Part Ten — Living Your Purpose: Finding Your Dharma

Find your dharma, and your work stops feeling like work.

Once you stop living for other people's approval, a bigger question opens up: what am I actually here to do? I think this is one of the most important questions a person can sit with, and I believe everyone has an answer waiting inside them.

The teacher who says this best, to me, is Jay Shetty, and he uses an old word from the monks: dharma. Hard to translate, but the simplest way to put it is your true calling — the thing you are meant to do with your life.

Shetty gives a beautifully simple formula for finding it. Your dharma sits where three things meet (Jay Shetty, Think Like a Monk):

What you love — your passion, the thing you would do even if no one paid you.
What you are good at — your natural talent and skill.
What the world needs — how that gift can actually serve other people.

Where those three overlap, you find work that does not feel like work. You find purpose. As Shetty puts it, dharma = passion + expertise + usefulness.

I did not plan poker. I stumbled into it. As a kid I was good at math and loved to problem-solve — I'd play chess against myself, both sides, just for the joy of it. And I loved to risk, to swing high. For years those felt like random traits. Then I found poker, and every one of them clicked at once. I didn't choose it. I discovered the thing I was already built for. That's dharma.

But dharma can move. After my awakening, the ground shifted. Same gifts — the love of a hard problem, the nerve to bet big — but they found a higher table. My game now isn't winning pots. It's spreading this wisdom as far as it will go. So if your purpose moves on you one day, don't panic. It's not a betrayal. It's life dealing you a bigger hand.

Here is why this matters so much, and why I put it right after the work on authenticity and self-worth. A job can change a hundred times in a life. Dharma does not. It is not your title or your salary — it is your inner compass. Many people climb the whole ladder of success only to find it was leaning against the wrong wall. They were chasing someone else's dream the entire time. Dharma is how you make sure the ladder is yours.

Notice how this ties back to everything else in this book. Finding your purpose is not about grabbing something for yourself out of fear of being nobody. It is the opposite. It is discovering the gift you already carry and giving it away. That is why the monks at Jay Shetty's ashram did not ask each other "How was work today?" They asked, "Have you served today?"

The practice is simple, and you can start this week:

Notice what you lose track of time doing. That is a clue to your passion.
Ask the people who know you what you are naturally good at. We are often blind to our own gifts.
Look for the overlap with a real need. Where does your gift solve a problem someone actually has?
Then point your life at that overlap — not all at once, but a little more each year.

You were not born to copy someone else's life. You were born with a gift that is yours alone — and the world has a need shaped exactly like it. Find your dharma, and your work stops feeling like work. It becomes the truest thing you do.