CHAPTER 1■WHO ARE YOU?
if the things we believe are different than the things we do, there can be no true happiness.
David O. McKay
Ninth president of the Mormon Church
It was that day in 1943. A nineteen-year-old boy from Dorchester, Massachusetts, had become a low-beam radar navigator in the Eighth Division of the United States Air Force. And today was the day that he would fly his first mission—over Germany. That day this boy had to make a decision that would leave childhood far behind: whether or not to wear the Jewish Star of David on his missions. He knew the price he might pay if his plane were shot down. He knew his chances of survival would plummet if he were caught wearing that Star.
He decided to wear that Star. When he did, he joined peoples from all nations, religions, races, and creeds who have chosen throughout the course of human history to uphold their beliefs and heritage in the face of persecution, torture, and even death. As that legendary Scot, William Wallace of Braveheart fame, exhorted his men, “Cowards die many times; brave men die only once.”
By declaring himself publicly, my father told the world and himself who he was, who he wanted to be, and what he believed in. By that one act, he took the abstract concepts of values, conscience, and personal responsibility and made them real, creating a living heritage for his future family.
I often think of my father’s challenge. I ask, “What is my Star of David? What are the values that direct my decisions? What am I passionate about, whatever the cost?”
My father was not a zealot or even a practicing Jew. He chose to wear that Star of David because it was how he made sense of his world and his place in it. Although he wasn’t aware of it then, in many ways that singular decision would define his life forever. It helped him come to terms with who he was. It was also the greatest gift he took into civilian life. That reckoning imprinted by thirty-five missions gave him the confidence to develop a winning career after the war. He found himself and his internal compass through his allegiance to that Star.
I’m sometimes jealous of my father’s “opportunity” to discover who he was and what he stood for. Whereas his life was put at risk, the war forced him to dig deep into his soul and clarify his passion to be a Jew and an inner drive to win, whatever the odds.
Few of you will experience such a dramatic situation. Yet to realize your potential by fulfilling your destiny, you too need to search inside yourself to awaken what makes you come alive with passion and without fear. This chapter guides you with the first step in creating your destiny plan: three lifelines that open your heart and your inner self. By working through the twelve lifelines and addressing the questions offered that most resonate with you, you will have written down the basic information you need to construct your destiny plan. Think of it as your personal, authentic strategic plan.
I think it might be helpful for you to see a brief description of my destiny plan to guide you in developing your own. Without a timetable or more specifics, the plan that serves as my North Star appears at the top of the next page. As you can see, a destiny plan is not a résumé, nor is it a description of any particular job. It is a summary of your hopes and dreams and how you will make a contribution to a better world. Like the word service, it is less about a specific act than an attitude, a consciousness of how you want to affect people and the planet, all living things. It is not only a window into the future but also a mirror to let you look at yourself today.
See Table
Constructing a destiny plan therefore requires you to address all four chapter title questions and a significant number of the other sixty-four “destiny plan” questions in the book. Select the questions that you find most helpful in reframing your risk-reward assessment of different job alternatives. Chapters 1 and 2 will offer a mirror in six lifelines to help you understand yourself. In my description, my responses are recorded in the “how” and “values” lines. Self-actualization, learning how to serve yourself, is a big step for most of you, something you are not taught in school.
Chapters 3 and 4 offer guidance for the next step: bringing your dreams and desires into the marketplace of your life (the “goal” and “why” responses to the challenges of this chapter and the next). These chapters do not tell you what to do or what job to pick. They are more cautionary in tone. Their purpose is not to carve out your path for you but rather to give you the greatest opportunity to find your path, stay on it, and get back on it more quickly when you fall off.
Today, your career, your destiny, is in your hands. Your destiny is something you achieve. With your passion and values as your guides, your ultimate success will be less a function of your abilities and more the result of your choices— choices of “small deeds done with great love,” in Mother Teresa’s words.