Do you ever find yourself lying awake at night with thoughts like…
“Why am I doing this?”
“What is it all for?”
“Do I just live, pay bills and die?”
“There’s gotta be more to life, right?”
We don’t admit it very often but this is something that just about all of us think about. And some of us think about it A LOT.
Ennui and Everything That Comes With It…
Think about WHERE you find yourself thinking these “what’s the point of life” thoughts.
My guess is it probably comes up the most when you’re lying awake at 3 a.m. already fretting over your mental to-do list, or stuck in traffic on your way to work dreading the day to come. Basically, the moments in your life when you have the most to worry, stress, and be unhappy about.
Now think about when you DON’T think about this.
This is probably when you’re spending time with friends and loved ones, engaging in activities that you find interesting and redeeming, or doing work that you feel brings value to the world.
In essence, this is the difference between SURVIVING and THRIVING on a day-to-day basis.
Doing things that stress you out so you can get money to pay bills is surviving.
Doing things that bring you happiness, joy, connection, and redemption is thriving.
And often these things that help you thrive are also related to your Purpose.
What Does It Mean to “Find Your Purpose”?
To find your Purpose means to develop an overarching sense of what’s meaningful to you in your life.
It’s drawing that line to clearly define the difference between Surviving and Thriving for YOU, so you can gradually shift more and more of your focus toward Thriving.
Over time this can lead to a stronger sense of optimism, hope, and resilience.
How Do You Find Your Purpose?
A man named Simon Sinek developed a really good technique for finding your Purpose in life, or as he calls it, your WHY.
Rather than reinventing the wheel, I’ll give you the Cliff Notes version of the process here.
It starts by thinking of the most impactful stories of your life. These could be moments from your childhood that had an effect on you, important milestone moments in life, or anything that stands out as especially impactful towards who you are and the kind of person you’ve become today.
Sinek recommends coming up with a list of at least ten of these stories, and then narrowing it down to the top five.
From there you’re going to go through those stories and identify the primary themes. What was an underlying need or motivation for you in those stories? Love? Independence? Beauty? Faith? Commitment? Write down everything that comes up.
Crafting Your Why Statement
Once you have this list of themes, you use the top two or three to craft a specific WHY statement. This Why statement represents your contrition to the world and has a specific format:
“To [Contribution], so that [Impact]”
One of the important aspects of the Why statement is it’s less about how you live for yourself and more about the bigger contribution to make to other people and the world around you.
The reason for this is we all desire to be connected and cooperative by nature. Sure, there might be a handful of total misanthropes amongst us, but generally speaking we’re all going to feel happier and more fulfilled when we’re doing things towards something bigger than us, whether that be family, community, the planet, or a higher power.
Once you have this Why statement, the other left over themes can be used to delineate your HOWs, i.e. How you live up to your Why.
How to “Find Your Why” For Yourself
I’ve done this exercise with a number of clients and they’ve all expressed how it was tremendously helpful getting perspective and direction in their lives. Even if they came out of it with a WHY they could have suspected at the beginning, the clarity of KNOWING that this was their WHY was worth the work.
If you’d like to get a more complete description of the exercise for yourself, I have two recommendations.
One, you can buy the book, Find Your Why, for yourself and go through all the steps in there.
Or two, you can check out this blog post, which actually shares a pretty solid summary of the book.
Once you’ve got your WHY statement and HOWs, post them somewhere visible to help remind you of them daily.
On any given day we’ll have a number of tasks and projects set in front of us. These all represent competing priorities in our world that we need to prioritize. What do we focus on first?