Do what makes you come alive

'It felt like breathing; it felt right.'

She came alive, at the age of 20, when she held her first talk show event. She is Oprah Winfrey and she is a woman regarded by many around the world as a source of inspiration, love, and meaning.

Coming alive is to pursue a passion relentlessly and without care about what others might think. Coming alive is to live every day with enthusiasm and drive, always striving to fulfil your greatest potential.

This is mentally draining, which is why Oprah strongly emphasises that we each find what makes us tick and wake up in the morning, so that we can persevere when things get tough, because we love what we do.

Let's now consider how doing the thing that 'makes us come alive' fits in with success. For the purposes of clarity, we will look at Oprah as an example.

Serving as the lead on one of the most popular talk shows in world clearly has its financial benefits. We should never neglect the importance of money and attaining a position of financial stability.

Money helps us cater for our needs and for those whom we are responsible, such as our family and friends. Money also enables us to seize opportunities, to which we would not be exposed if we did not have a sufficient amount of money.

Money does not, however, add meaning to one's life. Meaning comes from listening to your feelings and making decisions based on your gut, says Oprah. Your gut is your GPS for life, guiding you through obstacles, challenges, and uncertainty.

Here's the difficult part. Only YOU can understand your gut feeling. So, making a decision based on your gut could seem entirely absurd from the perspective of other people, but to you it IS natural. IT IS RIGHT. There is a good case, then, for developing the resilience, over time, to care less about the views others hold about your decisions and instead devote more attention to understanding how we feel as unique individuals.

What about failure? What if doing the thing that makes me come alive is challenging and hard? As you already know, nobody said that anything worthwhile is easy. Let me, however, share some advice that I received quite recently.

Michael Nartey, co-head of Global Distribution at Barclays (formerly managing director at Goldman Sachs), is a man who rose to the top of one of the world's greatest financial institutions having been born and lived in Ghana for a large part of his life.

He said the following:

'If you are able to go home, reflect on the possible lessons that you should learn from your mistake or failure today, and come into work the next day with a fresh mindset that involves not thinking about the day before, then you will become successful.'

Michael's point could alternatively be explained in the following way: learn from your mistakes, but live in the present.

I cannot over emphasise the importance of living in the present. Opportunities, in the form of occasions to seize career-related opportunities, to develop and enhance your relationships, or to simply laugh and hug the people you love, occur in the present.

We cannot seize these wonderful opportunities that add meaning and happiness in our lives if we are too consumed with the past or too worried about what the future may bring.

Both are outside our control: we cannot change the past and we have virtually no influence over the future. Developing the humility and resilience to concede to this fact is the first step in letting go of a burden that keeps us back and arriving at a more peaceful state of mind.

Find what you love, what makes you come alive, and devote yourself to that day in, day out, with integrity, passion, and endless drive.

Do what makes you come alive and show it to the rest of the world