Skip to main content

How to know your life purpose in 5 minutes | Adam Leipzig | TEDxMalibu

This is a must watch video. Do you know what you wanna do with your life? My wife worked it out two years ago and put a plan into action at the age of 52 (back then) to be a kids English teacher. My wife can find joy in almost everything, even meeting hew people. She sometimes laughs when they introduce themselves. She's bursting with joy. She's very very VERY social. People sometimes give her a strange looks when can't contain herself and laughs at introductions. I know why. You do too, now. 

My wife found her life's purpose by accident. 

I knew my life's purpose at age eight (when I stopped drawing and started writing) but never really put a plan into action. I wrote many short stories but New Zealand didn't have much of a market (actually it had none) for the horror stories I wrote. This was in the late 80's and 90's before the Internet opened wide. 

Thanks to the Internet, I sold my first short story in 2001. Writer's groups were all over the place, and I meet many fantastic people. I started my own Ning group with over 600 members about half were active and posted daily. I closed the group when Ning moved to a pay service. 

So, I knew what I wanted to do with my life. I should have been more hard on myself. And now, I'm 50. I've had 6 novels published, sold 77 short stories and I have a mortgage and a job and I struggle to make ends met. Like most writers / people. 

I think about writers like Peter James. I linked his Wikipedia page. And other writers who have done amazingly well with their dreams and desires. 

Not sure why I didn't reach the top, but I've come to terms with that. 
Watching this video, I realized maybe I haven't identified my audience as I thought. 
Watch the video below. 



My answer: 

The five points:
1) Lee
2) Writer
3) Readers
4) Escape
5) Hope or satisfaction 

Q: Lee, what do you do? 
A: I show other people that any adversary can be overcome. 
Q: How do you do that?
A: Through my writing. 

What about you? 






Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Pen Names

Hello all, I'm debating on whether or not to us a pen name for my crime novels. You see, way back in 2001 when I made my first sale, I used the name Richard Lee ( http://threeand10.com ). In 2009 a publisher of my second novel, The Last Church convinced me to use my real name. Although I announced the name change to my massive Ning group, MySpace and Twitter, not a lot of people took notice and The Last Church didn't sell as well as it should have with the Richard Lee brand. I had no idea about branding back then. Now, I do. In 2015, I returned to write under the Richard Lee brand and some comments I got were: I wondered what happened to you. Welcome back, Dude.  Missed you. Are you still writing? etc. My books now sell in several languages. Richard Lee wrote horror and science fiction (usually blended together).  Now that I'm writing crime, ( http://www.thriller.nz ) I decided to switch to my real name, and start crime fiction branding (no idea how to do that). But, now I&

It all starts with an idea

It all starts with an idea and they come at any time of any day and you can’t control it. You have no say in the matter, really. For me, ideas just pop into my head, as if my muse was chewing her pencil and a crack appeared in the  fabric  of space and time. From that crack, a slice of thought slipped out and my muse caught it. A lot of people believe ideas are the product of the universe and some people (Dean Koontz?) can just grab them when they need. But adhering to this belief, one must assume thousands of other people also received the very same thought. Writers would plot around it; poets would create  beauty  from it; hundreds would do nothing with it. This is called the initial idea and it is the start of whatever you want to make of it. My initial idea is to write a series of articles based on  writing  / learning the art of screenwriting. It is an area that interests me and has done for years. Only now do I have the opportunity to attempt it.  Screenwriters make 200,000 smack

Sometimes you gotta stop

I've been going over my book a lot. It is after all my first Crime Thriller. I wrote a new beginning, showing our hero doing normal world stuff, added a few paragraphs here and there to refresh memories of absent characters that will reappear. It's been edited, reedited and pro(?)-edited. Rewritten, added to and cut.  There comes a time when you have to just let it be.  Send that kid out into the world. Even though it's book 1 of 2, it has to fly on it's own merit as a complete stop with one hell of a cliffhanger.  I have spent the morning looking for an assessor to go through the book and while that is happening, I can get a head start on book 2. In fact, I've already started doing that.  Scrivener was my writing app of choice for a long time. But my old 2gb MacbookAir can't support version 3, so instead of using version 2.9 (really slow on my Mac), I have decided to use online writing apps, so I can write from anywhere on any available machine.   I rewrote the