Live with purpose
What is your ideal life?
Inspired by Inner Mastery, Outer Impact:
The year is __ and on a warm spring evening you lie down in bed to sleep through one more night of your eventful life. You are ninety years old today: you have entered the twilight years. Your mind drifts into a life review: a journey across the decades of your life, starting from the day when you first came across this exercise. You have reason to be proud and contented with how you have lived since then. There have been challenges and there have been triumphs, and you weren't always able to stay perfectly directed in your affairs but the broad course of your life, your strivings and pursuits has stayed true to your Inner Core. As sleep seeps over your weary form, your face glows with satisfaction and gratitude for your journey.
Put yourself in that moment, when you have just turned ninety, and write down the kind of life you would have led from today to that day, to allow you to conclude that it has been a life well lived.
One friend described her dread at the thought of returning to her high-stress, high-stakes, all-or-nothing job. Another described his uncertainty about why he’s going back to thankless work, and another was questioning the definition of work-life balance.
In fact, during many of the conversations I’m having at the moment, I detect a general yearning for a deeper sense of connection – a need for direction, for passion, for something more than a paycheck... a need for purpose.
what is purpose?
There are multiple interpretations of what a “life purpose” is. For the spiritual folks, they may see it a higher calling. For the religious, they may see it as an instruction from God.
Beyond religious connotations, a life purpose is simply your life’s message. It is the message you wish to drive in the world during your time on Earth. An example of a life purpose is “To inspire everyone to greatness” or “To touch every human on Earth” or “To relieve every living being of suffering.” Having a life purpose applies to all of us, whether we are religious or atheists.
Other terms for life purpose are “life direction,” “purpose statement,” and “life mission.” They are all the same thing.
It doesn’t matter whether you’re 10 years old, 20, 30, 40, 50, 60, or older. As long as you wish to live a more meaningful and conscious life, a life purpose is for you.
why do we need purpose?
Life purpose is the starting point of life
A life purpose is the first step to live your most conscious life. While you can be busy with a million tasks every day, when you don’t have a clear purpose, you may be heading down the wrong path. That’s because your goals may have nothing to do with your purpose, which means that you can pursue your current goals for the next 10, 20 years, only to realize that this isn’t what you wanted after all. As Stephen Covey once said, “If the ladder is not leaning against the right wall, every step we take just gets us to the wrong place faster.”
On the other hand, when you have a life purpose, that’s when conscious living begins. While it doesn’t mean that all your problems disappear, at least you know what you want to drive in this world. With a clear purpose, you can then set the right goals and plans, and take the right daily steps to create your most meaningful life.
Our Goals
As Nelson Mandela said,
"After climbing a great hill, one only finds that there are many more hills to climb."
Purpose shifts our focus from goals to the values that reside in our Inner Core. Goals are material outcomes that we either achieve or don't--but values have no beginning or end. When we train ourselves to wake up every day committed to putting our values into action, our motivation and happiness start to come from knowing that we have done our best to express them in the conditions that unfolded that day rather than from whether we got credit for our contributions, or concluded a deal, or launched a product.
Power of pUrpose
When we are anchored in Purpose, it provides strong motivation from within. We are comfortable making sacrifices to pursue our goals because we connect with the deeper reason behind them. We wake up each day feeling inspired.
We happily take on even the most mundane tasks since we see the connection between them and the Purpose we hold at our Core. We are able to make hard choices and trade-offs with greater clarity and equanimity since we are guided by what matters to us deep within.
Our strivings and struggles are imbued with meaning, intent, and depth. We feel alive. Our existence has significance.
Purpose makes us put our ego aside so our Inner Core can come shining through.