Event: Finding Purpose in Turbulent Times

Shaun Tomson On the 24th of April, 2006, I had a terrible personal tragedy. I lost my beautiful 15 and a half year old son, played a dangerous game at school, bad choice. And since that time, I’ve taken my life in a completely different direction. I was an entrepreneur, I was a businessman, and I went down a different path, a path of purpose. And I now speak to hundreds of thousands of people across the world at some of the most famous learning institutions, never spoken at Harvard before, and I’m very excited to speak to you. I speak to the largest corporations in the world. I speak schools, I speak prisons, rehab clinics, sports teams, SEAL teams, all sorts of different people and different groups about our purpose. And what I’ve realized over the last 20 years since I’ve been doing this, our words have got great power. Yes, the words of inspirational leaders like JFK have incredible power too. But the words of transformation are our own words. Our own words that can create personal change and through that personal change, we can create change in the lives of others and in the societies of others. So, words have got power to change our mind state. Mind state, how we feel about life. So I wanna ask all of you a question. I want you to text me, bust out your phones. I know you’re eating. But if you can bust out your phones and I want you to text me one word that describes how you feel about life. Let me put the QR code up again. Just one word that describes how you feel about life right now, it’s anonymous. So just text a word about how you feel about life right now. And I’ll show you something interesting. So one word, and hopefully, magically, it’s gonna appear on the screen here. Happy, chaotic, indifferent, gratitude, uncertain. Keep the words coming. We’ll give it about another 60 seconds. Confused, overwhelmed. And you can see there’s a duality, and there’s always a duality. Confused, overwhelmed, happy, grateful. So I would say it’s most probably about 80% negative. So I started doing this in March 2020, when the world shut down during COVID. My first client was the hottest company in the world at that time. It was called Gilead Sciences, a biotech company that had the only treatment in the World for COVID called Remdesivir. And these are results from that company. These were all fully employed people. None of these employees had any risk of being fired. And these were their results. Exhausted, disappointed, anxious, uncertain, not dissimilar to the words that you have sent me. As COVID started to dissipate, the malaise started to lift from around the world. This is another company exhausted, excited, confused, eager. This was yesterday for two of Matt’s classes of maybe about 80, 90 students, anxious, challenged, duality, optimistic, opportunity. What I’d seen over the last five years since COVID started, this was the malaise afflicting the world. The mindset, stress, anxiety, depression, disconnection, I called it the sad mindset. So what I try to do with my simple method and my simple perspective, I try to change the mindset from stress, anxiety, depression, disconnection to what I call this code mindset. Commitment, optimism, desire, engagement. Our words have got unbelievable power to change our mind state. When I walked in and saw those wonderful words of JFK, what can you do? And I think about other simple messages that have changed this country. Some you might not agree with, but certainly, yes, we can. Make America great again. I mean, those have been fundamental to create societal change. Words have got incredible power. So words have got great power for both negativity and positivity, duality. Words have got power for unkindness and kindness. Words have great power to engender despair. Words have power to motivate hope. So where does this power come from? As I see it, and as I have observed with hundreds of thousands of people that I’ve worked with, the power comes from purpose. Purpose, our North Star, our mojo, our mission. What is purpose? That’s the strict academic description of what it is. Long-term commitment to accomplish aims meaningful to oneself and the broader world. Purpose is not just about self, about success. Purpose about doing something, getting something done and doing something for the broader community. I like to think there’s five elements to purpose. This is a little acronym. Purpose, it’s aspirational. It’s our North Star. Purpose is inspirational. My purpose inspires me, but it inspires my family, my wife, my son. And the people that I connect with. Purpose is moral, fundamental bedrock of our existence, part of our ethos, part of our character. And purpose is authentic. There’s no bullshit about purpose. My purpose is a authentic to me in the same way that your purpose and mission and Northstar is authentic to you. And it’s timeless. It’s not like a smart goal, specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, time-sensitive. Purpose is forever. So why is it important? Why is it important to have this fundamental mission? So these are interesting statistics. And I like to tell stories, but I want to show you the statistics about the power of purpose. So this is a big longitudinal study. 73,000 people from the University of Michigan having purpose in life makes you live longer. It actually makes you live twice as long. How about that for an inducement to live a life of mission and purpose? And then in the work context, because all of you are either working, you’re gonna be an entrepreneur, you’re going to work for someone, working with a sense of purpose leads to, how about this, greater engagement, fundamental business problem right now, motivation, productivity, and retention. And then this is from a big Ernst and Young study of over a million units, business unit, a million people, 10,000 business units. Purpose-led organizations perform 42% better than those that are simply in business. Why is a lack of purpose important? How about this for a telling statistic from Ernst & Young, from Gallup. 79% of employees are not engaged at work. What does that mean? They’re not connected to their team members, to their colleagues, to their associates. They’re not connected to the mission of the business and they don’t dig the workplace. I mean, the malaise of lack of a purpose. So during COVID, I saw this issue, man, with all these people I was speaking to, I saw there’s like stress, anxiety, depression, disconnection. So I had lunch with a cool dude in Santa Barbara, California, where I live. He’s a philosopher, famous author. I think he sold 18 million books. And we just met over lunch, casual lunch. And he said to me, hey Sean, why don’t we write a book together? I told him about the malaise that was affecting the world. I said, okay, we’ll call it the Surfer and the Sage because he’s a philosopher, poet. And the book was an exploration about how one can move from the darkness to the light, how one could move from the negative to the positive. So every single chapter was about a duality, anxious and calm, but the negative first, despair and hope, doubt and faith. It was a great, inspiring project for me to do, is write another book, it was my fifth book. But in the context of those troubled times to go out there and do a project to help, to help people find light. There’s a wonderful legend here in Santa Barbara where I now live, that we all live under the Rainbow Bridge. That Hutash, the earth mother of the Chumash people that had been living in the area for 13 and a half thousand years, the oldest humans in North America, and they grew up on this island called Santa Cruz Island. Hutash planted a magic seed, the people came from the magic seed. And in one of the first stories of sustainability or lack of sustainability. They ate through all their resources on the island, and they started to starve. They prayed to the Earth Mother, please send more food. She said, now, what I will do is I will build a magic bridge so you can cross to a new life on the mainland. It’s 24 miles across the channel. So the people crossed, she said, but whatever you do, don’t look down. Of course, when you give people a prescription, they’ll do the opposite. A lot of the people looked down and they fell into the channel and they started to drown. She saw people drowning and she didn’t have the power to rescue them. But she cast a spell and she turned them into dolphins. So this whole channel is filled with dolphins and when I go surfing, I ride with them. They’ll be surfing under my board or I’ll be waiting for a wave and they’ll come squeaking up next to me, a mommy dolphin, a little baby and I stick my head out of the water and so I keep communicating back with them, so now I like to think that where the dolphin came down is my local beach in Santa Barbara called Hammond’s Reef and my late son Matthew and I used to love to surf this beach. And on this one particular day, we went down to the beach to go surfing. There was no surfing. He said, Dada, let’s go and check out the Shumash Memorial. So, on Shalawa Meadow, which is dedicated to the Shumash people, is a beautiful little memorial. You can see it’s got the dolphin figurines on it. And we ran up the beach to the memorial and you leave an offering. You leave a stone or you leave a shell. It has a beautiful inscription. The sacredness of the land lies in the mind of its people. This land. Is dedicated to the spirit and memory of the ancestors and their children, ties us all together. So after we left the offering, we left a shell, he ran down the beach and he started to collect the stones that were on the beach, and he arranged them in a large circle. And inside that circle, we made another circle of stones. And inside the circle, we made a third circle. And in the innermost circle, we put down two large rocks, and he ran off down the bridge, got a stick, and he said, dada. We’re going to sit inside this sacred story circle, and we’re gonna tell each other stories. There’s just one rule, whoever has the stick, tells the story. What does the other person do? Just listens, perfect communication. So father and son sat inside the sacred story cycle. We passed that stick back and forth, heart to heart, eye to eye, man, just exchanging our love, exchanging our spirit. And out of all the times I’ve spent on the beaches in the world, that was the best time. And I spoke at a big Hawaiian school, which has an endowment about the same size as Harvard called Kamehameha School, dedicated to preserving and protecting Hawaiian heritage and culture. And the dean said to me, when you spoke to your son, you spoke in spirit language. And all the students put their heads down. And he said, students, give Shaun your mana, your life force, your spirit. And this wave of mana rolled across this chapel to me. It was an amazing moment. And I could feel the power of spirit and spirit language. So I got to my home and as I put my key in the door, Matthew dug in his pocket and he pulled out a stone. I said, what’s that Matthew? He said, this is a sacred story stone from the sacred story circle. All the stories we told today are all inside that stone. How about that? And he put the stone right outside my door and it magically moves around the garden. And every day or some days when I go home and I listen, I can’t feel and hear the stories, but the power and the spirit I feel, the spirit that’s inside that stone, the mana that’s the stone, the life force that we both put together in the stone. I’m hoping that all of you today have felt my spirit. You’ve felt my mana. And all of have got this tremendous power. And when you write your code, it helps you focus, distill, and recode the power that you have into something even better. So I wanna ask you one more favor, and that is bust out your phones, and I want you to send one word that you’re gonna take home with you. Just one word, I’ll go back to it. Just text me one word that you gonna take with you and hopefully the words will just, did you guys get that? I’ll get the QR code. One word that you’re taking home with you. Purpose, mana, code, power, optimism, intentionality. These are beautiful words, agency, purpose. These are great words. So I want to thank you all for your hour of valuable, valuable time. It’s been a great honor to speak here at Harvard. Double Shaka, thank you very much.