Before doing anything in your career, you need to determine your personal purpose. I know “goal fortifying” and “personal purpose” sounds cheesy, but I’m trying to avoid the phrase “goal setting”. Goal setting is much smaller and serves a different purpose.
Getting To The Core
We are trying to get to the core of your being. What makes you tick? What has you up working on a project all hours of the night (I’m writing this an hour before my alarm goes off because writing is part of my purpose). You need to know not only what drives you, but what you are driving towards. Why? Because if you do not self reflect and find out what your passion (the drive) and purpose (the destination) is you will work towards goals and purposes that are not yours. You’ll find the world, friends or even parents can only provide so much direction, but you need to determine it for yourself. If you do not, years down the road you will look at what you are working towards and find your life empty and unfulfilled.
When you read this opening paragraph were you thinking about jobs and careers as your goal and purpose? If you did, stop. You are not your job, and your job is not your purpose in life. It can be a figment of your goal and purpose, but it is not where you should put the foundation of your being. So many of us are trained to make that the core of who we are from a young age, too young of an age. What do you want to do after you graduate? Where do you want to work? Get these questions out of your mind while you read this article and self reflect!
The Bigger Picture Purpose
So what do I mean when I say purpose and goal if I am not referring to your career? I am talking about what you want out of life. Think of your life like a toothpaste bottle. Do you want to die with a ton of toothpaste (what you love and things you want to do) still in the bottle? Or on your death bed do you want to be drawing the flat of your toothbrush across the bottle to squeak out the last bit of toothpaste with the people you love.
To do this you must determine your passion (your personal drive) and your purpose (your destinations). Knowing these will help you to determine what you should be doing. Also, knowing these will build a personal filter. When reading success books and books about future and career, or hey, this blog, you need to have your own filter so that other people’s goals and purposes are not pushed on you. If you do not have this filter and read a majority of the blog posts on LinkedIn, you may succeed, but I can’t imagine anything worse than succeeding at the wrong thing.
Determining Your Passion & Personal Drive
This is usually the easier thing to determine about yourself. This is what is keeping you up late as you read about it. One of my passions is reading and writing. While I have actually struggled a large portion of my life to read and write, it is something I love and need to work hard for. What are you passionate about?
Word of warning. A lot of people say that if you do what you love for a job, you will never work a day in your life. While this is slightly true, I must warn you. Be prepared (when working towards your passion as a career) to see your passion twisted into an unrecognizable form for the sake of money. If there is profit to be had, your passion will be streamlined and monetized to a point that will leave you dismayed.
Determining Your Purpose & Destinations
You have many destinations in life. Figuring out what these are can be easy, and can be difficult. A lot of time we propose end goals that are merely figments or sections of a larger goal.
Let’s use me as an example. I could say one of my purposes and end goals in life are to get married and have kids. Well okay. That’s a quick fix. Let’s get a mail order bride and then start working on the second goal. Umm, no, I do not want that. Marriage and kids are not the end goal but simply figments of a larger goal. I want to love and be loved within a family. Okay, now we are looking at a bigger picture. Having this bigger picture also helps clarify the steps you need to take. If my goal is to get married and have kids, then the steps I would take are going on dates and finding a spouse (or the mail order option). When I clarify my larger goal to love and be loved within a family I build, the steps I take are a bit different. First, I have to be loveable, I have to work on myself as a person, not just find a wife or mail order bride.
Another example, I want to have a successful career. Okay, go down to Walmart and get a job so you can work there for the rest of your life and boom! You had a successful career working at Walmart. Define what a successful career is to you. Is it climbing up the company latter and becoming the CEO. Is it starting a business? Do you want to work your 8 hours and invest your time in your family? Defining your end goals in this way will help bring clarity to your actions and purpose.
If you are having a hard time defining your purpose ask the vague questions first. Or if you know certain goals you already have, ask yourself “Why do I want to do this?”, or “How can this be accomplished in other ways?”. There are multiple ways to live your life, and nobody is going to tell you how to.
You Can’t Have It All
The reality is we only have so much time. If you want a career that requires a majority of your time and life, then you cannot also have a large loving family. This is where most of our problems in life derive from. We divide our time to extreme levels looking for satisfaction because we never take the time to determine what we want out of life. And by doing that we self implode or have mediocre careers, mediocre friendships and mediocre marriages. This should not be the case.
My Thoughts As A Believer In Christ
As a Christian, I know there is a God and He has designed us with a purpose. Some of you may be reading this and do not believe in the Bible. That is okay, but if you believe that we are an accident and not created with an intelligent design, then we do not have an intelligent purpose. A person who does not believe in God will seek fulfillment in life and not find it.
For my fellow Christians out there, we are fearfully and wonderfully made with a purpose. Our purpose in life is to bring glory to God. If you do not factor this into your purpose, if you do not devote yourself to God and bringing Him glory through your relationship with Him and serving Him, you’ll likely seek fulfillment in the world. And the world will leave you feeling empty.
“Our greatest fear should not be of failure … but of succeeding at things in life that don’t really matter.”
– Francis Chan
Closing Thoughts
I myself and speaking through experience. I drove towards undefined success that was not what I wanted and would not fulfill my end purposes in life. Luckily, I learned from it and shifted my focus. I hope you can define your future goals and work towards them with more clarity than I did.
Take time and self reflect. What is your purpose? How can you honor God? What do I want to achieve in this short little life? Once you determine that, you can start building your goals and create a path towards that success. But. And this is a big but. As you live, your passion and purpose will change. Continual self-reflection will help you forge forward in life and continually be on the path you desire.
All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.
– Gandalf