Living On Purpose: Five Deliberate Choices to Realize Fulfillment and Joy

By Amy Eliza Wong

Achieve Profound Discernment and Joy

Many people from all walks of life, even after their many accomplishments and experiences, are often plagued by feelings of dissatisfaction and deep questioning. These feelings may lead them to wonder if the life they are living is the life they were meant to lead.

Living On Purpose is the guidebook these people have been waiting for. This book shows readers how to feel more connected to the people around them and how to be truly satisfied by the life they’re leading. It will help them get past the pervasive feelings of lack and dissatisfaction by explaining how to fill the hole that can’t be achieved by more money, more status, or the next big thing. 

Written by transformational leadership coach Amy Wong, this book will help shift readers to a mindset of possibility and freedom. Seamlessly merging her personal and professional experience with aspects of social neuroscience, Amy brings intellectual rigor and profound insight to the map of five choices that will lead the reader solidly back to themselves. 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Greenleaf Book Group
• Release date: May 24, 2022
• ISBN: 9781956072037

Book preview

Part I

THE POWER OF DELIBERATE CHOICES

Chapter 1

OPENING THE DOOR TO A TECHNICOLOR WORLD

I give up. You show me the way.

I don’t consider myself to be special, gifted, clairvoyant, or anything like that. I actually wish I was. Instead, I’m pretty average. I’m 5’4" and fall right at the average for anything that could be measured by stats, both intellectually and physically. As comforting as that may sound, I never appreciated that as a kid. I always secretly craved the novelty of an aberration. When my eye exam would come back normal, I’d be bummed I didn’t get to pick out a pair of glasses with my mom that afternoon. When I started getting chronic headaches in high school, I hoped for some exotic diagnosis so I would have something exciting to tell my friends. Boringly, it turned out to be a sensitivity to aspartame. Convinced that I was going to knock the SATs out of the park, I didn’t. At all. I came in exactly at the national average.

There was this one time though. I had an allergic reaction to the pain medication I was given when I had my wisdom teeth pulled out. Being swept out of my bed by three handsome paramedics would have been the most epic experience of my sixteen-year-old life … if I wasn’t consumed with the horrifying worry that I wasn’t wearing pajama pants. (Fortunately, I was.)

Allergic reaction aside, I’ve had a good life from the very beginning, filled with love from family and friends and relatively drama-free. But during a summer day in August of 2008, something happened to me that catapulted me into a completely different paradigm than I had been living previously. I liken it to the original Wizard of Oz, when sepia-toned Dorothy Gale opens the door of her farmhouse into the Technicolor world of Oz. My shift felt that dramatic.

Before I take you into this Technicolor world of mine, I need to give you a bit of context. I’m a wife and a mom. Raising two children with my husband prompts me to sometimes reflect on my BC (Before Children) life to help make sense of who I am now. Average or not, I have had defining moments that radically influenced who I am and shifted the trajectory I’ve been on. Healing from an eating disorder was a big one. Getting married to Arnold was another one. Having my first child, Aidan, and then my daughter, Aila, four and half years later, were two more. Defining moments, both positive and negative, are crucial components of our personal narratives. Perhaps we call them defining moments because they call us to rise to the occasion and be the person we will be proud of later. And even though defining moments differ wildly for everyone, they are an inevitable part of life, and they often mark the beginning of a distinct new phase. Those moments could be marriage, the death of a family member, bankruptcy, a new job or career change, a move to a new city, retirement, or graduating college, just to name a few. Everyone has moments, events, and situations that divide their life into meaningful chunks that add to their personal story of me.

I’m particularly interested in the meaningful events that divide one’s life into old version of me and new version of me.That moment for me was becoming a mother for the first time. Giving birth to Aidan and taking on the permanent role of mom gifted me entirely new eyes to perceive through. While there was certainly the wonderment and awe of welcoming Aidan into the world, it was no simple thing. No words can describe the jarring displacement of identity I felt the moment he was born.

Up until that point, I had always considered myself spiritual—not viewing spirituality through the lens of organized religion, but through my fascination with consciousness and the nature of existence. Starting at a young age, I was enchanted with the big conversations about who we are and why we’re here. I remember finding myself in a psychology section in the public library when I was in fifth grade, stumbling upon Being Peace, a book about mindfulness by Thich Nhat Hanh, the (now widely known) Vietnamese Zen Master.¹ I loved that book. I then found many other books that satiated my growing hunger for truth. I read books from Jiddu Krishnamurti, Wayne Dyer, Louise Hay, Deepak Chopra, and other texts, like A Course in Miracles and the Tao Te Ching.²

That hunger to know deeply about the human mind and spirit, which has persisted from then until now, I believe is the reason for the extraordinary occurrence that profoundly changed me in an instant. It happened in my closet on a summer day in August of 2008—a day that marks the division between an old version of me and a new version of me.

It was about 3:30 p.m. I had just arrived home from a one-hour meeting at the office where I worked in Silicon Valley. I normally hated going all the way down to the office for just one meeting, but this time I was too distracted to even notice the three and half hours spent in the car between San Francisco and Santa Clara and back again. On this day, I had requested a meeting with my beloved manager, Adrienne Whitmore, to discuss a life-altering decision that had taken me three months to make.

Adrienne was—and still is—one of my favorite people. She was the leader everyone wanted as their manager at Sun Microsystems. She was respected and adored by everyone who knew her; she was brilliant, kind, empowering, humble, and generous with her care and wisdom. Despite all this, I had requested the meeting to tell her I wouldn’t be coming back to work. Instead of feeling energized for this new transition, I felt gutted and confused. It felt like a breakup of the worst kind, like the It’s not you, it’s me sort of thing. My doubt was all-consuming, trying to convince me I was making a wrong decision. My heart, however, knew it was exactly the decision I needed to make.

I was approaching the end of my three-month maternity leave after the birth of my first child, Aidan. Up until the day Aidan was born, my work—my identity as a professional—was absolutely everything to me. I had poured my heart and soul into that company for almost ten years. I was twenty-nine years old, extremely proud of the career I had established, determined to become an executive by forty. But now as a mom, it was all different. Aidan’s birth threw me into a state of being absolutely nothing could have prepared me for. His birth, his presence in my life as a precious baby who I was now completely enamored with and responsible for, shook up everything I knew about myself. I had a runway of three months to figure out how to simultaneously be both mom and aspiring executive. I figured that three months would be enough time to bond with my child and successfully compartmentalize parenting and professional-ing. However, while those three months had been illuminating, I was far from the clarity I expected, especially given my familiarity with kids.

I’m the oldest daughter of three children—five and half years older than my sister, Kate, and eleven years older than my brother, Jake. My mom was devoted to us kids and made it a priority to be home with us while growing up. To supplement my dad’s income, she operated a daycare in our home. Our house was almost always in a state of loving chaos. There was never a day when we didn’t have a gaggle of kids under the care of my loving mom. To help her bring order to the chaos, I was usually by her side as her right hand, as she often called me. I eagerly and dutifully took it upon myself to organize games and events like obstacle courses, treasure hunts, and talent shows, as well as change diapers, feed babies, and read at story time. My adolescence was spent helping my mom out with all those kids, and I think that’s why caring for children feels like a part of my DNA. That’s why I had no doubt in my mind that I’d ease right into motherhood without a hitch.

The reality was a far cry from what I had imagined. I wasn’t eased into anything. It was more like being shot out of a cannon and ripped away from everything I thought I knew. Let me turn the table so you can see what I mean: up until that baby is born, your entire world revolves around you. You are the epicenter of an important, allconsuming, self-centered orbit. Not self-centered in a negative way, just an accurate descriptor for where your primary focus is. There’s no way to truly appreciate your self-centered reality because there is nothing to compare it to—you’re like a fish in water having no ability to conceive of the concept of water. Your self-centeredness is the only orbit you’ve known since birth. But the moment your baby comes, BOOM! The center of your orbit changes and is no longer around yourself but is now over there, around that baby. The epicenter of your universe and the lens through which everything is now perceived—the meaning of your entire life—is now all about the baby. This isn’t a bad thing; it’s a beautiful thing. And yet it’s acutely different, and massively