Purpose gives meaning to life. Why do we exist? Why does something exist. In determining your purpose, before answering what our purpose is, we need to make sure that the purpose takes into account two things:
- Happiness and
- Meaning
Meaning: this is the value that you attribute to the results of your work or business i.e you must believe that the outcome of what you are doing matters and is important.
Happiness is defined as our personal enjoyment of the process of achieving the meaning itself, i.e do you enjoy you are doing?
The greatest way to have a high degree of satisfaction with life is to engage in activities that produce happiness and meaning. Studies have shown that those who have greater meaning in their work and business felt like martyrs, they were not happy with their lives. Those who have greater happiness without meaning experience shallowness. Studies have shown that it always best to simultaneously balance this.
There are notes to keep in mind while establishing your purpose; they include:
- Make sure that the results you achieve are meaningful.
- Make sure that the process of achieving your results is a process you love
- Analyze how you spend your time.
Now to the question what is purpose;
Zig Ziglar said you can get everything you want, if you will help enough people get what they want. This statement lies at the core centre of purpose.
Brian and Gab stated that in other to discover your purpose, you need to answer questions like
- Who am I supposed to help?
- What can I actually help people with?
- How am I supposed to help them?
- Why do I need to help them?
You can get the WHAT, WHY AND HOW RIGHT, but if miss the WHO? One may lose his/her direction. Its not enough to know the problem you can solve and the solutions you can craft. You must first know who has the problem before you can draft the right solution.
Instead of asking What can we sell, ask who can we help? If you had unlimited money, what will you do with your life. How do you want to be remembered? What world problem would you like to improve or change?
We should note that once we have discovered our purpose, we should go all out to execute our purpose successfully. A lot of people find their purpose but they don’t do anything about it. They just let it slide, it becomes forgotten. The daily life struggles have a way of distracting us from our purpose, however once there is a clear actionable step to achieving our purpose, the purpose becomes easier to achieve.
Purpose in life, work and business is very key and should be taken very seriously to achieve both happiness and meaning in life. After implementing the actionable steps, we should further carry out a purpose audit at a specified period to see and correct any deviation from our purpose from time to time. Purpose is meaning and happiness.
Just DO IT!