Don't Find Your WHY. Choose it.

I call on James Clear, Jim Rohn, Victor Frankl, and Oliver Wendell Holmes to find out what my purpose is in this life. 

Purpose and meaning are the most difficult parts for me. Everything is so arbitrary – nobody is there to tell you if you are right or wrong. There’s no single path laid out for you except the one you’re going for, right now. So where are you headed right now? Where are your current habits and labor taking you five or ten years from now?

So many people are, as I heard Zig Ziglar say once, people are wandering generalities instead of meaningful specifics. 

God hasn’t chosen a perfect career for you – he gave you the personality and desires to find one. The universe hasn’t chosen a perfect spouse for you – it gave you the personality and desires to find them. I don’t want to get into spirituality here – it works no matter what you believe. 

In his book “Man’s Search For Meaning,” Victor Frankl has an answer that I think will satisfy most people, even though the answer is difficult. He says, “Ultimately, man should not ask what the meaning of his life is, but rather must recognize that it is he who is asked. In a word, each man is questioned by life; and he can only answer to life by answering for his own life; to life he can only respond by being responsible.” End quote.

Don’t try to find out what the meaning or purpose of your life is. We have the power to decide the meaning, to decide the purpose. 

We get caught up in looking for our purpose as if it’s out there somewhere– as if our purpose already exists. But it’s not out there. It’s not a tangible thing that you are going to find. It’s not even an ethereal thing you are going to find. 

It’s not out there until we put it out there. But because of media, and education, and society, we have this thought that the answer exists and we have to find it. 

Then we do one of two things. We search for it, this thing that’s not out there until we put it out there. Or, we wait for the answer to come to us. Wasting time. Oliver Wendall Holmes said, “Many people die with their music still in them. Too often it is because they are always getting ready to live. Before they know it time runs out.” 

It is my opinion that searching for our purpose is an excuse to put things off. We are scared of making the wrong decision, so we search – or wait around - for some enlightenment, and this is sad because enlightenment isn’t coming until we realize that we write our own story. 

For me, I could never come up with a story satisfying enough, or big enough, or one with enough meaning. So I waited for that enlightenment. From God, from the universe, no matter what I was waiting for, I wasted a good 30 years doing what I needed to do to get by while I waited. I wanted meaning, and I searched for it. That didn’t work. So I waited for it, and that didn’t work. 

All the while, during this 30 years I was filled with unbearable angst because I deeply wanted meaning, I wanted a purpose. 

I never found one. A few years ago, I read Frankl’s book, and I made my purpose. I designed it. I created it. I told life what my purpose was. 

The beautiful thing about this process is that since that time, my purpose has changed maybe 100 times. Sometimes tiny edits to the wording, sometimes large sweeping changes to reorganize and edit the direction of my life, after much reflection. The point was that I decided. 

Now, I never have a purposeless day. Even if I have a lazy day, where I should have been working but did nothing, I still had that specific purpose calling out to me – I knew what I was procrastinating on. And I held myself accountable the next day. 

So what is your purpose? What is your answer to the meaning of your life? What are you going to tell life that you are going to do?