Do you currently live with purpose?
Do you think about what kind of life you want to live? Who is that influenced by? Where did the thoughts of going after something come from? What do you feel like you are meant to do? What do you not want to do? Do you have clarity, or do you wake up without a sense of purpose?
It is really difficult to feel like you are moving forward when you live without purpose. Even if you do not have any distinct goals, having a purpose is a starting place in order to set your goals on top of. Your purpose, which may feel self defined, is something you realize you truly connect to. What do you want to do? It’s is not what someone else thinks you should do. Others may have better methods and great advice for ways to go about achieving your vision, but they cannot decide what you want to do for yourself. Only you can do that.
Sometimes this might seem extremely frustrating and unclear. You might walk around questioning every decision you have ever made and why it has led you to this place. And then other times you have the greatest feeling that in this exact moment you are doing exactly what you are supposed to be doing, or what you want to be doing. Most of the time that second feeling I just described comes from taking the time to think about what we want, and then to actually go after it. Pushing through the challenges that make us question our choices. If we identify that we value a particular mindset, or a particular lifestyle, we can find ways around our thoughts of doubt and fear in order to get us closer to what we want to do with our life. Now, an interesting idea is that we might not even enjoy what we were going after when we get to it. But the means of getting it and figuring that out are possible when you consider your actions. Having the capacity to honestly consider your daily actions and the cards you were dealt is the first step to improving your methods to effectively live in your purpose.
In business, building healthy translatable systems are a huge step for a business to run efficiently. These systems are developed for many reasons but mostly for efficiency and productivity. Within the ideas of efficiency and productivity are valuable attributes like organization, time management, and expertise, that are identified and built upon. If you create a great system, it allows you to have a high functioning business that in a way operates itself. The pre thought of how to create a system is a plan that is built in order to not waste time always trying to make new decisions every single day. Making decisions takes time and energy, and can be volatile in terms of favorable results. Having a system put in place can streamline the ability to create consistent positive experiences for what the system was created for. The better the system, the better the experience.
This is how individual life can operate as well. We become a system anyway, whether we are paying attention to it or not. Throughout our lives we build these subconscious thoughts, habits, and routines that take control of what we do before we even become aware of it. Creating the awareness to realize what your actual behavior is and where it came about can put you leaps and bounds ahead of people who do not realize this. Other than these systems that you create for yourself, a thought that might pop up is “Should there still be room for spontaneity that is not part of a system?” Absolutely. I feel like that is my favorite part of life. I love spontaneity and the discoveries I make during these moments. While it would be amazing to live purely in a spontaneous lifestyle, I believe a purposeful individual direction in our civilization is necessary for survival. Survival comes before spontaneity. If you don’t have the ability to survive, spontaneous discovery is a far second in terms of what is important on the hierarchy of what you are going to do when you wake up on a Saturday morning. Becoming better at surviving, is through our ability to build systems in our lives. I think this is observed in nature through the order that is seen as “routine” and consistent. For example, lions need to hunt to survive. There are methods to how they hunt and gather their food. They might have to freestyle and be spontaneous at times because they might be in a different location that they aren’t used to or find themselves a certain scenario that calls for different decisions, but the act of hunting for them has methods that they have learned either work or don’t. If they work, they continue to survive, if they don’t they won’t. That will always be the most important aspect of life, to exist and remain existing.
When something doesn’t work, you do not keep trying the same thing. I repeat, when something doesn’t work, you do not keep trying to same thing. This does not mean that when you can’t do something yet, that you stop repeating a process. That is different. You not being able to do something YET, is different than it not working.
There are situations when this understanding between these two ideas will be obvious. And then there are situations where this distinction will be hard to recognize. Building mental clarity in your purpose, and identifying what that purpose and intention is, will help you recognize what is working vs. not working and will allow you to make a quicker decision to fix it. When you can make quality decisions, you create quality experiences. When you can’t, you will have low quality experiences. Decision making is about taking responsibility for your energy and your time. The more you understand the value of your energy and your time, the easier it is to make decisions. This comes from spending time learning and practicing. It will increase your value and make you more aware of the energy you possess.
Here is something to pay attention to. It is one thing to think you are being productive with your energy and time. It is another to actually be. This can be observed in two ways. Full stop honesty with yourself through awareness of what you are actually doing with your time and energy. Or second, through others observations and communication of what you are doing.
Now depending on how you set this up, this can get tricky. Other peoples perception of what you are doing can only be understood by their perception of what they are judging. For example, if you want to play basketball at a high level and during your training you trained for an hour before your regular team practice today. Someone who never does that is going to look at you and tell you that you are such a hard worker and that they can’t believe you are doing that. Good for you. Sometimes, if they feel little jealous or outworked, they might even make you feel like you are doing too much. They are speaking from how they feel about it. Now let’s say there is another person you communicated this to, and for sake of the example we will go to the extreme and say Kobe Bryant in all of his greatness. He might look at you and ask you if you thought that was enough and tell you that he does 3 extra hours a day. Two completely different forms of feedback.
This idea of perspective can only be helpful to how you handle your decisions of what you want if you KNOW YOUR PURPOSE and you are committed to what you say you want. If you know what you want, you get around people that push you closer to it. You do not waste your time with people that let you cruise more often than not. You can, but that is your choice and you will adopt the behaviors of who you are around and who you listen to. There are no ways around that power of influence. And while you really have to take the initiative yourself in the beginning, which is extremely important, being around other motivated inspiring people can lift you up to a place that you could never go alone. Both are necessary for great progress and achievement.
So the better you know your purpose, the better you can allocate your limited resources of time and energy. This will be the greatest aspect of your life that you can ever work on and master. Guard both your time and energy as effectively and intentionally as possible. You will come to see that this dictates so much of what happens in your life.
Find your purpose and commit to it.