come from money, achievement, or possessions. It comes from making a positive contribution to the lives of others. The power of a clear business purpose is that it brings the needs of the customer first and foremost into the corporate consciousness. In addition to that greater sense of meaningfulness, as you’ll see, this also focuses the business on the most important things.

For example, I do a lot of workshops with companies that are at an inflection point in their growth. Most often, the company has been growing rapidly and is at a point where the management team recognizes that the company needs to change how it operates if it’s going to continue to grow and reach its potential. One of the biggest areas of concern that I hear among management teams in this situation is something like this: “You know, we’ve been growing so quickly and we have all of these different things happening, so many different priorities, that I no longer know who we really are and what’s most important. I’ve lost touch with why we do what we do and where we’re headed.” I call this corporate amnesia. The company has been changing so rapidly and dealing with so many system, staffing, customer support, and capital raising issues, that it’s forgotten why it exists and who it really serves: the customer.

If this state of corporate amnesia continues, then the company will get bogged down in its execution, the leadership team and staff will begin to act confused and/or apathetic, and the quality of work will suffer. Taking some time to re-craft the business purpose statement is a good way to begin to cure the amnesia and help to realign and reignite the culture. Armed with this new level of clarity, and assuming the organization is in good alignment with its strategy and execution, the company can prioritize, focus, and execute swiftly and passionately once again.

The Business Purpose Sets Boundaries & Direction

Inexperienced entrepreneurs often fail to recognize that one of the hardest aspects of successfully growing a business is knowing what to say “no” to. In other words, it’s actually easy to say “yes” and hard to say “no.” For example, when I was 27 years old, I started Commission Junction (CJ.com) along the banks of the Mississipi river in St. Paul, Minnesota. I didn’t know much at all about growing a business. Heck, I didn’t know much about anything.

But one important thing that I was vividly clear about (and almost religiously committed to) was a clear business purpose. For me, that meant that we would be a software as a service provider, we would be an open and transparent network, we would aggregate payments to make sure that affiliates got paid, and we would have an employee-first culture. At the time, however, we were just a small and amorphous startup that, from an outsider’s perspective, could go in a thousand different directions.

Man, was I tested on saying “no”! For example, my primary investor wanted to take the business in a variety of directions. He’d see opportunity. I’d see distraction. We’d argue constantly. “Let’s get into the search business,” he’d say. “No, no, no,” I’d tell him, “We have to focus on these core things only.” “You are stubborn!” he’d reply and let it go for a few days before bringing up yet another new strategy to try. And we’d repeat our little drama.

Another time, a bigwig CEO came into our tiny office and said that he wanted to buy the software for his own company. “I’m not going to participate in any network. How much do you want for just the software?” he demanded. Knowing that if I sold the software I’d diminish the value of the network, I told him, “It’s not for sale.” “C’mon, I know you need money. I can have my engineering team build this in a month. So how much?” he stated. “Sorry, no. You may want to try this competitor, they’ll sell you the software.” He stormed out in a huff but I never regretted that day.

Frankly, I’m not sure why I was so committed to my early vision of our purpose – but I was and, as I look back on that period, I see that it was that clear commitment that steered us in the right direction and made the company wildly successful. Whether you have an existing business with multiple product lines or you’re a pre-revenue start-up, taking the time to think through the elements of business purpose gives you a powerful frame of reference for when to say “no” and when to say “yes.”

The Business Purpose Leads to Authentic Market Positioning

It should be intuitive that not having a clear sense of business purpose makes it much harder to advertise, market, and differentiate yourself in a crowded marketplace. While a statement of business purpose is an internal document, it directly feeds into the company’s external market positioning. Positioning your business is the first step in any external marketing or branding efforts. But here’s the thing: Any effective positioning has to be authentic and authenticity comes from a deep sense of meaning and purpose about who the business serves and why it is important.

A clear and powerful business purpose also attracts aligned employees who share a similar purpose. After all, where would you want to work — for a company that’s confused and nebulous in its purpose or for one that’s clear and committed to a purpose that’s aligned with your own?

There’s a saying that “effective leadership is the art of saying the same thing 1,000 different ways.” When it comes to communicating with your employees about what’s most important, the elements of a clear business purpose provide an excellent framework. What does your team need to be reminded about this week? Is it what differentiates you in the marketplace? Is it a reminder of who your customer really is and the core pain or problem that you solve? Is it to focus on the right kind of distribution channels? Is it knowing what to say “yes” to and what to say “no” to? Do they need to get re-engaged with why the work you do is important in the world? Whatever the message, having a clear statement of purpose provides endless opportunities to engage with your employees and keep internal alignment strong.

Craft Your Business Purpose

When you’re ready to craft your business purpose, complete the Business Purpose interactive exercise below. The exercise will take you through a series of questions and will create a business purpose statement for you based on your answers. While the exercise is anonymous and will not be shared with others, you’ll be asked to enter the email address where you’d like to receive your business purpose statement. It should take 20 to 40 minutes to complete. Here are a few tips before you begin.

1. If you’re a start-up, you may find it really challenging to answer these questions. This is natural. It means that you don’t have a real business or business model created yet. You have an idea that may or may not form into a business. It’s still helpful to go through the exercise, however, because the questions that you struggle with also reveal the answers you need to focus on finding out the most.
2. If you’re a larger company with more than one product line or business unit, then do one business purpose statement for the company and one for each product line or business unit. It should be interesting to see if the purpose of each product line “rolls-up” nicely into the master business purpose. If not, and there’s significant misalignment, this could mean that you’re in a strategic folly.

==> CRAFT YOUR BUSINESS PURPOSE: Launch the Business Purpose interactive exercise

“If it’s not about passion, you’re dead the day you opened your doors.”
– Steve Blank, Customer Development Manifesto

You life's purpose is a fusion of your talents and focus and is ultimately performed in service or contribution to others.

So what’s your life purpose? It’s actually a combination of two things:

1. Where you choose to focus your energy and attention — the core issues or problems that you want to help others resolve.
2. How you uniquely express your talents — those activities that you are naturally good at and that add to your energy and joy.

Combining these two elements of focus and talents should make intuitive sense. If you’re spending most of your time and energy on things that (1) make a meaningful difference to you and others, (2) you’re naturally good at and add to your energy and joy, then you’re on purpose and experiencing all of the benefits this brings.

For me, the greatest benefit of knowing and expressing a clear sense of purpose is the boundaries it provides. Simply put, if someone or something is aligned with my purpose, I allow it into my life. If not, I don’t. Simple? Yes. Easy? Not always. Without a clear sense of purpose, however, I’m not sure how anyone could experience fulfillment and be truly effective.

The other key benefit of making a conscious commitment to a purpose is the bold recognition of your unique talents – those activities that add to your energy and joy and that you are exceptional at. There’s great benefit in knowing what these are and making a conscious choice to spend more time in those activities. Personally, if I notice that I’m spending too much time on what costs me energy and joy (and not enough in my core talents), then I know to stop and get back into my genius zone. When I’m operating in my genius zone, on the other hand, I’m highly productive, engaged, and happy. It’s a pretty awesome state of living.

If you’re ready to find or clarify your life purpose, simply launch the interactive Life Purpose exercise below. The exercise will take you through a series of questions, which will take about 20 minutes to complete, and will create a life purpose statement for you based on your answers. While the exercise is anonymous and will not be shared with others, you’ll be asked to enter the email address where you’d like to receive your life purpose statement.

I think you’ll find this process enlightening and surprisingly powerful. Enjoy!

==> FIND YOUR LIFE PURPOSE: Launch the Life Purpose interactive exercise

In this groundbreaking new book, Lex Sisney shows that there are universal principles and predictive patterns at work in your business and all other areas of your life. Once you understand the principles and see the patterns, you can quickly turn breakdowns into breakthroughs. A guidebook for entrepreneurs, CEOs, and department managers, Organizational Physics reveals, at the most fundamental level, how to:

• Drive success and greater personal satisfaction
• Build and manage powerhouse teams
• Choose the right strategy
• Execute fast

It’s an all-encompassing business growth manual for those who are serious about getting ahead.