4 Ways to Discover Your Life’s Purpose Now

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4 Ways to Discover Your Life’s Purpose Now

Over the course of my young life, I’ve read a lot of books on finding your life’s purpose.  Constantly searching for the inspiration that will lead me to what I am meant to do.  Everyone always says, “just do what you love”, but I find that to be a little vague.  I love many things, but there isn’t a lot there that I would say is my purpose in life.   How do you find what you are meant to do?  What should I be doing with my life that won’t leave me empty and regretful at the end of my journey here?

Some people know from a very young age what they are meant to do.  They love it whole heartedly and are passionate about their careers.  I have had a different experience.

When I was younger, I had one passion and one passion only: sports.  My goal in life was to make my dad proud by all the athletic accomplishments I could rack up.  Unfortunately, after high school it became quite evident that I was not born with the gifts to take that love of the game any further.

So I did what I was supposed to do, I went to college.  I’m very grateful I was told that I had no choice but to go to college now.  I think it was worth every second.  However, I did not give much thought to what I wanted to do with my life while I was there.  I picked finance as a major and entered the business world.  While this path does have some updsides, I’ve gained knowledge that has proven to be very beneficial to me.  But I’m not passionate about it.  Honestly, I’m pretty miserable with my career.

The good news is, I’m willing to take a risk.  I’m willing to search out what my purpose is for this life, and then go and get it.  You should be willing to as well.  I know it’s scary sometimes, thinking about leaving your livelihood to try something else, but the pure happiness and joy you will attain by living your passion and following your dreams will leave you more grateful then you have ever been before.

Life is short!  Go for it!

But how do we figure out what our purpose is?  Here are 4 methods that you can try to discover your life’s purpose.  If you don’t get there from these, don’t give up.  Keep searching!

4 Methods for Discovering Your Life’s Purpose

1)      Write your life story as if it were perfect –

Take out a sheet of paper and start writing.  Write about every aspect of your life to be absolutely perfect in your eyes.  Your house, your job, your family, everything in a utopia that you construct.  What does it look like?  What do you do with your time?  What gives you that feeling of happiness?  What activities do you do?  When you have completed this exercise, and it may take many revisions and several days to complete, if you are completely happy with this life you created, start writing what you would need to do to create this life.  It may be difficult but it can be done!  Go get it!

2)      Thoughts Map –

Get a piece of paper and at the top write “This is my true purpose in life”.  Now comes the fun part.  Start making a list of the first things that come to your mind.  It can be a question, one word, happy, sad, or crazy.  Just keep writing.  Don’t stop, don’t think, just write.  Keep writing words one line at a time until something hits you.  Keep going until something just feels so right and you are filled with feelings you haven’t felt in a long time, if at all.  When that happens, you may have found your purpose.

3)      What makes you cry? –

That’s right you are making another list.  Get ready.  This time you are going to list every single thing that makes you cry.  They can be happy things that make you cry tears of joy, or terrible things that make you terribly sad.  These are going to be things you are passionate about one way or another.  Is there a problem in the world you could work to fix?  Is there something that makes you so happy you would want to experience it every single day?  These are excellent places to start!

4)      Post-It reduction –

Grab a partner for this one.  Start writing the things that are most important to you in the whole world on post it notes, one per post-it.  Keep going until you can’t think of anything else to put down.  Now line them all up and sit back for a second.  Here is where it gets interesting.  Pick one thing that you can do without, that you can give up and hand that post it to your buddy.  When you get down to only a few post-its you are getting close to your purpose in life.  When you get down to the one thing you can’t live without in this world you have found your purpose.  If what you are doing in your life is not directly related to this post-it note you are headed in the wrong direction.  Do this several times, you’ll find that your answers will change over time.

Try one or try them all, but keep trying!  Life is too short to live a life without passion.  To not discover what you were put on this earth to do seems like a waste of the gift.   Do you have any ideas for how to find your purpose in life?  Leave them in the comments section so we can all give it a shot!

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