You Were Born To Do One Thing

Most of us are going to live and die without ever intentionally doing the one thing we were designed to do. Some of us will do it by accident, in flashes, when we are not paying attention, and we will spend the rest of our lives chasing that feeling without ever really understanding why.

But to get to the why, we have to know the what.

What is it? There is a design in you, in me, in us.

It's not complicated. It's simple. But I have never read or heard anyone describe it to you the way I'm about to.

Humor me for a second and let me tell you a quick story.

I was seven or eight years old at Cedar Point in Sandusky, Ohio, the first time I rode a roller coaster. We'd go once a summer. It was like our vacation. Every year I'd walk up to that wooden measuring stick at the entrance and stretch myself as tall as I possibly could, and every year my mom would look down at me and say, maybe next year.

So when it finally happened, I climbed in next to her. They locked the bar down over our laps, the chain started pulling us up the first hill, and as we got to the top she told me to put my hands up. I was absolutely not putting my hands up. I had that bar locked in both fists. The park got tiny below us and Lake Erie stretched out forever in the distance, and then we dropped, and I held my breath, and that's the first time I thought I was going to die. Boy, was that a mistake. My whole body locked up, and that ninety seconds felt like forever. It was terrible.

When we pulled back into the station, my mom looked at my face and started laughing, which I want to point out is a terrible thing to do to your traumatized eight-year-old, except I inherited that exact instinct from her, so my boys have felt that same punishment.

She says, "Did you hold your breath?"

"Yeah."

"No, no, no. You can't hold your breath. You have to scream. You have to breathe out."

I'm thinking, what, breathe out? And just like that, I was thinking about my breath the rest of the afternoon. Then right before we were leaving, I talked her into riding it again. But when we got to the top, I took a big breath in. And when we dropped, I screamed.

It was a completely different experience. The pressure released, my stomach flipped, and somewhere in the middle of all this, I started laughing, screaming and laughing at the same time all the way to the bottom. The fear had turned into something else entirely. Something that felt like electricity running through my whole body.

Same ride. Same drop. Same ninety seconds. Completely opposite experience.

The only difference was that I breathed out.

I didn't understand any of this when I was eight. I just knew that holding my breath made the whole thing a nightmare and screaming made it the best ninety seconds of my life. My mom gave me the secret back then like it was obvious, but I wouldn't really figure it out for another forty years.

Watch a six-year-old for ten minutes and you'll see it.

A kid doesn't want a Lamborghini. A kid doesn't want a corner office. A kid wants the rope swing, the cannonball into the lake, the dog, the friend, the dirt, the Christmas morning, the ride that goes too fast. They want to laugh so hard their stomach hurts and pop comes out their nose. They wake up in the morning with the engine already running, and the only question they're asking is what are we doing today, what are we doing right now, where's the next thing I can put myself into.

A kid wants to feel something.

To feel. To feel alive. To feel activated.

We're all just big kids. As we grow from kid to teenager to twenty-something to full-grown adult, the proxies and the signals will change a hundred times, but the core desire underneath them does not change. It will never change. We are wired to feel alive, and we will spend our entire lives chasing whatever we believe will give us that feeling.

The trouble is that the world taught us a translation. Feeling alive got renamed as money or status. Feeling like we mattered got renamed the body, the house, the title, the achievement, the proof on the outside that we were doing fine.

We are not actually shallow people chasing shallow stuff. We are deeply human people chasing the same exact thing we wanted when we were eight, just through substitutes that don't quite deliver the feeling we are actually after.

We chase wealth and people and success. We chase the house, the car, the stuff. Some of us chase drugs or alcohol or addiction. Because we think these are the things we want. But they're not. We think we want the thing, but what we actually want is the experience of the thing. We want to feel alive. We want to feel activated. Some of us just want to feel something.

That's the core human desire. To experience, and I mean really experience, really feel the world around us. That's what we want. This is what it means to breathe in and consume the world around us. This is half the equation. But keep in mind:

Sex is good for a few minutes. Love is good forever.

Stuff can make us feel important, but freedom can last forever.

Fame can feel good on a Tuesday. Impact is good for the rest of your life.

This is why some of us need to truly and truthfully experience the world. Maybe hop on a plane and fly to St. John in the U.S. Virgin Islands and walk slowly out into the ocean at Trunk Bay and just stand there and soak it all in. This is why some of us need to fly across the country, buy a motorcycle, and spend the next two weeks riding it back home. This is why some of us need to pack up the kids kicking and screaming and take them over to Europe for three weeks just to inject all of us into a different culture. This is why some of us need to disappear into the woods for a week with no cell phone.

The best part about life is experiencing the world with people you love.

Trunk Bay is worth mentioning again.

I have been walking down to that beach for twenty years, and every single time I do it, I am literally awestruck. The water is a color you don't quite believe is real. The sand is amazing. The green hills come down to meet the beach, and around four in the afternoon the light hits the water at an angle that activates everything.

This is the core human desire. To experience the world around us. But there is an equally important other half of that coin.

I call it the core human instinct.

And we can survive ignoring our desires for a while. People do it every day. You can talk yourself out of wanting something for years if you have to. But try ignoring an instinct and see what happens.

The core human instinct is to create. To breathe out.

Biologically, if we don't breathe in and breathe out, we die. But think about this for a second. Psychologically, it works exactly the same way. We need to experience AND we need to create. We need to breathe in AND breathe out. Otherwise, we die inside.

To make. To author. To build. To put yourself into the world. To make something that wasn't there before you showed up. The book. The business. The relationship. The meal. The conversation. The thing you build with your hands. The thing you build with your life.

This is breathing out.

And here's the part that took me forty years to figure out. The list of things that don't fade in minutes has a pattern.

Every single one of those things is created.

Love is not something you find. It's created. You don't find your spouse, you create a marriage. You create a family. Businesses are created. Health is created. Freedom is created. Impact is created. Every single thing on that list, every single thing that actually delivers the feeling we have been chasing our whole lives, was CREATED.

So that's how life actually works.

The fundamental human calibration is to breathe in and breathe out. To experience and create the world around us at the same time.

Some of us think life happens to us.
Others think life happens for us.
Life was always meant to happen through us.

What you want is to experience. What you need is to create.

And I bet ninety-nine out of one hundred people are leaning too hard on one side of this right now.

I've done it.

In my teens and twenties, I was pegged hard to the experience side. I was trying to feel alive on almost no money and almost no status, and the only substitutes I could afford were cheap and short, and I would burn through them and end up empty and chase the next one. I knew something was missing. I just didn't know what.

Then in my thirties and forties, I overcorrected, and I overcorrected hard. I climbed every mountain around me. I built the businesses, hit the numbers, scaled companies. I had everything I thought I wanted.

And I still felt incomplete.

I think the answer goes back further than psychology, further than biology even.

I think we were made by a Creator. I think the universe and this planet and you and me and the staggering complexity of a single human cell did not happen by random chance, and Genesis 1:27 says it as plainly as it can be said. So God created mankind in his own image, in the image of God he created them.

The Greek word for handiwork in Ephesians 2:10 is poiema, which is literally where we get the word poem. You are God's poem. Made to make.

The first thing God did with humanity was breathe life into us. He exhaled His own life into our lungs. That breath is what made us alive. And if we are made in His image, designed by a Creator to be creators, then our design is to complete that cycle. The breath of life was never meant to stay trapped inside you. It was meant to flow through you and back out into the world. Into the things you build, the people you love, the beauty you generate that didn't exist before you showed up.

You are not just holding God's breath. You are meant to release it.

How many billions of people on this planet have struggled their whole lives to answer the question why am I here, and how many billions more have felt absolutely nothing at all when they tried. The number is staggering. And I am telling you, the answer is not as far away as we have made it. We were made by the ultimate Creator, in His image, and we were born to create. We were born to breathe in AND breathe out. That is the answer to why you are here.

So if the experience side of this is calling to you, you already know what to do. Get on the plane. Stand in the water. Drive across the country. Take the kids to Europe. Disappear into the woods. Watch the sunset without taking a picture of it.

But if you are on the other side, the create side, here is what is calling to you.

Some of us need to start the book we have been thinking about for years. Start breathing out. Some of us need to write the song. Some of us need to start the company. Some of us need to make the meal, plant the garden, build the thing with our hands, paint the room, learn the instrument, start the podcast, write the essay, ship the thing.

You know what I'm talking about. You know exactly what I'm talking about.

If you take only one thing from this, take this. The next time something feels off in your life and you cannot figure out what it is, before you blame your job or your marriage or your bank account, check your breathing. You're stuck on one side. You are either taking in too much and putting nothing back, or you are putting out so much you have stopped actually living inside the life you are making.

That is almost always the answer. I genuinely believe this one idea solves about ninety-five percent of what could possibly be bothering you right now.

I lost over forty years to the wrong calibration. You don't have to.

So just

Breathe in.
Breathe out.
Both.