Richard Jacobs - The 7 Questions to Find Your Purpose

About the Author:

Richard Jacobs is the CEO of the award-winning YES Change Consultancy (www.yesindeed.com) and the founder of the extreme sports media company Black Diamond Films (www.blackdiamond.co.uk).

As a professional actor he performed in Hollywood films, in Londons West End theatres, on national and international television and as part of the BBCs improvisation team performing to live audiences of 15 million people. He also won an Olivier Award for his work with the Royal Opera House.

He launched his first business, Black Diamond Films, at the age of 21, marketing and distributing extreme sports films. Black Diamond became the leading distributor of specialist film in Europe within four years. He sold out of Black Diamond and began YES, an award-winning consultancy designing seminars and change programmes for publicand private-sector clients.

He has designed and delivered seminars and change programmes for public and private-sector clients for over 20 years. He has personally trained over 200,000 people in the areas of communication, creativity, collaboration and Purposeful leadership. His style is interactive and engaging, leaning on storytelling, comedy and improvisation to develop accelerated learning and build new habits of effectiveness. Recently he has specialized in pioneering new forms of learning using a wide variety of media, interactive theatre, online learning and serious play. He is currently advising the European Union (EU) on change strategies.

Contents

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank my wife Kalinka for her irrepressible passion for self-discovery and personal evolution; for her guidance, support, wisdom and love; for her refusal to entertain anything other than authenticity; for her tenacity, for excellence and her embodiment of elegance. She also did all the illustrations for the book. Thank you.

I would like to thank my children Zac and Keera for reinventing the world, for their radiance and brightness and for teaching me every day.

I would like to thank and acknowledge all the people who have come through my seminars. It is through them that anything I have of value to offer was forged, refined, tested and packaged. A roomful of people is intelligent and I have been fortunate enough to stand at the front of many thousands of rooms. Thank you for your willingness and kindness.

I would like to thank Jo and all the team at Watkins for making this book happen. I am deeply grateful in continuously unfolding ways.

Lastly, I would like to bow deeply to the Purposeful people who have made films, music, discoveries and world-changing speeches; who have stood for their principles, been the voices of generations and who have echoed a timeless voice through the idioms of the ages.

You are my inspiration.

Introduction

Whats the meaning of life? Anybody? Twenty words or less please. Is it love? Spiritual enlightenment? Just having fun? This is not a new question. For thousands of years people have been postulating theories. Some have gone to war, needing to prove that they are right... We know the meaning of life, so were going to end yours as a way of proving it. Whos got the answer? Nobody? Everybody? Maybe there is no answer. What if the meaning of life is the meaning you find in your life. If thats the case, then everybodys right; however, they are only right about themselves. They have no idea about whats right for anybody else.

Neither do I.

You do, though. You know exactly whats right for you. You know what gives your life Purpose and meaning. You know whats most important to you. You know what most inspires you and in the deepest recesses of your mind the places that surface when youre looking out of the window of a moving train and your mind drifts into the place between imagination and knowledge. For a fleeting moment everything falls into place. There is a gentle, deep breath and an order to the world takes shape. An order that is only meant for you. Its accompanied by a quiet knowing, a feeling of recognition and understanding ... and then a baby cries, or the phone pings, a food trolley selling imitation sandwiches rolls past your seat and the reverie ends. Real life seems to take over and the sumptuous clarity of the window-gazing silence seems to fade as if that were the dream and the sandwich trolley were real life.

We can all get to these places, but for most people it happens by accident or at least in an ad hoc fashion. What we need is a surefire way to access this quality of contemplation. The Internet has so much information, it would be impossible to navigate without a search engine. The same is true for the innernet. We need search engines. And these come in the form of questions.

Einstein said, Its not that Im so smart, I just stay with problems longer. When we focus our attention and go progressively deeper we can find most of the answers we seek. The question is, how do we do this? Do we need to spend years sitting on a mountain-top, talking to gurus and spiritual teachers and drinking magical potions? Dont get me wrong, all that stuffs great. I love it. But do we need it? Our Purpose, our sense of meaning, is innate. It could not be our Purpose otherwise. We simply need a way that makes it easy to go inwards and find the source.

I grew up an Indiana Jones fan. When I watched him go into a cave or a temple and face a thousand challenges it always struck me how easy it was for the people who followed him. All they had to do was follow in his footsteps and they would surely avoid the traps. The good news is that many thousands have trodden the seven footsteps you are about to take. Their journeys have refined and simplified the route, avoiding the common pitfalls of the conscious mind, the misplaced modesties, the scars of teachers and the unfulfilled expectations of youth. This book is designed as a unique search engine that will reveal to you what you already know but may never have named. At its heart are seven questions, the structure, style and content of which are designed to help you stay long enough to find and name your Purpose. For most people about an hour and a half is enough. Following the seven questions, the book is devoted to helping you to mine the riches of your answers as well as experiments to help your Purpose come off the page and into your life, moment by moment, action by action.

Throughout the book there are stories about people who have gone through the process, and examples from workshops and seminars I have given in the corporate world.

I do a lot of work with large organizations to trigger meaningful behavioural change. My specialism is scaleable programmes working with large groups of people. In other words, training and change that lead people to fundamentally shift their mindsets and behaviours so that they are more effective, more fulfilled and more aligned with each other. Sometimes this is for 500 people in one office, sometimes its for 70,000 people in 80 countries.

A lot of the formative work described in this book has taken place in the corporate environment and with non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and government. This has proved to be a unique design brief. It requires an approach that cuts out all the fat, the waffle and the hope, and helps create new and more effective ways of engaging people. The material has been influenced in two key ways:

People coming to a work seminar have not paid or, for the most part, chosen to be there. This means that the material needs to strike a chord with them, regardless of any personal reticence, office politics or the fact that while they are sitting in a chair listening to me another ten emails have hit their inbox. The material needs to be incisive and resilient.