There’s a popular misconception walking down the streets these days — your life purpose should be to change the world, and you need to commit to your life purpose for a lifetime.
Your life purpose doesn’t need to change everyone’s world. It needs to change someone’s world — starting from yours.
And like anything else in the world, your life purpose will change too. It will evolve based on your evolving maturity and intellect.
Why do we even need a life purpose in the first place?
Having a life purpose will guide you to move forward in one meaningful direction. If you don’t know where you’re heading, you will definitely feel lost during your journey.
Living a peaceful life will mean living a life of purpose and meaning. To live meaningfully, we need to work out the bigger picture of our actions. Why do we even work? What are we trying to get out of everything we do?
A new study by a team of Harvard School of Public Health researchers finds that if you feel you have a higher sense of purpose in life — defined as having meaning, a sense of direction and goals — you are more likely to remain healthy and physically strong as you grow older.
~cnbc.com
It could be overwhelming to start.
Tying yourself to one life purpose and one goal sounds scary.
What if I don’t know yet what I want to do for the rest of my life — you may think this too. And it’s reasonable to doubt.
To make it less overwhelming, let’s make sure we accept the evolving and temporary state of everything in this world.
Everything is temporary, and everything evolves.
Repeating this, again and again, will take the pressure off from you.
You can start here.
Overwhelm is an indulging emotion. The one antidote I have been practicing to kill overwhelm is ‘taking actions.’
Starting small is better than staying stuck in overwhelm.
In the next few points, I’ll mention a few action points for you to start, if you haven’t discovered your life purpose yet —
Talk to more people.
Talk to more ‘successful’ people — people who are successful in your world. Anangsha Alammyan, Ayodeji Awosika, and Tim Denning are successful people in my world. For someone who is not a regular reader, they might not even recognize these names.
Can you look around? See if you can find some inspirational people in your circle. Talk to them. Observe them. Learn their stories and note what ignites a fire in them.
Read more books.
Most of my mentors don’t even know they are my mentors. Rich Litvin inspired me to try becoming a life coach — because I read his book. I became a better writer when I read “Reinvent Yourself” and “Choose Yourself” by James Altucher.
Reading more books will open up your mind to more possibilities.
Follow your curiosity.
What are you curious about? What’s something that fascinates you? Is it rockets and space, or is it DNA and molecules?
An easy way to follow this is to make a list of everything you wanted to do/become when you were a kid.
We are born with an immense resource of curiosity inside our brains, and somewhere down the line, we learn to kill it.
As soon as you learn to be curious again, you will start heading in the direction of living a purpose-driven life.
Experiment with something.
Google how to earn money online. Try it. Or maybe search the trending industries of 2020 and learn a few tricks about some industries online.
So many courses are available for free or at modest rates online. Start learning and experimenting.
I honestly never thought I’d be a digital marketer, and I was a digital marketer for 4+ years before I quit my job to become a life coach.
Start something today. You may never know where it will lead you.
Help someone.
This is the easiest way to move in the direction of discovering your life purpose. Ask yourself — who can I help today?
You don’t need to build homes for homeless people (although that would be cool, right?)
It could be a tiny starting point, like cooking dinner for your family.
Practice alignment.
Design an imaginary compass for your life. Be self-aware of who you are, your core values, standards, expectations, etc.
Set this imaginary compass in the direction of your life purpose. Deliberately choose your decisions from here.
Whenever you need to decide anything, like dating someone, or a career opportunity, put in on this imaginary compass, and see if it aligns with your life purpose and core values.
If it does, go on and get it. If it doesn’t, just let it go.
Final words
Finding your purpose in life isn’t a 1-day task. It takes months and years to find the sweet spot where you can call it your life’s purpose.
But guess what? Today’s the first day of the rest of your life.
To tackle the overwhelm of where to start, here are 6 things you can do today to step forward in the direction of discovering your life purpose —
- Talk to more people
- Read more books
- Follow your curiosity
- Experiment something
- Help someone
- Practice alignment
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