5 Strategies to Help You Find Your One True Calling
As human beings, we are blessed (and plagued) with our ability to contemplate our existence.
Unlike monkeys or snakes, we can critically analyze our purpose in this world. In fact, everything around is you demanding that you know your one true purpose.
From the time you can talk to the time you die, you are constantly asked:
what do you want to do with your life?
The pressure to figure out what you are “supposed” to do is as real as ever before.
But it’s not just the outside pressure that looms over us; humans are designed for a higher purpose than punching a clock every day. We want more out of our work and our lives, and have a massive internal drive to discover our true calling.
And yet so few of us actually find that calling. Instead, we are stuck in the discomfort of not knowing what we want. Waiting for that one day where it will hit us over the head.
Unfortunately, that day will never come.
You and I have to purposefully seek out purpose. But it doesn’t come easy and never happens when we want it to.
The truth is, finding and discovering your purpose takes time. It doesn’t happen overnight. And the longer that you go without finding your one true purpose, the more intense that pressure can be, making you to think you’re doing something wrong.
But if you have the right strategies and mindsets, not only you can relax knowing that your purpose will come to you one day, but it will come quicker and easier than ever.
Through my own self-discovery I’ve tried many different things to help me work towards my purpose and while I’m not 100% there yet, I’m light years to where I was. Along the way, I’ve found a few things that have worked for me and I want to share them with you. Some of them are tangible strategies but most are mindsets shifts. I’ve found that if you have the right mindset, your strategy doesn’t matter as much.
1. Clarity Comes with Action
It’s our actions that build a purposeful life and the consequences of those actions are the most powerful teachers on Earth. -Dan Millman
One of my favorite stories about finding purpose comes from an unexpected source: a grocery store employee.
My fiance and I were checking out the fine cheese section one day when an older lady approached us asking us if we needed help.
After talking with her for awhile, I was curious how she knew so much about cheese.
After retiring at the age of 52, she was looking for something to keep her busy. As a customer of this particular grocery store, she had always found the employees friendly and very helpful. With a background in accounting, she applied to be a back of house bookkeeper.
For whatever reason, they decided not to hire her for bookkeeping, and instead stuck her in the cheese department. Like us, she knew nothing about cheese. But cheese was her job now so she began to learn.
She bought books, took online courses, and joined online forums to help her understand the product she was selling. Within a couple of years — without even applying for the job — she was promoted to the Head Cheese Master position (yes, that’s a title).
And now, after 3 years in the HCM role, she is studying to become the cheese equivalent of a Sommelier.
What I love about this story is that she found her purpose in life (at 55 years old!) by doingsomething, not by sitting around and thinking about it. She never knew that she was passionate about cheese until she actually got placed in the role. Now, it’s all she thinks about.
The lesson?
Take action to find your purpose, don’t expect it to just happen. Get out and start doing because once you do, opportunities will start falling into your lap that will help you clarify your purpose, even if you have no idea what that is.
2. What Can’t You Not Do?
…what is the work you can’t not do? Discover that, live it, not just for you, but for everybody around you, because that is what starts to change the world. — Scott Dinsmore
When looking towards passion, many people think about what they can do — what gets them excited or what they would happily do every day. But a better way to look at it is not what you can do, but rather what you can’t not do that is key.
Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, used this same framework to quit his high-paying Wall Street job and start an online bookstore. He calls it “regret minimization”.
Essentially, his goal in life is to minimize the amount of regret he might have at the end of his life. Not starting this online bookstore (which was a crazy idea back then) would have been a huge regret for him.
So he forwent a huge bonus and bootstrapped this company.
Now, I’m not saying that you need to follow in his footsteps and start one of the biggest companies in the world (but, by all means, please do — and give me 1% for the advice). I’m encouraging you to use this framework so you can apply it in your own life.
Is there something in your life or work right now that you would regret not doing? Something that, when you are in your rocking chair reflecting back on your life 40 years from now, that you would be kicking yourself because you didn’t do it?
Is it starting that company? Going for that promotion at work? Changing careers into marketing? Asking that guy out on a date?
This framework of thinking through what can’t you not do is sometimes more helpful than what you can do because it gets to the root of your desires. When we strip away capabilities and the “how” of a dream, it becomes easier to take action towards because failure isn’t really part of the decision making process. Just simply trying isn’t seen as a bad thing but rather something that comes from trying.
Recently when I was offered a job promotion for a radically different job in a different industry and when I was making the decision to take the leap, I asked myself “would I regret not trying?” The answer was, of course, yes, so I took the job and have never been happier in a role than I am today.
My encouragement to you is to think: what can’t you do? What would you regret not doing?
Find the answer and go do that.
3. Look For the Flow
…success, like happiness, cannot be pursued; it must ensue…as the unintended side-effect of one’s personal dedication to a course greater than oneself. — Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
As a kid, I remember sitting in class, bored out of my mind and staring at the clock, wishing for it to move faster. The more I watched it, however, the slower it went.
I had no idea how that was even possible back then, but it completely makes sense now that I understand the process of flow.
Flow, as defined by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, is the intersection between what you are good at and when time has become irrelevant.
Clearly, as a kid, I wasn’t in my flow.
I wasn’t doing something I was good at or something that I was remotely interested in. Nowadays, I find my flow much more often — through writing, coaching, in sales conversations, and even in deep conversations with friends.
The more flow you have in your life, the more aligned you are with your purpose.
To find your own flow, think back to a time when time passed by without you even thinking about it. You weren’t staring at the clock endlessly or checking social media every few minutes. A time when it didn’t matter how long you were doing this specific task, you were 100% present.
What were you doing? Who were you with?
If you can remember a moment of lost time like this, it’s a good indicator that you were in your own flow.
The goal is to build more of these flow moments in your life. The more flow you have, the more purposeful your life will become.
4. Make Little Bets
Our true schooling has only begun as we shift from word lessons to world lessons. — Dan Millman
One thing I see many people struggle with as they figure out their purpose is that they constantly beat themselves up for failing.
With our social media influenced culture today, the pressure to “have it all figured out” has never been greater. This pressure is causing us to either not try at all or flat out pretend to have it all figured out too. Obviously, this is a fallacy because the truth is — most people have no clue what they are doing, they’re just following the crowd. In fact, we’re all just stumbling around working to see what works and what doesn’t.
So when I see someone beat themselves up for even trying, when most people won’t even do that, I think it’s just silly.
I get it though: failing isn’t something that you want to do. If you’re a high achiever, failing shouldn’t even be in your vocabulary, right?
Well, maybe it doesn’t have to be.
Ramit Sethi, a New York Times bestselling author, doesn’t use the word “failure”. Instead, he says that he just runs tests that didn’t work. This is a complete mindset shift from failure. Failing and failure can be catastrophic. Testing, on the other hand, can lead to insights. It can lead to a different strategy and a new approach to the same problem.
I love this concept because it takes all of the emotion out of trying something new. And if you want to get closer to your purpose, you must keep trying new things.
In Peter Sims’ book, Little Bets, he encourages these tests to help you get closer to your purpose. The idea is simple: do something small to test an idea. Instead of leaping from a cliff and hoping you’ll fly, test the wings first.
Are you curious about being a writer? Try writing every morning for 2 weeks to see what happens.
Interested in running a business? Start selling some used jewelry online.
The more you make these little tests or bets, the less risk you take and the quicker and faster you can get to your true purpose. Make a small hypothesis and then test, test, and do more tests. Have patience with this process. Know what you want your outcome to be but don’t force it.
Jeff Goins in his book, The Art of Work, said: “calling is not merely a moment, it’s a lifestyle, a constant progression of submitting to a larger purpose.
Stop looking for that one moment, that one thing, because it almost will never come. You have to make small steps, that accumulate over time, in order to clarify what you really want. Experience is the best teacher we have.
5. What Do You Suffer For?
What man actually needs is not a tensionless state but rather the striving and struggling for a worthwhile goal. — Victor Frankl
When we think of living a purposeful life, most likely we are imagining a stress-free life where every day is exciting and full of passion, but that’s not always the case.
Viktor Frankl, author of one of the most read books of all time, Man’s Search For Meaning, was a survivor of the most barbaric concentration camp during World War II — Auschwitz. As a writer and philosopher, he documented his time in the concentration camps and reflected upon what he learned afterward.
One of the key findings he came away with was that everyone suffers in life. You don’t need to be in a concentration camp to suffer. Suffering happens to everyone in different ways. What separates those who live a purposeful and happy life versus those who are miserable, is the meaning you place on suffering.
Suffering in and itself is meaningless; we give our suffering meaning by the way in which we respond to it. — Viktor Frankl
There was no doubt that every person in the concentration camps suffered. But what Frankl witnessed was that the moment someone gave up hope, they would die within a few days. This didn’t happen just once but time and time again. The instant someone didn’t believe they would get out, their bodies would shut down and give up.
It wasn’t the suffering that was the detriment, but rather what the suffering was for. The moment a person believed that the suffering was for nothing, their body gave up.
While you and I will never experience something so tragic, we all suffer in our own ways.
You might have to work late at night while you miss your kid’s baseball game. You might have to pull an all-nighter after work to study for your upcoming test.
Regardless of the examples, we all suffer in our own small ways. But as Paulo Coelho said in The Alchemist:
The fear of suffering is worse than suffering itself.
Find what you are willing to suffer for and embrace it, because the fear of it will be greater than the suffering in itself.
Conclusion
No matter what strategy or mindset you chose to adopt from this list, pick one and do something with it. Take a sticky note, write down the mindset you wish to make, and tape it to your bathroom mirror. Put your headphones in and talk to yourself about it while walking to the office every morning.
Whatever your method, you need to implement something if you want the results. Your purpose won’t find you, you have to actively pursue it.
