Let’s talk about personal purpose and the impact it can have on our life.
In other articles, I’ve addressed the topic of what personal purpose is and how to find it, such as:
Here, I want to focus on why finding our personal purpose is so important.
We could spend an entire article defining exactly what a personal purpose is, but let’s just go for a short working definition: it is work that we love and that is part of our mission in life, our dream. We take it personally. It’s not just a means to end, or to pay the bills, or retire early. We love the work itself. The work itself is the point.
If you’ve never had a strong personal purpose, it’s tricky to describe exactly why it’s powerful. However, I can confidently say that my life is much fuller and richer now that I’m living my calling, and here I’m going to describe the benefits as best I can.
Our Personal Purpose & Meaning
First of all, a powerful personal purpose connects us with a strong sense of meaning.
Most of us have periods in life when things feel a bit meaningless. Our career doesn’t inspire us, our surroundings seem stale, our family may even bore us. Life feels like Groundhog Day.
This isn’t a surprise, because often we fail to design our life around an inspiring personal purpose. We take care of everything we’re supposed to take care of, but with no backbone or guiding principle or larger framework.
There’s nothing undergirding all of our doing, so inevitably it feels hollow. Unfortunately, 99% of everyone I’ve ever met fall into this category: their lives lack a powerful, overarching meaning.
Living like this, we may start to subtly wonder why we’re alive: “What’s it all about?” “What’s the point?” “Why am I doing all this?” This isn’t as extreme as suicidal ideation, but it can involve significant feelings of hollowness, confusion and meaninglessness.
I like to compare a meaningless life to a child who isn’t allowed to play at their favourite game or with their favourite toy. If they’re denied this for a significant amount of time, they may start to feel empty inside. They’re disconnected from the joy of being a child, of frivolity, of sheer enjoyment. When we feel a lack of meaning, we’re like that child. We’re deprived of our natural wonder and joy.
If we live in this state, Napoleon Hill considers us a “drifter”:
The first thing you will notice about a drifter is his total lack of a major purpose in life.
napoleon hill
Personal purpose can bring us a great sense of meaning, especially as it brings tangible change to our lives, the lives of others, and to the world.
This is intuitive, because our personal purpose is inherently meaningful to us. When we water and develop it, inevitably it imbues our whole life with joy.
In finding my personal purpose and holding steadfastly to it for months and years, I’ve found that life consistently seems interesting, inspiring, wonderful, juicy.
When I first gained clarity over my personal purpose, the sense of meaning wasn’t so strong. I felt I was grasping at it, trying to get my work into the world, yet not quite succeeding
But now that my website has tens of thousands of visitors every month, I feel a greater sense of meaning. I know that my work is being read and digested.
I know that people worldwide are learning more about their psychology and learning techniques for personal transformation. I’m playing a role in the world that makes me proud and that I chose and created for myself.
Our Personal Purpose Recontextualises Everything
Another big plus of having a personal purpose, if it’s powerful enough, is that it recontextualises and reorganises our entire life.
Think of an Olympian training to win the gold medal in their discipline. For years, perhaps decades, their entire life is structured around their goal: their breakfast, their morning routine, their training, their leisure time, their dinner, their weekends, their holidays, and more. Everything is channeled towards that effort.
Winning gold includes and relies on all of their activities, yet it’s bigger than any individual one. This imbues the sportsperson’s entire life with meaning: their breakfast isn’t just bran flakes with fruit and yoghurt, but a key part of their gold medal effort.
This is one of the beautiful things about personal purpose. Our entire life, including our diet, friendships, family, habits, sleep routine, fitness, spiritual life, down time, and more, is all part of our purpose.
This is true by definition. It’s our purpose, the reason for our existence. It’s obvious, therefore, that everything else serves it.
Even the unpleasant aspects of the purpose are included. Things like running a company, accounting, making calls, sending emails, employing people, and any other task we may dislike, are all part of the effort. Therefore, they all take on meaning and are essential to our progress. This means we’re less likely to shy away from them.
Rather than being a loose constellation of disparate projects and obligations serving no larger purpose, our whole life becomes one single effort, driving towards our ultimate goal. As such, we feel whole.
The first sign of a non-drifter is this: He is always engaged in doing something definite, through some well-organized plan which is definite. He has a major goal in life towards which he is always working, and many minor goals, all of which lead toward his central scheme.
napoleon hill
Reach Peak Performance
That strong sense of meaning and clear focus inevitably leads to many hours spent mastering the skills required to creating a powerful end product, hours which eventually result in peak performance.
When we’re at the top of our game, we have moments when we know we’re nailing it and that our abilities far outstrip those of other people. We go beyond mere method memorisation and copying past masters, and we gain an intuitive feel for the workings of our field.
We see how all the pieces fit together and can alter them to our liking. We become the one who rewrites the rules, creates something new, and makes a mark on the world. Everything we touch turns to gold.
What was once difficult and obscure is now natural and obvious. We can remain present and enjoy our work as we do it, rather than straining to get things right. We feel relaxed, alert, certain, in control without controlling.
Attaining mastery is undoubtedly one of the great joys of building and living out our personal purpose.
All of us have access to a higher form of intelligence, one that can allow us to see more of the world, to anticipate trends, to respond with speed and accuracy to any circumstance. This intelligence is cultivated by deeply immersing ourselves in a field of study and staying true to our inclinations, no matter how unconventional our approach might seem to others. Through such intense immersion over many years we come to internalize and gain an intuitive feel for the complicated components of our field. When we fuse this intuitive feel with rational processes, we expand our minds to the outer limits of our potential and are able to see into the secret core of life itself.
robert greene
Personal Purpose Makes Us Irresistible
Another remarkable aspect of personal purpose is the power it gives us. The power to persist, to create, to lead, to convince, to inspire, to change. All of these combine to make us irresistible.
Being irresistible means we get lots done with less effort. Our actions have power. We have influence, so can make things happen quickly. We’re at the cutting edge of our field, so people look to us for inspiration and guidance.
One of the areas we develop most is our persistence. To succeed in our personal purpose, especially if it’s lofty and outstrips our current abilities, we must overcome problem after problem after problem. At many points on our path, particularly early on, we’ll doubt ourselves and wonder whether all this isn’t just one big idealistic fantasy.
To continue through these blocks, we must possess or conjure up persistence. If we don’t, we’ll eventually get knocked down. If we do, no matter what attempts to thwart us, we’ll find a way.
In my mind, persistence is the key to making our personal purpose a reality. As such, it’s also the key to becoming irresistible.
The non-drifter meets with temporary defeat and failure, but his reaction to all forms of adversity is positive. He fights instead of giving up, and usually wins.
napoleon hill
Experience Personal Growth
Another hugely positive side effect of having a strong personal purpose is the personal growth we experience.
First of all, we likely need to experience some level of growth to even find and articulate our purpose. If we’ve been living for years or decades without one, we’ll likely need to go through a process of discovery, asking ourselves what we really want from life, what our true passions are, what motivates us, and so on.
The four stages of finding it are Exploring, Narrowing Down, Researching and Defining.
In my own case, I only found my personal purpose after a profound life crisis when I left university. I went through three to four years of wholesale change on many levels. It was only after purging many of my prior ambitions that I could forge a new, inspiring, altruistic one.
I discovered a whole new field of life that I’d never explored before: psychology and meditation. I read books and took courses on finding life purpose. I started websites, went down dead ends, and spent some dark days wondering if I’d ever find a coherent sense of purpose in my life.
But now that I’m out the other end, I see myself as having experienced a metamorphosis, and the new Ross is imbued with an altogether different view of life, and a strong personal purpose.
That said, finding and defining our purpose is just the beginning. As I say in my Life Calling episode (see video below), the process of making it real eventually culminates in it being our career. If not, it’s not 100% our life calling.
The road lasts a few years and is usually tough. It requires learning, testing, experimenting, growing, failing and persisting. This is true whether we’re starting a business, gaining a degree, forming a charity organisation, or any other pursuit.
In all new areas, we must expand our comfort zone, act while scared, contemplate some grand new possibilities for our life, and go through all manner of other growth-inducing experiences.
Rest assured, we must pay the price for this growth. The price is the resistance and pain that we kick up as we attempt to plow forward.
On our path, we’ll be unceremoniously assailed with a series of psychological smokebombs: days, weeks and even months when we have no idea how we’ll succeed. We’ll wonder why we began the journey, thinking it was all just a foolish, infantile dream. We’ll feel small and scared. We’ll want to give it all up and run away.
We must recognise that this is our fear and our conservative self talking. They don’t tell us the truth: their only interest is to keep us stuck in our old self. In fact, these smokebombs are a sign that we’re growing.
As the Hero always does, we will succeed, so long as we persist. And when we finally live our personal purpose, we’ll realise just how much we’ve grown and changed. We’ll look back at who we were when we started the journey, and will barely recognise that past self.
To do meaningful things in the world, we must refuse the beaten track and instead carve our own path. In hacking our way through the uncharted jungle with a machete, we grow from a naïve youth into a seasoned warrior.
You might like my episode on Life Calling.
Enables Maximal Contribution
When we live out our personal purpose, we’re positioning ourselves to contribute maximally to the world. This is true for a few reasons.
First, living our personal purpose implies a degree of freedom. We can’t really contribute to the world as we want when we work under somebody’s thumb, unless we’re very lucky. We’re bound up by the red tape.
Most companies are set up hierarchically, and their mission is selfish. It’s about growth, maximising market share, and becoming a household name. Rarely is contribution their main focus. By maintaining independence, we can focus on contribution rather than the ancillary stuff.
Second, we become highly competent. Our passion drives us to reach supreme levels of skill, far beyond those of us who work in a career out of necessity rather than purpose. We leave them far away in the rear-view mirror, and we become optimally placed to make change happen.
Third, the nature of personal purpose is that it’s highly idiosyncratic and unique to us. It’s almost as though we’re a new species carving out a niche in an ecosystem, which in turn complexifies and diversifies. In expressing our uniqueness, we contribute something to the world that hasn’t existed before.
Nobody Can Take Our Personal Purpose From Us
The final benefit is that nobody can take our personal purpose from us. What do I mean by this?
Life is full of contingencies and uncertainties. Our health comes and goes. Our moods morph and change. Our finances fluctuate. Our pets die. Our long-term partner may move on. Even our friendships and family are contingent. And yes, having a stable job is also uncertain: every day, people lose their supposedly stable jobs. Nothing is really certain in life.
Though I don’t want to pretend that our personal purpose is totally infallible, it’s much more stable than many other things we possess, because it’s self-generated. It’s not a physical entity bound to the laws of physics and time and decay: it’s an inner force that we generate and choose to live by.
This is beautiful, because we’ll remain lit up inside despite temporary setbacks and difficulties, of which we’ll have many as we live out our personal purpose.
I like to think of my personal purpose as my sanctuary. It keeps me sane and grounded. It keeps my hands on the wheel of my life even when there is chaos ensuing around me. It’s the one constant in an ocean of change.
It’s up to us to develop this level of connection to our personal purpose and to stick to it no matter what. Nobody has that responsibility but us. However, once we do develop that connection, nobody can take it away from us.
The topic of personal purpose, like everything I discuss at Deep Psychology, is very close to my heart. You can find related articles in my Career and Purpose series.
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