What’s your purpose? How do you find it? These are some of life’s hardest questions. Some will spend their lifetime trying to find it through work, while others never do. But what about those who did find their purpose? Were they just born with it? Did they make it up? Did they find it by accident or have they always just known? Maybe they’ve just convinced themselves in their purpose because of the job they’ve been doing for so long.
Have you ever meet that person who’s always seemed to know what they want, even as a kid? The doctor who knew from the moment they were three years old that they were just meant to be one? How about the lawyer who always wanted to be a lawyer, spent their whole lives striving to be one and then having an epiphany in their 40s that they were always meant to be a fisherman instead? How does that happen?
Life happens. You can’t pick your parents, you can’t pick your religion, culture or financial circumstances. Everyone is a product of the environment they grew up in and as life happens, we end up simply doing the best that we can. Sometimes we get on a comfortable path, put our heads down to work and before you know it – you’re 70 years old. Other times, we think we’re on the right path and when we stop for a second to look around, realize we’re not on the path we wanted all along. Everyone has different beliefs on this. Some people believe fate is fate and that you are born to do whatever you were born to do with no control over it. I think the opposite.
Looking back at my life, I’ve always had a chip on my shoulder. I was always trying to work harder to prove something to myself or to simply make my parents proud. As a teenager, I remember wanting to simply be a man. For me, that meant being tough, playing sports, fighting, etc. I strangely found the Army through weird circumstances (that’s a story for another time), and what started out as something I was just going to do for a few years ended up feeding my sense of purpose and fulfilling my need to be a man and prove to the world that I was doing something bigger than myself. And then that changed. I felt lost. I was doing such big things in the world and it was coming to an abrupt end. What then?
I started looking for jobs similar to what I was doing, but it wasn’t the same. There were parts of it I was passionate about, but in general – I was just burnt the fuck out. So I stopped. This was the best thing I could possibly do for myself. I was used to pushing through pain and I believed that many times you had to simply do things you didn’t always want to do because you had to. It was the price of hard work. You did the work whether you wanted to or not and through that process you would eventually win. Simple as that. But this time was different. The hard work and the process I loved wasn’t the same. It wasn’t enjoyable and I wasn’t happy.
My advice to you if you’re burnt out, don’t feel the passion for doing what you’re doing anymore, or you’re simply not happy is to – STOP. After 23 years of service, things had changed, I was different. So I reflected on my life and I got reacquainted with who I was again.
I did personality tests, I did strengths tests. I did them over and over until it resonated with me and everything clicked. I looked back over my life and my career and I thought of the times that I effortlessly performed at my best. I thought of the people in my life who impacted me the most and thought of the distinct lessons they taught me that stuck with me to this day.
Then I thought about my passions, my hobbies and things I liked to do that made me lose track of time. I worked on my values. I had list of 200 words that describe various values and gave myself 3 seconds to make a decision as to whether that value resonated with me or not. I took the pile of values that resonated with me and did the exercise again until I could narrow it down to 10, then 5 and then 3. I sat with them for a week and did the entire exercise all over again. Instead of being logical about it, I went with what I FELT in my heart. To hold myself accountable, I kept a journal to see whether or not I was really living by these values, or if I was simply paying lip service to them. I did this until my values resonated as strongly as my strengths and personality tests.
After all this reflection, I read, I journaled and I tried to connect the dots. I had all these different data points that were just jumbled up. They resonated with me but I didn’t quite understand what it meant. I took the time to draw out the particular projects and jobs that I had effortlessly done throughout my life and worked with friends on the same path also trying to understand their purpose. I told the stories of each of those instances while they wrote out the common themes and threads that aligned with all of them. Then they drafted purpose statements for me as I also did for them. Some of the statements were ok, some sorta resonated, but again – it wasn’t quite right.
I took all this data and sat with it. I took those things that resonated with me the most and continued to draw parallels between all of them. There are threads that tied all of these things together that were much bigger than any job or project I had ever done. With the help of some coaches, colleagues, friends and therapists – it hit me.
“To help others discover the greatest versions of themselves so that together we can live to our highest potential and inspire others to do the same…”
I continued to refine it and kept coming back to the same conclusion. Looking at life through that lens made things different. I was energized, everything made sense, and I had this confidence I hadn’t felt in years. Now I was focused. I knew what made me happy, I knew what my purpose was, and instead of searching for jobs that made me happy or paid a certain amount – I was laser focused on the types of jobs that resonated with me and my purpose.
Money was a factor, but not to the extent that it aligned with my values, my natural strengths and my purpose. Money was secondary to that cause I had the confidence to know that I would excel at those jobs effortlessly.
Had I not stopped to do this work on myself, I would have been driven to find jobs based off money primarily. I would’ve grinded it out just to realize it wasn’t a fit and would’ve continued to jump from job to job looking for the happiness through trial and error. If you’re as stubborn as I am and refuse to quit – that could have taken YEARS.
Life is too short to waste time to figure it out what makes you happy through trial and error. So I implore you to STOP. Work isn’t going anywhere, so take the time to stop and reflect. Don’t wait until you’re 70, stop and get reacquainted with the person you see in the mirror everyday. Do you know that person in the mirror anymore? You should. But sometimes we let life and work get in the way of taking the timeout to get to know ourselves. Sad thing is, some of us have already forgotten.
Remember this – you are more than your job. You are more than the title on your email signature block, or the title on your desk. Some will say that their identity is their job as a Father, Husband, Wife or Son. I will argue again that you are more than that as well. You are SO much more than you could possibly imagine, if you stop and think about it.
Do I think that your purpose changes over time? Yes. I do. I don’t believe that humans are meant to stay static in anything that they do. Over time, I believe our mission is to strive to become the greatest version of ourselves and to strive and evolve. We can’t do that by stubbornly thinking a certain way and NEVER evolving. I think the same thing goes for your purpose. Someday, that purpose may or may not fade into something else – and that’s okay. Living a life of purpose for a short amount of time is worth more to me than living a lifetime of unhappiness