So remember when you were a kid and you had the time and the freedom to do things, whether it was playing with friends, escaping into worlds, making art or music, playing sports, running around outside, vanishing into the woods, or really any other activity or experience, where time seemed to just kind of vanish.
You were fiercely focused, maybe even working diligently, but kind of felt like it was effortless, like play, and you just felt utterly alive and in the moment, like nothing else existed and you never wanted it to end.
When was the last time you felt that way?
And here's another question.
What if your work, the thing you spent most of your waking adult hours doing, what if that could make you feel that same way you felt in those moments as a kid?
Sounds like a total fantasy, right?
Especially at a time where most people have completely abandoned that possibility and work has become kind of something that you more just suffer through, or you endure, or you see as something that you just kind of have to do.
And it gives you certain benefits, like covering your expenses and allowing you to do certain things, but you really don't look to it or even expect any level of true enduring joy, satisfaction, bliss, meaning, purpose, expression.
But what if it actually didn't have to be that way?
What if there was a way to reimagine the way that we contribute to the world and maybe earn our living also, so that it dropped us into that near transcendent state of hyper present, full contact joy?
And what if your work could make you come alive?
That question, it's been kind of a near obsession for much of my adult life.
And over the last few years, I've gone deep into the good life lab and discovered some things that completely surprised me about the way most of us pursue work and build our livelihoods, that is both massively destructive to our state of mind and inevitably, to our lives.
And I also discovered some really powerful and unexpected answers and antidotes, ones I never saw coming.
And truthfully, if you had asked me a decade ago, I would have said weren't possible.
In fact, I would have probably argued strongly against some of the things I've now come to, very strongly believe, both through my own experience and through devouring so much wisdom out there.
Among these things is the notion that there is a set of universal imprints, a sort of a source code level driver of work that makes us come more fully alive.
This is something that I would have never actually expected or bought into and maybe even argued against.
But through a lot of work, a lot of research, a lot of experimentation, I've come completely full circle.
And I spent a lot of time over the last chunk of years identifying these things.