How Brilliant People Live Their Purpose and How You Can Too

The only way you will solve the problems you face in your life is to do something that is very unnatural for people to do. You have to define and accept uncomfortable reality. Accept the problems and deal with them head on. Most people either lie to themselves about the problems they have, or make them much worse than they actually are and lose the power to make a change. Addressing uncomfortable reality is hard because fear creeps in. But remember, the cave you fear to enter holds the treasure you seek, as Joseph Campbell once said. Until you accept your fears you cannot overcome them and until you embrace your demons you cannot heal them. You don’t run from fear, you go through fear. When you address and acknowledge unpleasant reality, creativity begins to soar and you come up with apparently magical solutions to problems. Optimistic, reality-based visions can create the impossible.

The first step in creating a life filled with passion, excitement and purpose, the first step in solving any problem is: Define and accept reality! Don’t make it worse because you then loose your power to take action, don’t ignore it and don’t lie about it. If you pretend it doesn’t exist, there’s nothing you can do about it. Decide what you want to do, accept the boundaries, the limits and the box you find yourself inside and start building with the limited resources you have available. And if the reality is that you have nothing, start building with your bare hands because others will join you and support you once you start.

Most people accept living unhappy lives because it is the only way they know how to live, they refuse to be open to the new emerging possibilities and refuse to make positive changes. Because they are afraid of being outside of their own comfort zone and don’t risk anything, they live lives that are far less than what they could actually have. And the greatest inner struggle begins when they try to answer these personal and profound questions:

• Who am I?
• Am I the one that I really want to be?
• Am I all that I could be?
• Do I know who I want to be in life?
• Do I know what I really want in life?
• What’s my purpose in life?
• What am I becoming?

You discover the answer to these questions beyond the field of opinions, social pressures and external influence.

Leadership always begins with you. The most important thing about leadership is the understanding that you are the leader of your life. You cannot outsource to other people what is fundamentally important to you. You have the full responsibility as well as the complete benefits. In this lecture you will discover the two most important things in your life - what nobody can take away from you.

Authentic success goes beyond goals, it goes much deeper within you, it's about finding and staying on purpose. Purpose changes and you begin to navigate through life in different ways that lead to different purposes in different times in your life, but you simply need to follow what’s honestly important to you. Ask yourself – what is it that you care about so much in the world? What are the problems that you want to solve? You can't be excited about life, you have to excited about something that you want to change about life. The huge problems we are facing in the world right now are actually opportunities for you to make a difference. It's a major responsibility to be honest with yourself and have the courage to speak your truth.

Success is a mental state and is the result of you connecting to your purpose in every moment of your life. You have to move to the beat of your own inspiration and follow your intuition. If you can identify with what's very natural to you, with what brings you happiness and a sense of fulfillment, and engage in it with great joy, you're achieving your purpose in every moment of your life. If you are always looking for your purpose in the future, you are in trouble because you will never find it.

Life is hard. For that reason, from a very practical perspective, you need to become authentic and align your thoughts, your feelings and your actions. The projects you take on must be aligned with what you feel and they have to take you closer to your meaning. It’s that little voice in your mind that says "you can't do that for a living, you can't do the thing that's most natural and brings you joy because that's not how the world works" - that's your greatest challenge. Money is not important enough to let it drive your life. - don't let money drive you. If you can forget about money and think about what it's really important for you, what would you do if money didn't matter?

We live in an era of accelerated transformations where modern technologies have fueled our minds to work at super speeds. On a superficial level we demand instant gratification for our thoughts, ideas and desires. On a more profound level however, our minds and our hearts constantly push the boundaries of creation, of imagination and human potential. Our most cherished visions for the future require time, patience and persistence to grow into reality. This lecture presents the story of the first woman astronaut and commander of the NASA Space Shuttle. How did she do it and what it means to you?

The only way to be rewarded in life is by virtue of your contribution to the world - there's nothing more important than contributing to the process of life. The way you make a contribution opens the door to new possibilities not limited to what your degree is in, what your training is in, or how much money you have. Contribute to the world with what's important and meaningful to you - what you value about yourself and what you want so much to put out into the world. Contribute with something that you care so much about that you're willing to dedicate your life to it. And this decision has to come from the heart, it’s always emotional commitment. ­­

When you begin to live life through the intelligence of your heart, the mind might come in trying to rationalize inspiring ideas away. The mind might come up with all the reasons why you can't do what you want to do – “You don't have enough money, your degree is not suitable, you are not trained, people will laugh at you” - that's not the heart because the heart by-passes the fears of the mind. In this lecture you will learn how to discover the powerful voice of your heart. How do you listen to your inner voice? Just be still and know. Spend some time in silence. Shake the other voices talking in your head and only listen to the little silent voice arising from within your heart. Get secure within yourself, learn to make your choices with more discrimination from the heart, consistently put your heart into things. In this way, the mind becomes an instrument, instead of a prison.

The key parameter that allows successful people to reach incredible goals and live happy and truly fulfilled lives - whether they are NASA leaders who put man on the moon, built spaceships and sent robots to Mars, business executives who change the lives of millions of people daily through their ideas and innovations, or authors and musicians who inspired generations – is authenticity. Know who you are deep in your heart and be who you are deep in your heart. Being an authentic person means aligning what you think with what you feel and what you do. When you align your thoughts, your feelings and your actions, in that moment you say to the mountain “mountain, move away”, and you will have the inner power to climb it all the way to the top.

Heart intelligence is the marriage between the potential of our minds and the power of our feelings, the union between thought and emotion, between reasoning and feeling, the integration of the two modes through which we make decisions and perceive reality – our thoughts and our emotions. It’s the new bandwidth of intelligence that’s coming into the world today. The best science of today demonstrates what our most cherished spiritual traditions have told us since thousands of years ago – listen to the wisdom of the heart. Focus on what your heart is telling you with each moment because it integrates both the advanced, reasoning capabilities of your mind and your emotional intelligence in the process. The intelligence of the heart has direct, measurable impacts on thinking, superior cognitive processes, decision-making ability, productivity, innovative problem solving, our actions and the overall quality of our lives. Science is now bringing accurate proof on how the heart intelligence can drive achievement and success. As you learn to tune in to the intelligence of your heart you move into new states of awareness, of intuition, that give you greater ability to have intuitive insights, to activate creativity and really move beyond your own limitations.

Everything in the world was at first and for a while a dream. To dream the impossible dream really is your first step. Your dream has to be possible enough so you can show how you will make it real and impossible enough so it’s worth pursuing it. Any worthy idea initially seemed crazy and you will find yourself at this tension between the possible and the impossible – in that moment you are truly growing and pushing your boundaries.

Everything starts with a dream. However, in order to transform the dream into reality you need to turn your vision into a beautiful story that excites other people so they will offer you their full support. You need to bring people on your side, make them believe in you and help you. You need to learn how to tell a great, super-credible story.

In this lecture Dr. Ed Hoffman speaks about turning dreams into reality. What were his dreams when he was a Ph.D. student, what inspired him to join NASA and how he contributed to the advancement of leadership at NASA. In this inspirational lecture, he explains how he developed frameworks for developing successful leaders and teams.

Our entire educational system is focused on training you to get a job and serve the ideas of somebody else. The world of entrepreneurship is counterintuitive to the educational systems, but in this world you are free and anything is possible. In this lecture Dr. Richards reveals the opportunities you have as entrepreneur, as well as the drawbacks and the most incredible rewards you get when your vision comes to life. This is worth all your years of hard work, persistence and dedication.

Everything you can imagine is possible, and so is everything you can't. Your imagination sets you apart from everything else in the universe. Any idea that has a high potential of becoming wildly successful initially appears absurd or ridiculous – it was this way with all the great discoveries. If your idea initially seems absurd, similar to something from sci-fi movies, you may be on a great path! When a compelling idea arises, it takes precedence over everything else, even over your fears and insecurities and you have take full responsibility for it. Imagination turns into reality through your actions, but it all starts with an idea.

You need to be a practical visionary to move from imagination to implementation. You need to learn how to analyze the practical aspects of it - the science, the engineering, the management - and to decide on the feasibility of the idea. You need learn how to adapt your mindset from the beginning to the end of the execution of your idea.

You need to think through your idea in every possible detail, option and possibility, and demonstrate how it could be done to the people who can support you. You need to learn to shift their idea from "it cannot be done" to "here's how it might be done".

Everybody can have a great idea, there are millions of great ideas that never see the light of day. How you executive on that idea is fundamentally important. If you drop below the line of credibility, you don't stand a chance. If you go above the line of supercredibility, maybe you have a chance. How you position yourself is critical to your success.

Dr. Charles Pellerin is the leader that led NASA's Hubble Space Telescope Repair Mission - a space flight that required astronauts to go out of the space Shuttle and replace the broken parts of Hubble - all that at 27,000 km/h spinning around the Earth. People use to say to Charlie that putting the Hubble mission together must have been really hard for him. His answer always is: "Actually, it was the easiest thing that I have ever done. All the trauma and strife supported me in 100 percent commitment to fixing the telescope. My 100 percent commitment caused solutions to appear naturally and magically". The way you get what you want is by becoming 100% committed. If you notice you are taking bold, apparently crazy actions, you are probably already 100 percent committed. Your success is near, keep on going!

You need to learn how to sort your ideas to be able to take them from imagination, to implementation, to reality.