Growth
5 Reasons Why You Must Find The Purpose of Life
To say the least, as long as you wish to live a more meaningful and conscious life, a life purpose is for you. In this article, I’ll help you to tackle the importance of knowing your purpose of life – Why you should be conscious of it, in every waking hour.
It’s important for every human being to find the purpose of life and to live more meaningfully, aiming to fulfill those purposes.
In my last article, I narrated the ways to find the purpose of your life – how you can embrace a ‘trial & error’ method, how to accept your failures and step out of your comfort zones – so on and so forth!
But you must be wondering that while these ways are pretty important – what exactly is the reason to find a purpose in life?
I won’t be surprised if you are thinking ‘Why should I find the purpose of my life?’ or ‘Is it really necessary to find any purpose at all?’
Moreover, if we take a step back and see, what is ‘the purpose of life’? It’s no extraordinary thing that saints attain after chanting or mediating ages, neither is it any superpower that God endows some men with! Rather, it’s simply your life’s message.
It is the message you wish to drive in the world during your time on this Earth.
An example of a life purpose is – to inspire everyone or to help every living being who is suffering, or maybe to fulfill our passion for nurturing ourselves for a bigger goal or just to keep our parents happy.
Your ‘purpose of life’ can literally be anything – it doesn’t matter how big or small it is – as long as it makes sense to you, and gives you the joy of being alive! Having a life purpose applies to all of us.
To say the least, as long as you wish to live a more meaningful and conscious life, a life purpose is for you.
In this article, I’ll help you to tackle the importance of knowing your purpose in life – Why you should be conscious of it, in every waking hour.
Reasons to find the purpose of life:
1. Finding the purpose is the starting point of life.
The fact that you’ve stumbled upon this article and spending your valuable time reading through it, is because you are keen to focus on your SELF DEVELOPMENT – which is the stepping stone to your personal growth.
A life purpose is what encourages you to live your most conscious life. While you can be busy with a million tasks every day, when you don’t have a clear purpose, you may be heading down the wrong path.
That’s because your goals may have nothing to do with your purpose, which means that you can pursue your current goals for the next 10, 20 years, only to realize that this isn’t what you wanted after all.
To put it in the words of Stephen Covey, “If the ladder is not leaning against the right wall, every step we take just gets us to the wrong place faster.”
On the contrary, when you know what you want from this life and become conscious of your purpose, you try and motivate yourself every day, doing your best the things that you feel can help you shine brighter.
With a clear purpose, you can then set the right goals and plans, and take the right daily steps to create your most meaningful life.
2. Finding the purpose helps you to live longer.
Yeah, I’m just not kidding! Research has proved that you can live longer if you have something to live for.
A 2009 study shows that Japanese men and women who had ‘ikigai’ – a sense of purpose, a reason to jump out of bed each morning – tended to live longer than those who had not. Purpose likely improves health by strengthening the body against stress.
However, you must be careful to not mix up the purpose of your life with the job that you’re into – as many of us have some sort of a career, in which we spend most of our time.
Your purpose should mature beyond your career. In other words, don’t tie your life purpose to your job! That’s why it’s called a life purpose – not a career purpose or job purpose.
You definitely must consider them in discovering your purpose, but I contend that a career is not the main thing you should live for.
When you pursue your purpose, your life becomes filled with direction and meaning. If I have to tell you my story, although I was happily working with a volunteer travel organization – I was mostly spending my days sitting in a cubicle, while what I desired was to be free, to hop from one place to another, to get closer to people in a faraway land and to actually volunteer & make a difference.
Life changed when I gathered the guts to quit the 9-to-5 and started doing what I felt was right for me.
When people ask me ‘Why I travel the world‘ – I say that it gives me a sense of being alive.
3. Finding the purpose gives clarity on what’s important and what’s unimportant.
When you know your purpose, it helps you differentiate between what exactly is important and what’s not so important.
Most people today are so caught up in so many things that ultimately, they forget to make a difference in their lives and often confuse their priorities.
Earn more money! Get a house! Buy a car! – these seem to be the focus of chase for many people, although these can’t be the purpose of being alive.
When you have a purpose, you can immediately see which goals are important and which aren’t.
For example, after I found my purpose, I realized that almost all the goals that I had been working toward previously were pointless in the grand scheme of things.
Rather, the most important thing for me is to live out of the box, explore this beautiful world, know the stories that unfold at the farthest corners and watch the sunsets as time takes a pause.
When you discover your purpose, you can direct your focus to the really important things.
Instead of wasting your time on the inconsequential stuff, you can focus on your bigger goals & follow the ways that will help you in achieving those.
4. Finding the purpose provides a constant drive for your passion.
As I already mentioned, when I realized my passion for traveling and was slowly realizing those beautiful lessons that I’m learning through my journeys – that no textbooks could ever teach me – I knew that this was the purpose of my life – to explore, experience, and enhance myself.
Needless to say, when you pursue your purpose, you gain an incredible burst of energy that keeps you going.
When you aren’t living your purpose, days become dull. Weekdays come and you do what’s needed; weekends approach and you look forward to them.
Then the week starts again and you wake up to Mondays with resistance, waiting for weekends to come again. That’s a loop, which keeps going on and on.
You won’t believe me if I tell you that I don’t really understand the difference of days – and I enjoy my Wednesdays as much as I enjoy my Sundays!
If you look forward to weekends as opposed to what you do each day, it’s time to think about whether your work is something you really care about, or whether it is simply a means to an end.
Pursue something of the highest meaning to you. To do this, you need to first start with, “What is my purpose of life?”
5. Find your purpose because YOU ONLY LIVE ONCE!
Take a minute and think deeply about it. We’re all gonna die – sooner or later – but do you want to spend your precious time on earth doing things that offer little engagement or add meaning to your being?
Know that each passing day is gone forever – and your time is running out – it’s easy to get caught up in the day to day struggle.
Sometimes you lose sight of how amazing it is to be alive. You forget that your life is a gift. You forget that you’re supposed to treat something precious with care.
Perhaps you would want to quit smoking because you want to live long enough to see your kids mature into awesome adults.
Maybe, you want to quit toying with gossip because you know there’s too much of that in the world already and gossip is not the way you want to be remembered for.
Rather, you can take up the task of cooking a great meal for your family – as that can be a purpose – to shower your close ones with love. Or you can teach the kids of your maid, spreading the lights of education.
When you’re aware of your life purpose, you start to identify the values you want to base your life on.
Your values become your very own code of conduct that you’ll always observe wherever you are. Your values can’t be taken away from you.
And if you know your purpose, the uniqueness of why you’re here, your values should appear naturally.
We have only one life on this planet, why not make it worthy?