How to Find Your Life’s Purpose (and Whether You Have One or Not).

October 17, 2007

Let’s face it, life is full of unanswerable questions. Is there a God? What is our purpose in life? Well, I can’t help you much with that first one, but I think I can give you a great answer to that second question. It might not be the answer you were expecting, or an answer you’ve heard before, but would you expect anything less of me? You can go other places around the personal development world and find plenty of soul-searching, chakra-opening exercises to discovering your true purpose for living, but this is the only place around that will tell you with grinning confidence that you have no purpose in life. Intrigued? Well, follow along and see if I can’t talk my way out of this one . . .

A Life’s Purpose is Illogical.

I am nothing, if not logical. I tend to have radical ideas, believe in things that skeptics might scoff at, put my faith in my own theories, but I will believe nothing without evidence. I believe in the Law of Attraction because quantum physics has backed it up to a certain extent. Is it proven? No, but I’m confident enough in the evidence that I will put my faith in the theory. The problem I have with someone searching for their life’s purpose is that there is no evidence to suggest that it exists. If anything, saying that we have a purpose in life is actually completely illogical. Look at it this way:

If God is infallible, and has a plan and purpose for all of existence, it must follow that the plan and the purpose are likewise infallible. If God gave everyone’s soul an individual purpose, the purpose given must work within the confines of, and in congruency with, God’s overall plan. Since God is all powerful, his plan has no choice but to come to pass (read fate). Since the plan is inevitable, your part in it must also be inevitable, which means that you will complete your purpose whether or not you are aware of the purpose itself. In other words, you can’t help but to live your purpose.

This to me seems a very illogical prospect. Either we are all going to complete our purpose through sheer fate and luck of the draw, or God is taking a serious gamble that His overall plan might not succeed. We’re left with two possibilities:

1.God has a plan and it will be carried out no matter what you do. Your free will is an illusion and any choice you make will only move you further down the path to your purpose. Or . . .
2.There is no plan, no purpose and you have complete free will to do and choose as you please.

This However is Not Why Your Life Has No Purpose.

Let me tell you a personal story about how I discovered the purpose to my life:

I spent many years of my life just ?going with the flow,? as it were. I didn’t know what I wanted and, strangely enough, I really didn’t care. I went wherever life decided to take me. When I went to college, it was to a place I had never seen or heard of before. A friend told me it was good for the major I wanted so I shrugged my shoulders and went. This turned out to be a very good, though completely unintentional, decision. The point is that I wasn’t in control of my own life and therefore my life was going absolutely no where. One day I decided to sit down and find out what it was I was meant to be doing in my life. I tried Steve Pavlina’s method for finding my purpose, writing down as many possibilities as I could think of until I found the few that truly struck an emotional chord inside me.

What I ended up with was three pages worth of possibilities, an unstruck chord, and a lot of wasted time. Frustrated, I decided that maybe a life’s purpose just wasn’t really for me. For a few days after this I continued reading over the list I had made, hoping that one would jump out at me, until one night I was finally struck by the answer. Out of no where, it hit me: The point of living my life is to live my life. The point of being me is to be me. How simple!

?That’s all well and good,? I thought. ?But if that is true, what does that mean I am supposed to be doing?? That was a harder question. It’s great to say just be yourself, but wasn’t figuring out who I was part of the problem to begin with? I sat back down in front of my three pages and started scanning my list again asking myself over and over, ?What do I want to do for the rest of my life?? Again, I was struck with an answer, WHO CARES?! I shouldn’t be planning the next 30 years, I should be planning the next 30 minutes!

I discovered that I wasn’t supposed to be doing anything with my life. It didn’t matter what I wanted to do with the next 30 years, what mattered is what I wanted to do right then. Attraction and creation don’t happen in the future, they happen right now. We aren’t guaranteed 30 more minutes on this earth, much less 30 more years. The only thing we are guaranteed is this moment. All I had to do was create this moment the way I wanted it to be and the pieces would come together down the line.

You don’t have a life, you have only right now.

It’s good to have goals. It’s good to have something to work toward. But having a purpose in your life isn’t meant to fence you in. Confining yourself to one singular purpose in life only blocks your consciousness off from the rest of the opportunities for growth and happiness that come your way. Could’ve done something great, but it didn’t quiet fit in with my purpose . . . oh, well. Your life isn’t like a race to get from point A to point B. Your life is like a day at the theme park, or an evening at the buffet. Ride all the rides you can before the park closes down! Ride the ones you like twice before you leave! Try every bit of food at the buffet before the night is out. Didn’t like that dish, try something else! Take chances, try everything, that is the point and purpose of your life!

Here is How to Find Your Purpose:
Find What Makes You Happy
Find What Makes You Sad
Find What Makes You Angry
Find What Inspires You
Find What Annoys You
Find What You Hate
Find What You Can’t Live Without

Find All of Those Things. Do All Those Things. Lather, Rinse, Repeat.

Life isn’t a rat race. Life isn’t a fixed track that leads to a dead end. Life is a space ship that can take you to any point in an unending universe you wish to go. Where will you go? What will you do?

 

Wanna take a Ride?

Posted in Determination, Emotions, Goal Setting, Happiness, Law of Attraction, Motivation, Providing Value, Success