Advance With A Sense Of Purpose – The Law Of Awareness

While animals rely on instinct, humans rely on conscious decisions. If we’re not careful though, we can be pulled in directions we don’t want. To avoid drifting in life, we need a sense of purpose. This is all about knowing ourselves and what we want. Having a sense of direction turns us into an unstoppable force.

Just a few decades ago, people didn’t have many career and life choices. As a consequence, they would settle into things and they would stay there. The world has changed so much since then that finding figures that can help you make better choices (such as mentors, family members, or religious leaders) is harder than ever. When we face something unprecedented, we either get excited and experiment with different things without committing to anything.

Alternatively, the chaos frightens us to the point that we choose something that motivates us and this gives us the stability we crave. Both paths have their problems. Trying too many things means we never get to master any. Committing to one particular thing early in our lives leads to boredom, insecurity, anxiety, stress, and depression.

We all want a sense of direction, but our options are virtually endless. The inner compass guiding our actions involves discovering our individual purpose. This internal guidance system manifests itself often when we’re children, but as we get older, the voice becomes clearer and clearer. The author calls this voice our primal inclinations. Our job is to trust that voice so that all the negative emotions turn into productive ones. The opposite of primal inclinations are false purposes and include all the things that guide your behavior but will never give you what you’re looking for. Examples of false purposes include power, attention, and money.

Never ignore the role of having a sense of purpose, so find it and connect to it deeply. This is hard work because you’ll run into many obstacles and distractions. With this in mind, the author suggests five strategies to overcome said strategies.

Discover your calling: This involves looking for things that fascinate you. Examine the activities that feel natural and easy.
Use resistance and negative spurs: The process of getting the basic skills so that you can combine them in creative ways is boring and painful. Nevertheless, embrace the pain, as well as people’s criticisms. Use everything negative as motivation.
Absorb purposeful energy: Don’t spend too much time with people who don’t have a sense of purpose. Instead, look for the opposite. You may find a mentor or a partner and they’ll encourage you to be better.
Create a ladder of descending goals: Having long-term goals gives you clarity, but also generates anxiety. Whenever possible, have smaller goals that you can achieve easily. This gives you a sense of progress and satisfaction.
Lose yourself in the work: having a sense of purpose requires commitment and sacrifice. Along the way, there will be temptations, as well as times of frustration, boredom, and failure. To avoid all this, achieve moments of flow where you lose yourself in what you’re doing. For this purpose, you have to be in the middle of a project, you must give yourself uninterrupted time, and you must focus on your work.
Be careful with false purposes. They create the illusion of purpose, but they’re empty. Real purpose can’t be manufactured and it comes from within. This means that it’s personal and intimate. False purposes, on the other hand, come from something external.

These are the most common types of false purposes:

The pursuit of pleasure: This refers to sex, drugs, entertainment, or games. You can identify them because you get diminishing returns whenever you engage with them. In other words, the more you do them, the less pleasure you obtain.
Causes and cults: People need to believe in something so they gravitate toward microcauses or cults.
Money and success: People who pursue money and success have trouble defining what’s enough. This turns into a neverending obsession that’s devoid of meaning.
Attention: Social media has made pursuing fame and money easier than ever. Ironically, having a sense of purpose draws people as well. In this case, the attention goes to your work and not yourself.
Cynicism: This is the feeling that life’s meaningless. Move away from this idea because it leads nowhere. Find excitement and curiosity in the world instead.


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