Do you ever feel you’re living by obligation instead of inspiration, doing what’s expected rather than what lights you up? You’re not alone. So many of us spend years chasing a hand-me-down definition of success, only to wonder if we’ve been climbing the wrong mountain.
Light Up offers a different path: a step-by-step way to design your life around what truly inspires you. When you find your vision, clarity, and courage, you gain the power to choose wisely. You reject what doesn’t serve you and create the meaningful life you long for.
And guess what? You have a lot more fun along the way!
Being lit up isn’t reserved for a lucky few. Inspiration isn’t a gift of birth. It’s a practice of design. Because if you don’t design your life, somebody else will do it for you.
It really is possible to find, or rediscover, your purpose and achieve worldly success that’s aligned with your essence and your values. As Matt’s friend and teacher Rabbi Arik Wolf puts it, the goal here is to live your “soul mission.”
It takes time to uncover what that mission might be. The first four Essentials of True Wealth—Show Up, Wake Up, Grow Up, and Clean Up—are devoted to helping you do just that. They’re crafted to help you to establish a wise, compassionate, and balanced outlook more reflective of your true nature. If we don’t take the time to access these deeper, more authentic parts of ourselves, we run the risk of chasing old, recycled definitions of success that are not necessarily going to make us happy. You don’t want to find yourself on the wrong mountain, nor do you need to.
Being lit up is not just about talent or opportunity, it’s an intentional process: identifying what matters most, aligning choices to it, and committing to a life of purpose.
The good news? This process can be learned. Light Up provides tools to help you design, not drift into, your best life.
Here’s how it works: The Light Up chapter in our book The Right Mountain (coming 2026) is packed with practices to spark inspiration. One practice that really helps is to discover your Ikigai:
Reflect on the Japanese concept of your “reason for being”:
Where these overlap, you find Ikigai.
For this vision-clarifying exercise, begin by writing down everything that comes to mind in each of these four categories. You could give yourself an hour, a day, a week, or more per area. You can also use a session with your mentor, coach, or friend to brainstorm ideas.
Reflect on your answers as you go. Are they bold statements that anyone who knows you could guess? Or have you written something that surprises even you? What do your answers reveal about how much you’re already living your Ikigai, or how far away you are from the life you long to live? If you’re living your dream already, or feel close to it, celebrate that. If your dream is only lightly sketched on the page, that’s fine, too. Circle words that feel important. You can use them as steppingstones on the path toward your Ikigai
Notice the energy these exercises generate. That unmistakable spark—that’s you being lit up.
“Being lit up is not about doing more—it’s about aligning with what matters most. Once you find your Heart’s Core, you become powerful, clear, and free to create the life you long for.” — Matt Ludmer
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