Pivot Points: Living a Purpose Oriented Life

By Doug Colvard

Do you ever seek to understand why you do the things you do? Are you looking to inject purpose into your life?

In Pivot Points: Living a Purpose Oriented Life

• Language: English
• Publisher: New Degree Press
• Release date: Sep 1, 2022
• ISBN: 9798885046664

Doug Colvard

Doug Colvard, J.D., is a venture capital lawyer by trade but a seeker by heart. Growing up in the mountains of North Carolina, he grew accustomed to getting lost in the beauty of the woods and has consistently sought to integrate his love of nature with his practice in the board room. His current work, Pivot Points, is a culmination of life stories that seeks to understand, contextualize and appreciate those beautiful opportunities presented to each of us in life.When he is not writing or advising clients, Doug can often be found enjoying long runs, bike rides and games with his family, where they reside at the outskirts of Raleigh, NC.

Book preview

Introduction

To be a good human being is to have a kind of openness to the world, an ability to trust uncertain things beyond your own control, that can lead you to be shattered.

–Martha Nussbaum

* * *

The other day, when my wife was out grocery shopping, something inspired me to do a nice gesture before her return. I was determined to perform my good husbandly duties and help around the house by straightening up. I started with the laundry before moving on to vacuuming and wiping down the furniture. When I got to our bedroom door, I stopped at the entrance for a brief second to plan out my attack.

Hmm, I think I’ll start with the furniture first, I muttered out loud while my prissy golden retriever, watching me in the hallway, stared at me like some crazy person—especially since it was only me and the dog in the house.

As I made my way over to my dresser, I noticed my blown glass bear figurine standing on top astutely at attention in his rightful spot. My glass bear was hollow inside and had a slit on the top where I used to stuff him with the treasures of my youth: my first piggy bank, in fact. If you looked inside, you would see a collection of spare change, some crumpled up dollar bills, and even a few worthless coins I collected from the largely extinct arcades from my youth.

I picked up the bear, dusted underneath, and placed him back on the dresser. Before I set him back down, though, I noticed dozens of little cracks flowing through him like tiny blood vessels.

That’s odd, I thought before placing my bear back down.

I gave him no more attention while I continued the rest of my cleaning duties. I finished up in the bedroom and started on down the hallway. I was about to start cleaning up my office when crash!

The sound turned my head and pulled my eyes back toward the bedroom.

Koda! by impulse, I yelled out my golden retriever’s name as her curiosity and lack of gracefulness normally meant she was the culprit of all things broken in our house. But as I started back toward the bedroom, I could see her lying down in the same spot in the hallway. She picked her head up for long enough to glare at me with the whites of her eyes before she laid back down, brushing off my outburst.

As I reentered the bedroom, I saw it: fate had finally caught up with that poor little bear. His life on this earth as a glass piggy bank was finally over. Shattered into thousands of tiny pieces of glass across my bedroom floor, no amount of glue in the world would have saved him. My glass bear was gone.

Now, I know what you might be thinking: Things break all the time. So what? Anyone who has lived with a significant other, whether that’s a tiny human, adult, or furry friend, knows things just find a way of breaking. Shirts are ripped, lamps are tipped over, and living room couches are permanently indented from hundred-pound labs who use them as their personal beds during the day when their owners are gone. This glass bear was not novel. He was mundane. But regardless of how ordinary he may have appeared, he was particularly special to me. My grandmother had given him to me as a Christmas present when I was six years old. He was a nostalgic image of my childhood.

When my glass bear shattered on the floor, it brought me back to three decades of memories. That bear traveled with me through a dozen or so moves across the country throughout every season of my youth and early adulthood. He was thrown, tossed, stepped on, used as a bowling ball, and hit with more flying objects than I care to count. He was fortunate to have lasted as long as he did.

Looking down at the glass bear that once was that day, I heard the words of my grandmother many moons ago jump into my consciousness.

Remember, Dougie, as she so affectionately called me, a penny saved is a penny earned!

Despite her relatively good fortune in life, I guess my grandmother could not escape her Depression-era roots growing up on a farm in southern Illinois. She always looked for opportunities to teach the next generation how to save. A trait that, for better or for worse, I inherited from her. I recalled fond memories of my grandmother that day—the woman she was, the kind heart she showed toward me, as well as the lessons she was willing to share with me about life. This tragic event, the loss of my glass bear, was not all bad though.

As I crouched down and slowly began picking up each little shard of glass so they did not land in a stray paw, human, or animal, a thought slapped me in the face. It was a real ah ha moment.

* * *

Pivot Points, those moments in time that compel us to think about the direction of our life, tend to creep up on us when we least expect them.

* * *

Now, Pivot Poixnts are not limited merely to those major life events: birth, graduation, marriage, and death. Sure, they can be those things, but even the most inconspicuous moments, say a glass bear breaking, can take you back to a specific memory or thought that asks you the simple question:

What am I doing with my life and is it fulfilling my purpose?

Sometimes, I feel like that glass bear. Outsiders looking from a distance might judge me as a mediocre success. I am not some famous movie star, rising politician, groundbreaking scientist, or startup guru. In many ways, I’m the story of the successful middle class. I’m clean-cut, educated, have a nine-to-five job, house with a mortgage, and beautiful family I like to take on a trip to the beach once or twice a year. I am what economists would call a law-abiding, tax-paying citizen.

The glass bear was never destined to be idolized as some famous piece of art in a gallery and neither was I. But I appeared just as solidly crafted as that bear who withstood the test of time—for thirty years at least.

Take away the collection of coins I stuffed him with, and you would notice my bear was just a thick piece of hollow glass. I have a lot of junk I have stuffed into my life, some valuable and some about as worthless as those arcade tokens that spent way too much time making their home in that glass bear.

A void creeps into my being, which makes me question every life decision and seek to fill it with junk. I have filled my life with more hobbies than I care to count, displayed my awards for others to see, spoken on my success at conferences, and attended fundraisers with the elite. I have had a relatively easy time filling up my days and outside appearance of worth, but I have never done a really good job at filling the emptiness inside of me.

Looking closely enough will expose dozens of tiny cracks in my outer shell, weathered from the years of small, inconspicuous, minor lapses of judgment. Those cracks are just as catastrophic as those tiny fractures I saw on my bear right before his demise.

A small fib over here, a bad habit over there, none of which have been detrimental individually. Over time, though, aggregated together, they have eroded my core values. I have skipped out on work to go play golf and lied to friends about being sick in order to stay in and watch television. The problem is it only takes one slight move and poof—that fragile, molded figurine my family, teachers, and mentors spent so much effort crafting turns into a pile of broken glass.

My glass bear breaking that day was a Pivot Point for me. As I cleaned up my mess, I could not help but repeat the words over and over in my head, What am I doing with my life? The book you are now reading is the result of that question.

Pivot Points was born out of the realization that we all have those moments in life where we are at a juncture. That crossroad where we are compelled to make a decision, sometimes for the better and other times in ways we would like to forget. Regardless, these pivotal experiences reveal the emptiness we feel inside our souls and the longing we have to live a life filled with purpose and meaning. In our post-modern, existential world, the ability to filter through the fluff and get to our core purpose is becoming more and more difficult.

As a millennial, I am all too aware we are the seeking generation. We seek to understand why we do the things we do and whether we should continue the status quo. The only thing that makes us different from prior generations, though, is we are also the distracted generation.

We can never be in the moment. We are showered with a parade of information overload. We are on our phones when at dinner, shop online while participating on a Zoom call, or simultaneously text five groups of friends while feeding a toddler. Corporate America has begun to pick up on this realization as well. Discounting religion and medicine, the self-help industry is expected by some experts to grow to nearly $13 billion in the next few years and will likely far surpass this estimate. That is a lot of cash to throw at finding your purpose.

Call me pessimist (or maybe even a hypocrite for writing this book) but I do not think the self-help industry is going to fix the problem. Finding your authentic self and setting a course toward your destined purpose in life is a personal endeavor. It is wholly your own and for no one else to steal, corrupt, coerce, or exploit. Doing so, however, requires you to take an introspective look at your own life—your values, your goals, your failures, and your successes. You must wrestle with your own demons. And you must spot the lessons you may have failed to pick up on when they were handed to you.

This book is an exposé on several defining Pivot Points that have influenced the way I live and what I value. It reveals some chapters from my own life, exposes my thought processes in the moment, and retrospectively provides a window into what I decided to do about those Pivot Points.

My hope is by sharing my own experiences, you can better understand your own. Hopefully, you will be able to spot those Pivot Points in your life, regardless of how trivial they may appear to the outside world, assess their meaning for you, and use those lessons to put yourself on the track to fulfilling your purpose.

After all, life is a collection of stories, isn’t it?

Chapter 1

Opportunity

There’s a lot of difference between listening and hearing.

–G.K. Chesterton

* * *

Smell might be the most peculiar of all the senses. It evokes mystical properties. When we smell, our tastes become bolder, our vision becomes clearer, and our hearing becomes sharper. What is most unusual about this sense, though, is its ability to instantly rewind time. From a single whiff, I can be taken back to a particular moment to relive those images pressed in my mind years ago as vividly as the day they were first formed.

Whenever I smell the sharp scent of decaying fall foliage, I am taken back to the southern woods of Appalachia. If I close my eyes, I see as vividly as when I was a teen a sprawling campus of stone-lined halls, toad-croaked ponds, crisp mountain creeks, valley pastures, and imperfectly groomed