With Purpose Success, part 36

I am a terrific car salesman who values giving people a fair shake and matching them with a car and a loan that they can afford and which fits their needs. In my life I have seen colleagues take advantage of unsophisticated, low-income buyers by selling them junk vehicles and placing them in high-interest loans to maximize their own income. I will start or join a nonprofit that evaluates the purchase price of a used car on behalf of the working poor and arranges affordable, low-interest car loans for them. 

I am a loving at-home mother with deep concerns about humankind's ability to manage the planet. I see that my children are learning almost nothing in school about the tenuous balance between human activity and the natural world and believe that only through education can we secure our long-term future. I will encourage my school system to integrate sustainable-living lessons into their core curriculums and use that experience to develop a program that can be adopted easily by schools everywhere. 

By the way, these are real vision statements that have been put into practice by real people and with spectacular results. You'll meet Robert 

Chambers and Katie Ginsberg in the next few pages. Like their vision statements, yours should resonate with your core desires and fill you with excitement. If you pursue your honest-to-goodness passion you can find significance in your life that may or may not include a paycheck but will certainly fill you with purpose-and you just may have a blast in the process. 

I'll close this chapter with another quote, this one from a person who knows a thing or two about material success. Financier George Roberts, part of the Wall Street powerhouse Kohlberg, Kravis & Roberts, has an estimated net worth of $2.5 billion. Says Roberts: "I'm often asked by people, especially younger people, 'What do you have to do to be successful?' 

And I assume they're asking not what you have to do to make money, but what do you have to do to be a successful individual. You've got to work hard, set goals, be prepared to be disappointed, keep a sense of humor, keep a perspective of what's really important, and lastly, help others that are less strong and less fortunate than yourself, because you will get back many, many, many fold what you have done for yourself." 

Dreams and Goals Aren't for Kids-They're for the Kid at Heart 

Just because I'm old doesn't mean I don't have dreams.

-John Glenn 

The comic Billy Crystal made us laugh years ago when, on Saturday Night Live and in other appearances, he would impersonate the actor 

Fernando Lamas as a talk-show host interviewing celebrities. "Dahling, yooouuuu look mahvelous," he would gush, and then famously conclude that "you know, dahling, it's better to look good than to feel good." Crystal's exquisite timing, his inflections, and his expressions made the lines hilarious. But there was a real joke buried in there too; it is, of course, much better to feel good than to look good. At some level, we all know that or Crystal's laugh lines would have bombed.