Finding Life Purpose in 5 Easy Steps
Image Title: On My Desk
Finding my Life Purpose
Quite often, I have had thoughts that there is no reason or meaning to life. When looking online for inspiration and direction, I found many articles and videos saying find your life purpose.
It sounds so noble.
It sounds like we all have a cause for the betterment of… something. It is like we all have a contributing factor to… something. Like we are part of.. something big and need to find our purpose so that we can play our part.
Clearly, this was why I was unhappy. I needed to find my purpose!
I don’t know about you, but I feel like that almost implies a pressure, a responsibility to find the big reason and act on it!
I began to search for the answer. Tips I found led me to try and identify exactly what I loved doing, and therein to find my purpose in life.
A lot of the finding my purpose tips all somehow leaned towards earning money by something I was really good at. It is an easy trap to fall into. After all, if I have a major life purpose, I must be good at it, and I must be good enough at it to monetise it, right? Well, for a while, that is what I thought.
I found an amazing youtube video How to know your life purpose in 5 minutes | Adam Leipzig | TEDxMalibu and I finally thought I know how to do this! The video os only 10 or so minutes long and is so valuable. I followed the five easy steps and came up with this amazing life purpose. At the time, I was focussing on my fairy photographic art, and that is where I looked for my purpose. I came up with this purpose statement:
I create fantasy art images that bring magic and mystery to people who are tired of the limitations of reality, and who want to brighten their homes and their lives with creatures and worlds that they would not normally see in every day life.
Amazing, right? Sounds lovely! I like it…
but…
I lived for about 18 months trying to fulfil this amazing life purpose. I thought I had it all worked out. And I did, sort of, but I found that the pressure to maintain my normal life, my job, and fulfil this amazing life purpose meant I just burned out.
After a shockingly bad 2022, I have spent a lot of time thinking about this topic again. I came to the conclusion that finding a purpose was too advanced for me at my current state of mind. I had to understand myself first and foremost, before I could find my purpose in life.
If you know who you are, what you love, and what you want to do, you are probably ready to define your life purpose. For you, I 100% recommend watching the talk How to know your life purpose in 5 minutes | Adam Leipzig | TEDxMalibu I am not going to write down his five steps here, because he deserves to have the views on his video for his really great advice, so do watch it, but remember to come back here after for more on my website!
For me, I had to find out who I am, first and foremost, and try and be true to myself before being anywhere near ready to define a life purpose to live by. I have managed to do this and have a blog post on it, which I hope you will read if you are struggling with this. Maybe, hearing what I found, will help you find yourself too.