Before I fully embraced my path as a coach and speaker, I spent years in a role that, by all societal standards, was a great success. It was prestigious, paid well, and offered a clear path upward. Yet, every Sunday night, a quiet dread settled in my stomach. I was climbing a mountain, but it wasn’t my mountain. That success was built on external validation, not true desire.
I’ve learned this lesson best through the lives of the great visionaries, like the physicist and two-time Nobel Prize winner, Marie Curie.
Curie, in an era where women were often excluded from science, wasn’t motivated by fame, money, or even the Nobel prize itself. Her actions were driven by a singular, burning desire: to understand and unveil the mysterious properties of radioactivity. She worked in a leaky shed with rudimentary equipment, often enduring harsh, dangerous conditions.
Her desire was not a casual preference; it was an unrelenting obsession, a deep internal resonance with the unknown. It was this singular, focused, and powerful internal element that gave her the resilience and clarity to pioneer an entirely new field. She didn’t seek the realization first; she followed the intense desire for knowledge. The realization, the discovery of Polonium and Radium, was the inevitable consequence of that fundamental desire.
Her story proves that the greatest breakthroughs are born not from obligation, but from that first, pure, and overwhelming element of passion. It reminds us that our true calling is what gives us the superhuman strength to endure the difficulty of any journey.
