Are you brave enough to follow your purpose in life?

How do you discover your real purpose in life? I'm not talking about your job, your daily responsibilities, or even your long-term goals. I mean the real reason why you're here at all - the very reason you exist.

Perhaps you're a rather nihilistic person who doesn't believe you have a purpose and that life has no meaning. Doesn't matter. Not believing that you have a purpose won't prevent you from discovering it, just as a lack of belief in gravity won't prevent you from tripping. All that a lack of belief will do is make it take longer, so if you're one of those people, just change the number 20 in the title of this blog entry to 40 (or 60 if you're really stubborn). Most likely though if you don't believe you have a purpose, then you probably won't believe what I'm saying anyway, but even so, what's the risk of investing an hour just in case?

Here's a story about Bruce Lee which sets the stage for this little exercise. A master martial artist asked Bruce to teach him everything Bruce knew about martial arts. Bruce held up two cups, both filled with liquid. "The first cup," said Bruce, "represents all of your knowledge about martial arts. The second cup represents all of my knowledge about martial arts. If you want to fill your cup with my knowledge, you must first empty your cup of your knowledge."

If you want to discover your true purpose in life, you must first empty your mind of all the false purposes you've been taught (including the idea that you may have no purpose at all).

So how to discover your purpose in life? While there are many ways to do this, some of them fairly involved, here is one of the simplest that anyone can do. The more open you are to this process, and the more you expect it to work, the faster it will work for you. But not being open to it or having doubts about it or thinking it's an entirely idiotic and meaningless waste of time won't prevent it from working as long as you stick with it - again, it will just take longer to converge.

Here's what to do:

1. Take out a blank sheet of paper or open up a word processor where you can type (I prefer the latter because it's faster).
2. Write at the top, "What is my true purpose in life?"
3. Write an answer (any answer) that pops into your head. It doesn't have to be a complete sentence. A short phrase is fine.
4. Repeat step 3 until you write the answer that makes you cry. This is your purpose.

That's it. It doesn't matter if you're a counselor or an engineer or a bodybuilder. To some people this exercise will make perfect sense. To others it will seem utterly stupid. Usually it takes 15-20 minutes to clear your head of all the clutter and the social conditioning about what you think your purpose in life is. The false answers will come from your mind and your memories. But when the true answer finally arrives, it will feel like it's coming to you from a different source entirely.

For those who are very entrenched in low-awareness living, it will take a lot longer to get all the false answers out, possibly more than an hour. But if you persist, after 100 or 200 or maybe even 500 answers, you'll be struck by the answer that causes you to surge with emotion, the answer that breaks you. If you've never done this, it may very well sound silly to you. So let it seem silly, and do it anyway.

As you go through this process, some of your answers will be very similar. You may even re-list previous answers. Then you might head off on a new tangent and generate 10-20 more answers along some other theme. And that's fine. You can list whatever answer pops into your head as long as you just keep writing.

At some point during the process (typically after about 50-100 answers), you may want to quit and just can't see it converging. You may feel the urge to get up and make an excuse to do something else. That's normal. Push past this resistance, and just keep writing. The feeling of resistance will eventually pass.

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How can you intelligently decide what to do with the rest of your life? And how can you find an answer that you won't later change on a whim?

Many of us face this decision for the first time in our late teens and early 20s. Some never face it at all and shrink from the magnitude of it, allowing chance to decide. But this is a decision that can be made consciously - you just have to know how to approach it.

If you're a typical reader of this site, then you have a number of long-term career possibilities. You could succeed at many different things if you put your mind to them. The problem isn't that you don't have a choice - it's that you have too many choices. And because of the overload of choices, it's difficult for you to commit to any of them. Perhaps you've made certain commitments in the past, only to change your mind a short way down the path.

The problem with outside-in

Most likely you were raised to make your career choices in an outside-in manner. Would you rather be a doctor, a lawyer, or an engineer? Do you want to get a job, go into the family business, or become self-employed? You scan the available options - even though they seem countless - and do your best to make a reasonable choice. Many people would consider this an intelligent approach.

The problem with the outside-in approach, however, is that it's ultimately circular.

Suppose you want to make the best choice you can regarding what to do with your life. If you look outside yourself for the answer, you'll see an overload of options - way too many for you to consider with any depth. You can't make the best choice by scanning all the possibilities. You'll die before you get close to finishing, and new career possibilities are being created all the time.

So instead of best, perhaps you're willing to settle for a good choice. In order to know what a good choice is though, you need some kind of evaluation criteria. How do you define the "should" in "What should you do?" You need a context. For example, if you're playing a game of chess and you want to know what move to make next, you need to know the rules of the game, the current board configuration, and ideally something about your opponent. If you don't even know what game you're playing, then you can't intelligently answer the question, "What should you do?"

And that's the basic problem - you don't really know what game you're playing here on earth. You don't know the complete rules of the game. None of us do. Science and religion attempt to give us answers, but the most brilliant and respected people on both sides often disagree, and each side still has many unanswered questions. You can jump to conclusions like many people do, but the wisest approach may be to simply admit, "There are some things I just don't know."

You could take this a step further and say that if you don't know the rules of the game, then your purpose should be to learn them. Figure out how the world works, and then your role may become more clear. This line of questioning leads many people into scientific and religious studies. And that's fine. Humanity slowly pushes forward in these areas, but you as an individual still need to decide what piece of the puzzle to work on during your lifetime, and you're still left swimming in a sea of choices. But at least this line of thinking gives you a goal - to learn why you exist and what you should do with your existence.

You've come full circle though. You conclude that what you should do with your life is to figure out what you should do with your life. Dead end.

You're playing a game where you don't know all the rules, and the exact purpose of the game isn't clear. However, you still have to make a move. You have no choice in that respect. Even standing still is a valid move in the game of life. If you look to the game for answers, the ultimate answer will be that you should make moves that will help you figure out the game. But since you don't know the game well enough, you still don't know what move to make right now. This approach simply isn't helpful. It just doesn't create clarity. It will only leave you more confused.

Of course, you could just start making random moves to learn about life through trial and error. That's a valid short-term approach, but we can do better than that...

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Once you discover and embrace your life purpose, are you set for the rest of your life? Do you keep fulfilling that same purpose until you die? Or can your purpose change over time?

Truthfully I think the answer is a little of both. There is a permanent, unchanging aspect of my purpose, and that aspect is growth. I have an undeniably strong sense that I'm here to grow, and that sense has never wavered. I imagine that conscious growth will always be part of my purpose.

On the other hand, there are aspects of my purpose I consider temporary. Those aspects are things like writing articles and giving speeches. Those will undoubtedly change and evolve over time. Thinking of myself as primarily a blogger, writer, or speaker would mean confusing the medium with the message. The message of growth may be permanent, but the current medium of expression is temporary.

In a way you have two purposes then: your message and your medium. Your message is the primary contribution you're here to make. Your message is who you are. If you can connect with your higher self, you know your message. Your message doesn't really change, but your depth of understanding will change over time. In a general way I can say that my message is growth. Or I can get more specific and say it's to help people live more consciously and courageously. This message doesn't really change; only my understanding of it does.

Your medium is the specific expression of your message. This is how you express your contribution to the world. You can have a really wonderful and empowering message, but if you choose a lousy form of expression, you won't have much impact. Running a computer games business was a weak fit for my message, while blogging is a much better medium for it.

You have many choices for a medium that fits your message. Suppose you recognize that your message is to heal people. You could be a doctor, a massage therapist, a holistic healer, a teacher, a musician, a nutritionist, a chef, a speaker, a counselor, etc. All of these are good outlets for healing.

Picking the right medium to express your message can be a real challenge, so let me give you some advice on how to do it intelligently. As I wrote in the article Living Congruently, a purpose-centered life requires finding the overlap between the answers to four questions:

1. What do I need to do?
2. What do I want to do?
3. What can I do?
4. What should I do?

There's lots more... Click here to read on.