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About Finding Your Purpose

About Finding Your Purpose

‘Find your purpose’, ‘follow your passion’, ‘have a vision’ – at first glance, all of these things sound so similar, but most of all – abstract and distant. It sounds wishy-washy and seems to have nothing to do with reality.

‘Real-life’ is about the ‘now’: paying the bills, meeting deadlines, trying to get a raise, trying to find some form of work-life balance. Who has time to really think about things like your ‘purpose’? 

And yet, articles, blog posts, personal development coaches constantly urge us to ‘FIND YOUR PURPOSE’’. 

And yes, Ms. Multiple Careers is also going to contribute to this discussion.

It may sound like a lofty and luxurious thing to be thinking about your purpose, especially at times when your bank account is nearing zero or you’re simply juggling many other, more urgent things in life. 

But in this post, I will try to share why finding your purpose is important, how finding your purpose can bring meaning and fulfillment to your life, and most importantly, some pointers for finding it.

For the first 5 years of my career, I have never thought about what my purpose was. It was hard for me to grasp as I was in the early stages of enjoying my corporate career.

 There were a lot of shiny distracting objects that held my attention: the prospect of an upcoming raise and promotion, perhaps an overseas placement, free training, events and lunch buffets at 5-star hotels.

But towards the end of that career, at a point where I became disinterested, unmotivated, lost, and totally annoyed at my job, and experienced an extended phase of burnout that lasted a few months too long, I started to delve more into the question of what I really wanted out of life, and more specifically, what I really wanted to do for work, and as a career. 

I started asking the question ‘What is my purpose’?

What should I aim at, what should I build my life around that I don’t end up feeling empty and full of regret when I’m 90?

It’s not an easy question to answer. So I simply ignored it for a while. I got busy with other things, I did some acting, flipped a house, made some films, got married, moved to Canada, started a youtube channel, and then this blog. 

I did a lot of different things that I loved, but it wasn’t easy to pinpoint what my purpose was. 

The reason why people have such a hard time ‘finding their purpose’ is that they are looking for this single purpose for life. The one guiding purpose, the sole reason for their existence, and the drive to do anything on this earth. 

We are inspired by famous people who seem to have a very clear and single purpose, and think that something is wrong with us or lacking with us if we don’t have such a life purpose as well.

The reality is that some people, and it might be a very small percentage of people, know their life purpose. But they didn’t create it or make it up. Instead, it came to them, oftentimes as a result of, or a reaction to an experience, a profound insight, or even pain, suffering, and hardship. 

As a response to this they discovered that voice inside them that said ‘I have to do something about this’, or ‘I need to fix this’, or ‘I just need to contribute towards this’, or even ‘I need to make this thing I imagined’. 

And because it is so meaningful and of such importance to them, it becomes an overarching goal. They find their life purpose. 

But as I said, this happens for some people. What happens to others?

Oftentimes people find their purpose at a later age. When you’re younger and don’t have much experience yet, you’re in an absorbing, exploring, figuring out mode. You’re still trying to decide what to make of everything. 

What really matters and what doesn’t will only gradually reveal itself to you through the events and experiences.

As you get older, you accumulate a larger collection of experiences, go through more difficulties, get a better perspective of what matters and what doesn’t. Many people will therefore gain more clarity about their purpose as they grow older.

But this doesn’t happen automatically and is not always the case either. Some people die without ever knowing their purpose or pursuing what is meaningful.

On the other hand, some younger people can find their purpose early on as well. 

So if it’s not really a matter of age, then what determines whether and when you can find your purpose? 

It will depend in part on the quantity, type, and intensity of your experiences.

The more insightful, fascinating, and sometimes even painful your experiences are, the more likely you are to find your purpose. Sometimes it could just take one very memorable experience that leads you to your purpose. 

This also means that if you don’t experience things in life, if you never step outside of your comfort zone and explore things, you might never find your purpose. 

If you want to find your purpose, you also need to keep looking for it. If you don’t care about having a purpose, then you’ll likely never find it.

But here’s a big mistake that people tend to make when trying to find their purpose.

Most people go straight to the question ‘what is my life purpose”. And then, because they are not ready for that discovery yet, because they haven’t experienced enough yet to get to that realization, they get stuck and give up.

It’s like trying to find a pearl in the ocean when you’ve never even dipped your toe into the water.

What about me? I don’t know what my life purpose is, and I don’t know if I will ever find a singular purpose. But here’s what I did instead.

I believe that people don’t just have this one big purpose in life, but rather several smaller purposes, or ‘mini-purposes’ if you will.

These are things that are important and meaningful for you to achieve in the foreseeable future, let’s say in the next 5 years, or even just 3 years.

This might not be a grand plan to save endangered species, or to bring clean water to every single person in the world – not that these aren’t meaningful things – but as I said before, you can’t just make it up. 

You can’t just make up a grand, noble-sounding purpose.

Instead, you have to work from the inside out. You have to ask yourself, what the next most meaningful thing that you can do in your career, is. 

Let’s say you’re a comedian and what you would like your purpose to be is to ‘make people laugh’. It sounds profound and simple, but for some reason, it just doesn’t ring true to you. And if it doesn’t, then no matter how good it sounds, you can’t say that that is your purpose. It won’t lead you anywhere.

Let’s say that what you can deeply connect with instead is ‘to make a living being a regular stand-up comedian at a club’, and you feel that that is something worth pursuing for the next 3-5 years, then yes, that can be your ‘mini-purpose’. 

But then again, you might feel that it’s more like a goal. Sure you want to make a living, and also want to be a regular. But even though you don’t achieve this goal specifically, you would still continue doing stand-up.

You need to keep finetuning it until you arrive at something that feels concrete and actionable, but also something that’s organic, drives you and gives you enough meaning. 

So from there, you might fine-tune it to become: ‘Making people laugh while making some money, if not a living from it’.

I’m not saying that it can’t be something ambitious, but what’s key is that you genuinely connect with that purpose. That it doesn’t feel too abstract to you.

Here you might ask: How is this different from a goal?

Goals, purposes, are part of the same hierarchy. You could say that a purpose is also a goal, it is something you want to achieve. 

The difference is that a purpose is an overarching goal, and it it also answers the question of why you want to do something.

So if your goal is ‘I want to be a regular at a comedy club’, you need to ask yourself ‘Why do I want this?’, and the answer could be ‘because I want to make people laugh’, then you continue asking ‘why do I want to make people laugh?’, then the answer could be ‘because I want them to forget their worries for a moment and feel happy. 

This is just an example. But the point is that the purpose would be the level of goal that can exist on it’s own. It doesn’t need further reasoning or be justified by a higher goal.

This means that you could come up with a mini-purpose that says ‘for the next 10 years I want to work my ass off and live frugally to achieve financial independence’. 

That may not be your life purpose, but ‘achieving financial independence’ is an end-goal that can stand on its own. And it also drives you and is meaningful enough for you to pursue.  

Take the pressure off of you, and start defining your mini-purpose or mini-purposes, which is the next purpose in sight. 

If you try to figure out your mini-purpose, you will learn a lot about what is relatively more or less important to you. And you will stay alert to what’s meaningful to you.

Now, what about my life purpose then?

I am not at all cynical about this. I do believe that people can have a life purpose. But you cannot choose when to discover it. You cannot just make it appear.

The only way you can find your life purpose, if that matters to you, is to sensitize yourself towards your smaller purposes in life. 

You can’t find that big purpose in life if you’re not even aware of the smaller purposes you already have. 

A purpose is simply a reason for which you do a bunch of other things. And there can be several mini-purposes in life.

Your mini-purpose could be to spend the next 3 years uncovering some truth about something and inform the public about it. And you do that by starting a youtube channel, or a blog.

Your mini-purpose could be as simple as earning more money in the next 2 years to help a family member with their medical expenses. Doesn’t sound like the typical ‘purpose’, but yes, this is a purpose that needs attention and dedication, and is definitely meaningful,

Your mini-purpose could be to become the best accountant you can be within the next 5 years, simply because you want to stretch yourself and see how good you can get.

All these small purposes might seem not as significant, but if you continue to find these, and act with a purpose, you will find that over time you will get clearer and clearer about a possibly larger purpose for life.

And even if it doesn’t happen, at least you will get closer to it and have a more meaningful career and life. 

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