Welcome everyone, I'm your host Greg McEwen and I am here with you on this journey to
learn to understand so that we can contribute more.
I've become aware recently that I haven't really shared very much with you about my
experience and adventure here at the University of Cambridge.
And for the next four solo episodes, I'm going to try and put that right.
Have you ever found yourself in a place that made it easier for you to detect your mission
in life?
By the end of this episode, you will feel inspired I hope to seek out places that increase the
probability of you detecting, understanding and hearing that mission that is so often
hidden below the surface.
So let's get to it.
To get more out of today's episode, take action immediately.
Within a few minutes or hours of listening to this episode, take a tiny step towards
applying it.
Recently my son and I spent time at King's College, Cambridge.
That's not the college I'm a member of, I'm a member of Queens.
And for anybody who hasn't spent time at Cambridge, this is even a part of the story
even more confusing than those of us that are here.
There are 31 colleges.
You can think of it as something like the houses in Harry Potter, but instead of there
being four, there's 31.
Each college works in its own independent way.
So really, there isn't one university at all, not in the way that one would imagine it
at universities the world over.
Each university has its money separate, has its own leadership, has its own policies,
and its own physical campus, its own college.
And so unless you're deliberate about it, you will only naturally have access to the
one college that you are a member of.
Mine is Queens, which is absolutely beautiful.
Whenever I am there, I feel that sweet burden of the hundreds of years of learning that
have gone before.
But as I said, my son and I had the opportunity to spend time at King's.
There's lots to describe about that place, but the most poignant moment was when we went
to the chapel at King's College.
Every college to my knowledge has a chapel, and King's is the crown jewel of them all.
Walking through the front door, I felt like Harry Potter might have done walking into
Diagon Alley, or Lucy walking through the wardrobe into Narnia.
The spectacle was more than I was prepared for.
Since beginning this renaissance in my life, this adventure to Cambridge, and all that
it symbolizes, all of the learning and adventure beyond the university itself, I have found
that beauty and learning have a particular effect on me, and that effect is they make
me want to weep in awe.
As I walked into King's College Chapel, we were transmitted into somewhere otherworldly.
That ceiling, a design so fit for purpose that we could not help but look up.
Look heaven would so to speak.
My 16-year-old son actually gaped involuntarily for a full 30 seconds.
There's a word for all of this.
It's majesty.
I was listening to Beethoven as we walked down the aisle of this ancient edifice, whose
existence is an ever-present and dramatic symbol to all who would seek learning to do
so with humility, and the endless wish to see and serve something bigger, something beyond
ourselves.
This chapel, which took a mere hundred years to build, has stood there now for 500.
For half a millennia, it has offered a renewal of mind and spirit for any who are willing
to make the trek.
And as I walked its main hall, I thought of you, and I wished you could be there with
me, seeing what I was seeing, feeling what I felt, and could look up and ponder what
does this mean for me?
Because beyond the many, many pressing matters of your life, there is something below the
surface, something beyond the curtain, something vibrant and transformative, something
that will stir the soul, a whisper that will cut to the heart, a flicker that will illuminate
our lives and at the same time shake us.
And it helps us to sense to know really that our mission in life is not decided and it's
not designed, our essential mission in life must be detected.
And one thing I know for sure is that we won't detect it if we're just living in our inbox.
We won't detect it if we're doom looping through nasty, dueling monologues on Twitter.
We will not detect it if we are just driven by envy, wanting things because other people
have them or by that mimetic desire where we want things because we think other people
want them, which is even more unhelpful.
We will not detect it if we are consumed with the trivial.
We will not detect it on a low nutrient information diet where we're just constantly plugged
in to whatever digital platform is capturing our attention and selling it to others.
We will not detect it if we are used as we so often can be by the highly volatile emotional
political slogans of whatever persuasion we happen to have.
We won't detect it there.
These things offer us no clues at all but one, even those things say to us if we pay attention,
this is not the way.
But after all, if you don't know what you want, at least you are better off knowing
what you don't want and who of us truly wants these trifling things, this vanity fair, these
loud persuasive voices that can be so low on wisdom, something within us, something several
layers down, hungers for a beautiful life of meaning.
It's not a left-wing or a right-wing thing, it's a wing to fly upwards.
Here's what I heard as I walked these sacred halls where a learning temple was once conceived.
I heard the call to learn faster and deeper and broader than ever before and to teach in
more honest and eloquent ways.
And I heard, if I may, something for you too.
I felt to say to you this, that there is hope ahead and very, very good things to come,
that there's a job ahead if you seek one, a career ahead of you if you seek that too,
family healing, if that is an intent that you're holding on to right now, and a mission
of importance if you pause to seek it.
But there is a price to pay and that is to be in places that increase the probability
of you detecting your mission in life.
Now, I don't mean to be presumptuous about this.
I know full well that not everybody can be in the Chapel at King's College and nor do
I think we have to be in that exact location to be able to find places that will increase
this probability of understanding, sensing, seeing, naming, defining, and then following
our unique mission in life.
But all of us know and can discern when we're in places that are not going to help us with
people who are not likely to help us.
And all of us have the power to be able to say no to that and to do it as gracefully
as possible.
I have a friend, an entrepreneur, a CEO of quite an impressive organization who told
me of a man who he did not know well, who knocked on his door quite out of the blue one
day and asked if he could just come and sit in his home, sit in a beautiful living room,
a place that he had been once before, but not for very long.
He said, I just want to be in a place that feels like it's full of light.
He never explained why he did it.
And the entrepreneur I'm speaking of never shared more of the story than I've just shared
with you.
But there's something lovely and telling and informative about that lovely incident, something
for all of us to think of those places where it becomes clearer to us what we are supposed
to do and not to do.
Maybe there's a special place in your life.
Maybe it's a particular place in nature.
Maybe it's when you go for a walk where you go to run.
Maybe it's your home.
Maybe it's someone else's home.
Maybe it's with certain kinds of people.
So here's my invitation.
Right now, I want you to think of and visualize a place in the world that will increase the
probability of you being able to detect your mission in life, what the next right thing
is to do in your life.
That place comes to mind.
And how can you get there?
How quickly can you make a plan to be there and spend some time?
Because what I know for sure is that if you get in that place, then you can hear something
more important than anything you've heard in today's episode.
You can hear something that's unique for you that can help you orient yourself in this
disorienting world.
To me, that matters.
That's essential.
At least that's what I've been thinking about, as I've been thinking about you.
What is one idea you heard today that caught your attention?
Why does that matter so much?
And who is one person you can share that with within the next 24 to 48 hours?
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Essentialism Academy.
For more details, go to essentialism.com forward slash podcast promo.
Thank you, really thank you for listening.
And I'll see you next time.
Bye.
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