Sometimes you have it young, and it leaves you when you grow old. Sometimes you don’t have it at all growing up, and it appears like a sudden guest when your hair starts to gray. Sometimes it flourishes without you even trying, and sometimes no matter how hard you try you just can’t make it happen.
Motivational types like to say “you can be anything you want to be,” which is, of course, a blatant lie. You can’t be a rock star and celibate monk at the same time. You can’t be a samurai, knight or king. You can’t be anything you want, but you can be something – and there’s great freedom in that limitation.
But it also means you can’t be other things. And sometimes, no matter how hard some people try, their work simply lacks the je né sais quoi which elevates a great piece of hard work into a work of magic.
I should know. I graduated with a diploma in 3D animation, and worked hard at it. I’m saying working overtime, overnight, over the weekends, studying and working on my own projects after work. But no matter how hard I did it, I could never break past the barrier between good and great.
Do you believe that there is an inherent purpose to your life? I don’t believe that we’re given a life purpose at birth, but I do appreciate the focus that even a consciously created life purpose can provide.
I was feeling a little burnt out a few weeks ago, and came across Steve Pavlina’s review of the book Life On Purpose: Six Passages to an Inspired Life by Brad Swift. The review sounded interesting, and I felt like I could use the clarity, so I hunted the book down (only copy remaining!) at a local bookstore.
I had a week of leave this week and decided to spend most of it working through the book. (Turns out powering through the book may not be the best way to go through the material, as Brad advises the reader to take some time in between some exercises for thought and reflection.) Did the book deliver on its promise, to “take a major shortcut on the road to clarifying your true purpose” and “infuse the inspiration of purpose into every aspect of your life”? Yes, but not in the way I expected.
Inherited Purpose vs. True Purpose
I appreciate the distinction that Brad makes between an inherited purpose and true purpose. Your inherited purpose is the purpose full of ‘shoulds’, all the things you think you should do instead of what you want to do, and is driven by fear.
I recently discovered Beyond Survival with Les Stroud, a documentary series where survival expert Stroud journeys the world, seeking the last indigenous tribes on the planet, to learn from them their secrets of survival – in short, in search of wisdom.
When I watch it, it stirs something in me – and I wonder if I’ve lost my way. The search for wisdom was what drove me to study Taoism and Wing Chun in my youth. It drove me to briefly become a life coach, and start Life Coaches Blog. It drove me to learn from magicians and Buddhist monks, to train with ninjas in Japan and meditate in silence for 10 days. It drove me to practice yoga and learn how to defend myself. It’s the sub-title of this blog, and best represents the most powerful driving force in my life: The desire to learn more and be more.
All that feels far away now.
In my daily life, I sit at a desk most of the day and write into a computer about consumer technology. I love tech and I love writing with a deep passion. But I wonder if I’ve strayed from the path, if where I am is where I am supposed to be – if I’ve stopped searching for wisdom.
They challenge me physically, mentally and emotionally to push through difficult moments, learn new things and stretch myself, literally and figuratively.
While both are wonderful supplements to my life, neither are strictly necessary, like how making a living is necessary. There’s always this little voice in the back of my head that asks me why I bother. Why I bother contorting my body into awkward and painful positions. Why I bother learning how to defend myself when I don’t live in a dangerous environment.
To be honest, there are times when I really don’t feel like going to class, especially at the end of a long day of work, when curling up in bed watching a movie feels so much more inviting than yet another evening of hard work.
I chalk that little voice up to the insidious Resistance, whose very purpose in life is to stop me from becoming my best self.
I don’t always win against the voice of Resistance, and every time I lose, Resistance rewards me with a lump of delight and a jug of regret. But when I win – and the more I simply show up to class every week no matter how tired or unenthusiastic I feel, the easier it becomes to win – the joy of having learned something new, to have stretched myself and made myself stronger, to have become better today than I was yesterday, eclipses any empty high that Resistance can offer.
Rory Miller’s post about self-esteem and insecurity got me thinking. Where he had problems dealing with violent people who had too much self-esteem – “I am more worthy than you” – in my short stint life-coaching my problem was how to help kids, teens and adults with too little self-esteem – “you are more worthy than I am” – people who didn’t believe enough in their intrinsic self-worth.
Self-esteem is a pretty nebulous concept, but Nathaniel Branden probably sums it best as “…the experience of being competent to cope with the basic challenges of life and being worthy of happiness”.
A low self-esteem caused all sorts of problems in the people I coached, so much so that at one time I even wondered if a lack of self-esteem was at the root of all personal problems. A lack of belief in one’s ability to do causes someone not to try new things and thus not to grow. A lack of belief in one’s self-worth makes it hard to relate to other people as equals, hard to build quality relationships and easier for bullies to run roughshod over them.
Miller suggests replacing self-esteem, which can be a feeling and belief without any basis in reality, with self-respect, basing how someone feels about herself on actual accomplishments. Stephen Covey calls this building the emotional bank account; the more you fulfill promises to yourself, the more you trust and respect yourself.
