How to find your life's purpose in three simple steps.
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How to find your life's purpose in three simple steps.
All you need is some alone time, the ability to self-reflect, and your imagination.
Within the article, the reader will gain the following insights:
How to identify your life’s purpose in two words,
The two aspects of your life’s purpose that it needs to have,
Knowing how the odds have been stacked against our generation.
I recently watched the Academy of Ideas video on quitting your job to follow your life's purpose. The video was profound, and I wanted to dive deeper into the lessons discussed, but I realized I couldn't go further into an analysis, until we discussed step one: how to find your purpose.
Looking at the current generations of millennials and gen-z, I'd venture to say that the vast majority don't know what their purpose is. So before we can even discuss how to live your purpose, we first need to address what is your purpose.
This article aims to provide us with some insight to help us find our purpose because once we know it, we can discover how to live it.
How to state your purpose
First off, our purpose doesn't have to be super specific. It's pretty generic, broad, and overarching, and I discuss this briefly in my book that I’m finishing.
For background, in this specific section, I'm discussing how in the last 200 years, we've lost the idea of spirituality and religion, but just like the ancients in the past, we need to infuse our spirituality into our day-to-day lives.
And we do that when we live our soul's purpose:
So there is no "one way" to spiritual enlightenment and one doesn’t need to follow a specific way. The spiritual transformation can occur within yourself; all it takes is deep soul searching. Strip away everything that's been taught to us, and fully dive into the depths of your soul to find out:
What do you want to do with this life?
Why do you want to do it with your life?
I akin the soul purpose to a simple formula: a verb and a noun. In two words, the verb and noun, after much soul searching, what would you like to do with your life? Personally, you could say mine is: "spread truth" – hence the book currently in your hands, but this is just an example. Again, this is a deep, soul-searching, philosophical question that only you and you alone can answer.
The idea behind this life purpose is that it serves as an overarching ideal. A byproduct of this is that we embody this ideal and live it, day in and day out. This ideal becomes the reason behind our thoughts and actions; it compels us to engage with life. It makes us face life, and by confronting life, we grow from it.
However, to live and actualize our purpose, it must be first intrinsically rewarding and, then, financially sustaining.
The Two Factors to a Life Purpose
Let's say your verb and noun purpose is to "build community." There are a multiple of ways that you can actualize this ideal.
For example, you could:
own a venue where people can come to discuss ideas and strengthen their communities or,
you could operate a hair shop where young and old could come together and interact just by getting a haircut
These are examples of the life purpose, "build community," being actualized and sustaining one's life. If you own the venue or the hair shop, first, you must go through the hard work of creating one, but two, if successful, you'll receive income from your purpose, which enables you to keep living your purpose.
Let's focus on the first part of the equation, intrinsically rewarding.
Suppose our purpose is to build a community. This ideal has to be intrinsically rewarding because, to start anything tied to accomplishing this goal, like getting funding, hiring resources, etc., can prove challenging and daunting.
Intrinsic rewarding purposes enable us to dig deeper, work harder, and analyze better when the going gets tough because we derive an internal reward from overcoming these challenges. Our soul is encouraged by encountering these barriers.
These rewards also produce the byproduct of character traits like courage, determination, patience, and perseverance.
This fortifying of character is why we must ensure that our life purpose is intrinsically rewarding because by living our life's purpose, we develop and strengthen our character.
Next, our purpose should be something that we can live on. It should be life-giving. In other words, it should be something tangible that provides us with the means to live; it should be financially rewarding.
Quite simply, the reason for this is that poverty takes life. So our purpose cannot and should not lead to poverty.
An intrinsically rewarding purpose that we can actualize that produce financial rewards to we can live off is the first step in living our life’s purpose. But we must realize, the odds are not in our favor.
The odds are stacked against you
As I stated earlier in the article, the majority of us don’t even know our life's purpose. To find that purpose, we're going to take some time to reflect, to go deep within.
What's critical to note is that for the first time, the current generation, millennials and gen-z, have the odds stacked against them to go within and self-reflect. I've talked about these in previous articles, such as how our souls should soar or, specifically, how we've been sent up to fail.
These articles emphasize that our current society is heavily influenced by technology - the brainchild of scientism - which can be directly oppositional to nature, to going within, and to self-reflecting.
So for us to move forward, we need to take a step back and find out, "who am I?"
Who are we without our ego, the image we display on our social media accounts? Who are we without the persona, the face we put to the world? Who are we without the television and the ideas that get programmed into us?
That's the essence of my philosophy section; who are we if we strip away everything that's been given to us and all that remains is us at our core?
It will take deep soul searching to find the answer; however, it's easier to identify our purpose once we find this out.
So here comes the hard part.
You're going to need to go within. You're going to be the one to break away from society to find yourself. You're going to be the one to strip away your ego and your persona to find out who you are at the divine spark level.
And then, you'll have to find out what things you like to do that allow you to live your life's purpose. This identification phase will involve experimentation and trying out different things until you find out what provides you that intrinsic reward that will enable you to engage with and persevere over the challenges that you might encounter.
Once we know our life's purpose and what tangible, valuable skills we can do that enable us to live our purpose and provide us with the resources to live, we can continue down the path of finding out how we can build our lives around this purpose.
Questions for the reader:
If you were to strip away what your friends think about you (your ego) and what you portray out to the world (your persona), do you know who you are at that divine spark level?
Do we need to spend less time on external things like social media and distractions and more time on soul searching, digging deeper to find ourselves?
Can you envision yourself - who you deeply are - living out your life's purpose, where this purpose is sustaining for you and your family?