Impacting lives w : Evan Carmichael
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“Your purpose comes from your pain, the moment you’d never want to repeat, that’s where you’ve felt the most worthless as a human being, and when you have people currently going through that thing you went through, you serve them by helping them get through it and you will be fulfilled” that was a short quote that really hit me. My purpose, as I’ve said in previous articles, is to help people reach their full potential.
And though I’m happy with where I am now and I’m extremely grateful for the people I’ve surrounded myself with who have helped me reach the position that I’m in today, I love learning from other people too. Learning from more successful people helps you see the things that you can’t see just yet, and this will bring you even more success in the future.
So when I read that quote, it hit me really hard that I just simply had to have a conversation with the author. In case you didn’t know, that quote came from a book by Evan Carmichael “Built to serve: Find Your Purpose and Become the Leader You Were Born to Be”. Evan has had an insanely interesting background, you’ll believe me after I tell you that he built a biotech company at just 19 years old! How much of us can say that we’ve done that at that age? He then went on to be a venture capitalist at just 22 years old, to set two world records, and now he’s also running a YouTube channel with almost 3 million subscribers!
So with all that insane track record behind him, I was already amazed and intrigued to finally be able to speak with him, and when I got the opportunity to interview him on Instagram live, you better believe I took the opportunity.
One of the first questions I asked him was, what is your purpose, and how do you find it? And he said that, basically, your purpose comes from your pain, whatever you struggle with the most as a human being is what you’d want to help other people get through, and you are indeed, built to serve; we all want to help people, we want to do something meaningful for those around us. And that is true! That’s the reason I make my Instagram content, why I do all these live interviews; I want to do something to impact other people’s lives! But there’s another thing that Evan mentioned in the interview that really hits home for me, he said that the most meaningful thing you can do for other people is to help those who are the person that you used to be, and if you can help them out, that will simply touch their lives a lot more.
You can do that by doing simple things, like buying someone coffee or letting someone take your place in a line, or letting other cars pass you by when you’re driving on the road. It’s these little acts of kindness that, over time, will impact the world around you in more ways than one. Think of the ripple effect or the butterfly effect, for example. Those two things can really help you see the impact that you create through your small actions in life.
Evan himself said that for him, he was struggling as an entrepreneur when he was 19 which was about the time he founded his biotech company, and he felt very isolated. He didn’t have anyone to inspire him and Instagram wasn’t even a thing yet. He mentioned that he felt so low as a human being and he was working like crazy every single day but he wasn’t getting any results, and though he had made it through, he now looks back on those times of being isolated from everything and being absolutely alone as one of the worst times in his life as an entrepreneur who is simply trying to build his company.
That’s why Evan, who is now in his 40s still makes content. He’s not doing it for the sake of the monetary gain, he’s looking at it as trying to help 19-year-old Evans out there who might be going through the same thing that he was at 19 because, to be honest, many people are going through what he did back when he was 19 now. You might ask why he’s still doing all of this when he’s now a successful individual who never has to go through all of that trouble, but then here’s the thing, everything around us is continually evolving, and it always will, but helping others out, guiding them through the things that you’ve already gone through first-hand and impacting their lives in ways that only you and your unique perspective can will simply never get old. That’s why Evan still churns out videos in his 40s and that’s also why I’m doing what I’m doing these days; that’s his purpose and mine.
And figuring that purpose in life not only gives you a clear path to where you know you want to go but also gives you clarity. When you think of purpose, you might think that it’s a static thing that stays the same forever, but it’s never like that, and the journey to get there is often painful, which I already talked about in the last article about my interview with Qintari.
For Evan, he discovered his life’s purpose when he was 19 and trying to figure things out all on his own, and he wrote his book which I mentioned, in the beginning, to help make it easier for other people to discover their purpose without having to go the long path that he had taken simply because there was no one guiding him. Go read it for yourselves and discover your purpose.
