Losing Your Purpose

I lost my purpose and it crushed me

Have you ever felt like you lost your purpose and lost all motivation in your life?

I lost my purpose in the beginning of 2020 and it shattered me.

Feeling Crushed

If you read the first article in this series, you know that I discovered my purpose was to build an app to help people connect.

I was working on building the app and launching a startup with it. Everything was going great. I joined my local co-working space, enrolled in a startup incubator program, and was building the app and the startup. Above all, I was thrilled to be living my purpose and working on something meaningful. I was ecstatic to spend each day working on getting closer to realizing my vision.

For one of our workshops, we had to do some market research. I had done quite a bit of market research before and had not seen anything like what I was building, so I was not expecting to find anything new.

But I came across an app which did exactly what I had in mind, had already been launched for years, had significant funding, and had a great team behind it.

I was devastated when I saw this app already existed.

I lost all my motivation to keep working on it. At the time, building something unique was important to me and it would not have been satisfying to build a replica. That was the main deterrent to me. It also would not have been worth it, either, from a financial and startup point of view. I was dealing with bad seasonal allergies and this was also the start of the pandemic, so it was a rough time overall.

Stopping… Then Letting Go

I felt completely lost. It was like like my whole heart had been stripped out of my body. I identified myself as the creator of this app; without it, who was I?

I decided to put my startup on hold. I felt devastated and did not know what to do next.

After a couple weeks, I decided to let go and move on to something else. Was it easy? No, definitely not. But as a practicing Stoic, I’ve learned to let things go that no longer serve me.