How to Find Your Purpose

The pandemic has given me a lot of time to think about what I want to do with my life. What I like to do. What gets me up in the morning. The truth is, I'm not sure. I feel grateful to have a "day job" I love at a company who truly cares about its employees and the world in general.

But that doesn't pop me out of bed in the morning. When the alarm goes off at 5am, I hit snooze. I'm not excited to get going. I'd rather head back to dreamland because that's better than anything else going on that day.

So when I recently read about the Aires New Moon, I learned that this is a great time to search for what fires us up, from deep inside.

If you're searching for your purpose too, I'll ask you the questions that stood out to me:

What would your 8-year-old self be doing right now? What do you find yourself wanting to talk endlessly about? And what can you simply not live without?

I've been thinking a lot about it. 8-year-old me would be writing! She would be storytelling. She would be talking about the latest idea boiling to the top of her imagination, no matter how silly or fantastical.

I can live without the act of writing, but I can't live without storytelling. How that translates into a life purpose, I'm not sure. And I'll keep seeking the answer.

Of course, these aren’t the only questions you should be asking yourself to find your life’s purpose. Many people have childhood trauma that even as young at 8 they were never able to be true to their childlike nature and passions so they have to work through that to find who they are. And while there are countless books about the topic, there aren’t enough hours in the day to read them all, searching for the one that will have the answer that’s pertinent to you.

Even reading Viktor Frankel’s Man’s Search for Meaning, while an incredible book, did nothing to help me find purpose. In fact, I felt a little hopeless because it’s consistently the best selling book next to the Bible, so it’s helped millions of people but couldn’t help me. (NOTE: this isn’t a review of the book. It’s an exceptional, essential book that everyone should read at least once in their life for the myriad wisdom it imparts.)

Growing up our family ate a lot of chicken, so I frequently saw my mom diligently cleaning the fat off the pale pink, floppy chicken breasts. One day I was standing in the kitchen with her and she asked me what was wrong. I said, “I feel like chicken.” She said, “That’s good because we’re having chicken for dinner. But what’s wrong with you?” Frustrated I’d respond, “I don’t know. I just feel like chicken.”

What neither of us put together was that I didn’t know the word for what I felt. All I knew is that I felt like that lifeless piece of chicken. Later, I’d learn that the word I was searching for was “blah” which is still not the best word for a feeling but it’s the most fitting.

Without a purpose, no matter how good your life is, it can feel blah.

Which brings me to what I’ve learned about the other half of finding your purpose: it should help others.

I think this is where I always begin questioning if storytelling is my purpose because it’s not easy to see how telling a story can impact someone’s life, especially since my chosen genre is thrillers and horror.

Realizing that helping others is the part that trips up a lot of people is helpful because it makes me feel less alone. Think about how much better the world would be if we all did things with the goal of helping other people through that action. The entire world would be a lot better off.

So along with wondering what 8-year-old me would like to do, I am also wondering how I can use that to make a difference in the world and help others.

It reminds me of the story of the boy who saw thousands of starfish washing up on the shore. He was throwing them back into the ocean one by one. A man walked up to him and asked, “What are you doing? You can’t save them all so it won’t make a difference.” The boy picked up a starfish, looked at it, threw it back in the ocean and said, “It made a difference to that one.

Maybe your purpose isn’t to be Mother Teresa, and that’s ok. Maybe it’s just to save a handful of starfish and make a difference in their life. But I’ve learned one thing and it’s that if I give up on finding out what my purpose isa, I may miss out on the chance to save the starfish.