Chapter Four
"Without urgency, desire loses its value.”
—Jim Rohn
Once you have the answers to the three original questions you reflected on (why is this important, why is this important to me, and why am I the right person to be doing this), you have won a third of the purpose-driven battle. The next two pieces that you need to discover and reflect on for yourself involve inspiration and then timing.
As it pertains to inspiration, it is not enough to come up with responses that sound good. No one has ever committed their entire life or even a portion of their life to something because it sounded good. The reality is that it also has to feel good. You need to feel like what you are doing is the right thing because it feels right. Maya Angelou has a famous quote that says, “People will forget what you said . . . but people will never forget how you made them feel.” You need to help other people feel like this is the right thing to do.
At this point, if you have the clarity you need when you think about the three questions and they are enough to inspire you—so much so that you cannot wait to finish getting through this book so you can get started on that job transition, volunteering for the organization in your neighborhood or starting your own organization—then you are at a good point. If you are not, take another moment, pause for a little and continue to reflect on these three questions in order:
- Why is this important?
- Why is this important to me?
- Why am I the right person to be doing this?
By now, you have clarity and you can, at least, subjectively say that you are inspired by the reflection you have done. The last piece of the puzzle in your purpose-finding journey is to think about the timing. Sometimes you will find things that are important, they mean something to you, and you believe in your heart of hearts that you are the right person to be engaged with them, but the timing is not right. In fact, this is something that would have been great for you to have done five or ten years ago or that would be great five or ten years from now. The easiest way to modify these questions and find out is to add a bit of urgency to them by adding some variation of time sensitivity. Be careful not to jump to these questions directly and to only reflect on these three after you have answered the first three.
- Why is this important right now?
- Why is this important to me right now?
- Why am I the right person to be doing this right now?
We all have had that friend who has had a dream that they never pursued because the timing was not right for them. They started raising a family, they did not have enough money, or the forces of the universe were simply working against them. Those things are real—okay, maybe not the last one, but the other things are real—and they matter. Ignoring where you are in this moment and failing to have the self-awareness that is necessary to successfully reflect on those questions could be to your detriment. I remember thinking about the first three questions and coming to a point where I knew the work I was doing mattered to society. The achievement gap impacted the economy, so it was relevant to other people. Then I got to a point where I understood why my work in education was meaningful to me. I was the first one in my family to graduate from college, and I had people and organizations that helped me get to that point. And I finally understood that I was meant to be doing this work because of my unique perspective in the education space.
For some strange reason, that clarity was not enough. I had people say, “Karim, that is great, and I believe in you, but you should come back to this when you are older and have more money or more experience.” And, of course, being the stubborn millennial that I was, I would ignore them. But you can only ignore people for so long before you start to doubt yourself and everything you believe in. By the time I got the same set of advice for the thirtieth time, I became discouraged. I started to think that maybe everyone was right. This work is meaningful and important and I should be engaged in it, but just not at this moment. The moment you start to believe that, it actually comes true. It was not until I had the realization that my reflection was missing a little more intentionality that I overcame the discouragement. It is why I always say the reflection is not complete with those three questions until they are expanded to include the three questions that I outlined with the time-sensitivity variation.
Why is this important right now? There are thousands of issues and jobs out there that you could engage with: homelessness, malaria, Zika, poverty, etc. The majority of people want to focus their time and efforts on things that are important in this moment. Of course it is important for every child to have an opportunity at an equal education, but with so many other persistent problems, something else needs to exist to move people to act on this issue right now, in this very moment.
When I thought about why the work I was doing was so important right now, I reflected on the statistic, published by the United States Census in 2010, that said by 2023 minority children would comprise more than 50 percent of the school-aged population. That stat created the urgency around the work that I needed to justify to myself and to others that this problem needed to be addressed sooner rather than later. Minority children were the ones who were most likely to attend disadvantaged schools and were most likely to fall victim to the achievement gap. If we did not work to start reversing the inequality and close the gaps in achievement, the negative impact on the economy would only continue to be compounded. If we acted today, we could at least make an effort to rewrite the future.
When you think about why the work you want to pursue or engage in is particularly important or timely for you in this moment, make sure you reflect on why it did not feel like that yesterday and why you cannot see its being as important for you to pursue a few years from now. Timing is everything.
Why am I the right person to be doing this right now? Despite all of my efforts to educate my friends and mentors about what I was involved with and how it was revolutionizing summer education, they still saw Practice Makes Perfect as a tutoring company or an after-school program. If that was what they saw it as, then I needed to reflect on that question with that context in mind. Why was I the right person to be running an after-school program or a tutoring company right now? I had never run an after-school or a tutoring company before. There were people out there who had run these types of companies for years before. If you are looking to transition from one industry to another, ask yourself what indicators or qualities you possess that make you believe that you can be the best person for that particular opportunity right now.
When I thought about why I was the right person to be doing this work right now, I kept thinking about how much freedom I had in that very moment. I was ready to graduate from college with zero dollars in debt. I was young and had little to almost no familial obligations. I had the fortune of hearing older entrepreneurs come to my classes and encourage the students to go into entrepreneurship early. They made it clear that the risk is very high. You have to want and be ready to go all-in. And that is much easier to do when you are right out of college without kids or a family than it is ten or fifteen years later.
There could not have been a better time for me. I only discovered that my work with Practice Makes Perfect was more a part of my purpose after years of believing it was my passion. I got to the right point in my life where it made sense to reflect on these questions with my purpose-driven work already in my mind. It also gives me hope, and helps me to believe that all of us are already engaged in work or in something that is waiting for us to claim it as our purpose. We just have not done the reflection yet.
I made these six questions the foundation of my reflection and the ones I have advised people to reflect on before they begin any purpose-driven work, because they are the most common questions that you will hear from your friends, your family, your potential supporters, and beyond.