5 Questions To Help You Choose Your Purpose In Life

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June 20, 2008

key Today I read a pretty good article by sales and achievement guru Brian Tracy on “How To Find Your True Calling” in life.

It had some good stuff I wanted to share, but I’ve renamed my post a little to reflect my own existential beliefs that your purpose is not something hiding under a rock somewhere, waiting to be found - but rather something you have to choose based on what you want out of life that agrees with your base temperament.

Still, many of the ideas are still the same so here we go. Brian says:

Your success in life will be largely determined by your ability to find your true calling, the right work for you to do, and then putting your whole heart into doing it very well.

The happiest people are those who have carefully thought through who they are, what they want, where they are going, and then decided exactly what they need to do to get to their goal. Asking yourself five targeted questions can help you home in on whatever path is right for you.

To begin to understand what this means to you, here are five questions to ask yourself:

#1. What do I do easily and well?

For me, that list would include writing, researching weird subjects and making new discoveries, pattern recognition in numbers, visualizing design and innerworkings of complex systems, finding hard-to-find info (especially in tracking people down and getting weird insider info about their lives), photography, film making, and, when I’m in a super good mood, making parodies. Also, for some strange reason, I’ve always been able to match music to film really well (meaning, picking the right music to go with a particular scene in a film)… and love doing it.

What about you? What would your list look like?

#2. What are the things I have done in life that have been most responsible for my successes?

Well, if I didn’t write ads I wouldn’t make any money so I guess that’s #1 for me. Also, my and Jason’s ability to design software well has brought us to where we are today with TodoPRO, the most ambitious design of our lives. And with the money in the future, I’d like to be able to use the research and design skills to make some major discoveries and new inventions… but that has a lot less to do with money as it is a “labor of love” so… not sure if that counts on this question

#3. What would I do differently, knowing what I know now?

From what I’ve learned dealing with the likes of a guy we’ll call “Mark” and another guy we’ll call “Jack” (among others) these days I know more about spotting a phony business deal than ever. Real businesses sign contracts and honor their agreements - they have real projects with real benchmarks and GET THINGS DONE. They also have advisors who keep them away from the Barrage Of Bullshit (BoB) out there that inevitably begins to slam into you once you become successful.

Posers, on the other hand, talk a good game, but get all weird on you when it comes to time to pay up and put some real skin in the game.

Then there’s people with just plain bad ideas for starting businesses… when you’re young, these people are a lot harder to spot because they are so passionate about their crappy idea, it’s hard not to fall into the whole mess. Passionate people are attention magnets… and that’s good; you just gotta watch out for what the guy’s passionate ABOUT. That means knowing enough about how business works and how money actually gets brought IN to an organization. The passionate people tend to get caught up in the “thing” and never bother to make sure there’s an easy way to get PAID. They somehow think the money will come later and take care of itself. Of course, it never does.

#4. What work would I choose to do if I won a million dollars cash in the lottery tomorrow?

To me, this question is bad basis, but I get what Brian is trying to get people to think about here. He wants to know what you’d want to be doing if you didn’t “have” to make money for awhile.

In my last post, I hinted briefly at how I believe an infinite vacation (where every day was like how “vacations” are to you now) seems cool at first but eventually dissolves into your own private hell that no one else you know can possibly understand. We need variation between work and play in our lives (even if your “work” IS your “play” in a sense.)

So that’s why Brian said “what WORK would you CHOOSE”… very good choice of words there. Because even if money were no object and you didn’t “have” to do anything, chances are you’d want to shoot yourself within a year if you didn’t invent some kind of project to crank on that had some kind of pre-determined purpose.

For me, I want to travel around the world some to find a better place to live than the U.S. - life in the U.S. is getting uglier and nastier with each passing year, and I don’t want to be around to pay some huge expatriation exit fee to the Boys In Black at the IRS when my time comes to jump this sinking ship we once called “Land of the Free” (these days, its more like “Land of the Enslaved”) - the “good news” is, thankfully we’re not as bad as what’s happening over in England… yet.

Besides travel, I want to start up a research and development lab with my friend Jason Summers, and begin delving into some of life’s weirder and more untouched aspects. Prove and disprove myths, make new discoveries, and create cool gadgets the corporate controllers of mainstream science don’t touch.

Speaking of projects with Jason - our huge endeavor, TodoPRO, is something I believe could change the way most companies operate and manage themselves in the same sort of way Google changed how businesses use the internet.

It’d be nice to also use what I know about mail order and online marketing to create a DVD company similar to The Teaching Company, except tackle non-academic subjects with the same care, attention, and respect they give to academia.

#5. If I were absolutely guaranteed tremendous success in any job I chose, what field would I go into?

Brian asks this question because fear of failure keeps a lot of people from just taking the plunge and doing what needs to be done; cutting ties with their old crap, and charging head-on into the new good stuff.

For me? Same answers as #4. I don’t really fear failure, as long as it doesn’t completely cripple me and make me… er, “normal” again… I’ll take risks as long as I’m not wagering ALL my money at once. (case in point: I recently lost around $30,000… but you know what? Oddly, I didn’t feel very raw about it. In fact, you might even say it didn’t bother me at all. I just felt grateful I had the ability to lose that much and it not hurt me. In about a year or two I may be able to recover some, possibly even all of it… but there are no guarantees… and I’m at peace with that.)

What about you? Do any of these questions help jog your mind on what you want to spend your time doing every day?

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