Jane Goodall, Robert Redford, and the Courage to Live Your Vision
Nov 28, 2025
This year we lost two of the greats…
Robert Redford and Jane Goodall.
(I know, right. What a dream…)
Now, something you may not know about Robert, is that his greatest passion was, in fact, art.
So much so that as a 19 year old he aspired to be a painter, studied at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, and sold sidewall sketches for pocket cash. (At least until his tutor crushed his ambition, and he sloped back to the U.S, in his words “too immature” to push through and follow his dream.)
And Jane?
Well, when she entered the forest of Gombe back in 1960, the world knew nothing meaningful about chimpanzees, much less about their relationship to humans. But something told Jane that there was more, and she was willing to watch and wait until she’d found out what that was.
(And Jane had patience: as a little girl she once hid in a chicken coop for four hours to see a hen lay an egg.)
Now, this post isn’t long enough to do justice to Jane or Robert, but in their own way, both inspire me in equal measure.
Why? Because both lived beyond culture, beyond society, and beyond the conventional path set out for them. Both searched within to discover what really lit them up, what matters to them.
In short, both chose to live their vision.
You see, all too often we can become consumed by goals and ambition. But goals are just a mental scaffold of what life is supposed to look like, and if you’re not careful you can ramrod reality in a pursuit to make one thing happen.
But having a vision is different. It allows you to be shaped by life's experiences, to be open to the journey, and learn what the future, and the universe, holds for you.
“You go along with your life, you have ideas or visions, they come to you and you try to fulfill them but you don't necessarily have a big context for it. It's an evolutionary thing… one thing leads to another until finally you have a way station, where two or three things come together.
“So directing evolved to another place, which meant for me incorporating two things that I never dreamed would happen: one thing I thought I'd lost which was art… I’d thought I had to lose something in order to be something else. So when the time came to direct, it was my own doing. I wanted to direct, I had this instinct… I realized that the art and the acting came together.”
- Robert Redford
You see, if Redford hadn’t been open to the journey, open to life’s experiences, he never would have given us stories about grief or corruption. He never would have become an activist, or founded Sundance. And he never would have become, in his own way, a true artist.
The same could be said for Jane. Had she ignored her curiosity, her unorthodox way of doing things, we might still be decades behind, in the dark, lacking understanding of the natural world.
And neither would have realized their vision, or what the universe actually held for them.
“A sense of calm came over me. More and more often I found myself thinking, This is where I belong. This is what I came into this world to do.”
- Jane Goodall
So, let me turn the spotlight on you.
What did you come into this world to do?
What’s your vision?
Not your “goal.” Not what you’ve been told you “should” want.
Your vision.
And are you living it?
Or are you caught up in something else: squeezing life into a box, pursuing the arbitrary, ignoring the real difference you want to make in the world?
It takes courage to stand up and uncover your vision. But there is a way. And I’d love to help you do it.
Inside my 1:1 program, Deepen and Align, we’ll work together to uncover your vision, and turn it into tangible, doable, meaningful action -- so you can finally start to live it.
So that no matter where you are now, what has come before, or how long it takes, you can, like Jane and Robert, find fulfillment, and that sense of, “yes, this is what I came into this world to do.”
And yes, like Jane and Robert, one day look back on a life well lived.
Go here to find all the details.
Love and blessings,
Naomi
