What’s Your Purpose?

I’m not talking life, the universe and everything here (although I did just recently read that again, it holds up pretty well after 30 years). What I mean is, what conceptually do you want to achieve in life? Is there a bucket list or a list of life goals? Are you looking to make a million and retire in a mansion by the water with a kick-ass boat out the front? Or do you want to end your life feeling like you’ve left a mark on the world – whether it’s creating a business, writing books, working in aged care or just helping one person to get where they need to go? Or maybe it’s about family, making sure they’re fed, watered, have shelter and a solid foundation to succeed from.

Ryan Holiday investigates John Boyd in his book, Ego is the Enemy, who was a little known USAAF fighter pilot and strategist. His ideas and strategies probably had the largest effect on modern warfare as anyone else. No one’s heard of him, because that’s what he taught to his pupils. To be known, get the promotion and the pay rise you’ll compromise friends, relationships and your personal values. However, you can leave a mark, do it quietly, don’t take the accolades and make sure your fellow airmen (colleagues / friends / humans) get something positive from the efforts you put in without your ego needing to interfere with the purpose.

What you choose to do with your time and what you choose to do for money works on you. The egocentric path requires, as Boyd knew, many compromises. If your purpose is something larger than you – to accomplish something, to prove something to yourself – then suddenly everything becomes both easier and more difficult. Easier in the sense that you know now what it is you need to do and what is important to you. The other “choices” wash away, as they aren’t really choices at all. They’re distractions. It’s about the doing, not the recognition. Easier in the sense that you don’t need to compromise. Harder because each opportunity – no matter how gratifying or rewarding – must be evaluated along strict guidelines: Does this help me do what I have set out to do? Does this allow me to do what I need to do? Am I being selfish or selfless?

-Ryan Holiday – Ego is the Enemy

When you’re looking to achieve something larger than you, the choice is easy. You know that the thing you want to achieve is the most important thing – everything else can be damned. Its even easier when it’s not just about you.

So what’s your purpose?

According to James Clear, Warren Buffett’s personal pilot went to Buffett asking for help working through some career priorities. Buffett took him through a three step process where he had him write down 25 career priorities. Then circle the top five. When questioned about the remaining 20 goals, the pilot said that obviously he’d be focusing on the top five, but the other 20 were still important and he’d work through those intermittently, but with less urgency. Buffett immediately said “No, you’re looking at it wrong”. He goes on to explain that the other 20 should be the “avoid at all cost” list, they are nothing but distractions pulling you away from the top five. When you’ve completed your top five, re-assess your list and put another five to the top of the list.

Taking these two stories, those of Boyd and Buffett, whilst they come from different ends of the spectrum (Buffett was everything Boyd was trying to avoid becoming) – the both come at the world front the same angle. Avoid at all costs those things that are distracting you from your purpose. Be single minded about achieving a small handful of goals.

Finding those things that matter is sometimes the hard part. What do you want to achieve? Where are you headed? What do you value?

Sometimes it’s not hard, though. I have more of a clear idea about the life I want than I ever did before. And that’s because I have a wife who helped me crystallise that, we both gave each other permission to dream and the dreams we have are similar. Bingo!

Working out how to overcome the obstacles in your path is somehow easier when you know what you’re heading towards. Be singular and do everything you can possibly do to get there. For us, it’s retiring our debt and returning to accumulating wealth. We’ll do everything we can to achieve that in the shortest time possible.

Yesterday I looked at the juggling clubs I’ve been carrying with me for the last fifteen. I remembered how I used to juggle well and was progressing nicely from balls to clubs. I reluctantly put them in the ‘for sale’ pile based on the philosophies I’ve spoken of above. I would still love to juggle those clubs expertly, but you know what, it’s not in the top five things I want to achieve in the next three years and I haven’t found the time in the last fifteen years. So why keep them around, so every time I see them I think – “i wish I had the time” – but I don’t? Minimalism gives us permission to shed these things that aren’t serving us and don’t fit with our immediate plans for success. If it doesn’t help me achieve one of the top five goals I have in my life, it’s a distraction. Get rid of it.

So for me, my purpose is those things I have to achieve I the next year or three that will get Jay and I to the position where we can embark on the next chapter of our life. We don’t know what that chapter will look like but we know that we can’t start discovering it before we’re debt free. We also have some time to invest in making that chapter happen, earning money, developing new skills and finding out what our passions and values are that we want to exploit for the next chapter.

So what’s your purpose? What are you going to achieve in the short term and what can you shed to make it happen.

Let me know in a response below.

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