Five Signs Your Life Is More Purposeful Than You Think

Learn to identify the signals from the noise. Here’s how:

Photo by Austin Chan on Unsplash

Human life is excruciatingly short.

If I asked you many weeks, on average, you lived before you died, what would you say?

Assuming an average age of death of 80 years old, you will have about 4,000-weeks of life on this planet.

Some people may have 4,600 weeks, others might only have 2,500 weeks.

The duration doesn’t matter, the underlying message is the same:

Life is short.

Yet how many people do you see squander their life away?

They live unexamined lives, where they never question whether they are happy with the trajectory of where they are going. As Aristotle once said, “the unexamined life is not worth living.”

Many people die at 30 but are buried at 80.

I’m heading into my late 20s and I can already see friends and family settling for lives that are beneath them. They know they can do better, but the effort and fear of failure hold them back.

Better to play it safe. You can’t fail at something you never try to do.

Questions on whether you’re living life true to your purpose can be painful to answer.

But questions you can’t answer are better than answers you can’t question.

The journey to finding your purpose can often be more enjoyable than the outcome. Here are some clear signs you’re moving towards living a more authentic life.

#1 You stop living in the future and start living in the present

Living in the future is enticing.

The future is where all your dreams and aspirations can live harmoniously, no matter how contradictory they are.

You are able to build an amazing career whilst also traveling the world for 10 months of the year. You can have a happy family life, whilst also seeing your close friends every day.

While it is useful to have a big vision for your life, living in the future can be as dangerous as living in a delusion. And in some ways, constantly attaching your happiness to an imagined future is delusional.

There will never be a time when everything in your life fits perfectly. There will never be a time in your life when you feel completely ready either.

The grass only seems greener in the future because it is fertilized with cow shit.

Making any decision requires sacrifice and compromise. But that’s what makes hard decisions so meaningful.

Deciding to get married is putting your faith in someone else over everyone else. Choosing to work for yourself is putting faith in yourself.

They require you to give up all other imagined futures.

It is the act of sacrifice, and the risk of regret, that makes the large decisions in your life so meaningful.

When you stop sacrificing your present moment for some imagined future, you are living a life that is filled with greater purpose.

The journey counts for more than the outcome. Start enjoying today for what it offers, rather than sacrificing the present.

#2 You stop competing with others

Competition with others only makes you bitter.

Competition with yourself only makes you better.

Become better, not bitter.

When you play stupid games, you win stupid rewards.

If you don’t have a clear purpose in life, the only other option is to try and beat others at status games.

Live in a bigger house, drive a nicer car, work in a prestigious job you hate to impress others.

Status games are zero-sum. You might win today, but you’ll be the loser tomorrow. Guaranteed.

There will always be a bigger house to buy, a nicer car to drive, and more soul-crushing jobs to work. There will always be someone richer or better-looking than you.

A person with a clear purpose only competes with themselves. They don’t worry about what others are doing because they aren’t playing the same game.

#3 You stop numbing yourself to reality

Most people live lives of quiet desperation.

Instead of confronting the reality of their situation, they decide to numb themselves to the banality of their existence.

Sex, drugs and alcohol are used to dull the nascent thoughts of change.

They fear that change will mean that they will lose friends, people will judge them or their family will not agree with the decisions being made.

Facing reality is hard. Taking action to make changes is painful. But while you can numb yourself from it for a little bit, reality will always be there.

#4 You don’t have a distinction between life and work

Having a clear purpose means your life and work tend to merge with each other.

I am not saying you are working 24/7 but if you have a job and a life that is coherent, what you do for work should align with your personal life and your personal life will bleed into your work life.

When you have to compartmentalize what you do, there is a lack of alignment of purpose across these domains of your life.

When I finally found what I enjoyed doing, I found it really difficult to separate where my work began and where my personal life ended. They were almost the same.

My purpose was so strong that I was just authentically being myself almost all the time. I found this strange at first, but it told me that I was doing something that was genuine to my own interests and passions.

#5 You stop regretting past decisions

Regrets are a natural part of life. Having them is what makes us human.

To live, it seems, is to accumulate at least some regrets

In 2005, social psychologists Amu Summerville and Neal Roese examined the prevalence of negative emotions in people’s lives. They found that:

The emotion that participants said they experienced the most was regret. The emotion they said they valued the most was also regret.

Regrets enable us to make better decisions in the future. They make our lives more meaningful and provide a clearer sense of our purpose.

Don’t ignore your regrets, learn to use them better.

Closing Thoughts

Having a purpose is powerful.

When you attach yourself to a purpose, it can never be taken away from you.

You can get fired from a job, lose your money and people will inevitably leave your life.

But when you attach yourself to a purpose, you can never lose it.

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