Whether you were created or coded, you were put here to play a role

Think about everything that had to happen for you to be reading this. The town you grew up in. The teacher who took an interest, or didn’t. The job you took because the other offer fell through. The manager who gave you the territory nobody else wanted. How much of that was accident, and how much of it was design?

I was reading a devotional this morning and it asked a question that stopped me cold. If you truly believed God designed you for a specific purpose, how would you behave differently? What would you attempt? Which problems would you go after?

Then I flipped it.

Forget God for a second. Say none of this is real. Say it is a simulation, and you were coded. Loaded in with specific attributes, dropped into a specific environment, with a specific set of problems placed around you. A character with a role to play.

The answer did not change.

Two worldviews that cannot both be true, and they hand you the same instruction. You are not here by accident. Whether you were created or coded, you were put here to play a role.

Reading the role

The useful part is that both versions give you the same three clues, and you already hold all of them.

Your attributes. The things you are unusually good at, and the things you cannot stop doing even when nobody is paying you to do them. I cannot walk past a badly qualified deal. Twenty years in sales and I still want to ask who the Economic Buyer is at a dinner party.

Your environment. Where you were placed, who is around you, and what you can see from where you stand that other people cannot. The industry you know from the inside. The team you happen to lead. The city you happen to live in.

Your problems. The specific things that are broken in your line of sight. Nobody put them there for someone else to fix. They are in front of you.

Where those three overlap is the role. Attributes you did not choose, an environment you did not pick, and problems you keep bumping into. The overlap is rarely mysterious. If you are honest, you can name it in a sentence, and you have been able to for years.

I wrote MEDDICC because the book I needed did not exist. I had the attribute, which was having learnt MEDDICC the hard way across several companies. I had the environment, which was teams of Sellers who had been told to use MEDDICC and given nothing to read. I had the problem in my lap every Monday. I did not get a sign. I got a problem and a laptop. That book has now sold over 100,000 copies, and the only decision that mattered was accepting that it was mine to write.

What you are waiting for

The devotional question is the one that bites. If you believed you were here on purpose, what would you attempt?

People answer that question in private and then carry on exactly as before. They are waiting for a sign, or permission, or a version of themselves that feels ready. The Seller who knows the Champion is not real but waits for someone else to call it. The founder with the idea written down in 2019. The person who knows exactly what they should be doing right now and has built a diary that makes sure they never get to it.

You do not need another sign. You do not need permission. However you got here, you got here on purpose, and the role is sitting in the overlap of three things you already have.

So play it.

What is the role you have known about for years, and what have you been waiting for before you play it?