Something Bigger Than Yourself
How a Person Moves From Inherited Ways of Living to Consciously Chosen Meaning
Natalie Ola
3 min read · Originally Published 9.7.2025 · Updated 8.9.2026
Growing up I was sculpted by a culture and a kinship that traded personal joy for the preservation of ancient, heavy echoes. Rooted in a culture and a lineage of inherited shadows, I was taught to survive the winter rather than seek the sun.
In my pursuit of happiness I began searching for an understanding of what happiness actually is. The search led me to positive psychology.
What in the world is Positive Psychology?
In 1998, Martin Seligman, an American psychologist, educator, and author of self-help books became president of the American Psychological Association.
He chose positive psychology as a central theme for his term.
The core Ideas of positive psychology are embedded in shifts in focus and creation of a new goal – making psychology not just the study of weakness and damage, but also the study of strength and virtue; treatment is not just fixing what is broken, it is nurturing what’s best in ourselves.
The Three Pillars of Positive Psychology
Positive psychology can be understood as moving across three levels – experience, individual, and community.
Pillar I: Positive Experiences
Focus: Subjective
What it Involves: Positive Emotions and States
Pillar II: Positive Individual Traits
Focus: Individual
What it Involves: Strengths and Virtues
Pillar III: Positive Institution
Focus: Community
What it Involves: Environments That Support Flourishing
3 Ways to Live a Happy Life
One of the big realizations of that time was that there are three ways to have a good life; you can have a pleasant life, an engaged life, or a meaningful life.
⇀ Pleasant Life
Pleasant life is about moment to moment happiness. Hedonic happiness means emotional set points will dictate or lock you up for life.
Our childhood lays down a quiet foundation, an emotional anchor that determines how high our spirits can soar and where they will always return to rest.
Steven Kotler argues that consistent access to non-ordinary states of consciousness–or flow states–can raise my emotional set points – the baseline level of happiness established during my early childhood.
To live a fabulous, pleasant life I need access to the things I love. Actively doing what I love. Practicing my passions. For me, that means flow experience after flow experience after flow experience.
It also involves doing my homework and integrating the experiences. It’s about my discipline, responsibility, and self-awareness. You don’t just get to do a bunch of psychedelics and move up the chain; you have to integrate the experiences—to do the hard work on the back end.
⇀ Engaged Life
The next step is an engaged life.
This is a high-flow lifestyle. It moves fast.
To be truly engaged is to run with the current, swept up in a fast-paced choreography where action and breath become one.
⇀ Meaningful Life
The next step up is a meaningful life.
This is where those high flow activities are in service of something positive and bigger than yourself.
And this seems to be the pinnacle of happiness, the best that we can do.
Massively Transformative Purpose
A Massively Transformative Purpose is the ultimate, audacious north star guiding an individual.
Popularized by Salim Ismail in his foundational book Exponential Organizations and expanded upon by Peter Diamandis, an MTP is not a mission statement—it is a bold declaration of the radical, positive change an entity aims to bring to the world.
Ismail discovered that every single company achieving 10x growth over its competitors shared this exact trait.
Peter Diamandis wrote in his blog that a single individual driven by a purpose can change the world.
It is a purpose that drives you to wake up in the morning.
It is something that you literally repeat in your head while you eat, shower, and go to sleep until it becomes a part of you.
A Massive Transformative Purpose must be something that inspires and challenges you.
It must be aimed not just at the mind, but at your heart and soul as well. It has to be declared with confidence and utter honesty.
Above all, it has to be uniquely yours.
It has to drive you.
⇀ Massive Transformative Purpose gives you the power of pull.
Now this idea has completely transformed my life.
I have a little paragraph on the need to have a Massive Transformative Purpose in the affirmations I quietly recite while visualising my children with me.
I quietly hope it becomes embedded in their subconscious minds driving them forward towards their own realizations down the road.
I have built my little empire of raising my children around this idea. The moving forward was no longer aimless or driven by waves tossing me left and right.
Life became centered on meaning – moving towards the philosophical constant ahead: how I want us to live.
A constant ahead. A direction. A way of living.
It brought peace, it brought meaning.
I can honestly say, I found my happiness.
I’ve worked to reinforce it.
And life has become meaningful.
References:
Steven Kotler – Mapping Cloud Nine: Neuroscience, Flow, and the Upper Possibility Space of Human Experience (Audiobook, 2022)
Salim Ismail – Exponential Organizations: Why New Organizations Ten Times Better, Faster, Cheaper Than Yours (and What to Do About it)
Peter Diamandis – Discovering Your Massively Transformative Purpose (2017)