Soul and the Spark Myth | Nathan Hooper
Soul and the Spark Myth: Why Your Purpose Isn’t What You Think
You’ve been chasing the wrong thing.
That’s the hard truth buried inside Pixar’s Soul—and it’s the truth most of us don’t want to hear. We spend our lives convinced that fulfillment lives at the finish line: the promotion, the gig, the championship, the perfect relationship. We’ll be happy when. We’ll finally feel whole after. But what if that entire framework is backwards?
Soul doesn’t just tell a beautiful story about a jazz musician who dies before his big break. It dismantles the whole idea of what a spark actually is—and in doing that, it holds up a mirror to how we’re living right now.
The Spark Isn’t Your Purpose—It’s Permission to Start Living
Joe Gardner spends his entire life waiting. He’s a band teacher, single, living alone, convinced his real life hasn’t started yet. Then he gets the call: a gig with a famous jazz musician. Finally. After all these years of waiting, his moment has arrived.
He dies the same day.
And in that moment—falling into a sewer, watching his life flash before him—Joe realizes he’s been operating under a fundamental misunderstanding. He thought his spark was his purpose. He thought that once he achieved the thing he’d been chasing, everything would click into place. He’d finally be living.
But here’s what the film reveals: a spark isn’t a destination. It’s not the big accomplishment or the dream gig or the perfect goal. A spark is permission. It’s the moment you decide to actually engage with your life instead of waiting for it to begin.
When Jerry—one of the guides in the “Great Before”—tells Joe that his spark isn’t his purpose, Joe doesn’t understand. Jerry explains it simply: “Your spark comes when you’re ready to start living.” Not when you achieve something. Not when you reach a goal. When you start living.
That distinction changes everything.
Why We Confuse Passion With Purpose—And What It Costs
Nathan Hooper, an account strategist and sports psychology enthusiast, puts it this way: “Joe thought his spark was to play jazz. He thought that that was his purpose.” But what Joe discovers—what we all need to discover—is that passion and purpose are not the same thing.
Passion is the thing that gets your attention. Purpose is how you show up in the moments in between.
Think about what Joe’s life actually looked like before he died. He was a teacher. He was helping eighth graders. He had relationships, conversations, moments with people who mattered. But because he’d convinced himself that his real life would start once he got the jazz gig, he wasn’t actually present for any of it. He was waiting. He was performing a role called “guy who hasn’t made it yet.”
This is the trap Hooper warns against in his own life. He spent three summers doing door-to-door sales, and one summer in Austin, Texas, he set a goal to sell 1,000 contracts. That was the gold standard. That was the thing that would prove he was elite, that he’d made it.
On his first day, he barely closed one sale.
He went back to his apartment and lay on the ground, overwhelmed. Not by the work itself, but by the gap between where he was and where he thought he needed to be. The weight of that unfulfilled goal was crushing him.
Then he hired a coach. The coach asked a simple question: “What if we aimed for 500 first?”
That reframe changed everything. Suddenly the pressure lifted. He wasn’t trying to hit an arbitrary number that society had told him meant success. He was just showing up, doing his best, refining his craft. And guess what? He hit 500. He felt accomplished. He felt alive.
The goal wasn’t the spark. The showing up was.
The Reframe That Transforms Everything
Here’s the moment in Soul that hits hardest:
Joe dies and sees his life flash before him through a dark lens. He sees a moment where he’s eating pie with his dad. Through this lens of unfulfilled dreams, that moment looks meaningless. Just a guy eating pie. No accomplishment. No legacy. No proof that he mattered.
Then, at the end of the film, Joe reframes that same moment. He’s playing piano, reflecting on his life, and he sees it again: eating pie with his dad. But this time, he sees the love in it. He sees his dad’s joy at being in that moment with him. He sees the beauty of just being together.
The moment didn’t change. Joe’s lens did.
This is what Hooper calls “the reset that becomes a reframe.” Life takes us in directions we didn’t plan. The podcast he and his wife built to help couples prepare for marriage eventually ended. That wasn’t failure—that was a redirect. But it only became a gift once he reframed it.
The same is true for all of us.
We’re going to miss the goals we set. We’re going to take turns we didn’t expect. We’re going to end up somewhere different than where we thought we were headed. The question isn’t whether that happens. The question is: will you see it as a dead end, or as a different path?
How to Find Joy in the Journey—Before the Destination
So if the spark isn’t the big achievement, where does fulfillment actually come from?
It comes from presence.
Hooper describes it like this: “When I reflect back on any big accomplishment I have, I’m not reminiscing about the moment of achieving that accomplishment. I’m reminiscing about the process. About what I did, what happened, the obstacles we overcame to get there.”
The joy isn’t in crossing the finish line. It’s in the training. It’s in the conversations with your coach. It’s in the day you thought you couldn’t do it and you did anyway. It’s in the moment you realized you were stronger than you believed.
This is why Soul keeps returning to small moments: 22 tasting pizza for the first time. Joe watching birds in a field and realizing they’re just going about their lives, finding their food, not stressed about some bigger purpose. A leaf spinning down from a tree. A conversation with a barber. A moment with your kid at their first choir performance.
These aren’t distractions from your real life. These are your real life.
The practical way to access this? Hooper offers several anchors:
Nature as a reset button. When you’re spiraling, when you’re convinced your life is meaningless because you haven’t hit the goal, go outside. See the mountains. See the birds. See how vast the world is and how small your particular struggle actually is. It’s not dismissive. It’s perspective.
Journaling to process. John Battiste and his wife journal individually and together—even writing letters to each other in their journals. The act of writing forces you to think about your thinking. It lets you see the pattern. It lets you catch yourself before you disappear into the waiting.
Serving others intentionally. Joe’s real moment of fulfillment doesn’t come from playing the jazz gig. It comes from helping 22 find her spark. From getting outside of his own head and into someone else’s life. From serving.
The Permission You’ve Been Waiting For
Here’s what Soul is really saying, and what Hooper echoes throughout this conversation:
You don’t need to wait for the spark to start living. You don’t need to hit the goal to matter. You don’t need to achieve the thing to be worthy of joy.
Your spark comes when you’re ready to start living. Right now. In this moment. With the people in front of you. With the work you’re doing. With the small beautiful things that are happening all around you if you’d just stop long enough to see them.
The reset you need might not be a new goal. It might be a reframe of the goals you already have. It might be deciding that the process is the destination. That showing up is the win. That presence is the purpose.
Joe Gardner finally understood this—but it took dying to get there.
You don’t have to wait that long.
Ready to go deeper on how to find fulfillment in the moments that matter? Listen to the full conversation with Nathan Hooper on Yes And Land at https://YouTube.com/@yesandland | More at https://www.ridethewave.media