Welcome to the podcast where we explore unlocking your life’s purpose and maximizing potential. Join me, Jonathan Doyle, as we delve into the concept of teleology and strategies to avoid regret while striving towards your fullest potential. From Tom Brady’s lessons to the power of incremental improvement, let’s embark on this transformative journey together.
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Unleashing Your Life Purpose: Understanding Teleology and Maximizing Potential
Hey there, my friend, Jonathan Doyle with you once again, welcome to the daily podcast. It is my pleasure to be your host for these next few minutes. As together, we try, and discover how we might manifest in the world, the extraordinary potential, which we have.
In a couple of weeks, I’m heading down to Tasmania to do a week-long speaking tour where one of the things I’m going to be talking about is teleology. Teleology comes from really classical Greece. It’s this idea that every living thing has a telos. Which is meant to become something that within every living organism is a direction, a destiny, a purpose, a telos. And teleology is the study of how we go about realizing the deepest, inbuilt purpose of who we are.
I’ll give you an example, a tree, the telos of a tree is to grow. It’s to become larger or to become healthier or to fully realize and become all the tree that it could possibly become. Now the environment’s going to affect that, weather, rain, all that sort of stuff. But deep inside the DNA, the cells of that organism is like a software code, right? It’s like this telos, this ability to become what it’s supposed to become. And of course, for us as humans, we’ve got something similar.
So we can talk about that today. That’s a light and airy start. Isn’t it? Before we get in there. Please make sure you subscribe and hit the subscribe button to this podcast makes a huge difference. If you like what you hear, please send it to family and friends. And of course you can find everything else you need to know about me on the website: jonathandoyle.co. And if you’re on Instagram, you can find me @jdoylespeaks one word at jdoylespeaks, come and say hi on Instagram. Let’s get into it.
Avoiding Regret: Manifesting Your Telos Through Maximum Effort
You and I, my friend, need to talk about maximizing what you’ve got. If you want to reach this, telos, if you want to manifest over time, what you fully are. Then what we need to do is figure out what we’re supposed to do with what we’ve got. You don’t want to get to the end of your life and be one of those people who deals with regret.
I remember years ago, listening to a Gary Vaynerchuk podcast where he talked about visiting a nursing home once. That is the ubiquitous, negative experience of a significant number of older people in nursing homes. Now there’s some outliers that have had a great life, they’re happy, they’re still alive and contributing and doing interesting things. But he said that many people really struggle at the end of their life with regret.
All the things they could have done, but didn’t the relationships that they didn’t fix or heal or seek forgiveness in. We don’t want to get to the end of this journey and deal with regret. And the way we avoid that it’s by trying to manifest this telos.
Tom Brady's Lesson: Doing the Best with What You've Got
So we’re going through teleology. We’re going to talk about it and the way I want to explain it to you is really simple idea. I want to put in your head this day that all you really need to do is do all you can with what you’ve got.
Now, let me explain this to you. I’ve been watching a documentary series called The Dynasty. It’s about the American football player, Tom Brady, or my American listeners of course would know who the goat is. It’s also about the coach of the New England Patriots, Bill Belichick. A really distinct documentary because Brady is a real outlier, right? He’s a guy that basically has just broken every record. I’m sitting there watching him last night. I’m looking at him and I’m thinking, Tom, he’s in his forties, late forties now. But the guy looks amazing and he’s still a phenomenal athlete. I’m sitting there thinking that he just got handed this genetic lottery. Then a whole bunch of other experiences that paved the way for him to do what he had to do.
I’m sitting there watching it, thinking to myself, that’s interesting and that’s important. But what’s even more important is the message behind it. The essential lesson of his life, which is, yes, he got a few advantages. No one did the work for him.
Unleashing Personal Potential in Life
There’s an old saying for, I think from the US Navy seals, no one can do your pushups for you, right? It doesn’t matter how rich you are, if you need to do push ups, you can pay someone else to do them, but you ain’t getting the benefit. So sooner or later, no matter how gifted or talented or not we might feel about ourselves, eventually the invitation is to do what we have with what we’ve got. Tom Brady has simply done the best that he could reasonably do with what he’s been handed.
I’m in the gym today and I’m about 5’7, 5’8, 50 years old. And I’ve kept really fit. I’m sitting in the gym today and I’m in good shape and I’m thinking, I ain’t never going to be Tom Brady. I’m just never going to be 6’4 and just with those genetics. It’s not happening. I had this sort of moment of revelation in the gym where I thought, you know what? That’s not my telos. My telos is not to become Tom Brady. My telos is to become me. I’m thinking to myself, all I have to do in this particular training session is do the best I can with what I’ve got.
Maximizing Life's Purpose: Overcoming Challenges and Transcending Suffering
I want to talk about you now, we want to extrapolate this lesson to your life, which is, no matter what state you’re in, in what age you are, no matter what opportunities or not you have. The one thing that it tells all of us on this podcast today, is that it would be difficult for any of us to find a justification for not doing the best we can with what we’ve got.
You could list all sorts of criteria. You could say I had a traumatic childhood and I had this and I had that. But we have to acknowledge that there are people that have come from those sorts of backgrounds and yet have extraordinary lives. So it is possible to transcend our suffering. It is possible to overcome a difficult start in life.
Your Responsibility for Self-Improvement: Embracing Individuality and Maximizing Potential
I just want to put this reflective idea in your life today, that all you need to do is the best you can with what you’ve got. So whatever is appropriate for your age, whatever you can reasonably do. I think you should do. I think there is a responsibility that we all carry to try and do that. And as we do that, the world does become a slightly better place.
Can you imagine a world where like everybody, there’s just a billion people committed. Every one of the 8 billion people. People that were capable of doing this would begin to do it. Imagine the creativity, the energy, the compassion, the courage that would get released.
If everybody woke up tomorrow and just went, You know what I got to do today? The best I can with what I’ve got. It says today I’m going to work hard for a few hours and then I’ve organized a lunch date with my bride of 23 years. Don’t wanna get that wrong. I’m going to try and make sure that’s a great experience for us. And then I’m going to play golf with my 14 year old son in the afternoon.
Each of those things without being obsessive about it, I’m just going to try and show up and do the best that I can today, with the skills, the abilities, the mindsets that I’ve got at this particular point, try and improve them. Try and make them a little bit better tomorrow.
A Formula for Success: The Science of Improvement
A final thought in that documentary, Dynasty, there were some experts who were reflecting on what made the New England Patriots coach, Bill Belichick, so successful. Was it a brilliant tactical ability? Was it hyper intelligence? And he’s a smart guy and he’s got tactical skills. But they said that when he was really fascinated by what really drove him, it wasn’t talent, it wasn’t even hard work, it was improvement.
He was fascinated by the science of improvement. All he wanted from his organization, from his players, from his other coaches was that people were committed to the path of improvement. Because if you keep improving, things get better for you. They just do over time. If you just keep getting a little bit better over time each day, just marginally you stack those up and you get results.
So many people get frustrated in life because they haven’t won the lottery and they wanted to lose some weight or change their career. They tried some small action and it didn’t work. And they give up and then they get resentful and bitter and critical, and we don’t want to be that person. What we need to do is incremental improvement. Moving towards our telos.
The point, my friend, is to ask you the question, “Are you realistically doing all you can with what you’ve been given?”
All right, that’s it for today. Please make sure you subscribe. Come and say hi. And the website, jonathandoyle.co, share this with some people. Come and say hi on Instagram at @jdoylespeaks. My name is Jonathan Doyle. You and I are going to talk again tomorrow.
