Purpose and Direction

What is your purpose and how do you want to change and affect the world.

Soon after the completion of Disney World in Florida, someone said, “Isn’t it too bad that Walt Disney didn’t live to see this!” Mike Vance, creative director of Disney Studios, replied, “He did see it – that’s why it’s here.”

“Efforts and courage are not enough without purpose and direction.” — John F. Kennedy

When you have or know your life’s purpose, your life becomes filled with direction and meaning. You will have the right direction and destination to set you forward. Your purpose gives you a reason for getting up and showing up. If you don’t get up and show up, something important won’t be accomplished.

Finding Purpose and Direction

Unfortunately, it is a common for you to question where your life is going. If you’re constantly asking yourself where your choices are taking you and if you’re making the right ones, you’re not alone, according to Maxie McCoy, author of You’re Not Lost: An Inspired Action Plan for Finding Your Own Way. But feeling lost is not unusual. Either you got to where you always said you wanted to be, only to realize you don’t want that any more. Or, you’ve never known where you’re going.

Finding and living our purpose is key to having a meaningful, fulfilling life. And, a strong sense of purpose can have a powerful positive effect. When you have a sense of purpose, you never get up in the morning wondering what you’re going to do with yourself. When you’re ‘in purpose’ — that is, engaged with and working towards your purpose — life becomes easier, less complicated, and stressful. You become more focused, like an arrow flying towards its target, and your mind feels strong, with less space for negativity to seep in.

When you don’t have a sense of purpose in your life, it makes you more vulnerable to boredom, anxiety, depression and falling into a rut, according to Psychology Today. To get yourself out of a rut, you should think small, because small is manageable. Small actions let you test and “dry run” how the action might make you might feel. Small steps are better than unyielding and misguided big ones. And over time, they allow you to get closer and closer to a life that feels full of purpose and direction. So it is important to ask yourself: What’s the absolute smallest thing I can do right now to feel more of this?

“When a man does not know what harbor he is making for, no wind is the right wind.” — Seneca

Victor Frankl’s famous book, Man’s Search for Meaning, in which he describes his experiences in concentration camps during the Second World War. Frankl observed that the inmates who were most likely to survive were those who felt they had a goal or purpose. Frankl himself spent a lot of time trying to reconstruct a manuscript he had lost on his journey to the camp — his life’s work. Others held on to a vision of their future — seeing their loved ones again or a major task to complete once they were free.

Aligning ourselves to a purpose often makes us less self-centered. We feel a part of something bigger, something outside ourselves, and this makes us less focused on our own worries and anxieties. Our own problems seem less significant, and we spend less time thinking about them, and so our sense of well-being increases.

“Having a purpose is the difference between making a living and making a life.” — Tom Thiss

Survival is the most basic level of purpose, common to all living things on this planet. It means the effort to meet basic physical needs for food, shelter, or to protect one’s survival in the face of others who threaten it.

The desire for purpose is one of the main reasons why people are attracted to religion. If you are a Christian, your purpose is clear: to worship God and Jesus Christ and attempt to live a virtuous, Christ-like life.

Personal Accumulative — attaining wealth, status and success: Many people in our individualistic and competitive modern societies derive their sense of purpose in these ways, according to Psychology Today. Encouraged by the consumerist ethos of our societies, their main purpose is to accumulate: to make money, to attract attention, to become famous, or rise to positions of status and power.

Muhammad Ali understood that it takes more than physical training to champion any goal. To attain true success, Ali's desire, dream, and vision all had to align with his sense of purpose.
Have you shared your desire, dream and vision with anyone? 💫 pic.twitter.com/wk3r341GR9

— Hall of Fame Health (@HOFHealth) December 9, 2019

Purpose and hope are closely related. Working towards a goal implies that we feel that the goal is attainable, and that our lives will change for the better once we have reached it. It implies hope — depending on our type of purpose, hope for a better life for ourselves, a fairer and more just society, liberation from suffering and oppression for others, a healthier world, and so forth.

Having a sense of purpose is powerful. With a clear and concrete purpose that is greater than yourself, no ocean of difficulty is too great. Without a clear and concrete purpose, we rarely move beyond our current boundaries.

Vision and goals can provide you a sense of purpose and can help you see things and work towards things in the future. It has been said that, “Vision that looks inward becomes duty. Vision that looks outward becomes purpose.”

References:

From Gratitude to Greatness: Brownlee Global's Path to a Purposeful Life

Guide and Educate Individuals How to Build Long-Term Wealth, Better Manage Their Money, and Achieve Financial Freedom

Finding Purpose and Direction

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