Society & Culture
Do you believe God created you for a reason? Every one of us has a reason to be on this earth and it’s up to each individual to go through the exercise of figuring it out so that we can live up to the potential that’s been placed in us, serving people and world in the way that we were created to do. If you are not sure what your purpose is, there are some questions you might ask yourself to help you figure it out. You want to look at things that give you hints as to why you were created. Your answers to the following questions will give you a good idea of what your purpose might be. What brings you joy? What do you lose yourself in doing? What are the activities you do that are so engrossing you lose track of time? All of a sudden it’s 6 hours later and you’re looking at the clock wondering how the time passed so fast. Where in your life are you of the most value to other people? When you are solving some sort of problem for other people, what problem are you solving? In which area are your friends always asking for your help? What are you truly great at doing? There are some things either you do better than anybody you know, or with practice you could do better than anybody you know. Where in your life, business, or the work you produce, do you have unrelenting standards? If there is an area where you feel that strongly, it’s a good indicator that’s tied to your purpose. Imagine you were told that going forward in your life you were only going to be allowed to do one specific activity all day every day. What would you choose to do? If you don’t know what you’re born to do, spend some time thinking about these questions. In your quiet time, study these questions and your answers: they will give you clues to your purpose. Everybody has a superpower they do better than anybody else, or they have the potential to do better than anybody else with practice and refinement. In his book Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell states that it takes 10,000 hours of practice to be world class at something. When you discover what your purpose is, you want to spend those 10,000 hours to become world class. Figure out what your super power is, then work on it and continually refine it. Do you know what your purpose is, the reason you were put on this planet? Joe believes there are four things God put him on this earth to do: write, teach, solve problems and lead people. When he works in those four areas, that’s where he excels in life and gets the most satisfaction out of what he’s doing. When he applies himself in those four areas, that’s where he’s most effective. If you can discover those areas that are your purpose, it will make all the difference to you in being able to live a life with more fulfillment. Spend some time thinking about what those areas are for you. If you already know, spend time pursuing them and practicing them. Joe is constantly trying to learn new things and build himself in those four areas. When you discover your purpose you should orient your life to relentlessly pursue those things. There are two schools of thought when it comes to figuring out your purpose and how you’re going to pursue it in your life. The Utilitarian Approach - This is where you figure out how to monetize your purpose and make a living doing it. The Artistic Approach - This is where you make money doing something else so you are able to fund your purpose because either you can't or decide not to monetize your purpose You have to decide which way you want to go. Monetizing your purpose is a common goal, but some people look at their purpose and don’t want to monetize it. It might be because they’ll have to reduce their standards or commercialize it and they don’t want to do that. Or, because it’s going to be tough to make money doing it, and they know they can make more money doing something else, which can fund their purpose. You may be asking, how can I find fulfillment if I’m not able to work in my purpose every day? Remember, fulfillment and financial success do not necessarily go together. You can have financial success and no fulfillment, or fulfillment without financial success. You hear about people all the time that leave their high-paying corporate jobs to go pursue something that brings them joy or that’s their purpose. Perhaps they decide to open a surf shop, or travel the world, or become naturalists who live off the land and off the grid. If you choose to do that, the odds are high that you’ll have fulfillment even though you don’t necessarily have financial success. There are lots of women and men who feel that raising their children is their highest calling. They might even choose to live off one salary so one parent can home school the kids. They move forward, preparing their children for the world, and they feel incredibly fulfilled even though maybe they struggle financially. If you’re called to be a writer or an artist, there’s no guarantee that you can make a living doing those things. You need to have a great product, great marketing and you also need luck. There are hundreds of thousands if not millions of people who have written novels or like to paint or are amazing singers, but few of them are making a living doing it. Yet those people are likely to have very deep fulfillment despite potentially limited financial success. Look at Vincent Van Gogh or Edgar Allan Poe. Both are considered geniuses of their art, and it’s hard to argue either one of them wasn’t living out their purpose. However, both of them died broke. It’s something to keep in mind. Understand the difference between the utilitarian approach and the artistic approach, and decide which way you’re going to go. Only you can decide whether you will build a career in your purpose, or work a career that allows you to pursue your purpose. What about someone who is making a living in their purpose? Take Tony Robbins, the personal development coach and speaker. He has built a lucrative career in that area and if you’ve ever watched him or seen interviews with him, there’s little doubt that he gets great fulfillment from helping to grow people. It’s probably safe to say he’s figured out how to monetize his purpose. But sometimes people choose the opposite way. Joe has a friend who is an amazing woodworker. He could have made a living doing that, but he gets great joy doing those things for his friends and family and giving them away to people who are close to him. He was a real estate agent for his career, he got fulfillment from serving people that way as well, and did an outstanding job. He made a good living in real estate, was able to put money aside, and now he can spend more time in his woodshop than working with buyers and sellers. The woodshop likely brings him a very deep sense of fulfillment and he’s living out a purpose creating heirlooms for his family and friends. So which way will you go: the utilitarian approach or artistic approach? Before you decide, you need to get absolute clarity on your purpose. Start by using the questions listed above. But the questions alone are not enough. If you want to discover these things about yourself—your purpose, core values, fulfillment, and answers to other deep thinking questions—you need to create the right environment for yourself. Here are the six steps to creating a fertile environment for self-discovery, personal development, and gaining clarity on your purpose. Step One: Quiet Time. This is a recurring theme on the Student of Life podcast. There aren’t many things more important in your life than quiet time. You must set aside time for working on yourself, learning how your brain works, learning how you’re wired, contemplating the big questions in your life, coming up with plans for work, doing devotionals and spending time with God. The world is full of noise and distraction and too many people are so consumed with being busy that they do not stop to study themselves. Make an effort to stop the spinning, the noise, the craziness and just be quiet and see what your mind brings up. Joe uses two different types of quiet time. The first kind is a daily planning and devotional time in the morning. This helps Joe protect his energy, willpower and confidence, and be prepared for the day ahead. The other kind is typically on the weekends or in an evening, in a place that Joe finds inspiring, like nature. While sitting quietly with a journal, a good cigar and bourbon, Joe uses this time to think about life, problem solve and marinate ideas. Quiet time is essential for finding your purpose. Go through the questions from earlier, sit and contemplate them. Keep a thought or idea journal where you write down what you discover about yourself: how you think, where you struggle, your triggers, your good and bad habits, what emotions come up. You’re more likely to be more creative when you have that time away from noise and distractions. When you know yourself intimately, you make better decisions, and you're more likely to create conditions where you will have success. Step Two: Step outside of your comfort zone on a daily basis. Develop a sense of adventure, try new things and do things that scare you. When you’re not doing that, your comfort zone is shrinking, and as your comfort zone shrinks you become less adventurous and more sedentary. You learn things about yourself that you didn’t know when you’re facing a fear. Discovering new things about yourself is part of the process for finding your purpose. Did you know that your body reacts exactly the same way physiologically when you have fear and when you have excitement? The only difference is the way your brain frames it. When you're doing something scary, help your body trick your mind by reframing it as exciting! All those extreme sports people, they don’t realize they’re terrified because they’re so excited. If you do the things that scare you and step out of your comfort zone, the world opens up to you and you learn new things about yourself that bring you closer to your purpose. If you discover something that resonates with you or brings you joy, you’ve got to keep exploring that because you don’t know where it will lead. Step Three: Surround yourself with people you admire, who are actively living out their purpose. These are people that you aspire to be like. Ask yourself these questions: What traits do you admire in others and who do you know who has those traits? Who is great at something you want to do? Who is someone great at something they chose to go after? Find these people and spend time with them so you can learn from them. Joe’s grandma always advised, “you have two ears and one mouth, use them in that proportion.” When you’re meeting with these people and allowing them to mentor you, don’t worry about trying to impress them with what you know and can do. Ask them questions, step back and let them teach you. When you’re around people who are living out their purpose, you will see clues as to how you can live out your own purpose. When you’re around people who have traits that you admire, you’re going to see how you can make those admirable traits a part of who you are. You can see how these other folks treat people and you can learn how to treat people better yourself. When you’re serving people and playing out your purpose in a way that serves people, down the road you’ll have an opportunity to be a mentor to somebody else and help them move along the road like these folks will help you. Step Four: Aggressively weed negative people and negative thoughts out of your life. Don’t listen to the naysayers. Most people stop dreaming by the time they reach 30 years old. They get through at school, get into a career and maybe have a family. Then they shut off their dreams and spend their life living for the weekend, waiting for their next vacation, waiting for their retirement. Don’t be one of those people. Those folks are more likely to tear down other people. When you're on the sidelines, afraid to get into the game, it’s much easier to tear somebody else down than reignite your own dreams and have the courage to go after them. Remember, courage is not the absence of fear, courage is admitting there’s fear and going forward and doing it anyway. When the haters hate, don’t let them cap your dreams or dissuade you from going after it with all that you’ve got. Remember, the only person who can put limits on you is you. Get rid of that negativity from other people. Choose to be an optimist. Get the words ‘I can't’ out of your vocabulary and don’t let anybody else tell you that you can’t. We live in some of the most amazing times ever in the history of the world. There’s nothing that can’t be done. Miracles happen every day and people are accomplishing the impossible every day. Peter Diamandis calls it going after your moonshot. In the early 1960s, President John Kennedy said ‘we’re going to go to the moon by the end of the decade.’ Nobody knew how they were going to do it, but they still accomplished it. If people can do that with the technology way inferior to what we have today, there’s nothing you can’t do now. Don’t let anyone tell you that you can’t do it. Step Five: Stop lying to yourself. Life is full of challenges and when you acknowledge what you’re up against you will be able to come up with a realistic plan to overcome it. If you pretend the challenges don’t exist, they’re going to defeat you. Some people have a PhD in making excuses; it’s never their fault, fate has conspired against them. If you make excuses when you’re going after your purpose it will eat away at that purpose. If you don’t accomplish something you set out to do because you just didn’t do it, admit it to yourself. Even if you don’t admit it to other people, admit to yourself that you didn’t do it because you didn’t want it enough, or you were lazy in that moment, or you wanted to watch TV instead of doing what you could have done to improve yourself. Admit it to yourself, don’t tolerate excuses and don’t hang around excuse-makers. Failure is a step on the road to success. When you fail, do an autopsy, figure out what you will do differently next time, and get moving in a positive direction. If you don’t study your failures, you’ll never achieve what you want to achieve. As Edison said of the journey to inventing the incandescent light bulb: he didn’t fail 1000 times, it just took 1000 steps to create it! Have that kind of attitude when you fail. When you realize you’re going the wrong way, don’t make excuses or lie to yourself. Admit it, change direction and do it immediately. It’s never too late to change your direction. If you’re going in the wrong direction, every step you go takes you further and further away from the right direction. Don’t lie to yourself, don’t make excuses, pursue your purpose, and don’t sabotage yourself by lying to yourself or making excuses. Step Six: Never stop learning. Learning is the fountain of youth for your brain. If you stop using your brain you’re going to lose it. What inspires you? Seek out more information on that. Read, listen to podcasts, ask questions of the people that you meet with, learn from them. If you don’t expand your horizons and learn new things, there may be a purpose for you out there you won’t figure out because you’re not learning. Develop your curiosity and try to learn something from everybody you meet. “The only difference from us years from now is going to be in the books we read and the people we meet.” ~ Charles “Tremendous” Jones Follow these steps and you will create a fertile environment for achievement and self-discovery. And if you’re working at discovering your purpose, it will be an environment where your purpose will become apparent over time. When you discover it, relentlessly pursue it. Make it become who you are. All these things we’re talking about—purpose, core values, fulfillment—they’re things that don’t happen overnight. You need to work at it, think about it, study it, and spend time living with what you’ve come up with for a while before you move on and study it some more. Take the purposes you discover, filter them through your core values, and get the two areas into alignment so you can start moving towards fulfillment. Stay tuned for the next episode of Student of Life, where Joe discusses Vision.