When I was about 12 I thought that I’d like to be a motivational speaker.  I had seen maybe one or two motivational speakers in my life, and I surely didn’t understand a word they said, but I thought to myself, “That looks like fun.”  Of course, I hadn’t considered that I needed something valuable to say.

For years now, I’ve been trying to say it.  But only recently have I discovered what “it” is.

When I launched a blog last year I knew I wanted to be honest, but wasn’t certain how best to do so.  In fact, the first thing I wrote, and then posted to Facebook, was the fact that I had recently got clean after being an opiate addict for 10 years.  That got people’s attention.  A week later I denounced organized religion.  Needless to say, that’s not an effective strategy for winning an audience of readers.  (Or maybe it is.  Sometimes what’s relevant isn’t popular.)  Anyway, I kept writing.  But being new to blogging, I was also reading up on how I could best build an audience.

Everything I read said I needed to have a topic and it needed to be useful.  One guy wrote that nobody visits a blog unless it is relevant.  In some respects, he was right.  (I’ll write about how he was wrong another day.)

Whatever happened, my readers dwindled.  I knew I wanted to be real, but I still needed to discover exactly what I wanted to write about, what I was most passionate about.  Has that ever happened to you?  Have you ever had a goal, but were unsure how to reach it or even what it was, and only as you moved forward did things become clear?  You see, I knew I valued authenticity, but I hadn’t considered writing about it.  Unsure of my aim, I put things on hold to go exploring for a while.  And I went where my heart directed.

I know now that authenticity, meaning, and fulfillment are the things that I must write about.  Are these things useful?  Well, I know that above all, people want to be happy.  The trouble with happiness is that it isn’t attainable, at least not in itself.  Rather, it ensues.  It emerges when one is authentic and living a fulfilled, purposeful life.  Happiness is a blooming of the self, not an object to be discovered and pocketed.  So yeah, I think these things are important.

But I don’t claim to have it all figured out.  This is a work in progress.  I’m actually hoping you could help me along the way.  You can help by chiming in, telling your story, living your passion.  We’re all in this together anyway.  We should be sharing more.

So that’s my idea.  I’m just some guy that’s foolish and brave enough to think that when I speak, people will want to join the conversation.  If you’re in search of that place where you’re complete, where you have a voice and live your passion, then I hope you’ll hang around.  Here’s to exploring what it means to be human in the realest possible way.