Discovering your purpose will make everything easier, right?
We read books to discover where to direct our life. We look for answers from our friends, family, co-workers, articles, news stories, and watch videos. In a relationship, we wonder whether our partner is the right one.
We want to discover the truth, so we wait for an answer, but it never comes. Yet, we’re constantly on the lookout for clues to decode our purpose. We wait for a promotion to move our career to the next level or hope for insight that makes everything click. We want an epiphany.
You could be reading this for a variety of reasons like:
- How to discover your purpose
- How to know if you have the right purpose
In this article, you’ll learn the truth about discovering your purpose that could change the actions you pursue each day. You can also get a head start by watching my free Day Design Course.
Flip the Script on Discovering Your Purpose
Deep down, we hope that time and experience will reveal our purpose. We want our discovery to be empirical data—a tangible truth that we can hold up to the world and say, “here is my proof.” If only it were that straightforward.
But in the same way that we cannot hold and touch love, we cannot hold and touch our purpose, or happiness for that matter. So how can we know if we’ve obtained it or not?
As a Day Designer, our purpose is to be intentional with every hour of the day.
We’ve been so focused on discovering our purpose that we’ve forgotten that it’s us who decides it. When we place discovery outside of ourselves, we turn into receivers waiting for answers to come via luck or chance.
The hard truth is that we’re here to decide our purpose, not to discover it.
We establish the purpose of each day and each moment. Instead of activities coming from a place of discovery, we decide the meaning, then test that idea. It’s a decision that places the responsibility cleanly on our shoulders.
Some can’t bear the weight of such a burden, but you can.
What Indiana Jones Does Before He Leaves Home
We tap into our power by our decisions—we decide whether a conflict is a negative event or an opportunity, whether a natural disaster or social movement is the end of the world or the beginning of a better world.
Our decision-making guides our actions and is in our complete control.
When we wait to discover the truth, we are waiting on the outside, for reality to help us stumble on a discovery.
We treat our purpose like a treasure that we have to discover, exploring the world like Indiana Jones to uncover it. We don’t realize that we’re already holding the treasure—it just needs a little elbow grease to shine it up.
If we look closer, Indiana Jones already decided what was important before putting on his hat and jumped on a plane. He took a journey—not to discover—but because his mission required it.
His expeditions didn’t reveal his purpose. They reinforced it.
What brings him and his father together in The Last Crusade wasn’t making the most incredible discovery the world had ever known. It was realizing that what they’ve been missing all these years was an experience together.
The decisions they made on their journey showed them their bond ran deeper than even the most sacred treasure, the Holy Grail. “Let it go,” Indiana’s father reminds him as they almost tumble into an abyss.
In the end, they were happy to be alive and realized that the misunderstandings over the years had brought them closer to where they wanted to be. But it took a lot of experiments to get there.
Testing Frequently Is Better Than Discovering Your Purpose
As a Day Designer, we learn more about ourselves and what we want by testing our ideas. The information from our experiments is what leads us closer to our goals. It’s not waiting to discover our purpose, then acting later.
What can we do with one single day? How can we design it to the maximum, so it’s productive, not stressful but relaxed, and balanced? Doesn’t that sound nice if every day was like that?
We’re not just attacking our work with full intensity. We’re not leaving the other essential areas like family, friends, and kids who might be screaming in the other room because they need a diaper changed.
Our work is not our job but balancing all the aspects of our life as an integrated whole. It’s becoming 360.
We handle all the elements to the best of our abilities through our decisions, not through discovery. We empower ourselves by choosing what’s important, not waiting to discover what’s essential.
We can design our day by handling all of these things. It happens by making intentional decisions, not through discovery.
We hope that we’ll discover our purpose one day, but we can decide what it is right now. When we start making decisions around it, we can also find that our quest changes. We thought we’re pursuing the holy grail when in fact, we were after inner peace, for example.
Experimentation leads to clarity.
It’s Better to Decide Than to Discover
We can make a new decision at any moment. So today, flip from discovery to decision. There is no right or wrong purpose or one ordained from above.
There will be challenges and a long road of doubts. We can’t plan for 100% prediction no matter how much we learn. We have an opportunity to decide when and how we work, how we interact, how we make money, how we go on dates, how we clean our house—everything, including our purpose.
Discovering your purpose is as simple as deciding what it is. This truth is both the ultimate freedom and responsibility.
Our choice is to decide. If you’re looking for a different way to test ideas and improve your work-life balance, check out my Day Design Course. It’s a free video series that will work your core ideas from my Day Design Training program. I hope you get loads of value from it
Jason Dzamba
