How To Find Your Life’s Purpose
Tags: Mindfulness, Life, Personal Development, Purpose, Growth

Photo by Jamie Street on Unsplash

How to Find Your Purpose:

You need to find the thing in your life that will make you rush to get out of bed in the morning, the thing that you will never be late for. This thing is your purpose. Here is my 4-step action guide on how you can align with your purpose:

Step 1: Find what you are passionate about, do this truthfully with yourself

The first step is to find what you are passionate about. The most straightforward question I know to ask to find what you are passionate about is this: If money was nothing to worry about, what would you want to spend the rest of your life doing? That is your passion, and if you are truthful with yourself, then it’s an easy question to answer.

It’s important to note that this passion doesn’t have to be something that you are already good at doing. You can learn to become good at doing it over time. It’s easy to learn how to get good at something that you suck at; all you need to do is start enthusiastically failing at it continuously (see my article on “Failing Forward” to learn more about this step).

I know that sometimes it can be easy just to want to work on the things that we are already good at, even if we don’t like those things very much. What is hard, however, is trying to force yourself to be passionate about something that you aren’t.

Learning how to be good at something that you suck at and love is easier than learning how to be passionate about something you are good at but hate.

Find what you love and dedicate all of your free time to it.

Step 2: Determine what you offer that nobody else does

You have to determine the thing in life that you offer the world that no one else does, the thing that is unique to you. Despite you thinking at first that you may not offer anything special, you do. You are a unique individual who has a set of life experiences that no one else shares. You see the world and interact with it uniquely. It may be hard to see what is uniquely you, since to you, it may seem commonplace. However, if you ask those around you, I’m sure they will tell you exactly what sets you apart from other people.

One of the realities of life is that we are all strange. Our individualized journeys make us that way, and that is okay.

Usually, the thing that only you can offer is something related to your strangeness. You know, that thing you are likely self-conscious about. That thing that you are fearful others will judge you for, so you suppress it. Stop suppressing it.

Don’t feel ashamed for whatever that thing may be. It is your gift and nobody else’s. Sure there might be people who do something similar, but there is nobody who will do it just like you. Therefore it is up to you to share your unique gift with the world since no one else can do that for you.

Step 3: Establish urgency within your life

Once you realize that thing is unique to you, then you will recognize that only you can fulfill its delivery. To be blunt, if you die, that thing you offer dies too. Therefore you must do it while you are still breathing, and you only have a limited time to do so.

One large problem is that you don’t have the luxury of setting a charted plan for how you are going to do it. One of the conditions for setting a plan is knowing how much time you have, and then making a strategy according to that timeline. The reality is you don’t know how much time you have left to act out your purpose — you could have 20 years, you could have 2. Therefore you can’t set a “plan” for deferring your purposeful actions later; you must take purposeful actions now. This understanding makes things urgent.

Having your purpose be urgent is what leads you to live each day as if it’s your last, not in a frivolous way, but in a purpose-driven way.

To live each day in a purpose-driven way means each day, you must take meaningful actions towards fulfilling that purpose.

Step 4: Take Action

Once you understand that things are urgent and that only you can act out your purpose in a passionate way, you now have to start taking action.

This can seem like a massive undertaking at first glance. Something that I struggled with at first was not taking action because I believed that those actions had to be substantial. The truth is, any action of any size is moving you forward. Even if those actions are minute, when acted out every day for a year, you will see massive progress. Start small, as you find your grove the actions you take will naturally start getting larger without you even noticing it. Your current “large actions” will become your “small actions” of the future.

Being consistent with your action is key; that is how you will live every day with purpose. Once your actions holistically embody your purpose, so too will your mind — that is when you will know you are in alignment with your life’s purpose.