BUILDING A NEW FUTURE
NOW THAT YOU HAVE done the challenging work of beginning to release your past experiences, you must turn your attention toward building a new present and future. When we release, we are wiping the slate clean to create something better.
One of the most common pitfalls of people who try but do not succeed in releasing their past is that their focus remains on just that—the past. The work now is to envision who you want to be, connect with the most powerful version of yourself, design your life through your daily routine, and uncover your true purpose for being.
MEETING YOUR HIGHEST POTENTIAL FUTURE SELF
A popular tool in psychotherapy is something called inner child work15, or the process of imagining and reconnecting with your younger self. In this process, you can offer yourself guidance, even going back to certain traumatizing events and readdressing them with the wisdom you have now.
But more often, the process of reconnecting with your inner child is to let them communicate with you. It is how you can rediscover your inherent desires, passions, fears, and feelings.
The process is akin to reverse engineering, which is when you identify the end goals for your life and then work backwards to see what you need to do each day, week, month, and year to get there. However, it works the opposite way as well. You can use a visualization technique to connect to your highest potential future self.
 |
Sit down in a quiet place with a journal. Make sure you’re doing it at a time when you feel relaxed and open to receive guidance. If you go into this with fear, you are going to get fear.
Next, close your eyes and begin a meditation session. Take a few moments to breathe deeply and center yourself. Imagine sitting down at a comfortable table in a well-lit room, somewhere that you are happy and feel at peace.
Then, invite your future self to come sit with you and talk. You can request that they are a certain age, but usually the age will just come to you when you see them.
Specifically ask for the highest possible version of yourself to sit down. If you see anything scary at first, know that it is your fear of what could happen manifesting in your mind, not the truth of what will happen.
Once you get past that, you can start receiving advice.
 |
Aside from what you imagine this version of yourself telling you, pay attention to what they look like, how they behave, and what their facial expressions communicate.
The point of doing future self work is so that you can merge with this aspect of yourself. You want to clearly envision the most ideal version of yourself so that you know how your own life needs to grow, shift, and change.
See what they wear, how they feel, what they do each day. These will be the keys to your own becoming.
 |
If you go into this process with a laundry list of scary, huge questions for your future self to answer, you’re probably going to end up bound by panic rather than being open to receiving powerful guidance.
Instead, keep yourself open to whatever this person wants to share with you. The messages should be positive, uplifting, affirming, and helpful. Even if they communicate something to you such as, you need to let go of this relationship, it should be done in a way that is so calming and reaffirming that you are confident and at peace with it.
 |
Another powerful exercise using your future self is to imagine yourself now sitting down with yourself 3, 5, or even 7 years ago. It has to be close enough that you can relate to this person but far enough that you’ve changed.
Imagine sitting down in a space you used to frequent or inhabit. What you’re going to do now is hand them the pieces of your current life and all of the information they will need to go from who they are then to who you are now.
You can hand them your car keys, your email account for your job, your bank account, an outfit, or instructions on what to do in terms of career, relationships, or just day-today habits.
Or you can imagine your future self giving you aspects of your life now. Imagine them handing you the keys to the home you live in, or your wedding band, or anything else that is a part of your highest possible future life.
Remember, this process should make you feel calm, affirmed, and more self-assured, not the opposite. Fear is a hallucination, a trick of the mind and gut. Your future self can step in and remind you of all that is possible and empower you to live with certainty, clarity, and grace.
RELEASING YOUR PAST INTO THE QUANTUM FIELD
When something happens that scares you and then you do not ever get over that fear, you become traumatized.
Trauma is the experience of disconnecting with a fundamental source of safety. It happens most severely when our attachment to our primary caretakers is compromised. But there is truly an infinite number of ways the world can traumatize you, and to varying degrees.
There are lots of theories about what trauma is and where it comes from. Some believe that it is passed down physically through DNA.16 Others argue that it is shared mentally and emotionally through learned patterns and observations. Most commonly, trauma is believed to be an interpersonal experience we have in which we were challenged and then lacked the skills and coping mechanisms to rise to it.
No matter where it came from, if you have some kind of lingering trauma, you will know, because you will feel it. You will feel it physically in your body. You will feel anxiety, tension, fear, terror, sadness, or guilt. It will be displaced. It will not have a clear, direct cause. You will overreact to certain things and even when a problem is solved, you will still panic. This is the mark of trauma.
 |
This is the first and most important thing you need to know in order to overcome it: Trauma is a legitimate, physical issue. You store those emotions, energies, and patterns at a cellular level.
Thankfully, we can use the ripples at the top of the water to trace back down to the problem at the bottom. You can begin to use your body to help you heal.
 |
You do this by feeling into yourself and noticing where you are tight or tense. Our bodies harden to protect us. When we have a broken leg, our fascia tightens like a natural cast so that we do not bend ourselves that way
again. Similarly, when our hearts are broken, our emotions tighten so that we do not let ourselves feel again.
Of course, eventually, we have to walk. We have to love. We have to experience life again. We have to slowly soften the pieces of us that are trying to protect us so that we can move forward.
Healing trauma is not just a matter of psychoanalyzing it. It is a matter of literally working through it physically. The next time you feel yourself overreacting to some kind of stimulus, you will notice that your body is starting to tense up and create a fight-or-flight response. To heal this, you have to force yourself to take deep, soothing breaths until the part of your body that was once tense is relaxed again.
You will need to self-soothe in different ways: meditating, breathing, drinking enough water, getting enough sleep, using aromatherapy, sound therapy, or whatever else works for you.
You absolutely must work to take your brain and body physically out of panic/survival mode.
 |
You are traumatized because something scared you and you are convinced that it is still “out to get you.” This is what happens when we don’t face or overcome something difficult—we assume the threat lingers indefinitely.
The psychological aspect of trauma healing is that you have to literally restore the connection that was severed in the exact same way that it was broken.
If you are traumatized about relationships, you need to build healthy relationships. If you are traumatized about money, you need to get really good with money. If you are traumatized about traveling, you need to travel again.
We do not find the resolution in avoiding these things forever. In fact, just underneath the fear we often find that they are the things we really want more than anything else.
 |
Last, to overcome trauma, you have to stop engaging in psychic thinking. You have to stop pretending you are able to predict what will happen, that you know other people’s intentions, or that what you feel and think is absolute truth and reality.
This kind of thinking is what takes a triggering feeling and turns it into a defeating spiral. You take one scary thing and make it into a prediction for what the future will hold.
You are not an oracle. You do not know what’s next, though you are always capable of choosing what you do now. Almost always, the thing you are most panicked about is a thing you do not know is happening for sure. It is usually an assumption, a projection, a fear turned into a terrifying potential reality.
You might think that trauma is something that other, more damaged people have, but that is not true. Everyone is traumatized in one way or another, but it is how we respond to it, how we ultimately grow and develop self- mastery from it, that determines the course of our lives.
BECOMING THE MOST POWERFUL VERSION OF YOURSELF
Are you being the most powerful version of yourself?
If you had to pause to think about it, the answer is probably no.
Everybody has different facets of their personality, and we act on them based on the context we’re in. It’s a social adaptation tool: You are not the
same person with your friends as you are with your parents. Moving through these easily is a sign of high psychological function.
We are acquainted with the versions of ourselves that our current life requires. We know who we need to be at work, at home, or in love. But we are often unfamiliar with the person we need to be in order to move our lives forward.
In “inner child work,” you visualize and address your younger selves, often down to a specific age, depending on which version of you was traumatized. You communicate with that inner child self, learn from them, protect them, or give them the guidance that they needed when they were young.
This proves to be profoundly healing for people, mostly because we do not evolve past our former selves; we simply grow upon them.
However, this practice can work the opposite way as well. You can also visualize and connect with your future self— the version of you that you are growing into, or the person you know you are meant to be.
 |
The first step to becoming your most powerful self is to literally envision that person. Don’t take yourself out of your current context, either. Begin to ask yourself: What would the most powerful version of me do right now? What would they do with this day? How would they respond to this challenge? How would they move forward? How would they think? What would they feel?
Your most powerful self needs to be the CEO of your life. It is the person making managerial decisions, governing everything else. This is the editor- in-chief, the matriarch or patriarch. You are working for your most powerful self.
Once you have a clearer image of what your most powerful self is like, you then need to evaluate what habits, traits, and behaviors are actively holding
you back from fully embodying that person.
 |
Powerful people are not delusional. They do not believe they are perfect all the time at everything. This is not what makes them mentally strong. Instead, powerful people are very aware of their varying strengths and weaknesses.
In business, powerful people will often outsource the tasks at which they are less skilled. In life, powerful people know where their limits are and what their triggers might be. This allows them to move through their lives with more ease and to give themselves the time and space needed to work on their faults.
The ability to say to yourself: “I know I struggle a lot with this, so I’m going to take my time and work on it” is one of the most powerful things you can do.
 |
Powerful people are not the ones who are most universally liked.
They are also not the ones vying for others’ approval, and that’s the key.
To be a truly powerful person, you must be willing to be disliked. This is not to say that you behave in any way that’s malicious, but it is to say that no matter what you do, others are going to judge you. Powerful people know this. There is no path in life that you can take that will be free of resistance from others, and so it is important that you not only become okay with being disliked, but you anticipate it and act anyway.
 |
Powerful and purposeful are one in the same.
To be a truly powerful person, you need to have complete, unwavering conviction about what you want to create. To do this, you have to shift from a “live for the moment” to a “live for the legacy” mindset.
Your purpose is a dynamic, evolving thing. Most of the time, it is at the intersection of what you are interested in, what you are good at, and what the world needs. Having a clear vision of what you want to create and accomplish is essential to finding your inner power. You will not feel strongly about a dream that is not part of who you most essentially are.
 |
This is perhaps the most important and yet most commonly overlooked, because it is the least comfortable.
To do your inner work means to evaluate why something triggered you, why something is upsetting you, what your life is trying to show you, and the ways you could grow from these experiences. Truly powerful people absorb what has happened to them and sort of metabolize it. They use it as an opportunity to learn, to develop themselves. This type of inner mental and emotional work is non-negotiable if you want to be truly powerful.
Powerful people are not the most aggressive; aggression is usually a self- defense mechanism. Powerful people are the ones most unfazed by small disturbances and most willing to fully process and work through the big ones.
Of course, this is the foundational stuff. Next, you have to work on simplifying your life, talking less about your ambitions, and showing more of your accomplishments once they are completed. Gradually make health improvements. Assume that everyone, and everything, has something to teach you. Become comfortable with vulnerability, as vulnerability precedes almost every significant part of your life, and intentionally design your daily routine.
Through everything, you must be thinking as your most powerful self would. If you learn to see the world and your life through that lens, you can
create a life that reflects the intentions of that side of you. It already exists; you just need to know how to tap into it.
LEARNING TO VALIDATE YOUR FEELINGS
If we want to be effective in therapy, in politics, in relationships, in teaching kids, in talking someone down from the edge, in keeping peace, making friends, fostering connection, and making progress, there’s one technique we have to employ first.
It’s a little secret, and it’s one that requires very little effort. But it disarms people. It opens them, makes them receptive, willing to listen and adapt. It is healing, it is mind-altering, but most importantly, it is the first step to progress. It is emotional validation.
Validating someone’s feelings doesn’t mean you agree with them. It doesn’t mean you concede that they are correct. It doesn’t mean that those feelings are the healthiest; it doesn’t mean they are informed by logic. Validating feelings does not mean you make them more true; it means you remind someone that it is human to feel things they don’t always understand.
How often do we just need a partner to stop trying to strategize and just say,
that must really suck?
How much of a weight is lifted off our shoulders when we think: Yes, I really am stressed right now, and I deserve to be?
How light do we feel when we see another person’s story splayed out across a screen, one that we can relate to, and understand, no matter how devastating it is?
How much better do we feel when we simply allow ourselves to be aggrieved and pissed-off and irrationally mad?
When we let ourselves have it—the feeling, that is— something incredible happens. We no longer have to take it out on other people, because we are no longer relying on their validation to get us through it.
We can be aggrieved and pissed and mad and do our own processing without hurting anyone else.
When people are crying out or acting out in their lives, they aren’t just asking for help. They are most often just asking for someone to affirm that it is okay to feel the way that they do. And if they have to inflate and exaggerate circumstances for you to truly feel the weight and impact that they do? They’ll do it. They’ll do whatever it takes to get someone else to say: I am so sorry for what you are going through. This is not because they are incompetent or dumb. It is because in a world that does not teach us how to adequately process our own feelings, we must often rely solely on our maladaptive coping mechanisms.
When we cannot validate our own feelings, we go on a never-ending quest to try to force others to do it for us, but it never works. We never really get what we need.
This looks like needing attention, affirmation, compliments. But it also looks like being dramatic, negative, and focusing disproportionately on what’s wrong in our lives. When someone is complaining about something simple— and they seem to be doing it more than the given situation would call for—they aren’t trying to get your help about a small issue. They are trying to have their feelings validated.
This is also a common root of self-sabotaging behaviors. Sometimes, when we have deep wells of grief within us, we absolutely cannot allow ourselves to relax and enjoy our lives and relationships. We cannot just “have fun,” because doing so feels like a betrayal. It feels offensive. We need to feel validated, but we don’t even know why.
 |
Think of your feelings like water running through ducts in your body. Your thoughts determine whether or not the ducts are clean. The cleanliness of the ducts determines the quality of the water.
If you suddenly have a feeling that you dislike and don’t expect—a sudden rush of water, let’s say—it’s common to want to shut that valve off and not allow it to pass. However, stopping the flow of water does not make the water go away. Instead, it begins to intensely pressurize and create serious damage to the parts of your body that are no longer receiving flow. This begins to have a ripple effect on your entire life.
Sometimes, the water disperses itself gradually. Other times, it implodes and creates what we see on the surface as a complete emotional breakdown. When all of that water finally comes through and we grieve and cry and fall apart, we are going through a process of being reset. It is positive disintegration: We are gutted, but at the same time, feel better when it’s over.
All that happened in that implosion was that your feelings became validated when you gave yourself permission to feel them—because you had no other choice. This is what we do in therapy. This is what we do when we vent. This is what happens when we experience a catharsis. A sad movie that we kind of enjoy being sad about allows us to feel sad in a world that otherwise does not.
But there’s a healthier, easier way, which is learning how to process our feelings in real time.
“Validating your feelings” sounds like a big term, but it really means one thing: It’s just letting yourself have them.
When you are healing past trauma, often a big component is allowing yourself to experience the full expression of an emotion. You have probably done this in the past. Think about the passing of a relative whom you loved but were not overly attached to. When you learned of their death, you were undoubtedly sad. But you didn’t attend their funeral, cry for an hour, and then carry on with your life as though nothing happened.
Instead, you probably experienced a bout of sadness then, and then maybe the next day, and then maybe a week later. The waves of grief came and went in varying intensity. When you didn’t resist them, you cried and felt sad, or maybe took a nap, a hot bath, or a day off from work.
And then, without much effort from you, the feeling passed, and you felt better.
Once we have and acknowledge an emotion, it will often go away on its own. If there is no course of action to take—if all we really need to do is accept it—then we just have to let ourselves be there.
The reason we don’t do this more naturally is because obviously we can’t burst into tears at our desks every time we feel bothered by something. Turning off the water valve is perfectly fine, as long as we can go home and let it out later. It is okay to control when and where we process, and in fact, it’s better when we learn to do it in a more stable, safe space.
This can look like taking a few minutes to “junk journal” each day, spending time by ourselves where we can simply experience how we feel, without judgment, and without trying to change them. It can be as simple as allowing ourselves to cry before we fall asleep. We often think of that as a sign of weakness, when really, the ability to cry freely is a huge signal of mental and emotional strength. It’s when we can’t cry about what’s truly broken in our lives that we have a big problem.
Validating the way someone else feels is an exercise in radial empathy. It is starting the conversation with: “It is okay to feel this way.” Because when we point out how wrong someone is to feel the way they do, they shut down. And they shut down because they feel shame. They already know it’s not right to feel the way they do. If you start the conversation by heightening someone’s defenses or making them panic and suppress even harder, you make the situation worse.
But if you start with reminding them that anyone in their situation would probably feel similar to how they do right now, and that it is very possible that they can have strong, overwhelming emotions that don’t necessarily
mean their lives are completely ruined, and that it is okay to feel devastated when devastating things are before us, we lighten their load. We know this because when we stop resisting feeling sad and just let ourselves be sad, we realize that it will not last forever. We see that sometimes, the biggest problem isn’t that we are devastated, but that in refusing to accept what is in front of us, we create so much more suffering than we would if we had just had a cry when we needed to have a really good cry.
Validating other people teaches us how to validate ourselves. And when we learn how to validate ourselves, we become stronger. We see that our emotions are no longer threats, but informants. They show us what we care about, what we want to savor, and what we want to protect. They remind us that life is fleeting, and challenging, and gorgeous. When we are willing to accept the darkness, it is only then that we find the light.
ADOPTING YOUR OWN PRINCIPLES
If you feel lost, or as though you don’t know where you want your life to go next, or worse, fear that everything you have built could come crashing down, you don’t need more inspiration. You don’t need more positive thinking.
When you have money problems, you need money principles.
When you have relationship problems, you need relationship principles.
When you have work problems, you need work principles. When you have life problems, you need life principles.
More money does not solve money problems. Different relationships do not solve relationship problems. New work does not solve work problems. Your future life will not solve your life problems.
This is because money does not make you good with money. Love does not make you love yourself. Relationships don’t make you good at
relationships. Work doesn’t make you good at your job or capable of work/ life balance.
Problems don’t inherently make you a stronger person unless you change and adapt. The variable here is you. The common denominator is whether or not you shift your foundational perspective on the world and how you behave within it.
Let’s be very clear: Someone who makes $500K can be as seriously in debt and struggling as someone who makes $50K, and in fact, this happens more often than you would ever think. People who make less money are required to learn how to manage it better, and people who make more think they can eschew principles because of the quantity they are attaining.
You can screw up your dream relationship just as quickly as you can a hook up, because the way you relate to others is an issue with you, not something that shifts depending on whether or not you meet the most perfect person who never triggers or annoys you and relates to you with unconditional positive regard.
You can be just as unhappy in your ideal job, with your perfect hours, at your most desired pay rate, if you don’t know how to ration your time, relate to others in your workplace, or move your career forward. People who are “living their dreams” and “following their passion” can be just as unhappy as people who are not.
If you don’t have principles, your life is not going to get better. Problems are only going to follow you and get bigger as your life does.
The good things that happen to us in life are like a magnifier. They show us where we still need to grow. True love shows us to ourselves. Money shows us to ourselves. Dream jobs show us to ourselves. The good, the bad, the desperately-needs-to-change-right-now.
If you don’t have principles now, you won’t have them later. If you don’t have the money principle of living beneath your means, you won’t be able to do it when you have more money. If you don’t have the relationship
principle of not relying on others for your sense of self, it won’t magically resolve itself when you meet the “right person”; you will only sabotage that relationship, too.
 |
A principle is a fundamental truth that you can use to build the foundation of your life. A principle is not an opinion or a belief. A principle is a matter of cause and effect.
Principles can be personal guidelines.
Some examples of money principles are the following: Keep overhead costs low, get out and stay out of debt, live beneath your means, or save for a rainy day.
Many financial experts advocate prioritizing debt repayment as the beginning of financial health. This is because one day of accrued interest probably won’t impact you that much. But 20 years will, to the tune of tens of thousands of dollars, if not more.
In the same way, one day of gained interest in investments won’t make a big difference. But 20 years will, to an even more significant margin.
The point of having principles is that it shifts you from short-term survival to long-term thriving.
Most things in our lives are governed by principles. Stephen Covey explains this well: Principles are a natural law like gravity. It’s different than a value. Values are subjective; principles are objective.17 “We control our actions, but the consequences that flow from those actions are controlled by principles,” he says.
This means that if we are committed to the principle of eating good food each day, we will inevitably reap the benefit of better or improved health. If we write a sentence each day for many, many years, we will inevitably write a larger piece of work. If we commit to paying off a portion of our
debts each month, we will inevitably clear our balance. If we invest consistently and wisely, we will eventually see a return.
Our lives are governed by principles, as Benjamin Hardy explains: “Most people cram for tests while in college. But can you cram if you’re a farmer? Can you forget to plant in the spring, slack-off all summer, and then work hard during the fall? Of course not. A farm is a natural system governed by principles.” 18
So are you.
“The law of the harvest is always in effect. What you plant, you must harvest. Furthermore, what you plant consistently over time eventually yields a compounded or exponential harvest. You often don’t experience the consequences of your actions immediately, which can be deceiving. If you smoked one cigarette, you probably wouldn’t get cancer. If you spent $10 on coffee just one day, it probably wouldn’t affect your financial life. However, over time, these habits have drastic outcomes. It turns out that
$10 daily over 50 years at 5% compounding interest becomes $816,000.”19
When you make an investment, you don’t expect to see a return that day. In the same way, you can go to sleep feeling accomplished knowing that you chipped away at your future just by adhering to your principles.
Little things, done repeatedly and over time, become the big things.
 |
Inspiration can be misleading. Big dreams not backed by strategic plans are big flops waiting to happen.
Inspiration means you take a feeling and elaborate on it. You allow your mind to wander; you piece together pretty pictures and create an image of how you’d like your life to feel.
Principles are boring. They aren’t inspiring. They are the laws of nature.
Principles are not immediately gratifying. They do not make us feel better right away.
That’s why we often reach for inspiration but find it to be ineffective. This is because we get our minds and hearts set on a vague idea of what we think we want without ever really evaluating whether or not we want to engage in the daily work and effort it would take to get there.
When we don’t pair inspiration with the principles it takes to achieve those dreams, we become more lost and disappointed than ever before.
 |
Nobody is born with excellent principles; they are something that you learn.
However, there are many different principles in life, and some may contradict one another. That’s why it’s important to adopt your own, ones that fit your goals and your life.
BEGIN WITH THIS:
- What do you value? What do you genuinely care about?
- What feelings do you want to experience in your life?
- What makes you uneasy or gives you anxiety?
THE ANSWERS COULD BE SOMETHING LIKE THIS:
I value relationships, and so by principle, I am going to prioritize them when given the opportunity. Alternatively, by principle, I value honest and positive relationships, so I’m not going to be in dating limbo anymore; unless someone commits within a reasonable amount of time, I will regard their hesitation as a “no.”
Perhaps you value financial freedom, and so by principle, you are going to put your extra cash toward repaying debt or building savings or
investments. Perhaps you value travel and freedom, and so by principle, you are going to start working for yourself and always prioritize being able to work remotely or make your own schedule.
When you are clear on what your principles are, you can build your life from a genuine, healthy place. You can start working toward goals that support what you do and do not want to experience, that will make you the calmest and happiest version of yourself.
A good life is built from the inside out and is based on a foundation of self- conduct and prioritization. It’s not as dreamy as a vision board, but it’s a lot more effective.
FINDING YOUR TRUE PURPOSE
When you live in a world that is constantly telling you to follow your heart, trust your gut, quit your day job, and do what you love, it can be disheartening when you don’t know where to start. When you start thinking that you don’t know what to do with your life, what you really mean is that you don’t yet know who you are.
Finding your purpose is not necessarily about realizing that you are destined to live in a monastery or devote your life to a singular vocation or goal. Your purpose is not one job, it is not one relationship, it is not even one career field. Your purpose is, first and foremost, just to be here. Your existence has shifted the world in a way that it is invisible to you. Without you, absolutely nothing would exist just as it is right now. This is important to understand, because if you start believing that your whole purpose in being alive is just a specific job or role you take on at home, what happens when you quit or retire, or when the kids grow up and you’re no longer a parent?
You’ll sink because you will falsely think that was your only reason for being.
Your purpose today may have been to offer someone a smile when they were at their lowest. Your purpose this decade may be the job you’re in. When you realize that you are always impacting the world around you, you start to realize something: The most important thing you can do to live meaningfully is to work on yourself. To consciously become the happiest, kindest, and most gracious version of yourself.
Knowing your purpose also doesn’t necessarily mean your life will henceforth be easy or that you’ll always know what to do. In fact, when you are genuinely on your own path, the future won’t be clear, because if it is, you’re actually following someone else’s blueprint.
With all of that said, when most people wonder about their purpose, they are often referring to their life’s work and their jobs. Your career is not nothing. It is how you will spend the majority of your day, every day, for the better part of your life. That’s why figuring out how you can best serve the world through that makes the long days and difficult moments bearable.
Your life purpose is the point at which your skills, interests, and the market intersect.
You are the blueprint of your future. Everything that you are, everything that you have experienced, everything that you’re good at, every circumstance you have found yourself in, everything that you’re passionate about is not random; it’s a reflection of who you are and a sign about what you are here to do.
However, it’s not as easy as it sounds to become self-aware. You may still be thinking that you’re not sure what you’re good at, or that you’re even more passionate about one thing over another. That’s okay because your purpose does not require you to be the best at something.
It is not the thing at which you, and only you, can succeed more so than anyone else. It is the things that naturally call you, that effortlessly flow out of you, and that evoke specific emotions from you. You are here to work those out. You are here to transform them. Your ultimate purpose is to become the ideal version of yourself. Everything else flows from there.
FIGURING OUT WHAT YOU WANT TO DO WITH YOUR LIFE
Here are some questions you should ask yourself if you want to know what your purpose really is:
WHAT, AND WHO, IS WORTH SUFFERING FOR?
Even doing what you love for a living doesn’t mean every day will be easy. Everything comes with its own set of challenges, so the question is really: What are you willing to work for? What are you willing to be uncomfortable for?
CLOSE YOUR EYES AND IMAGINE THE BEST VERSION OF YOURSELF. WHAT IS THAT PERSON LIKE?
The best possible version of yourself—the most loving, kind, productive, and self-aware version—is who you really are. Everything else is the byproduct of coping mechanisms you’ve developed and picked up from other people.
IF SOCIAL MEDIA DIDN’T EXIST, WHAT WOULD YOU DO WITH YOUR LIFE?
If you knew that you wouldn’t be able to show off, impress, or even share what it was you chose to do with your life, how would it change your ambitions? This differentiates what you are doing because you want to do it from what you are doing for the sake of how it looks to other people.
WHAT COMES MOST NATURALLY TO YOU?
What you are most naturally good at is the path you should follow first, because it’s the path on which you will most effortlessly thrive.
WHAT WOULD YOUR IDEAL DAILY ROUTINE LOOK LIKE?
Forget about the elevator speech. Forget about having a fancy title or impressing people on LinkedIn. Think about what you want to do day-in and day-out. A lot of people get into jobs they think will make them happy but realize they only liked the idea of them and not the day-to-day reality.
WHAT DO YOU WANT YOUR LEGACY TO BE?
Instead of worrying about the virtues on your résumé, focus on the virtues of your eulogy. Who do you want to be remembered as? What do you want to be known for?
Though it’s lovely to reflect on all of the virtues and talents of your life, here is an even more important part of finding your purpose: It is often found through pain. Most people come into awareness of their purpose not because they are effortlessly clear on what their talents are and how they can best utilize them, but because at some point, they find themselves lost, depleted, exhausted, and with their backs against the wall.
In experiencing hardship and challenge, we begin to realize what really matters to us. It sparks a flame that, when kindled through action and commitment, becomes a transformative fire.
If you listen to the stories of many of the most successful people in the world, they often begin with unimaginable hardship. In the face of the most unlikely situations, these people are forced into action. Comfort and complacency is not an option. They realize they must become the heroes of their own lives and the creators of their own futures.
At the end of your life, your purpose will be defined not by how you struggled, what circumstances you were in, or what you were supposed to do, but how you responded in the face of adversity, who you were to the people in your life, and what you did each day that slowly, in its own unique way, changed the course of humanity.
