10. The Leader’s Reason for Being

How do you distill your life’s purpose into just 5 words? Even for the wordsmith, this proves challenging. But if you want to spend your life doing what is most meaningful to you, you have to know what that is. As this episode reveals, even when we give ourselves clues, it can still be difficult to piece it all together.

01:05 Illuminate Question 9

10:30 Language and writing has to be a central part of the rest of my life.

15:17 Part of why I’m here is to bring people together.

16:06 Revealing the 5 words

17:48 “We need to turn Europe into a feeling. That’s why it’s at the heart.”

18:54 “If language is the lodestar for the rest of my life, that has huge significance.”

21:40 Why could clarity spoil your life?

26:41 If we want to rally people around the vision, that’s through language.

29:20 “New ground is new words put into a particular sequence for the first time.”

31:14 “You build this inner voice within you when you know that something is not true.”

36:50 “You need the unity of purpose to get things done at some point, and be unified around a vision. But the diversity is important.”

40:52 The metaphor of interplay between a conductor and the music

45:28 Vision begins as an expression of yourself, your truth.

47:55 Creating a sentence

49:23 We need to find a language for people who don’t have a home.

52:29 What is home to you?

56:00 Regenerating a notion of home which can thrive in deeply uncertain times.

01:10:33 Home is a part of the vision

01:17:06 Will that be the defining moment of your life?

01:21:55 A singular purpose or overarching vision?

01:31:00 Can you string those 5 words together?

01:35:00 The headline vs. the conversation

01:47:20 The stadium as a metaphor for illuminating

01:53:33 Final answer?

Produced by NOVA