My Purpose in Life

Over the last few months I have been devouring personal development material by the truck load: books, audio CD's, blogs, you name it. It's inspiring and I've already started to make changes but there's been this nagging feeling at the back of my mind, a source of confusion that's been bugging me. I feel like I'm missing that "major purpose" for my life.

I first encountered the concept of having a definite major purpose in a book called "Think and Grow Rich" by Napoleon Hill. It's a classic book, first published in 1937! I remember being very confused the first time I read it. There were a few reasons for this - the language was a bit tough for me, when he talked about faith I thought he meant religion (and I am not a religious person) and he talked about weird concepts like "infinite intelligence" which I had a hard time with. Having read many other books since, and having read that one a couple more times I now "get it" a lot more. By faith, Hill means having faith in something such as your ability or an idea. An infinite intelligence is the phrase he uses to describe that inexplicable entitiy that provides you with ideas, imagination, intuition, hunches and so on.

Throughout the book, one of the key concepts running through it is that of having a definite major purpose and I have always struggled with this because I don't want just one thing, I want lots of things. I can see how some people would have one major purpose. For example those people that want to find the cure for cancer, end world hunger, invent a self-cleaning house and so on. But I don't have such lofty aspirations.

So I shrugged off this idea and didn't think much more about it. Some time later I listened to an audio program called "Time of Your Life" by Tony Robbins. I picked this up because it seemed like a time management program, and it is but it's much more than that. This gives you a plan for your whole life! In the program Tony has you take a long hard look at your whole life and look at what areas are lacking. He suggests that many people focus on one or two areas at the expense of others. For example, somebody may be doing very well in their career but their homelife or their health may be suffering as a result.

To combat these problems, he talks about having "categories" for your life that you want to focus on all the time so that nothing gets missed out. Seemed like a great idea to me! So I have categories that cover things like my health, career, relationships and so on. This seemed to contradict Napoleon Hill's idea of having a major purpose and this approach suited me better.

I was pretty happy with this for about two months and then just to throw a spanner in the works, I recently read an article on Steve Pavlina's blog about discovering your life's purpose. The article gave an exercise to help you determine what your purpose in lfe is. I tried the exercise and couldn't really get on with it so this got me all bothered once again - why didn't I have a major purpose in life? What does that mean?

I wasn't the only one who struggled with the exercise and a few days later Steve followed up the post with another one about the reason why you'd want to set a purpose in the first place. He talked about the process of setting goals and how most people only set goals that address their needs. But what happens once our needs are met? For most people, not a lot. They enter their comfort zone, never to break out of it and so their life trudges on pretty much in the same way from that time onwards. Steve offers the advice that having a higher purpose can push you to set goals beyond your basic needs that address this purpose.

But lets step back a moment. Needs v Purpose based goals. What a brilliant concept! That all made sense to me. This was the very reason I had been unable to set a major purpose for myself. Let me explain...

Over the last 10 years or so I've managed to mess up in quite a few places, particularly with my career (which I utterly destroyed) and my health. I also neglected friends & family and just dug myself into a variety of holes. I'm now in the process of getting myself out of that mess and I hope that once I get my life back in order I can really break free of the ordinary life and do something special. The thing is, right now all I can think about is "fixing" the things that are wrong. I want to fix my career, fix my health, fix the relationships with my family and so on. I now realise that these goals are designed to meet my basic needs. It's hard to think about having some higher purpose in life when I have so many things that just need fixing. Once I've fixed everything and my basic needs are met then I can take it to the next level.

After this I was pretty happy not having a major purpose. I figured it could simply wait.

Then, thanks to Steve Pavlina once again, I received another great insight! This time, he was talking about the setting of your values. Now this was something I had done before from an exercise in Tony Robbin's book "Awaken the Giant Within" but this article contained a concept that I hadn't thought of before - your values do not have to be static! They change over time as you shift your focus from one thing to another. He gave the example that he recently had health as his number one value whilst he was trying to reach a certain level of health and fitness. Now that he's reached that goal he's concentrating more on the transitioning of his career and as such he's placing more emphasis on a different set of values. Health is still in there but it's shifted down a few places.

What has Steve done there? He's shifted his focus from one of his goals to another. Is he still working towards lots of goals? I'm sure he is, but the point is, that at any one time there is one that's more important than all the others, that has most of his focus. Isn't that the same as having a major definite purpose? Yes!

Suddenly I realise that not only did my values not have to be static but neither did my goals! I do have a major purpose! Right now, I'm focusing on "fixing" my health and I have various goals in that area to to that. But once I've reached those goals I'll shift my focus to something else and that something will become my new definite major purpose.

Once I've fixed all of my basic needs, then I can shift upwards to the next level. I think there are some people in life who have a single driving force that governs their whole life but I believe those people are in the minority. But just because we dont all want to find the cure for cancer doesn't mean that we can't define a purpose for ourselves that is meaninful to us right now and go after that goal with vigor does it? No. Now I am happy. Now I have my purpose, at least until July 7th which is the deadline for its achievement :-)