Designing My Career of Purpose
After listening to the final iteration of my new business plan, my accelerator coach asked: “So what makes you happy?”. I was confused. I had just run him through the model for my future company. What’s happiness got to do with it? And why would my coach ask me about feelings?
Duh.
Not so long ago, I often described myself as a bit of peanut butter spread out over too many sandwiches. I combined a position as freelance creative director at an international branding agency, with a teaching position, my own clients, a position on a board, and I wrote about design for several magazines. I did not want to miss out on anything because anything could turn out to be the path to happiness. I weighed 52 kilos and had to eat nonstop in order to keep my body from giving in to gravity.
One evening in the fall of 2013, I realized this peanut butter thing has to go. I had held myself to a promise of making time for dinner with friends that day, but I was late nonetheless due to an overrun client meeting. When I finally arrived, my friends were already on to the main course. There was laughter and conversation. They were having a great time, and I had missed most of it once again. Gravity could no longer be resisted. I laid down on my back next to the dining room table, with my winter jacket still on. I stared at the feet of my friends above. Needless to say, this raised concern.
I laid down on my back next to the dining room table, with my winter jacket still on. I stared at the feet of my friends above.
It was clear I needed to stop spreading myself thin and really start to make work of a long lingering dream of a new business model for my design practice. So I enrolled at THNK, the Amsterdam School of Creative Leadership. One would assume that after ending up on the floor, a low point in many ways, I would understand personal happiness would be a major criterion for the choices I was planning to make while at THNK. But still, it had not occurred to me.
For six months, I got a chance to study different disruptive business models. I discovered revolutionary applications of emerging technologies, and got a better understanding of what it takes to scale a business and create social impact along the way. But this was no normal b-school. We were asked to hum while walking through the workshop space. To travel back to our childhood and reconnect with our earliest dreams. To answer wicked societal problems in a three-hour challenge. And, endlessly scary, we were asked to look a classmate in the eye for three full minutes without speaking.
After all that amount of crazy, the happiness question posed by my accelerator coach should not have caught me off guard. But it did, and it got me thinking.
After the dust settled, it turned out to be a relatively simple exercise. Finding the overlap between my dreams, my professional expertise, and what the world needs, came naturally. Everything was already there, the pieces just needed to come together.
I needed to become The Brandling. A new generation of change makers is emerging all over the world; people who want to challenge the status quo and create positive social impact. They need to be heard, and get support –whether that support comes in financial investment, societal change, sales or likes. I know branding can increase their impact, and so supporting these change makers became my mission.
Brand The Change combines my natural social engagement with my expertise in branding and my love for travel and intercultural contact. It’s my recipe for happiness. My new mission not only guides me forward, but helps me to make better choices when opportunities present themselves. Will it help me become better at empowering my clients? If the answer is no, it’s just another case of spreading the peanut butter too thin, and I will need to let it pass.
THNK has turned out to be a transformational experience in so many ways. My focus is paying off and serendipity is flowing. Since last fall, it has brought me to Tunisia, Zambia, Ireland, Saudi Arabia, Norway, and India. When I look back, I can't believe I never thought of putting happiness at the heart of what I was doing. I don’t know exactly what 2015 will bring, but one thing I know for sure: my peanut butter days are over.