Apr 16, 2017
If you take 100% responsibility for your own life, you are more in control of your success than if things just happen to you. But what is success and how do you reach it?
In this episode, we run through finding your purpose and coming up with a clear idea about what you want to achieve in life. This is what you are responsible for to make real and how you can define success for yourself. This doesn’t have to be purely financial, but ranges in any area you want; your finances, relationships, health and free time.
It is important to find your purpose as if you don’t know what you want, it is impossible to get it.
This starts off with the question of ‘what is the meaning of life?’. You can ask Siri and you will likely get a smart-ass answer, like chocolate. There is no one overall meaning to life except to exist and eventually die. But there is a meaning to your life. You just need to find it and live up to your potential.
To get your purpose, you need to decide what you want and what is important. You have to Be clear why you are here!
It is said that The Australian dream is to buy a house which will lead to a better quality of life. Pretty simple, right? Buy a house and be happy. Buying a house is great, but it won’t really provide financial security or happiness.
This is a societal norm, which is slowly changing. The house affordability issue is killing this dream for many. Most people spend their lives conforming in to societal dreams like this. Programming in life slowly changes our real purposes to conform to the new social norms. This leads to taking actions in life which will get the approval of others rather than ourselves.
We are told from childhood the word ‘no’ and ‘don’t do that’. While this was said to help protect us, it has led to crushing dreams.
While conformity has been important in evolution (by not sticking out and getting ousted by the tribe), it has lead into conforming to a normal level of life or living someone else’s dreams.
Just remember, if you aren’t working towards your dreams, you are working towards someone else’s!
This is why you need a reason to get out of bed in the morning which is your purpose. If you have this purpose, something to work for, you will be successful and happier along the way.
What is your purpose?
By now, hopefully you are convinced of the importance of finding
your purpose. So how do you find out why you are here? To figure
this out requires a bit of brain storming.
First, you need to write some lists of things that are important in your life. At the top of a blank piece of paper, write the following three headings:
- I care about
- What I am great at
- I love doing
Draw two lines down the page to make 3 columns under each heading. Then write 20 things for each under each heading. 20 for what you care about, 20 about what you love doing and 20 for what you are great at.
For those who are entrepreneurial, you can use the things in the the what I love doing category and ask, “how I can make a living off this”? You can use this to determine what you can make a living off, but we will cover this in a later episode.
Now that you have 60 things on the page, beside each one put a plus or minus against it. If it is something you really enjoy or are great at, put a plus against it. If it is something that you just put in there to make up the numbers, put a minus sign against it.
Now, with the three categories, write another list with only the things with a plus sign against them. From each section of; what I care about, what I am great at, what I love doing, select two things from each category. This will leave you with 6 things in total.
You might find that the things you are great at are the things that you love doing, because you care about them! It is common to see this sort of overlap as generally, if you enjoy doing something, you are normally pretty good at it! Also, if you are great at something you can use that to your advantage. There is a thing of general knowledge versus specialised knowledge.
This is how you find your purpose in life. It will take some playing around with to get right. Be honest with yourself.
For example, here are a few from my list: I care about: Making a difference in lives, I am great at: personal finance, I enjoy doing: Teaching
From these, I built my first purpose statement for myself: ‘I will help others by teaching personal finance’, so I started teaching personal finance courses. Then that led to the Rentvesting Podcast and now to Self Made Millennials.
You need to use language that suits you as well! This is a personal mission for you, so make it personal.
It really is that simple and needs to be refined over time, but what is really important is action. Taking action towards your purpose will be the difference between following your purpose versus following someone else’s. We will cover off on the action steps in the next episode.
Once you have your purpose statement, you need to know what you want out of it: This will be covered in the next episode. We will cover off getting the vision right and start achieving it!
In summary, you need to be clear why you are here and you need to get your purpose ingrained into you. You can sit around pondering what is the meaning of life, but it is much easier to find the meaning of your life.
So go find what is the purpose of your life and be on purpose!