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12
minutes
Since this article was published, weâve discussed its finer points on The Jordan Harbinger Show. (Thereâs even a video and worksheet!) Check it out here:Â
TJHS 138: Deep Dive | Forget Finding Your Purpose â Do This Instead
.
Real talk: For a long time, I worried about not having a compelling purpose.
By purpose, I donât mean a reason to get up in the morning, or something I really enjoyed doing, or a major milestone I was working toward. I always had plenty of those.
I mean Purpose with a Capital P â that simple, profound, awe-inspiring catch-all phrase that described What I Was Meant to Do on Earth. You know, the sentence you bust out at dinner parties and conferences that captures the brilliant essence of what you do and makes other people go,
Oooh, now this guyâs got it figured out
.
Yeah, I didnât have that.
What I did have was a disparate collection of intense interests: engineering, travel, foreign languages, and psychology, to name a few. I spent my adolescence and early adulthood going really deep into these fields, but they didnât exactly lend themselves to a clever mission statement.
All I knew was that I was pursuing these topics because I genuinely loved them. And for many years, they had no immediate benefit and no obvious connection to my deeper purpose, whatever that was.
Over time, these random interests started to coalesce into a general area of inquiry:
why people do what they do
. The one thing tying all my random hobbies together, I began to realize, was a simple but profound curiosity about human psychology.
Maybe that was my purpose, I thought. To Figure People Out.
That was my guiding interest when I began walking the path that led me to where I am today, and if anyone asked me what my purpose was back then, I probably said some version of that. Not bad, as far as neat summaries go. At the very least, it accurately described my interests.
The only problem was that I didnât feel much of an emotional connection to it. Even though I really loved what I did, this purpose statement was just that â a few choice words strung together to make my passion for social dynamics sound more important. On some level, I knew this was mostly a clever idea â and a way to not sound dumb when people asked me what I did.
And so the confusion continued. For several more years, I worried that I was missing something huge, something essential, for failing to know what my function in life really was.
If I couldnât articulate it, did I really
have
a purpose?
And if I didnât have a purpose, was my work actually
meaningful
?
What I didnât realize back then was how many people ask themselves the same question all the time. And how most of us carry around some shame and insecurity about this question, because no one wants to admit that they donât have something so important figured out.
A few years back, researchers at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention
conducted a major study on Americansâ well-being
.
In the study, the researchers asked people about their sense of purpose and meaning in life. The findings are pretty astonishing.
When asked if their lives have a clear sense of purpose, only one in five Americans strongly agreed.
When asked if they have a good sense of what makes their lives meaningful, only one in three strongly agreed.
And when the researchers asked participants if theyâve discovered a satisfying life purpose, nearly 40% of people reported that they hadnât
.
Which paints a pretty astounding picture â and, I think, a reassuring one.
Because while most of us feel that weâre one of the few flailing without a purpose, the research shows that most people are wrestling with this question at any given moment.
We just donât know it, because no one wants to talk about it.
Why is that?
The Cult of Purpose
One of the most common emails I receive from our listeners is about finding a purpose.
And almost every one of those emails comes down to the same basic problem.
I donât know what my purpose is, and itâs making me unhappy.
I rarely get emails that say,
I donât know what my purpose is and Iâm having a lot of fun trying to figure it out!
, or
I canât figure out my purpose but Iâm still loving life!
In almost every case, the quest for purpose goes hand-in-hand with anxiety, fear, depression and insecurity.
Which echoes a lot of scientific research in this area. Several studies have demonstrated a clear link
between purpose and happiness
, and between
our ability to find meaning and how fulfilled we are in life
.
So itâs no surprise that an entire industry has developed around this problem. Browse career websites, see a life coach or check out the top self-help books, and youâll find no shortage of experts trying to help you check this huge task off your list. Finding Your Purpose is kind of having a moment.
Actually, itâs been having a moment for the last several hundred years. As civilization progresses, and humans continue to climb
Maslowâs pyramid of needs
to higher and higher tiers of self-actualization, we hunger more and more for the loftier values of meaning and happiness. Now that we donât have to worry every second about surviving this world, we can obsess endlessly about why weâre in it in the first place.
As George Bernard Shaw famously put it, âThis is the true joy in life, the being used for a purpose recognized by yourself as a mighty one.â
Which is true, of course. As meaning-making machines, we humans are designed to seek a purpose beyond mere survival. Thereâs real joy in that â discovering and pursuing what weâre meant to do. If there werenât, we wouldnât be worrying so much about not finding it!
What Shaw
didnât
talk about was how elusive and frustrating that âmighty purposeâ can be.
The pressure to have a Mighty and Recognizable Purpose â and to be able to articulate it clearly with other people â has become endemic in our generation.
Our culture celebrates ideas more and more â especially big, romantic, noble ones â and expects us to embody those ideas in everything we do.
Social media and the personal branding movement only made this obligation worse, by requiring us to publicize our self-summaries to the world, and by penalizing us if we donât.
And so we see other people busting out their purposes with ease and being rewarded for their vision, while we quietly wonder if weâre the only ones who havenât figured it out.
Finding our purpose then becomes a real problem, and we start obsessing over our purpose from a place of obligation, doubt and fear. We read books, we attend seminars, we poll our friends, we take career quizzes, and we fantasize about all the other things we could be doing to make our lives more meaningful.
Because if we donât, we worry that weâll lose the game. Weâll just be directionless meat puppets in a purpose-driven world, all because we donât have that One Profound Idea about ourselves.
Thatâs
what I call the Cult of Purpose.
This idea that we
have
to know why weâre here in order to thrive.
That we should be able to talk about our purpose easily and confidently with other people at any given moment.
That if we canât, then weâre failing in life.
That if we donât, then weâll never really be fulfilled.
The Cult of Purpose is how the exciting journey to find out what we want to do with our lives becomes a desperate quest to satisfy an external idea of who we should be.
Thatâs the mistake I made when I was trying to figure out my purpose early on. I looked at all the varied topics I was interested in, articulated a purpose that tied them together in an elegant way, then reverse-engineered an identity that satisfied that purpose.
But as I know from my own life â and you know from yours, Iâm sure â that approach just doesnât work. Not really. Not for long, anyway.
Rather than generating true meaning in our lives, grasping at an external purpose and then fighting to fulfill it is an excellent recipe for
imposterism
.
Why?
Because instead of stepping into who we already are, weâre creating an
idea
, a mental fiction â a very attractive mental fiction, but a fiction nonetheless! â and then trying to become
that
.
Which, of course, is the very definition of being an imposter. Instead of being ourselves, we try to become an
idea
of ourselves.
And on the deepest level, we know weâre so much more than an idea.
The truth is, purpose isnât something we just decide. Itâs something we discover.
More than that, itâs something we
develop
.
Which is why we need to rethink how we find it.
How to
Actually
Find Your Purpose
Several years into the podcast, I realized that my early stated purpose â to figure people out â was starting to take on some new dimensions.
Because I was building a platform and interviewing experts all over the world, I was putting that idea into action, and realizing just how much I loved hosting the show.
My project opened up new questions. Why do people do what they do? What makes some people successful? Is there a psychology of success? How can I learn from the worldâs most successful people, and share their insights with other people?
Suddenly, with very little conscious thought, my âpurposeâ was becoming incredibly clear.
I was here to learn as much as I could about life, success and happiness by interviewing top performers, and to share that wisdom with as many people as possible.
Interestingly, I didnât really care about the actual words. They didnât matter as much.
What did matter was what I was
doing
.
My new purpose â which wasnât actually new, since I had unconsciously been pursuing it for more than 10 years â that purpose was coming to life.
Like a path that unfolds as you tread it, my purpose simply became what I was doing every single day.
How did I know to do it? I didnât âknowâ anything. I was just doing what I loved the most, and living the process of becoming better and better at it.
In other words, I didnât build a show because I decided it was my purpose; the show became my purpose because I built it.
Iâm convinced that template applies to every single one of us.
But how do we actually do that, if we donât know what we truly love?
And how do we know if we love something enough to put in the hard work to master it?
Excellent questions.
In my view, the answers come down to three key strategies.
And the first one is toâŚ
Help the people around you.
Heather, a fashion designer and JHS listener, recently sent me a long update on her two-year journey to redefine her purpose.
After struggling with everything weâve discussed in this article, she finally realized that Making Beautiful Clothes â what she thought was her purpose for almost a decade â wasnât enough to make her excited about work anymore. She still loved the art of fashion, but she had evolved dramatically as a person, and her sense of meaning in life had changed too.
But the more she sat down and thought about what her new purpose might be, the more convinced she became that she was lost. She was also scared, because she had built a network and an expertise in fashion, and stepping away from it felt like a huge risk. After months of inquiry, she was more stressed than ever, and no closer to an answer.
So finally, she decided to stop working on her purpose all the time. It was just too frustrating, she said.
Instead, Heather did something incredibly simple and incredibly smart: She carved out a few hours each week to help the people in her network.
The idea, she told me, was to stop focusing on herself so much, and to hopefully open her eyes to new possibilities by investing in the people around her.
One day, she reconnected over coffee with an old colleague who had left the fashion world to join an unusual nonprofit. Her friendâs organization provided professional attire and career mentoring to job-seeking women, so they could feel confident in their clothes and presentation when they went on interviews and navigated their careers.
Heather was immediately intrigued. Her friendâs nonprofit combined clothing and philanthropy in a way she hadnât considered before, and it gave a whole new meaning to the role of fashion in our lives.
So she decided to ask her friend how she could help.
As it happened, the nonprofit was in the middle of a major fundraising drive, and was looking for a corporate sponsor to match funds. Heatherâs current employer had a philanthropy arm, so she shared the nonprofitâs materials with her colleagues and helped set up a donation partnership. Heather ended up securing half of the nonprofitâs budget that year, and suddenly found herself more excited than ever to go to work.
Over the next six months, she stayed involved in her friendâs nonprofit, making introductions and coaching her informally on the side. The way she explained it to me, she did it purely out of love. It was the first project in years that she just wanted to pursue because she enjoyed it.
Eventually, her friend offered her an advisory role in the nonprofit. She continued her work as a member of the board. Then, a couple months ago, the nonprofit offered her a permanent position, and Heather â convinced that this is what she was meant to do â finally made the jump.
Sheâs now a director at the nonprofit in charge of corporate partnerships and new initiatives. In her last email, she said her purpose now seems so obvious: to use fashion and mentorship to empower other women.
In
Six-Minute Networking
, we talk in depth about the power of helping the people in your life. Generosity as a mindset is hands-down the best way to deepen relationships and create new opportunities for yourself.
But helping out your network is also one of the most powerful ways to find your purpose.
For one thing, being of service in general is, in the broadest sense, our fundamental purpose on earth.
No matter what particular mission you adopt in life, your deeper purpose will always depend on adding value to someoneâs life. Whether itâs money, insight, information, support or survival â value is the currency that bonds all of life together. In a way, thatâs the one universal purpose we all share, no matter what we do:
to simply be of use
.
But more concretely, helping other people â without worrying immediately about the benefit to ourselves â is an excellent way to discover what we do and do not want to do with our lives.
Heatherâs story, to me, is a perfect template for discovering â or
re
discovering â our purpose in life. By deliberately building social capital, she organically created an opportunity that revealed her deeper purpose when it seemed impossible to find.
Donât just do what you love. Do what youâre willing to work hard at.
As weâve seen, an invisible thread running through the quest for a purpose is doing what we naturally enjoy.
This is, of course, how a child operates, and children are really talented at living their purpose, which is generally to pursue the things they like for their own sake.
But as I often talk about on the podcast, we shouldnât necessarily turn our hobbies into our lifeâs work.
Contrary to the popular wisdom to âdo what you love and youâll never work another day in your life,â I donât believe in blindly turning every hobby you enjoy into your work. Some activities are meant to be just activities. A beer aficionado doesnât need to start a brewery in order to be happy. A consultant who enjoys painting doesnât have to paint portraits every weekend to find meaning. Simply enjoying something doesnât mean it should become your lifeâs purpose. In fact, making a casual hobby your lifeâs purpose could rob it of the simple pleasure itâs designed to afford you.
But if you enjoy an activity
and
youâre willing to work hard to become great at it, then it might be a sign that that activity holds the key to your purpose.
So how do you know if youâre willing to work hard at it?
By doing it in earnest for a period of time, and paying attention to how you respond to the work.
Think about Heather. She loved working with the fashion nonprofit. She was moved intellectually by its mission. But only by
actually helping the nonprofit for over a year
did she realize how much she enjoyed the process of raising money for a nonprofit. Fundraising is incredibly hard, frustrating, hands-on work. But by doing it for a long time while keeping her old job, she learned that she loved it enough to work through the challenges and become great at nonprofit management. If she hadnât, she might have rushed into another false purpose.
So if you find yourself looking for your purpose, start by paying attention to the things you already love doing.
Then go a step further, and ask yourself if they speak to you beyond pure enjoyment.
If possible, work at them for a period of time â a few months, at least â and discover for yourself whether theyâre something you could imagine devoting a significant portion of your life to.
If they give you more than just pleasure or distraction â if you find yourself exploring them in depth, thinking constantly about them, wanting to go through the hard work involved in becoming great at them â then you can trust that youâre moving toward your purpose.
Focus on action, not ideas.
I recently caught up with my friend Richard, an amazing essayist whoâs been publishing books and articles for over 40 years. Over lunch, I asked him when he realized that his purpose was to write.
He chuckled a little, and rolled his eyes. âI donât know if I ever realized it.â
âWhat do you mean?â I asked, confused. âYouâve spent your life writing. Itâs obviously your purpose.â
âWell, I guess it is now,â he said. âBut I never really
decided
that in my head.â
âSo howâd you find out?â
He thought about it for a second, then shrugged his shoulders. âI wrote.â
I thought about his response for days after that. It was so simple I almost found it disingenuous â until I realized how deeply true it was.
Because the other invisible thread running through this quest for a purpose is
action
.
As weâve seen, we donât find our true purpose by writing it down and then trying to make it real out in the world.
We make something real out in the world, then follow it until it reveals our purpose.
For some reason, popular wisdom still treats the process of finding a purpose as an intellectual activity â an exercise we sit down with a pen and paper to work on. As we know, that approach rarely works. It definitely didnât work for me, for Heather, for Richard, or for any of our listeners.
The one thing that
does
work is
action
â pursuing something, building something, fostering something, or creating something, big or small, out in the world. Thereâs just no way around it. I mean, even if you
did
find your purpose intellectually, youâd still have to
do
something about it, right?
So as you search for your purpose, commit to execution. Grand ideas are nice, but they wonât mean anything unless you put them into motion.
So make that introduction between two people in your network.
Carve out an hour each week to create a prototype of that bottle opener you thought up.
Spend 15 minutes each night writing pieces of the novel youâve been playing with.
Whatever it is,
commit to doing something
, and find out what itâs like to actually embody that activity in your life. Thatâs the only way to know if you enjoy it enough to continue doing it, to struggle, and to become great at it. Itâs also the only way for that potential purpose to become real.
At the end of the day, the words we use to describe our purpose matter way less than what we
do
with that purpose.
In fact, Iâd say the words are pretty much irrelevant, no matter what those personal branding books and dinner party people tell you.
We have to
embody
our purpose for it to be real, and the way we embody it is by
acting
upon it.
If we do that, our purpose becomes a lot more interesting, a lot more fun, and way more meaningful.
Because then weâre not just trying to âfindâ our purpose all the time. Weâre
living
it.
[Featured image by
Austin Chan
] | ||||||
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Reading Time: 12 minutes
**Since this article was published, weâve discussed its finer points on The Jordan Harbinger Show. (Thereâs even a video and worksheet!) Check it out here: [TJHS 138: Deep Dive \| Forget Finding Your Purpose â Do This Instead](https://www.jordanharbinger.com/deep-dive-forget-finding-your-purpose-do-this-instead/)**.
Real talk: For a long time, I worried about not having a compelling purpose.
By purpose, I donât mean a reason to get up in the morning, or something I really enjoyed doing, or a major milestone I was working toward. I always had plenty of those.
I mean Purpose with a Capital P â that simple, profound, awe-inspiring catch-all phrase that described What I Was Meant to Do on Earth. You know, the sentence you bust out at dinner parties and conferences that captures the brilliant essence of what you do and makes other people go, *Oooh, now this guyâs got it figured out*.
Yeah, I didnât have that.
What I did have was a disparate collection of intense interests: engineering, travel, foreign languages, and psychology, to name a few. I spent my adolescence and early adulthood going really deep into these fields, but they didnât exactly lend themselves to a clever mission statement.
All I knew was that I was pursuing these topics because I genuinely loved them. And for many years, they had no immediate benefit and no obvious connection to my deeper purpose, whatever that was.
Over time, these random interests started to coalesce into a general area of inquiry: *why people do what they do*. The one thing tying all my random hobbies together, I began to realize, was a simple but profound curiosity about human psychology.
Maybe that was my purpose, I thought. To Figure People Out.
That was my guiding interest when I began walking the path that led me to where I am today, and if anyone asked me what my purpose was back then, I probably said some version of that. Not bad, as far as neat summaries go. At the very least, it accurately described my interests.
The only problem was that I didnât feel much of an emotional connection to it. Even though I really loved what I did, this purpose statement was just that â a few choice words strung together to make my passion for social dynamics sound more important. On some level, I knew this was mostly a clever idea â and a way to not sound dumb when people asked me what I did.
And so the confusion continued. For several more years, I worried that I was missing something huge, something essential, for failing to know what my function in life really was.
If I couldnât articulate it, did I really *have* a purpose?
And if I didnât have a purpose, was my work actually *meaningful*?
What I didnât realize back then was how many people ask themselves the same question all the time. And how most of us carry around some shame and insecurity about this question, because no one wants to admit that they donât have something so important figured out.
A few years back, researchers at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention [conducted a major study on Americansâ well-being](http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1758-0854.2010.01035.x/epdf?referrer_access_token=2f5nNCjhSAJo732TGXHut4ta6bR2k8jH0KrdpFOxC67W0HU0qrNgjiZn5tOhsa9-a8ChOFFzyRcur-yYFnx4IMIlwY0II986wNvJH9zUzQnklD3-5WrshvkmPi8s6O-pnhMmim16q_utnssDbsIrlaNIkTyRSsQvG60WcTMqN2-LmBFjYP47PIwoF5o87NKFTrJE6WWZsHFIBI7mxr2fTLmMGGEEeuLCdosJvvNdUpgHxf0dEv9_RUkyz9a-_TukCDsoydk41dIWniCrnr-elqhaqxJ2pcQrvXyeRzgHaa8%3D).
In the study, the researchers asked people about their sense of purpose and meaning in life. The findings are pretty astonishing.
When asked if their lives have a clear sense of purpose, only one in five Americans strongly agreed.
When asked if they have a good sense of what makes their lives meaningful, only one in three strongly agreed.
**And when the researchers asked participants if theyâve discovered a satisfying life purpose, nearly 40% of people reported that they hadnât**.
Which paints a pretty astounding picture â and, I think, a reassuring one.
Because while most of us feel that weâre one of the few flailing without a purpose, the research shows that most people are wrestling with this question at any given moment.
We just donât know it, because no one wants to talk about it.
Why is that?
#### **The Cult of Purpose**
One of the most common emails I receive from our listeners is about finding a purpose.
And almost every one of those emails comes down to the same basic problem.
*I donât know what my purpose is, and itâs making me unhappy.*
I rarely get emails that say, *I donât know what my purpose is and Iâm having a lot of fun trying to figure it out\!*, or *I canât figure out my purpose but Iâm still loving life\!*
In almost every case, the quest for purpose goes hand-in-hand with anxiety, fear, depression and insecurity.
Which echoes a lot of scientific research in this area. Several studies have demonstrated a clear link [between purpose and happiness](http://psycnet.apa.org/record/2000-16046-011), and between [our ability to find meaning and how fulfilled we are in life](http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/17439760802303044#.VqUZcLzLHb8).
So itâs no surprise that an entire industry has developed around this problem. Browse career websites, see a life coach or check out the top self-help books, and youâll find no shortage of experts trying to help you check this huge task off your list. Finding Your Purpose is kind of having a moment.
Actually, itâs been having a moment for the last several hundred years. As civilization progresses, and humans continue to climb [Maslowâs pyramid of needs](https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/hide-and-seek/201205/our-hierarchy-needs) to higher and higher tiers of self-actualization, we hunger more and more for the loftier values of meaning and happiness. Now that we donât have to worry every second about surviving this world, we can obsess endlessly about why weâre in it in the first place.
As George Bernard Shaw famously put it, âThis is the true joy in life, the being used for a purpose recognized by yourself as a mighty one.â
Which is true, of course. As meaning-making machines, we humans are designed to seek a purpose beyond mere survival. Thereâs real joy in that â discovering and pursuing what weâre meant to do. If there werenât, we wouldnât be worrying so much about not finding it\!
What Shaw *didnât* talk about was how elusive and frustrating that âmighty purposeâ can be.
The pressure to have a Mighty and Recognizable Purpose â and to be able to articulate it clearly with other people â has become endemic in our generation.
Our culture celebrates ideas more and more â especially big, romantic, noble ones â and expects us to embody those ideas in everything we do.
Social media and the personal branding movement only made this obligation worse, by requiring us to publicize our self-summaries to the world, and by penalizing us if we donât.
And so we see other people busting out their purposes with ease and being rewarded for their vision, while we quietly wonder if weâre the only ones who havenât figured it out.
Finding our purpose then becomes a real problem, and we start obsessing over our purpose from a place of obligation, doubt and fear. We read books, we attend seminars, we poll our friends, we take career quizzes, and we fantasize about all the other things we could be doing to make our lives more meaningful.
Because if we donât, we worry that weâll lose the game. Weâll just be directionless meat puppets in a purpose-driven world, all because we donât have that One Profound Idea about ourselves.
***Thatâs*** **what I call the Cult of Purpose.**
This idea that we *have* to know why weâre here in order to thrive.
That we should be able to talk about our purpose easily and confidently with other people at any given moment.
That if we canât, then weâre failing in life.
That if we donât, then weâll never really be fulfilled.
**The Cult of Purpose is how the exciting journey to find out what we want to do with our lives becomes a desperate quest to satisfy an external idea of who we should be.**
Thatâs the mistake I made when I was trying to figure out my purpose early on. I looked at all the varied topics I was interested in, articulated a purpose that tied them together in an elegant way, then reverse-engineered an identity that satisfied that purpose.
But as I know from my own life â and you know from yours, Iâm sure â that approach just doesnât work. Not really. Not for long, anyway.
Rather than generating true meaning in our lives, grasping at an external purpose and then fighting to fulfill it is an excellent recipe for [imposterism](https://www.jordanharbinger.com/deep-dive-how-to-overcome-imposter-syndrome/).
Why?
Because instead of stepping into who we already are, weâre creating an *idea*, a mental fiction â a very attractive mental fiction, but a fiction nonetheless! â and then trying to become *that*.
Which, of course, is the very definition of being an imposter. Instead of being ourselves, we try to become an *idea* of ourselves.
And on the deepest level, we know weâre so much more than an idea.
**The truth is, purpose isnât something we just decide. Itâs something we discover.**
**More than that, itâs something we** ***develop*****.**
Which is why we need to rethink how we find it.
#### **How to** ***Actually*** **Find Your Purpose**
Several years into the podcast, I realized that my early stated purpose â to figure people out â was starting to take on some new dimensions.
Because I was building a platform and interviewing experts all over the world, I was putting that idea into action, and realizing just how much I loved hosting the show.
My project opened up new questions. Why do people do what they do? What makes some people successful? Is there a psychology of success? How can I learn from the worldâs most successful people, and share their insights with other people?
Suddenly, with very little conscious thought, my âpurposeâ was becoming incredibly clear.
I was here to learn as much as I could about life, success and happiness by interviewing top performers, and to share that wisdom with as many people as possible.
Interestingly, I didnât really care about the actual words. They didnât matter as much.
What did matter was what I was *doing*.
My new purpose â which wasnât actually new, since I had unconsciously been pursuing it for more than 10 years â that purpose was coming to life.
Like a path that unfolds as you tread it, my purpose simply became what I was doing every single day.
How did I know to do it? I didnât âknowâ anything. I was just doing what I loved the most, and living the process of becoming better and better at it.
**In other words, I didnât build a show because I decided it was my purpose; the show became my purpose because I built it.**
Iâm convinced that template applies to every single one of us.
But how do we actually do that, if we donât know what we truly love?
And how do we know if we love something enough to put in the hard work to master it?
Excellent questions.
In my view, the answers come down to three key strategies.
And the first one is toâŚ
#### **Help the people around you.**
Heather, a fashion designer and JHS listener, recently sent me a long update on her two-year journey to redefine her purpose.
After struggling with everything weâve discussed in this article, she finally realized that Making Beautiful Clothes â what she thought was her purpose for almost a decade â wasnât enough to make her excited about work anymore. She still loved the art of fashion, but she had evolved dramatically as a person, and her sense of meaning in life had changed too.
But the more she sat down and thought about what her new purpose might be, the more convinced she became that she was lost. She was also scared, because she had built a network and an expertise in fashion, and stepping away from it felt like a huge risk. After months of inquiry, she was more stressed than ever, and no closer to an answer.
So finally, she decided to stop working on her purpose all the time. It was just too frustrating, she said.
Instead, Heather did something incredibly simple and incredibly smart: She carved out a few hours each week to help the people in her network.
The idea, she told me, was to stop focusing on herself so much, and to hopefully open her eyes to new possibilities by investing in the people around her.
One day, she reconnected over coffee with an old colleague who had left the fashion world to join an unusual nonprofit. Her friendâs organization provided professional attire and career mentoring to job-seeking women, so they could feel confident in their clothes and presentation when they went on interviews and navigated their careers.
Heather was immediately intrigued. Her friendâs nonprofit combined clothing and philanthropy in a way she hadnât considered before, and it gave a whole new meaning to the role of fashion in our lives.
So she decided to ask her friend how she could help.
As it happened, the nonprofit was in the middle of a major fundraising drive, and was looking for a corporate sponsor to match funds. Heatherâs current employer had a philanthropy arm, so she shared the nonprofitâs materials with her colleagues and helped set up a donation partnership. Heather ended up securing half of the nonprofitâs budget that year, and suddenly found herself more excited than ever to go to work.
Over the next six months, she stayed involved in her friendâs nonprofit, making introductions and coaching her informally on the side. The way she explained it to me, she did it purely out of love. It was the first project in years that she just wanted to pursue because she enjoyed it.
Eventually, her friend offered her an advisory role in the nonprofit. She continued her work as a member of the board. Then, a couple months ago, the nonprofit offered her a permanent position, and Heather â convinced that this is what she was meant to do â finally made the jump.
Sheâs now a director at the nonprofit in charge of corporate partnerships and new initiatives. In her last email, she said her purpose now seems so obvious: to use fashion and mentorship to empower other women.
In [Six-Minute Networking](https://jordanharbinger.com/course), we talk in depth about the power of helping the people in your life. Generosity as a mindset is hands-down the best way to deepen relationships and create new opportunities for yourself.
**But helping out your network is also one of the most powerful ways to find your purpose.**
For one thing, being of service in general is, in the broadest sense, our fundamental purpose on earth.
No matter what particular mission you adopt in life, your deeper purpose will always depend on adding value to someoneâs life. Whether itâs money, insight, information, support or survival â value is the currency that bonds all of life together. In a way, thatâs the one universal purpose we all share, no matter what we do: *to simply be of use*.
But more concretely, helping other people â without worrying immediately about the benefit to ourselves â is an excellent way to discover what we do and do not want to do with our lives.
Heatherâs story, to me, is a perfect template for discovering â or *re*discovering â our purpose in life. By deliberately building social capital, she organically created an opportunity that revealed her deeper purpose when it seemed impossible to find.
#### **Donât just do what you love. Do what youâre willing to work hard at.**
As weâve seen, an invisible thread running through the quest for a purpose is doing what we naturally enjoy.
This is, of course, how a child operates, and children are really talented at living their purpose, which is generally to pursue the things they like for their own sake.
But as I often talk about on the podcast, we shouldnât necessarily turn our hobbies into our lifeâs work.
Contrary to the popular wisdom to âdo what you love and youâll never work another day in your life,â I donât believe in blindly turning every hobby you enjoy into your work. Some activities are meant to be just activities. A beer aficionado doesnât need to start a brewery in order to be happy. A consultant who enjoys painting doesnât have to paint portraits every weekend to find meaning. Simply enjoying something doesnât mean it should become your lifeâs purpose. In fact, making a casual hobby your lifeâs purpose could rob it of the simple pleasure itâs designed to afford you.
**But if you enjoy an activity** ***and*** **youâre willing to work hard to become great at it, then it might be a sign that that activity holds the key to your purpose.**
So how do you know if youâre willing to work hard at it?
By doing it in earnest for a period of time, and paying attention to how you respond to the work.
Think about Heather. She loved working with the fashion nonprofit. She was moved intellectually by its mission. But only by *actually helping the nonprofit for over a year* did she realize how much she enjoyed the process of raising money for a nonprofit. Fundraising is incredibly hard, frustrating, hands-on work. But by doing it for a long time while keeping her old job, she learned that she loved it enough to work through the challenges and become great at nonprofit management. If she hadnât, she might have rushed into another false purpose.
So if you find yourself looking for your purpose, start by paying attention to the things you already love doing.
Then go a step further, and ask yourself if they speak to you beyond pure enjoyment.
If possible, work at them for a period of time â a few months, at least â and discover for yourself whether theyâre something you could imagine devoting a significant portion of your life to.
If they give you more than just pleasure or distraction â if you find yourself exploring them in depth, thinking constantly about them, wanting to go through the hard work involved in becoming great at them â then you can trust that youâre moving toward your purpose.
#### **Focus on action, not ideas.**
I recently caught up with my friend Richard, an amazing essayist whoâs been publishing books and articles for over 40 years. Over lunch, I asked him when he realized that his purpose was to write.
He chuckled a little, and rolled his eyes. âI donât know if I ever realized it.â
âWhat do you mean?â I asked, confused. âYouâve spent your life writing. Itâs obviously your purpose.â
âWell, I guess it is now,â he said. âBut I never really *decided* that in my head.â
âSo howâd you find out?â
He thought about it for a second, then shrugged his shoulders. âI wrote.â
I thought about his response for days after that. It was so simple I almost found it disingenuous â until I realized how deeply true it was.
Because the other invisible thread running through this quest for a purpose is *action*.
As weâve seen, we donât find our true purpose by writing it down and then trying to make it real out in the world.
**We make something real out in the world, then follow it until it reveals our purpose.**
For some reason, popular wisdom still treats the process of finding a purpose as an intellectual activity â an exercise we sit down with a pen and paper to work on. As we know, that approach rarely works. It definitely didnât work for me, for Heather, for Richard, or for any of our listeners.
The one thing that *does* work is *action* â pursuing something, building something, fostering something, or creating something, big or small, out in the world. Thereâs just no way around it. I mean, even if you *did* find your purpose intellectually, youâd still have to *do* something about it, right?
So as you search for your purpose, commit to execution. Grand ideas are nice, but they wonât mean anything unless you put them into motion.
So make that introduction between two people in your network.
Carve out an hour each week to create a prototype of that bottle opener you thought up.
Spend 15 minutes each night writing pieces of the novel youâve been playing with.
Whatever it is, *commit to doing something*, and find out what itâs like to actually embody that activity in your life. Thatâs the only way to know if you enjoy it enough to continue doing it, to struggle, and to become great at it. Itâs also the only way for that potential purpose to become real.
**At the end of the day, the words we use to describe our purpose matter way less than what we** ***do*** **with that purpose.**
In fact, Iâd say the words are pretty much irrelevant, no matter what those personal branding books and dinner party people tell you.
We have to *embody* our purpose for it to be real, and the way we embody it is by *acting* upon it.
If we do that, our purpose becomes a lot more interesting, a lot more fun, and way more meaningful.
Because then weâre not just trying to âfindâ our purpose all the time. Weâre *living* it.
*\[Featured image by [Austin Chan](https://unsplash.com/photos/ukzHlkoz1IE)\]*
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| Readable Markdown | Reading Time: 12 minutes
**Since this article was published, weâve discussed its finer points on The Jordan Harbinger Show. (Thereâs even a video and worksheet!) Check it out here: [TJHS 138: Deep Dive \| Forget Finding Your Purpose â Do This Instead](https://www.jordanharbinger.com/deep-dive-forget-finding-your-purpose-do-this-instead/)**.
Real talk: For a long time, I worried about not having a compelling purpose.
By purpose, I donât mean a reason to get up in the morning, or something I really enjoyed doing, or a major milestone I was working toward. I always had plenty of those.
I mean Purpose with a Capital P â that simple, profound, awe-inspiring catch-all phrase that described What I Was Meant to Do on Earth. You know, the sentence you bust out at dinner parties and conferences that captures the brilliant essence of what you do and makes other people go, *Oooh, now this guyâs got it figured out*.
Yeah, I didnât have that.
What I did have was a disparate collection of intense interests: engineering, travel, foreign languages, and psychology, to name a few. I spent my adolescence and early adulthood going really deep into these fields, but they didnât exactly lend themselves to a clever mission statement.
All I knew was that I was pursuing these topics because I genuinely loved them. And for many years, they had no immediate benefit and no obvious connection to my deeper purpose, whatever that was.
Over time, these random interests started to coalesce into a general area of inquiry: *why people do what they do*. The one thing tying all my random hobbies together, I began to realize, was a simple but profound curiosity about human psychology.
Maybe that was my purpose, I thought. To Figure People Out.
That was my guiding interest when I began walking the path that led me to where I am today, and if anyone asked me what my purpose was back then, I probably said some version of that. Not bad, as far as neat summaries go. At the very least, it accurately described my interests.
The only problem was that I didnât feel much of an emotional connection to it. Even though I really loved what I did, this purpose statement was just that â a few choice words strung together to make my passion for social dynamics sound more important. On some level, I knew this was mostly a clever idea â and a way to not sound dumb when people asked me what I did.
And so the confusion continued. For several more years, I worried that I was missing something huge, something essential, for failing to know what my function in life really was.
If I couldnât articulate it, did I really *have* a purpose?
And if I didnât have a purpose, was my work actually *meaningful*?
What I didnât realize back then was how many people ask themselves the same question all the time. And how most of us carry around some shame and insecurity about this question, because no one wants to admit that they donât have something so important figured out.
A few years back, researchers at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention [conducted a major study on Americansâ well-being](http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1758-0854.2010.01035.x/epdf?referrer_access_token=2f5nNCjhSAJo732TGXHut4ta6bR2k8jH0KrdpFOxC67W0HU0qrNgjiZn5tOhsa9-a8ChOFFzyRcur-yYFnx4IMIlwY0II986wNvJH9zUzQnklD3-5WrshvkmPi8s6O-pnhMmim16q_utnssDbsIrlaNIkTyRSsQvG60WcTMqN2-LmBFjYP47PIwoF5o87NKFTrJE6WWZsHFIBI7mxr2fTLmMGGEEeuLCdosJvvNdUpgHxf0dEv9_RUkyz9a-_TukCDsoydk41dIWniCrnr-elqhaqxJ2pcQrvXyeRzgHaa8%3D).
In the study, the researchers asked people about their sense of purpose and meaning in life. The findings are pretty astonishing.
When asked if their lives have a clear sense of purpose, only one in five Americans strongly agreed.
When asked if they have a good sense of what makes their lives meaningful, only one in three strongly agreed.
**And when the researchers asked participants if theyâve discovered a satisfying life purpose, nearly 40% of people reported that they hadnât**.
Which paints a pretty astounding picture â and, I think, a reassuring one.
Because while most of us feel that weâre one of the few flailing without a purpose, the research shows that most people are wrestling with this question at any given moment.
We just donât know it, because no one wants to talk about it.
Why is that?
#### **The Cult of Purpose**
One of the most common emails I receive from our listeners is about finding a purpose.
And almost every one of those emails comes down to the same basic problem.
*I donât know what my purpose is, and itâs making me unhappy.*
I rarely get emails that say, *I donât know what my purpose is and Iâm having a lot of fun trying to figure it out\!*, or *I canât figure out my purpose but Iâm still loving life\!*
In almost every case, the quest for purpose goes hand-in-hand with anxiety, fear, depression and insecurity.
Which echoes a lot of scientific research in this area. Several studies have demonstrated a clear link [between purpose and happiness](http://psycnet.apa.org/record/2000-16046-011), and between [our ability to find meaning and how fulfilled we are in life](http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/17439760802303044#.VqUZcLzLHb8).
So itâs no surprise that an entire industry has developed around this problem. Browse career websites, see a life coach or check out the top self-help books, and youâll find no shortage of experts trying to help you check this huge task off your list. Finding Your Purpose is kind of having a moment.
Actually, itâs been having a moment for the last several hundred years. As civilization progresses, and humans continue to climb [Maslowâs pyramid of needs](https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/hide-and-seek/201205/our-hierarchy-needs) to higher and higher tiers of self-actualization, we hunger more and more for the loftier values of meaning and happiness. Now that we donât have to worry every second about surviving this world, we can obsess endlessly about why weâre in it in the first place.
As George Bernard Shaw famously put it, âThis is the true joy in life, the being used for a purpose recognized by yourself as a mighty one.â
Which is true, of course. As meaning-making machines, we humans are designed to seek a purpose beyond mere survival. Thereâs real joy in that â discovering and pursuing what weâre meant to do. If there werenât, we wouldnât be worrying so much about not finding it\!
What Shaw *didnât* talk about was how elusive and frustrating that âmighty purposeâ can be.
The pressure to have a Mighty and Recognizable Purpose â and to be able to articulate it clearly with other people â has become endemic in our generation.
Our culture celebrates ideas more and more â especially big, romantic, noble ones â and expects us to embody those ideas in everything we do.
Social media and the personal branding movement only made this obligation worse, by requiring us to publicize our self-summaries to the world, and by penalizing us if we donât.
And so we see other people busting out their purposes with ease and being rewarded for their vision, while we quietly wonder if weâre the only ones who havenât figured it out.
Finding our purpose then becomes a real problem, and we start obsessing over our purpose from a place of obligation, doubt and fear. We read books, we attend seminars, we poll our friends, we take career quizzes, and we fantasize about all the other things we could be doing to make our lives more meaningful.
Because if we donât, we worry that weâll lose the game. Weâll just be directionless meat puppets in a purpose-driven world, all because we donât have that One Profound Idea about ourselves.
***Thatâs*** **what I call the Cult of Purpose.**
This idea that we *have* to know why weâre here in order to thrive.
That we should be able to talk about our purpose easily and confidently with other people at any given moment.
That if we canât, then weâre failing in life.
That if we donât, then weâll never really be fulfilled.
**The Cult of Purpose is how the exciting journey to find out what we want to do with our lives becomes a desperate quest to satisfy an external idea of who we should be.**
Thatâs the mistake I made when I was trying to figure out my purpose early on. I looked at all the varied topics I was interested in, articulated a purpose that tied them together in an elegant way, then reverse-engineered an identity that satisfied that purpose.
But as I know from my own life â and you know from yours, Iâm sure â that approach just doesnât work. Not really. Not for long, anyway.
Rather than generating true meaning in our lives, grasping at an external purpose and then fighting to fulfill it is an excellent recipe for [imposterism](https://www.jordanharbinger.com/deep-dive-how-to-overcome-imposter-syndrome/).
Why?
Because instead of stepping into who we already are, weâre creating an *idea*, a mental fiction â a very attractive mental fiction, but a fiction nonetheless! â and then trying to become *that*.
Which, of course, is the very definition of being an imposter. Instead of being ourselves, we try to become an *idea* of ourselves.
And on the deepest level, we know weâre so much more than an idea.
**The truth is, purpose isnât something we just decide. Itâs something we discover.**
**More than that, itâs something we** ***develop*****.**
Which is why we need to rethink how we find it.
#### **How to** ***Actually*** **Find Your Purpose**
Several years into the podcast, I realized that my early stated purpose â to figure people out â was starting to take on some new dimensions.
Because I was building a platform and interviewing experts all over the world, I was putting that idea into action, and realizing just how much I loved hosting the show.
My project opened up new questions. Why do people do what they do? What makes some people successful? Is there a psychology of success? How can I learn from the worldâs most successful people, and share their insights with other people?
Suddenly, with very little conscious thought, my âpurposeâ was becoming incredibly clear.
I was here to learn as much as I could about life, success and happiness by interviewing top performers, and to share that wisdom with as many people as possible.
Interestingly, I didnât really care about the actual words. They didnât matter as much.
What did matter was what I was *doing*.
My new purpose â which wasnât actually new, since I had unconsciously been pursuing it for more than 10 years â that purpose was coming to life.
Like a path that unfolds as you tread it, my purpose simply became what I was doing every single day.
How did I know to do it? I didnât âknowâ anything. I was just doing what I loved the most, and living the process of becoming better and better at it.
**In other words, I didnât build a show because I decided it was my purpose; the show became my purpose because I built it.**
Iâm convinced that template applies to every single one of us.
But how do we actually do that, if we donât know what we truly love?
And how do we know if we love something enough to put in the hard work to master it?
Excellent questions.
In my view, the answers come down to three key strategies.
And the first one is toâŚ
#### **Help the people around you.**
Heather, a fashion designer and JHS listener, recently sent me a long update on her two-year journey to redefine her purpose.
After struggling with everything weâve discussed in this article, she finally realized that Making Beautiful Clothes â what she thought was her purpose for almost a decade â wasnât enough to make her excited about work anymore. She still loved the art of fashion, but she had evolved dramatically as a person, and her sense of meaning in life had changed too.
But the more she sat down and thought about what her new purpose might be, the more convinced she became that she was lost. She was also scared, because she had built a network and an expertise in fashion, and stepping away from it felt like a huge risk. After months of inquiry, she was more stressed than ever, and no closer to an answer.
So finally, she decided to stop working on her purpose all the time. It was just too frustrating, she said.
Instead, Heather did something incredibly simple and incredibly smart: She carved out a few hours each week to help the people in her network.
The idea, she told me, was to stop focusing on herself so much, and to hopefully open her eyes to new possibilities by investing in the people around her.
One day, she reconnected over coffee with an old colleague who had left the fashion world to join an unusual nonprofit. Her friendâs organization provided professional attire and career mentoring to job-seeking women, so they could feel confident in their clothes and presentation when they went on interviews and navigated their careers.
Heather was immediately intrigued. Her friendâs nonprofit combined clothing and philanthropy in a way she hadnât considered before, and it gave a whole new meaning to the role of fashion in our lives.
So she decided to ask her friend how she could help.
As it happened, the nonprofit was in the middle of a major fundraising drive, and was looking for a corporate sponsor to match funds. Heatherâs current employer had a philanthropy arm, so she shared the nonprofitâs materials with her colleagues and helped set up a donation partnership. Heather ended up securing half of the nonprofitâs budget that year, and suddenly found herself more excited than ever to go to work.
Over the next six months, she stayed involved in her friendâs nonprofit, making introductions and coaching her informally on the side. The way she explained it to me, she did it purely out of love. It was the first project in years that she just wanted to pursue because she enjoyed it.
Eventually, her friend offered her an advisory role in the nonprofit. She continued her work as a member of the board. Then, a couple months ago, the nonprofit offered her a permanent position, and Heather â convinced that this is what she was meant to do â finally made the jump.
Sheâs now a director at the nonprofit in charge of corporate partnerships and new initiatives. In her last email, she said her purpose now seems so obvious: to use fashion and mentorship to empower other women.
In [Six-Minute Networking](https://jordanharbinger.com/course), we talk in depth about the power of helping the people in your life. Generosity as a mindset is hands-down the best way to deepen relationships and create new opportunities for yourself.
**But helping out your network is also one of the most powerful ways to find your purpose.**
For one thing, being of service in general is, in the broadest sense, our fundamental purpose on earth.
No matter what particular mission you adopt in life, your deeper purpose will always depend on adding value to someoneâs life. Whether itâs money, insight, information, support or survival â value is the currency that bonds all of life together. In a way, thatâs the one universal purpose we all share, no matter what we do: *to simply be of use*.
But more concretely, helping other people â without worrying immediately about the benefit to ourselves â is an excellent way to discover what we do and do not want to do with our lives.
Heatherâs story, to me, is a perfect template for discovering â or *re*discovering â our purpose in life. By deliberately building social capital, she organically created an opportunity that revealed her deeper purpose when it seemed impossible to find.
#### **Donât just do what you love. Do what youâre willing to work hard at.**
As weâve seen, an invisible thread running through the quest for a purpose is doing what we naturally enjoy.
This is, of course, how a child operates, and children are really talented at living their purpose, which is generally to pursue the things they like for their own sake.
But as I often talk about on the podcast, we shouldnât necessarily turn our hobbies into our lifeâs work.
Contrary to the popular wisdom to âdo what you love and youâll never work another day in your life,â I donât believe in blindly turning every hobby you enjoy into your work. Some activities are meant to be just activities. A beer aficionado doesnât need to start a brewery in order to be happy. A consultant who enjoys painting doesnât have to paint portraits every weekend to find meaning. Simply enjoying something doesnât mean it should become your lifeâs purpose. In fact, making a casual hobby your lifeâs purpose could rob it of the simple pleasure itâs designed to afford you.
**But if you enjoy an activity** ***and*** **youâre willing to work hard to become great at it, then it might be a sign that that activity holds the key to your purpose.**
So how do you know if youâre willing to work hard at it?
By doing it in earnest for a period of time, and paying attention to how you respond to the work.
Think about Heather. She loved working with the fashion nonprofit. She was moved intellectually by its mission. But only by *actually helping the nonprofit for over a year* did she realize how much she enjoyed the process of raising money for a nonprofit. Fundraising is incredibly hard, frustrating, hands-on work. But by doing it for a long time while keeping her old job, she learned that she loved it enough to work through the challenges and become great at nonprofit management. If she hadnât, she might have rushed into another false purpose.
So if you find yourself looking for your purpose, start by paying attention to the things you already love doing.
Then go a step further, and ask yourself if they speak to you beyond pure enjoyment.
If possible, work at them for a period of time â a few months, at least â and discover for yourself whether theyâre something you could imagine devoting a significant portion of your life to.
If they give you more than just pleasure or distraction â if you find yourself exploring them in depth, thinking constantly about them, wanting to go through the hard work involved in becoming great at them â then you can trust that youâre moving toward your purpose.
#### **Focus on action, not ideas.**
I recently caught up with my friend Richard, an amazing essayist whoâs been publishing books and articles for over 40 years. Over lunch, I asked him when he realized that his purpose was to write.
He chuckled a little, and rolled his eyes. âI donât know if I ever realized it.â
âWhat do you mean?â I asked, confused. âYouâve spent your life writing. Itâs obviously your purpose.â
âWell, I guess it is now,â he said. âBut I never really *decided* that in my head.â
âSo howâd you find out?â
He thought about it for a second, then shrugged his shoulders. âI wrote.â
I thought about his response for days after that. It was so simple I almost found it disingenuous â until I realized how deeply true it was.
Because the other invisible thread running through this quest for a purpose is *action*.
As weâve seen, we donât find our true purpose by writing it down and then trying to make it real out in the world.
**We make something real out in the world, then follow it until it reveals our purpose.**
For some reason, popular wisdom still treats the process of finding a purpose as an intellectual activity â an exercise we sit down with a pen and paper to work on. As we know, that approach rarely works. It definitely didnât work for me, for Heather, for Richard, or for any of our listeners.
The one thing that *does* work is *action* â pursuing something, building something, fostering something, or creating something, big or small, out in the world. Thereâs just no way around it. I mean, even if you *did* find your purpose intellectually, youâd still have to *do* something about it, right?
So as you search for your purpose, commit to execution. Grand ideas are nice, but they wonât mean anything unless you put them into motion.
So make that introduction between two people in your network.
Carve out an hour each week to create a prototype of that bottle opener you thought up.
Spend 15 minutes each night writing pieces of the novel youâve been playing with.
Whatever it is, *commit to doing something*, and find out what itâs like to actually embody that activity in your life. Thatâs the only way to know if you enjoy it enough to continue doing it, to struggle, and to become great at it. Itâs also the only way for that potential purpose to become real.
**At the end of the day, the words we use to describe our purpose matter way less than what we** ***do*** **with that purpose.**
In fact, Iâd say the words are pretty much irrelevant, no matter what those personal branding books and dinner party people tell you.
We have to *embody* our purpose for it to be real, and the way we embody it is by *acting* upon it.
If we do that, our purpose becomes a lot more interesting, a lot more fun, and way more meaningful.
Because then weâre not just trying to âfindâ our purpose all the time. Weâre *living* it.
*\[Featured image by [Austin Chan](https://unsplash.com/photos/ukzHlkoz1IE)\]* | ||||||
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