We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Adam Kuhn a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.
Hi Adam, really happy you were able to join us today and we’re looking forward to sharing your story and insights with our readers. Let’s start with the heart of it all – purpose. How did you find your purpose?
I remember it well. It was the spring of 2011, I was 30 years old, and had accomplished nearly every major goal I set for my twenties. I had everything I wanted, everything I was striving for, and I felt surprisingly… hollow. Not terrible. Not great. Just… well… dull.
I had built a life that delivered the rewards I wanted while also making the time needed to enjoy them. I had achieved several promotions in my career, lived in fancy condos, had a wardrobe full of tailored clothes, was in a relationship with one of the prettiest girls I knew, enjoyed big vacations, ate out whenever and wherever I wanted, and said YES any time my friends wanted to do something adventurous. What was wrong? This is not how things were supposed to feel! You’re supposed to feel great when you work hard for aspirational goals and accomplish them. What was missing?
In a word: Purpose. Or at least that is my current hypothesis. A purpose that was true to me, uniquely me. Not something that I had learned from a movie, or what others wanted for me, but something that I had felt with my own heart that simply needed time to reveal itself.
I began searching for threads leading to insights that, hopefully, would help redirect my life. Fortunately, I didn’t have to search far.
Three years prior, I had gone on a trip to Tanzania to fulfill a childhood dream. Like most kids, I loved animals. I was especially enamored with the animals of eastern Africa such as elephants, lions, giraffes, hippos, gazelles, and more. Such unique, majestic creatures that still to this day take my breath away. So when my mom heard through a coworker about a health clinic being built in a remote town in Tanzania that needed volunteers, I was sold before I even knew the details. Not only would I go on a one-week safari, but I would also get to play a small part in building a clinic that would serve some of the world’s poorest people. Animals, helping people, and adventure—sign me up!
Once in Tanzania, nature infected me with awe on a daily basis. I also started noticing a surprising thing in the Tanzanian people. I saw first-hand that despite the extraordinary financial differences in standard of living, there seemed to be zero difference in the sense of fulfillment and happiness felt by those with enough resources to satisfy life’s basic needs. This surprised me, especially given the stark difference in living circumstance between myself and the local villagers.
My peers and I were generally quite happy and grateful in our shared home. We woke up each morning for three weeks on a small cot, in a shared room, in the most basic house I had ever lived in. We had a working toilet and shower that functioned reasonably well. We had cabinets filled with bottled water. We had a roof, walls, and floors that kept out most of the insects, mosquitoes, and lizards. Our household wasn’t without periodic difficulties and frustrations, but there was a general overall happiness. We felt we had what was needed to enjoy our day, and for the most part we did.
Our neighbors, the people who we would consider incredibly poor by American standards, seemed to feel just as happy as we did. How was this possible? Most people in the nearby Tanzanian countryside had their own small cots, but they were usually old and resting on top of either a dirt floor, or rough cement, if they were fortunate. They were without power in their homes and many had holes in the ground when needing to relieve themselves. They had to boil their water to protect against water-borne diseases, and had poorly constructed homes with gaps between their walls, floors, and ceilings which made inside spaces not too different from outside spaces in the eyes of nature’s small creatures. How could it be that they had access to the same levels of joy and fulfillment as those of us with so much more?
It seemed that as long as people were able to drink clean water, eat sufficiently nutritious food, have safe shelter, and make time for deep social connections, they were every bit as happy as any group of people I had met in my life. I arrived in Tanzania never having really thought about this nor would I have believed it to be true. I left Tanzania knowing it to be fact because I had seen it with my own eyes, interacting daily within the community.
During those dull days in 2011, I remembered back on this realization that money doesn’t cause happiness, and that a lot of my life was being spent making money. I finally began to resolve the cognitive dissonance that had me feeling hollow. It was time to try something different. Time to experiment.
I started simplifying my life and taking action based on what felt right in my heart. I began wearing simpler clothing. I stopped doing expensive things that only a small percentage of people can afford. I moved into a small, low-cost apartment. Many things were changing in my life and it felt wonderful.
As I created a simpler life, I noticed my relationship with work was also transforming. Work used to be a means of making the money needed to live my lifestyle. Now, with such a simple lifestyle, I found myself wondering why I was spending so much time doing things that weren’t making a positive difference in the world and weren’t particularly fun. It’s not that I was doing “bad” things or hating life, but it finally hit me that there was no reason I shouldn’t be enjoying myself each day AND helping others.
I still wasn’t ready to leave the corporate world, but I was ready to try something new that would eventually transform my career. I decided to become a youth soccer coach.
For the first time in my life, I learned it was possible to have a job that was both irresistibly fun and helpful to others. It wasn’t long before I was more focused on the kids I was serving on the field than the executives I was serving in the office. Through a fortuitous twist, an “organizational restructure” relieved me of my responsibilities to the analytics team I was leading and I was finally free to follow my heart. Whoa, what a feeling.
Seven years have passed since that moment, and it’s been the greatest seven years of my life. My love for coaching led me to help at my local youth soccer club to see how else I could serve. This led to starting a nonprofit, Satori, that now enables me and a friend to make a career out of helping others through soccer.
Simplifying my life, and letting go of attachments to things I didn’t need, created the space for purpose to finally flow through. Purpose has transformed my career, strengthened my bond with family, and allowed me to make some of the most genuine personal connections of my life.
This is not to say that life is now easy. Not at all. I still feel stress, sometimes intensely. But the difference now is when I’m worried or frustrated, I know the key is to slow myself down and maintain course while navigating and learning from the obstacles. This is very different from the days when stress led to wondering why I was spending my life doing things I didn’t enjoy for objectives that weren’t personally meaningful.
There is no instruction manual for how to break free from chasing the things that won’t deliver the joy, love, and fulfillment that we seek. But one thing that seems true to me is that trial and error often delivers better results than contemplation alone. Want to better understand your purpose? Try something new, see what happens, see how you feel, and keep moving forward—both because it works, and because it’s fun.
Don’t overthink it, hindsight has a way of connecting the dots. And someday, when enough time has passed, you might find that your purpose has finally come into focus.
Let’s take a small detour – maybe you can share a bit about yourself before we dive back into some of the other questions we had for you?
Hopefully I’m just a simple guy who works hard to make a positive difference. I grew up in a suburb of Denver, Colorado to parents who grew up on or near farms in Iowa. I suppose this mixture of city living plus small town values played a role in who I am today. My passions as a youth revolved around family, friends, and sports. Eventually, school and career gained in importance, but I try to do a good job of maintaining at least some of the enthusiasm and playfulness of youth.
If you had to pick three qualities that are most important to develop, which three would you say matter most?
To arrive where I am today, my journey probably required large doses of desire to make a positive difference in the lives of others, curiosity to try new things, and the open-mindedness to change course as truths were revealed along the way.
Alright so to wrap up, who deserves credit for helping you overcome challenges or build some of the essential skills you’ve needed?
I’ve been very lucky to have two parents that have always been supportive of me. They may not have always agreed with my choices, but they’ve never wavered in being there for me when I needed them. My younger brother has been the brightest light of my life which has provided great inspiration. I also have a small number of close friends that gave me essential guidance and inspiration in addition to soaking in many great books written by or about people I admire.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://gosatori.org/
