Find Your Purpose & Live With Greater Meaning | Betsy Wills & Alex Ellison

**Adam Taggart** (0:06)
Welcome to Thoughtful Money. I'm its founder and your host, Adam Taggart. Happy 2025, everyone. As we begin a new year, I thought it appropriate to continue Thoughtful Money's ongoing commitment to highlighting the principal components of true wealth, of which money is simply a means, not the end in itself. Now research tells us that true wealth is primarily a function of quality relationships, purpose and health. And today, we're gonna drill down deep into the purpose part of that equation. How can we live with greater meaning? And how do we even identify what our purpose is? Now there's actually an empirical process for answering these important questions, and we're fortunate to be able to learn about it today from Betsy Wills and Alex Ellison, co-authors of the book, Your Hidden Genius, the science-based strategy to uncovering and harnessing your innate talents. And for those looking to get started living with greater purpose, there are exciting testing services now available, based on the aptitudes research of Johnson O'Connor, whom long-time listeners have heard me rave about in this channel. That can help accelerate your progress here in 2025 I'm really looking forward to this discussion, and I think you're really going to enjoy it. Betsy and Alex, thanks so much for joining us today.

**Betsy Wills** (1:20)
Great to be here.

**Adam Taggart** (1:23)
All right. Well, look, ladies, thanks so much for joining me. As viewers of this channel know, this is a topic that's really near and dear to my heart. I even wrote an embarrassingly thin book years ago called Finding Your Way to Your Authentic Career. I wrote it in part by following part of the tenets that you guys talk about both in your book and the work that you guys have been involved in in general. And I do think in many ways that there's sort of a crisis of meaning in society today. And maybe we can get into that a little bit. But I'll just say from my discussions back when I was writing that book, the research shows something like 70 plus percent of people, maybe even more, if given the chance would be choosing to do something different for a living than what they're doing today. You go to a cocktail party, you can ask a surprisingly small number of questions of somebody who you've just met before you get to the point where they say, Jesus, I'd much rather be doing something different than what I'm doing right now. And a large part of that, I think, due to failures of our educational system and whatnot, we can talk about that if there's time. But I want to sort of start getting to the meat of things here. So I talked about in the intro, true wealth, its relationships, its purpose, and its health. Purpose is a really tricky one for people because in a lot of ways, people, sure, think it sounds great. Yeah, I'd love to be living my purpose. I just don't know what it is, right? So I mentioned this fellow, Johnson O'Connor, the research work that he did that kind of helped people learn about their purposes was all based on aptitudes. So why don't we start here?
What is the process of finding out what your purpose is? And these things called aptitudes, what are they? And Betsy, you and I have known each other for a good while now. Let me let you start the conversation here and then Alex will bring you in.

**Betsy Wills** (3:24)
Well, so Adam, to most people, this is a complete mystery and the word aptitude has been so conflated by the SAT or personality assessments or interest assessments, all the different things that we think we take. But it boils down to this. Aptitudes are actually our innate abilities that we're born with. Think of it as your brain's hardwiring.
It's not a skill that you learn, it's kind of the seed of your skill. And most people don't even realize that these can be measured. So Johnson O'Connor back in the 1920s sort of started tinkering around with this when he was working at GE. And they were literally trying to figure out, why is it that some people can put the widget on the, whatever you call it, the conveyor belt faster than other people? And so they started to look at that. Like some people just have this talent with their hands. And this kind of grew and grew until they realized there were over 52 different aptitudes that they could measure. And the reason most people don't realize this is because heretofore, it's been extremely expensive to get them measured. You know, you went to Johnson O'Connor and, you know, I think it's what $700, which is fantastic. And nothing beats going to a one on one session. But today, fortunately, this kind of assessments can be accessed much, much for much, much less money. And so it's kind of a growing trend that people are understanding. And when you understand what your innate abilities are, or these seeds of your skills, and I'm talking about things like your spatial ability, or inductive reasoning, or some people's musical talents, all these things can be measured and give us a much clearer view of where we can learn fastest and be much more satisfied in our jobs, which really comes down to purpose.