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hey this is Leo for actualised org and I'm gonna take you back I'm gonna give you a blast to the past in pop culture do you remember the movie Star Trek The Next Generation I know kind of nerdy of me to bring you back to those days but this was like an early 90s movie and it got me really thinking because lately I realize like I'm the main villain from that movie do you remember what the plot in that movie was you probably don't because you just remember the characters etc at Star Trek you just they're always up to some shenanigans but actually the plot of the movie was really interesting in that plot what was happening was that the the enterprise was fighting this main evil villain and the villain was creating trouble because there was this magical wave that rippled through the universe and it's like a wave of energy that ripples through and rember that wave of energy comes to contact if there's somebody standing in the presence of that wave that what happens is they get transported back in time in their mind into reliving their best memories so it's like this euphoric nostalgia it's almost like this drug that they get hooked on and was called the Nexus and so the main character the plot is the story goes that this main character when he was a young boy he encountered this Nexus and it felt so good for him it was such such a nostalgic moment such a hit of euphoria that he then spends the rest of his life chasing and finding where this wave is gonna go and he's now trying to control the wave because the wave is is random and sporadic and it's traveling through the universe and you can't really catch up to it but his plan was to destroy civilizations and planets and all this just so that he can get at this Nexus it's that he can feel as good as he felt back then and I realized that the last five years for me were really much like this guy chasing the Nexus and trying to get back to that point to that place except it was a little bit different the way it was different I'm not chasing after some nostalgic memory from the past but here's what happened with me after I graduated college I really wanted to become a game designer so I spent about eight months right after my graduation working on a big project that I needed as part of my portfolio so that I can get hired by a studio no studio would hire me unless I had something good to show them so I figured you know what I'm gonna do I'm gonna build a game and I'm gonna put it out there to the public see what kind of reactions I get I'm gonna learn in the process get some good experience and do what I love doing which is creating games and then hopefully get hired and finally be a professional designer and so I went through I designed the game I worked my butt off to program it to do all the artwork for that basically was one-man shop and did everything that I needed to do to get this launched and it was a mod for oblivion maybe you played it it's called la spires and in anyways long story short I ended up really working hard on that and launching it releasing and I was really happy with it myself but then much to my surprise I was really kind of astonished that it ended up being the number one mod for oblivion and it got downloaded over a hundred thousand times and what I loved seeing wasn't just those numbers I mean the numbers were certainly rewarding because I felt like my design senses got validated it's always nice to to have the external reward to kind of match the pleasure that you get in working on the project and for me that really was a labor of love it was something that I really was passionate about and I put it out there and I would have honestly been happy if it hadn't been played or downloaded at all it was just satisfying for me to do plus I was doing it for work reasons but on top of this I get flooded with a bunch of user comments and I got flooded with all these ratings and reactions and rave reviews for this mod and basically people were so in love with it they liked it so much they got so much value out of it they loved playing it so many times that became kind of like a cult hit within the modding community for oblivion and it was really a surreal experience to watch that I remember when I worked my ass off to launch the mod and I set a time schedule for myself and at that point I was really splint because I knew that if I didn't finish by a certain point that I would never finish it so I set a launch window in August and I said that by the end of August I would launch and finally the end of August was coming up and then it was like the last day of August and I couldn't push back anymore and I still had so much work to do on the model I wasn't satisfied there's still many bugs to work out so I was ironing out all the bugs and putting it all to find a little polishes on it but I had to release and people were waiting for it and asking me when it's gonna launch and I'm like well I'm gonna launch just like I promised the end of August and so the last day I end up crunching and I end up working for 24 hours straight to get every possible bug that I could out of this thing and I would literally I've never done this before I like nearly worked myself to death I was so delirious working on the bugs that I felt like I had an out-of-body experience but I had to launch so anyways I ended up doing that launching and then as soon as I launched I didn't even look at the reactions I just went to sleep and I slept for a day and then when I came back the thing was still full of bugs and people reporting bugs but people were also reporting how happy they were how thrilled they were and just like thanking me and asking questions and that sense that I got from about that point when I launched at the beginning of September this was I think in 2007 or 2008 2007 I think it was and then for the next about six months I just remember riding this wave and it was the greatest feeling that I ever felt and this was a feeling that I never ever felt before in my life and I haven't felt really since and it was the pride that you get from seeing your creative work out there and not only the pride that you get in putting the energy into the creative work but then seeing it validated by other people and it's not so much about you wanting the validation but it's more about like yeah you know that put a smile on someone's face and that was my work that did that and not only that but it was the fact that I gave myself permission to trust my creative my creative direction on this project and that I had to take creative risks in it to say you know what are people really gonna like this game are people gonna like destroy that put into it are people gonna like that the artwork that I did here if you were gonna like these directions that I chose and I just said you know what I'm not gonna care what people like I'm just gonna do what I like what I feel is right what I would want as a gamer and I ended up going with that decision and I'm putting it out there and people ended up really loving it and I felt very validated by that and felt awesome it just felt awesome to be able to go out there and to share what I consider a gift of mine at the time was my my design sense to be able to share that with people and to bring joy to people's lives with that and to me that that was such a moment of pride that really lasted not just for a day not a week it real a stood for like six to twelve months that I knew that that was that was it somehow I just randomly stumbled upon the feeling that I was most that maybe most engaged with life and the feeling that I really wanted to like if I could latch onto that and to hold it and or if I can just like bottle that feeling and sell it to other people to me that's the greatest feeling in the world is to have some sort of creative vision whether it's a vision for a business that you want to build or something you want to do with your career something work-related and then to go out there into labor for it and to build something new create something unique create something that your patent really passionate about and that you can get other people passionate about and then going out there and then saying here here's a gift take it and sure you can charge money for it whatever but in the end you're giving a gift you're giving yourself in a little package in a service or a product you're giving this to someone and you're like this is my heart I'm pouring my heart out to you here it is and then when you see that that person is is happy with it and that they accepted them they love it and they want more of it from you that is like the greatest pleasure in life and to me that's the creative creative content and creative contribution that you can have and that you can get when you're really on top of your game with your job and your work in your career and that what to me is makes the difference between just having a job and having a career and then really having a life calling where you're putting yourself into your work you really care about your work you're bleeding into your work and your sharing it with others and it's something positive that's making a big positive contribution to society to other people and you know I'm not under some grand illusion I don't think that this little game project that I made in the grand scheme of things really made that big of a difference but it was still enough of a positive difference that I could get those those feelings from it you know I didn't cure cancer I didn't cure AIDS I didn't put the first man on Mars or do anything super ambitious like that but even putting a game out there that someone could play for let's say 10 to 15 hours and have a blast playing it and me just knowing that you know they played that and for them that was 15 hours of pleasure that they received for free I put this thing out for free I could have charged money forward people still would have paid but the fact is that they were playing it and they loved it and you know someone might have had a bad day at work that week when I released or someone might have been having a shitty situation and their family they might have had a relationship breakup and then all the sudden this this game launches and then they go they play for 15 hours and the kind of escape and they enjoy the things that I put in there they enjoy the story danger they enjoy the art work and they just kind of get drawn into it drawn into it they play it and then they get something from it right that's me making a positive impact on the world to me that was huge and what happened after that is that I launched that project it was really successful because of that success I was getting some interviews got the interest of some studios and I got hired by a nice studio in Boston I went and became a professional game designer and I worked there the problem though is that really I spent the next five years that was five years ago I spent the next five years trying to recapture that feeling and I still haven't really recaptured it until today today is the first time that I'm really starting to feel a little bit of that and the reason that is because I launched my personal development blueprint and I'm putting new videos out and I'm starting to get that sense again of creative contribution and I haven't even gotten any reactions from anybody yet for this content but I'm just seeing that I'm proud of it myself I'm proud of I'm putting out there and I'm starting to see again that feed getting that that that tingle of that feeling that I got five years ago when I knew that I was on the brink of releasing something that was gonna impact people in a positive way and not only that but I was putting my soul into it like this is me putting myself on the line I'm not sure really how people are gonna react I'm not sure if I'm going the right direction so I'm just saying you know what I'm gonna I'm gonna do it I'm gonna express myself I'm gonna give my gifts and I'm gonna see how it's gonna work and this has been really challenging to me for five years you might ask well why did it take you five years to get back to this point and well that's a good question I've been asking myself that for five years now because I've been that that hit that drug that I got after that release of creative you know that sense of creative contribution I've been after it for five years now and it's almost kind of scary because I forgot what it feels like until just now and it's like it's tingles down my spine and when I think about that it almost brings tears to my eyes because it's such a powerful feeling and I think that if I wasn't lucky to have just kind of landed that hit with that game that maybe I wouldn't have even realized that that was a peak experience that was even possible for me and so I kind of wonder like do people even know that this is something that is out there for them I think that a lot of people don't because they just the way that I see people thinking about their jobs and the way that people work their jobs just kind of the nine-to-five grinding it through not really putting their soul into it not working in creative in a creative capacity not really sharing themselves not really caring about having a sense of contribution when I think about that that I'm like these people probably don't even realize what they're missing out on this is like the greatest jewel one of the greatest joys in life that you couldn't put that you can kind of put yourself in and going back to to this nexus idea right this is exactly what was happening in the Star Trek next generations is that this guy had an experience a peak experience by interacting coming in contact with this nexus then it was so powerful that everything else in life wasn't that important it's he was after that and then he could dedicate his whole life to pursuing it and so back to my point as to why it took me five years to get back here it's because after I graduated and then I went on and became a professional developer the problem there is that I went to work in a big team environment and I never got that sense of contribution to the project that I got when I was working on my small little thing it's a little bit counterintuitive because I thought that when I was graduating and becoming a professional and that I would be working on a big real game you know what I was working on in the end was piddly stuff when I was working on a big game that was gonna be sold and you know Best Buy or Walmart one of these big stores and it was something that's gonna be on a console like the Xbox or the PlayStation or the PC then that's gonna be like even a bigger sense of contribution but what I ultimately found was that when you're working in a team environment your sense of creative autonomy and creative contribution gets diluted if you got a hundred people working on a project versus one person working on a project then it's almost like you're getting one hundredth of the amount of input into that project especially when you're just starting off and you're a newbie and you don't get that much creative autonomy you're having that much say in this project and so there when I was working for about a year I didn't get that sense of creative contribution and I started realizing that if I wanted that same kind of sense of contribution that what I really needed to do was go into business for myself and then I couldn't do that in a studio environment I couldn't do that working for somebody else so for me that that first year of of working as a game designer was really bittersweet because on the one hand I finally made it and I made it to the big leagues right this was like my dream job this is something that I've been dreaming up since I was a kid and I worked really hard to get there but on the other hand it was really bitter because I felt that I wasn't getting that sense of contribution which was the whole reason of why I tried to get there and so I started to realize that really I came to this kind of dark and saddening conclusion which made me very depressed is that I have to because what I really need to do is they need to go into business for myself and at that point I had no idea about how business worked how to do that I didn't have any capital and have any money I couldn't quit my job because I didn't have the money to quit my job I needed to stay there to make ends meet and I didn't really know how to create a game studio I didn't know how to take the passion that I had for game design and convert it into something like a business so I started getting some ideas started researching it but I also knew that I just didn't have the capital for it because it's hard to start a game studio in your basement this was just before mobile gaming got started so at that point it wasn't really feasible there was no really way to start a low-budget game and so I was thinking well I have to raise capital and what I did then is I started my own business and internet marketing and that was something that I really didn't enjoy doing I didn't enjoy their new market in fact I didn't like marketing at all I had a real hatred for marketing because I don't usually like the kind of values that that marketing espouses and so I said you know what screw it because I need to get myself a financial and financially independent I'm gonna go into internet marketing I'm gonna do that for a few years with the hope of building up enough capital to start my own studio etc etc etc and to cut this long story short what ended up happening is I did quit after a year started my internet marketing business but then the internet marketing business kind of dragged on and on and on and on and even though I became really successful for me and I did end up creating quite a bit of independent financial independence for myself I was never able to to reach that point where I was able to really start my own studio and at that point mobile gaming went went really really caught on fire and I started doing a little bit of that but I felt like because I wasn't working in that studio environment and because I quit my studio job I felt like I really wasn't a game designer anymore and so I wasn't getting I just wasn't really getting that same passion that I had anymore for game design and I ended up quitting that and just focusing on inner marketing for about three or four years and that really took me off track because I was partly seduced by the money of it was partly seduced by the comfort that I was now in because I had the money I didn't really need to work much anymore I didn't need to push myself creatively which is challenging to do and so I ended up not having that creative hit anymore and I didn't have any sense of create about the creative contribution nothing like I got from that game project that I started and so I was like that guy is Star Trek the next generation that came into contact with the Nexus and felt so great about it but then that Nexus moved away and it moved into other into other galaxies or whatever and he no longer could be in the Nexus and he couldn't feel it anymore but he wanted it so bad and so for many years that was the case for me is that I was doing internet marketing and on the one hand I had to be fully involved in that because it required all my time on the other hand I always had my eye out on something bigger because I wanted that hit that drug I got from creative contribution and I was never able to really make anything that made that click for me and you know I'm struggling with it struggling with it struggling with it and then I started kind of even losing the drive to pursue it because what happens after a while you know a year passes two years pass what happens is that your mind just kind of shifts on to new things and you kind of tend to forget that feeling no longer feels as palpable as it was at one point and so you slowly forget about it forget about it and you start rationalizing away and you start saying yeah you know what my life is pretty comfortable it's pretty good I don't really need to be go out there I don't need to be rattling cages and doing all this crazy stuff and taking all these crazy risks just to get that little hit bit of hit of creative contribution and so that's what ended up happening is that I kind of forgot about it let it go thought that maybe it was naive or that maybe I'll get it in the future somehow and so I didn't have it and then you know at one point I just got so fed up with the internet marketing stuff that I had to say you know enough is enough and that I have to find something else for me and I knew that it was no longer gonna be game design and what I had to do is I had to make this really challenging transition which I didn't even know that I that I that was possible at the time was I had to shift life purposes and for me that was really challenging because I had to say okay my life purpose was game design and that was something that came about relatively randomly through my childhood just because I started playing a lot of games and I got involved with it and I'm like well what's what else could it be for me if it's not game design is there even anything else that it could be and so I'd have to do a lot of soul-searching and just kind of looked into what I was doing as my hobbies and one of the hobbies that I had at that point was reading a lot of personal development stuff and I thought you know this is kind of interesting and then from there I transitioned it into going to a coaching program and then it took me a year of training and doing all that and a lot of insecurity just to get to the point where you know I launched my website and then even after I launched my website still a lot of insecurities and challenges and still not getting any creative juice because you know building a website is something that takes months maybe even years to do especially the quality level that I wanted to do it and I felt like you know I needed to I needed to really put myself into the website and I didn't just want to build a cookie-cutter site like everybody else I wanted to build something that was unique something that was expressive of my gifts of myself so I needed to make something creative and it was again like what is that going to be and all the creative challenges involved because expressing yourself creatively is a whole topic onto itself and all the challenges and fears and limiting beliefs that come with that and all the emotional kind of toil that goes into that and all the self-doubt and self-sabotage and all the resistance that's created there I'm probably going to shoot a lot of videos on that topic in the future but the point being that only just now five years after going through this kind of discovering what my passion was and then losing it and then trying to find a new passion and then working on that and then trying to work through all the challenges only after about five years of that whole that work that I went through do I now feel like I'm getting to the point where I'm back on track and it's still gonna take quite a bit of work for me I'm still battling all those creative challenges again now that I'm in this creative position with with this website and the videos that I'm shooting in the coaching that I'm doing and all the personal development research that I'm doing but just now I'm starting to feel it and it feels amazing and I'm so excited about what the future can be for me with with this peak experience of creative contribution the reason I mention it though is because I want a tangible example I was trying to talk about creative contribution in other videos but it's been difficult for me because it's hard to communicate something so abstract I think many people out there don't even realize what this feels like it's almost like trying to describe sex or an orgasm to someone who's never had it or it's trying to describe you know the taste of a ripe peach on on a hot summer day to someone who doesn't have any taste buds it's like it's difficult to describe that or describing the beauty of like a sunset or the beauty of some natural Vista out like in the desert or in the forest like those are experiences that are almost transcendent and like tap into the highest the highest self a certain like a higher level of consciousness is required to hit those and I think that a lot of people go through life without experiencing these high these high states of consciousness and without experiencing these peak experiences specifically creative contribution and I think that's my biggest challenge to you with career and life purpose is that if you're coming to me with questions about life purpose if you're coming to me with questions about career or if you're just wandering about you know what is the best that you can get out of your work what is the best you can get out of your business I think this is it it's creative contribution and I'm not the only one that says this most self development experts out there especially that are working and experienced in the field of career will tell you that one of the greatest pleasures in life is contribution right it's giving of yourself it's not about focusing on yourself and getting more money that stuff tends to be very shallow it's about what you can contribute and not only contribute something positive but contribute yourself where you're self expressive so there's a difference between say me going to a soup kitchen right now and labeling it out soup to people and me contributing to society in the way that is tapping into my greatest gifts because you know I am NOT a good soup later laid ler I'm not a very interpersonal kind of guy who likes to you know go out there and and hobnob with with the poor and the hungry I'm not a mother Teresa type figure so for me that's not like my thing that's not mice that's not where my talents lie my talents lie and being analytical and in sharing my expertise and my knowledge of my understanding with people I'm really good at looking at something studying it dissecting it creating a model of it modeling it and then saying here you go here's this model how can it help you in your life and so that's a different form of contribution and when you're looking for ways to contribute in your life instead of thinking about well I could just earn a ton of money doing something on over here and I can go and take that money and maybe go contribute it to a charity or I can go give that money to my family instead of contributing in that kind of way what I want to urge you to do is to set up your life so that the contribution is happening through your greatest gift and that is happening through your work or your career or your business I think that's a much more powerful way to go about it so a lot of people do it backwards right a lot of people will go work a dead-end job or maybe even not a dead-end job but a great job but it's still not very fulfilling for them but it earns them let's say a lot of money like maybe a lawyer will be working as a lawyer because he's earning a lot of money but he doesn't like doing the legal work and he doesn't really think that he's helping people with his with the legal cases he might be miserable doing that but he says to himself well I'm earning a lot of this money which I can use and put to good by helping my family out by helping other people through charities and through my donations and the social work that I'm doing and the stuff that I'm doing on the side with my hobbies so that's definitely not a bad strategy you can do that that's better than what most people are doing out there but I think there's a much more powerful route and that is looking at what are your greatest strengths what are the gifts that you really want to share what does the creative contribution that you want in part on the world what do you feel is most important what is the biggest difference that you feel would be necessary out there in the world and if you went out there and you made that difference and you made that positive impact that impact is positive so you're contributing by making that impact for example for me I think one of the greatest things that is lacking in the world right now is awareness around psychology specifically practical psychology how do you get your mind how do you understand your mind so you can go out there and create a really successful life and be very productive and have high performance and be successful and be happy I think that if more people understood that then the world would be much better off so for me I do that by a shooting of video or I do that by writing an article and I do that by coaching somebody that's how I do it and for me that's a really powerful way to contribute and when I'm putting my analytical strengths into it because my greatest strengths I think is my analytical abilities when I'm putting that in there and I'm sharing my understanding with you in a profound way that comes back to me that comes back to me not only in me feeling really good it makes me feel super fulfilled that kind of feeling I can't buy with anything it's like I'm back in that nexus zone and it feels amazing so not only am I getting that but it's also making me very motivated it's making me very passionate and it's making me really want to work hard on my business it's making me want to create all this content and in the end I'm gonna be able to design all that hopefully so that it comes back to me both in the feelings that I get but also in financial rewards because I want to get well compensated for what I'm doing as well and then of course I'm gonna have the best of both worlds because I'm gonna have the money then then I can then use however I want both for myself but then I can use it for my family and I can use it for charities if I want to and I can use it all sorts of different ways or I could even maybe reinvest it back in my business so that I can contribute even more by scale my business up so that I can reach more viewers so that's just one example with myself I wanted to give a very specific concrete example because it's hard to talk about this stuff in the abstract so the takeaway here is I really want you to bind to this vision of the power of creative contribution and how much joy and fulfillment you can get from that that's really a feeling that cannot be purchased no matter how much money you're making and then of course that when you do have that feeling you're going to be in a much better position to earn a lot of money so you're really not sacrificing anything when you pursue this the only trick is that of course you have to do some introspection soul-searching to get this to come about in your life for me it was really a five-year process of doing this and it was a scary process I didn't really know if it was gonna work for me I didn't know a lot about personal development I didn't have the resources that I'm providing to you right now at the time so I had to kind of experiment and use trial and error to figure a lot of this stuff out with you I'm trying to fix that problem is I'm trying to make you a little bit more aware about what your options are and I'm trying to give you the motivation the push that you need to go out there to pursue it I think you need to live on your edge if you want to have that kind of powerful exciting life where you're really on your edge and you're getting the most out of life and you're gonna die with no regrets then it's gonna come down to this it's gonna come down to saying you know what the job that I have right now maybe isn't quite as thrilling as I know it can be and so I'm gonna have the courage to go out there and do some soul-searching and look around at the different opportunities and possibilities that are out there even though in the short run that might cost me some energy might cost me some time maybe I'll even have to take a cut in pay in the short term to figure out how this is all going to come together and you tell yourself that basically you're going to commit to it and then you're gonna find a way because that's what I did as I said I'm gonna find a way and I didn't know how but eventually you know it took five years and I almost felt like I didn't make it but the end I did and I think that that path with help from coaching mentors the resources that are out there books seminars you can definitely figure it out the only thing that's going to really determine whether you do it or not is your motivation is your drive your want for it so that I see as being my biggest objective here is to instill you with that vision so the vision is creative contribution it feels amazing you want it in your life if you haven't felt it before you're really missing out and I would I would almost urge you to do something creative and put something creative out there in the world so you can just get a sense of it get a sense of what that feels like to have it and if you've had it in the past and you don't have it very consistently anymore the same way that I did it then I encourage you to do a little bit of soul-searching go through these videos look especially on my stuff on life purpose and get that stuff handled so that you have that experience very consistently in your life that's what I want for you that's what's gonna make you really fulfilled that's what's gonna make you really successful all right if you have any questions or comments I want you to leave them down below I love hearing comments about this stuff especially this topic life purpose for me is a really deep personal topic so I love hearing about your guys's struggles and how these ideas could be helping you out and what else I can throw out here for you that can help you get this stuff figured out all right this is leo signing off