Finding a Purpose
A novice programmer was once assigned to code a simple financial package.
The novice worked furiously for many days, but when his master reviewed his program, he discovered that it contained a screen editor, a set of generalized graphics routines, an artificial intelligence interface, but not the slightest mention of anything financial.
When the master asked about this, the novice became indignant. “Don’t be so impatient,” he said, “I’ll put in the financial stuff eventually.”
– The Tao of Programming
A lot of work can be done without a purpose, but what does that work accomplish?
I’m very guilty of this, even after finding a purpose to my life. Before I found a purpose, though, I simply did not have any direction… I went wherever my circumstances took me, not choosing to steer my own life in any one direction. After I found a purpose, I have found that making goals and plans comes much more easily, and it is also much easier to stick with those plans.
Having a purpose also gives me a benchmark for when to cut out old goals and plans, and compare society’s definition of success against my own definition.
There are several ways to find a purpose, but I’ll just be sharing the way that I used to find my own. Some people have reported using this method successfully in under 30 minutes, while others have had to spend a few hour-long sessions using this method before finding a purpose. I used this method for two 15 minute sessions, then one 30 minute session before I defined my purpose as “To bring peace to everybody.”
How to Find Your Purpose
This method is actually very simple… Find a place where you can write undisturbed, then write down as many ideas for a purpose as you can, one on each line. If you’re doing this on paper, bring plenty of sheets.
The way that you’ll know if you found a purpose is you will start crying after or while writing it down.
Don’t be afraid to write down things that you absolutely know are not going to be your purpose… Often, if we try to ignore an idea, it will keep popping up until we have dealt with it, distracting us from finding an idea that is closer to our purpose.
Also, it helps to write down different variations of your ideas, to sort of create a gauge of where you need to go. If one idea feels good, but doesn’t make you cry, then narrow the scope down, or broaden it, or even apply it to different groups of people entirely and see how you feel about that.
Finally (on the subject of finding a purpose), please keep in mind that my purpose is extremely short. Most purposes that I’ve seen other people come up with are very detailed, two to three sentence specific purposes… By comparison, mine is extremely broad, vague, and open-ended… I’ll never fully accomplish my purpose, whereas most other purposes can be accomplished and maintained.
Living Your Purpose
Now we get into the sticky part of the process… When I first found my purpose, I reworked this site, cleaned out my life, and devoted a lot of my time to finding out more about peace.
What I failed to do, though, was to set aside any firm goals and create any plans necessary to reach those goals. My purpose is broad; I want to reach everybody and let them know that peace is both possible and desirable.
Of course, I’m not naive enough to think that I can personally talk to everybody in the world… Neither do I think that everybody will want to listen to what I have to say even if I could talk to them all. From the moment I decided on my purpose, I realized that it was doomed to failure.
Because of this perspective, I modified my primary goal. I understand the principles of a ‘viral’ idea… That is, one person has an idea, shares it with one or two other people, and if those people like this idea, they’ll share it with one or two other people as well. Eventually, the idea will spread across the world. With this in mind, I planned to find a small group of people who would listen to my ideas, and I set out to find peace in my own life, so that I could share what I’ve learned.
Unfortunately, after reaching this beginning goal, I stopped trying to push harder, finding more people who I could spread a message of peace to. RSS subscribers slowly trickled in as word-of-mouth spread, and I’ve seen the people who visit this site touching on the topic of peace on their own sites. What I really need, though, is to reach a ‘critical mass,’ where I can reach enough people each year that they’ll turn around and copy me, inspiring still others to copy them.
I don’t think that I can do this only with a blog. I’m brainstorming ideas for future additions to this site, and I’ll welcome ideas from others as well… Perhaps a bulletin system where people can mention peace-related activities in different areas, or a forum… Peace isn’t only about me, it’s about everyone.
The key to living a purpose, no matter how broad or specific, is to make attainable goals, plans to reach those goals, and to take time regularly (perhaps each month) to review those goals and revise the plans.
Friday’s 30 Day Trial Updates
I have stopped my 30 day trial on waking up early due to health concerns. This past week, I’ve been getting constant headaches, and the only recent change in my environment has been waking up at 4am. I’m not completely certain that the headaches are caused by waking up early, so I decided to take a week off and return to waking at 5:30am, and if the headaches disappear, then I’ll experiment more to see what my threshold is. I made it three whole weeks with waking at 4am, though, which is a wonderful testament to myself that I have the willpower necessary to make other changes. My willpower didn’t fail, it was simply concerns over my health.
After waking up at 5:30 this morning, however, I am happy to report that I don’t have a headache today.
I have started two more 30 day trials though. I discussed my financial planning previously (which will take a bit longer than only 30 days to find any real results), and I am also starting an exercise routine.
My finances are largely unchanged, although this pay period will have more surplus than last pay period, allowing me to create a buffer zone as I anticipate an “extra” paycheck in April, due to the number of ‘pay months’ (two two-week pay periods) and calendar months being different throughout the year. While I don’t expect any large results until this extra paycheck in April, I still plan on setting as high of an emergency savings as I can, both before and after April.
Also, despite wanting to have a more active role in dolling out our money, my wife went ahead and paid our bills that were coming due these next two weeks without me being there… I suppose it’s not appropriate to ask someone else to break a habit only for your benefit.
As for the exercise routine, my current plan is to spend time lifting weights on every odd day, and ride an exercise bicycle every even day. Currently, I’ve set aside a block of time about 45 minutes after I eat dinner to do my exercising, which is the ideal time to build strength (as opposed to exercising before eating breakfast in the morning, which is the ideal time to lose weight). Yesterday, I was surprised by just how out-of-shape I had become since leaving the Army… I did a full body workout, and did one set of each exercise for each muscle group, until I neared muscle failure. (Just starting out, I don’t want to reach muscle failure, because that can cause a lot of damage to untrained muscles.)
My arms lost the most relative strength in the four years since I last exercised regularly… I used to be able to do around 75 push-ups in under 2 minutes. Now, I’m quite certain that I can do around 20 in the same amount of time, if I fall over in exhaustion immediately afterwards. My abdominal muscles have shown deterioration as well… I used to do over 85 sit-ups in under 2 minutes, which is considered very fast. My speed isn’t what I was most concerned about, though… I used to be able to do sit-ups indefinitely, sometimes doing over 300 repetitions before getting bored. Now, I can do 35 before the burn gets too great to continue.
I’m certain that the speed of my legs has decreased, although with my bad hip, I won’t be testing how fast I can run. Just as with my abs, I’m more concerned with the endurance of my legs. I can walk continuously for eight hours, with the limit being my hip, but when I get on the bicycle tonight, we’ll see just how much my legs have deteriorated. At my fastest, I used to run 2 miles in just over 12 minutes, although I would be happy to travel that same distance in under 20 minutes now.
Question of the Day
Well, there really isn’t a question for today… Rather, an open-ended invitation to share your experiences with this method of finding your purpose, or perhaps a different method of finding a purpose, and if you already have one, feel free to share the purpose you’ve selected previously.
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