To find your purpose, you need to ask the question, what am I here to do? It will be about providing something. Your purpose is about what drives you.
When I think of my purpose, I imagine a car battery in my mind - the thing that starts my motor, the power inside me, that energizes me and fires me up. In other words, my driving force. It’s like it provides me my inner compass, so I know that I am facing TRUE NORTH. It keeps me directed and on track.
Discovering one’s purpose is a life defining event, because it leads, directs and guides us to our outcomes - to the big picture of the possibility that could be for our life, our vision, our dream, our aspirations. When we are clear about our purpose, our reason for being, it builds our self confidence, because we are grounded and therefore confident about what is our reason for doing what we are doing. When we are clear about our purpose, life gets much clearer about ‘who I am’ and where we are going and the dreams for our life. This is then linked to ‘INTENTION’.
Our intentions are powerful forces that come from within. If you know your outcome, what your intention is to achieve, with each step your vision, aspiration, dream becomes clearer. With each step you take towards success, you can feel it, you can smell it and you get hungry to have it. This is where loving what you do and doing what you love starts to kick in and give you power that drives you forward.
When you come to a point in your life where you feel that it is time for you to take that big step forward, and you muster the courage to start your journey, you need to be clear and decide what you want for your life. It may be a personal journey with another person you want to spend your life with. It may be deciding to get an education that will provide opportunities for your future work and career, or it may be a dream or an aspiration to start your own business. Once you reach this point, you are stepping onto your path, your journey to ‘FULFILLMENT’. It may mean that your whole life will change and it is certainly going to be one of your life-defining events.
My own personal experience is that the experience you learn and gain on your journey, step-by-step, is shaping you to what you will become, and the big picture of life is more about what you become. This is, in and of itself, very fulfilling.
When I decided that I wanted to go and live in another country, which I believed was a land of milk and honey and where I could have a more fulfilling life than in my mother country, I arrived with $20, my entire wealth. I bought my first business at 20 years old, my first apartment house at 21 years old and rented beds. I had two businesses and three houses by the time I was 24 years old.
As the years have rolled by and I accomplish many things, life is more about what I have become in my purpose to help many people to have a better quality of life, than about what I have achieved. I often wonder how this 18-year-old youth from humble beginnings did what he did as I look back.
I feel more fulfilled about those early achievements than the bigger and better things I accomplished in later life. I think it was in those young years that I found my purpose and I connected to my battery, my driving force. On life’s path, there are many obstacles: ups and downs, sharp bends in the road, new things to challenge and a lot of hard work. For me, they have brought tremendous fulfillment, as I have challenged myself to be the best I can be with a daily mantra of, "I’m going to do it better today, than I did it yesterday."
How about you? Are you ready to start your journey, step on your path? Have you found your purpose?
With experience, eventually comes wisdom. Believe in yourself, and my warmest wishes for you to have a fulfilling life.