With Purpose Success, part 7

I decided rather quickly to donate all future earnings from the book to help rebuild New Orleans. This was no PR stunt. I didn't talk about it with anyone but my family. I wanted my teenage daughter and son to know that I stood for something bigger than a nice house near the San
Francisco Bay with a pool and a view. I wanted them to measure me not by what I said and wrote, but by what I did. So I went to an acquaintance of mine, Jonathan Reckford, the executive director of Habitat for Humanity.
Habitat is a fabulous organization that builds shelter for the needy across the globe, and I intended to make this group my primary beneficiary.
After telling Reckford about my financial pledge, he shared with me a simple, yet eye-popping observation: "Ken, I see and hear a lot of people your age [late fifties] going through what you're going through." "What do you mean?" I asked. "You know, you've got that gnawing feeling." "What gnawing feeling?" "You're trying to make the transition-from success to significance."
There was a long pause. I've enjoyed my accomplishments in my life.
I haven't done everything I've dreamed of. But I've done a lot. I have an enormous amount to be thankful for, and at this stage in my life it's beginning to matter less to me how much more money I make or how influential I am in my field. What's becoming far more interesting to me is finding fun, interesting, helpful, and personally rewarding ways to give something back. Sometimes you hear a clever phrase and it sticks with you for a while, and then dissipates. But "success to significance" has stayed with me as a powerful, lasting call to action.
I immediately began to insert this idea about what people might do with the second half of their lives into my speeches around the world and noticed a common response: people would cock their head, raise their eyebrows, and smile ever so slightly-as if a light in their brain just went on. When you speak to 10,000 people a month, as I usually do, and a line in your speech bombs-you know it. This line definitely wasn't bombing; it was striking a nerve. This idea went right through people's barriers, their business at hand, their BlackBerrys, their newspapers, their worries and hassles. It seemed to stir them.
When people approach me after my presentations I like to ask them what part interested them most. These days, nearly everyone says something along these lines: "You know, that concept of going from success to significance rocked my world." Well-just a few more words on this story-let me tell you what further rocked my world:
I've never been part of a more impressive speaking roster than one at a private conference titled "Imagining the Future," which was held at
Pebble Beach in 2006 for the very top executives at media conglomerate News Corp. I was one of four keynote speakers. The others were Bill