How to find a purpose that excites you, no matter your age or background
Untethered Mind, Sunday Edition, 4-min read.
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A struggle many face, particularly in the modern age, is a lack of purpose.
We hear gurus talk about finding your purpose left, right and centre, but what do they really mean?
There are many ways to interpret it, and essentially, it comes down to finding a strong reason or a why to do things.
Your why keeps you going when you might have otherwise quit had such a sense of purpose been absent.
It can be a why that keeps you busy for a week, or it can be a why that holds your attention for life.
Through the work I do with my clients, I’ve found one of the best ways to describe purpose that connects with people is this:
You are on purpose when you find a way to contribute in a way no one else (or few) can.
You can certainly get excited about more materialistic purposes, like ‘I am going to buy my dream mansion in City Heights by age 35.’ These kinds of purposes may keep you going for a while. But they won’t get to why some people are driven in ways that few others are not over the long term.
When you make it about contribution, suddenly things get interesting. Contribution inevitably requires that you set yourself on a course to provide value in some way to the world, whether it’s helping other humans, the environment or animals, for example.
People talk about the importance of finding happiness, but you’ll likely never stop chasing it until you shift your strategy to contribution.
Having a purpose that involves contributing to something greater than yourself gets you out of your personal insecurities, wakes you up, and gives you a life-affirming sense of responsibility. Ultimately, it’s what will make you happy.
My purpose is to help as many people as I can move from feeling stuck, anxious, and depressed to feeling alive and creating incredible things that inspire the world. This is why you’ll see most of my work—whether articles, books, or courses—devoted to this kind of thing. It feels good, and it gets me out of bed most mornings.
To have found your purpose doesn’t mean you need to change the world in some massive way, though that’s cool. But you don’t want your purpose reliant on making too small and specific a group of people happy, because then your cause is over-reliant on these particular people doing things a certain way.
Many talk about how their families are their purpose. That’s great, and I encourage this as a purpose, but it shouldn’t be the purpose. The purpose needs to be greater than that.
It would also benefit greatly from some real or conceptual enemy to add fuel to the fire. For me, my primary enemy is self-censorship and shame.
These things stunt the creative process and make us depressed and ineffective. I am invigorated knowing I am helping people fight these things. Now it’s really a cause.
You can use the Purpose Finder mini-course I created for my Mastery Den newsletter subscribers here for more depth on how to find your superpower and enemy - components of a strong purpose.
Ideally, it raises the hairs on your neck when you consider it.
Once you find it, quit focusing on your purpose and get back to doing the work.
It’s only through daily, small, and often quiet actions that we can experience what it feels like to be on purpose.
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What’s your bigger purpose?
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If you’re feeling stuck and need some refreshing motivation ideas for your creative or entrepreneurial projects, you’ll love my latest book: ‘Creatively Jacked: 43 badass motivation ideas for ambitious creators.’
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