Finding Your Purpose is Simpler Than You Think

Here’s one undeniable way to discover yours.

Photo by Jaunt and Joy on Unsplash

You’re looking to find purpose—a reason to get up in the morning or a career to fulfill your heart and soul. I know the feeling.

You try this and try that for a little while, only to be disappointed you don’t fall in love right away. “When will my calling hit me in the face and change my life for the better?” you wonder.

Come on; you can’t be serious. No Fairy Godmother of Purpose will ever appear and grant you a life of passion and meaning. Even if someone offers you a fantastic opportunity, you have to recognize it first.

A purpose can sometimes come from natural abilities or a need you feel you must fulfill from early in your life, but it’s rare. You won’t like reading this—but a purpose takes hard work and patience.

It’s not a magical gift from the gods.

Coming from writing and creating comics regularly for many years, I now know my purpose is to educate and entertain through stories and art. I didn’t hike up a mountain to the top and receive a divine message.

I discovered my purpose by doing the work.

But don’t worry, it’s not as hard as you might think. You have to make concrete decisions and stick to them. Here’s how…

Commit to something

Discovering your purpose first takes you to committing to learning and growing in a particular area or career. It’s astonishing how connected we can become to an area we choose to give ourselves to heart and soul.

What are you interested in learning and becoming the best at over many years? If you pick something that excites you and scares you a little, you’re on the right track.

Make a point to practice the skill regularly to improve, and you’ll see how it fills you with purpose, with a drive to do better and share it with the world. When you commit—essentially, take responsibility for something—it gives your life meaning.

Pretty simple, right?

I’ve loved writing for most of my life, but committing to posting articles here on Medium regularly and becoming a better writer helped cultivate my feeling of purpose. Helping inspire others to succeed now feels like my purpose through the written word.

“The quality of a person’s life is in direct proportion to their commitment to excellence, regardless of their chosen field of endeavor.”

Vince Lombardi

Embrace responsibility

People run away from responsibility like it’s an evil villain chasing them in a horror movie, preferring to escape into simple, non-threatening pleasure-seeking getaways as much as possible.

If you want a purpose-driven life, you have to embrace the responsibility that goes along with that life. You can’t have one thing without the other. Accepting that there’s a price to pay for everything is a part of doing something worthwhile.

If you want to be a better writer, you’ll need to watch less TV and spend more hours on the keyboard. The more you work at it, the better you’re writing will become, then you begin to desire watching TV less as your desire to write grows. You feel like it’s your purpose.

When you, let’s say, become a parent, volunteer somewhere, commit to a relationship, take on a mortgage to buy a home or any one of a thousand other “responsibilities,” they permeate your life with purpose and meaning.

That’s the upside of responsibility no one tells you.

“Without commitment you cannot have depth in anything.”

Neil Strauss

Attract your purpose through action

It’s all on you now. Commit to growing and improving in several parts of your life that interest you.

Even if you don’t think it could be your purpose right now, you’d be amazed by how things look different once you dedicate yourself to them and become the best over time.

When I started teaching art in an elementary school, I thought I would hate it because I wasn’t making all of my money being an illustrator. There were a lot of new responsibilities to take on, like taking care of children and classroom management, and I had to learn to plan lessons and make a curriculum.

Over that first year of teaching, I was pleasantly surprised at how much I enjoyed being an educator. I made time to draw comics in my off-hours, and I felt like my teaching job was making a difference to young people.

The position grew on me as I took on the commitment and handled the responsibility. You won’t always know what will be the right fit.

When you commit and work hard, your purpose finds you.

Want more? If you’re struggling with making authentic work, click here to join my (free) email list, and through comics, articles about culture, and living your truth, you can discover how to upgrade your mindset and share your creative writing and art with the world.

3 Mindset Shifts to Help You Hate Yourself

And motivate you to do better.

Illustrated by the author.

Being a success is overrated.

Why worry about making yourself better when the world is slowly spiraling down the toilet bowl?

Let's get real here, people.

Thinking positively does little to help your attitude anyway, and you just end up feeling like a fake. Facing reality and putting yourself down can work wonders. Take it from me, a generally positive person, at least that's what all my friends call me—I'm ready for a change.

These last few years, I survived a pandemic, watching good people die in droves even after being careful not to spend time in crowds but still end up catching covid. Wearing masks and washing hands only to still, that's right, see more people catch covid. Other self-proclaimed good folks believe they don't even need a vaccine, and it's all a hoax. They seem fine with themselves.

Meanwhile, I lose my job and have to learn to survive and find a new one while everyone else is fleeing theirs. Should I try to be happy? Make it all the better by telling myself positive mantras?

If someone can decide what life means to them and choose how to live it the way they want, even if it's ridiculous, I've opted that thinking positively is getting thrown out the window.

Here's a mindset shift that defies what self-help gurus preach, so we can start demotivating ourselves and get honest about our situations. It's time you gain power from negative self-criticism.

1. Recognize your negative cycle and give it a hug

Criticizing yourself and your appearance after waking up in the morning, looking at your sad reflection staring back, is the new motivation for success. Dominate your mind with negative talk about how you need to lose weight and exercise more.

I bet your hair looks awful. Isn't it time for a new hairdo?

Yeah, your job sucks. Who cares. What are you going to do about it? Nothing. I thought so.

Doesn't this feel good?

Destructive self-talk sculpts an image of yourself that's hard to break unless you recognize you're doing it in the first place. Embrace this downer version of you and let the Eeyore-like side shine.

What? Is all this negativity silly to you? After smelling all your garbage, you should want to clean it up.

2. See your negative self-image as a flame, and fan it

The more you fan a flame, the more it burns. It's time to grow yours into a roaring fire with negative self-talk. How bad can you make yourself feel?

Dare yourself to try. How many crappy details about your life and failures can you drum up? Life ain't always great, so stop pretending.

Give it all you got, and feel that fire rage inside. The worse you feel, the better.

You might get so enraged that you get completely sick and tired of being sick and tired. So what?

Why don't you do something about it? Oh, you're too lazy, huh?

If only you cared enough to think of times where you made the right choices and succeeded. Accept that some things in life work out, and others don't.

Feeling bad about yourself can help make you feel good.

3. Be unkind to yourself to motivate change

The other day I cursed at myself for making a wrong turn and having to re-route the directions to an appointment—one I was already late for anyway. I could have been kind and talked to my brain about how everything will be fine and work out well in the end.

But it didn't. Me being late made everything worse and upset people I care about. Maybe next time I have a meaningful engagement, I should leave super early because I suck at finding new places.

Making sure to step outside yourself and see the bad can help you know what to improve. You shouldn't hide behind positivity if you want to make real change.

You have to be unkind to yourself to know where to grow and get so upset you actually do something instead of just talking.

The end is not nigh

You have triggers that make you feel down on yourself or give up, and you might as well discover them so you know when you're spanking yourself. When we feel at our lowest, we are often about to make a breakthrough.

If you can tell when you're at rock bottom, you can be open for the moment of clarity that helps you see where to go next. Giving yourself a chance to notice what pulls you down can help you know how to climb back up. Or, better yet, how not to spiral down in the future.

Times are tough in the world right now, and we need to be tougher. You can't always fix everything by just thinking positively.

You've seen those old black and white photos of families from a hundred years ago. They weren't smiling, and they were surviving.

They didn't finish a day on the farm, working out in the hot sun, smiling, and telling themselves how happy they were. Looking in the mirror, telling themselves life can be easy and fun when life was hard. Our ancestors had very few options.

It's much easier now, but we act like it should be a breeze.

Life is still challenging, no matter how nicer our living conditions have become—facing negativity and letting it run all over you is how to understand what gets you down and leads to change.

Unless you suffer from chronic depression, you might want to see a doctor and get on medication if that's the case.

The rest of us can learn to live with our negativity and practice some grit.

Cheers to the new you.

Want more? If you’re struggling with making authentic work, click here to join my (free) email list, and through comics, articles about culture, and living your truth, you can discover how to upgrade your mindset and share your creative writing and art with the world.

How to Succeed Using "The Parenting Mindset"

If you want to do anything meaningful in life, you always hear experts say it's crucial to be a "self-starter" or a person who's "motivated" to be successful? 

Maybe you feel like that's for a special kind of person. What if you think there's no way that can be you?

It doesn't mean you have nothing in the world to strive for or go after. You may have big dreams.

You're just not doing what it takes to move forward. 

I bet you've read or heard inspirational teachers saying, define what real success looks like to you. Find your reason "why," to make it important enough. And that will motivate you to pursue your goals.

This is good advice, but what if you still have trouble moving forward toward what you consider success?

Take on "The Parenting Mindset." 

Maybe you're not even a parent. But one thing is true—you must take care of yourself. 

No one else is going to, not really. 

Your life is totally, and without a doubt, all your responsibility.

I am a parent, and one thing I felt when my daughter was born was a massive sense of responsibility. Babies are helpless. Even though I knew this intellectually, the fact that she couldn't do anything for herself hit me like a ton of bricks. 

If my wife and I didn't feed, clothe, and change her diapers regularly, she wouldn't survive.

You are not helpless, however. You can make changes and live the life you choose. No matter what you've been through. 

The hardest part of parenting—the part that created the mindset below—is that you must do all of these things to raise your child, and no one cares if you're tired. 

It doesn't matter if you're sick or depressed. Your baby needs food. Your child needs your support and care.

Think of your life this way.

The parenting mindset involves treating your goals like a child that needs constant care, only you can give, no matter what. 

That's the hard part about life, right? Having to take care of business and move forward even when you're feeling down or "life" is slapping you in the face with a wet towel.

It can be easy to let all your motivation get sucked out of you.

I know there are those of us who have more challenges to overcome than others, but it could always be worse. 

Actually, I would suggest thinking about all the ways it could be worse, so you understand how good you have it. 

Gratitude. It's the perfect reset. Start there, and then keep moving forward.

Sometimes, we're tired and need to rest. That's fine. Take time to recharge, but decide for how long.

Decide to take a break for a few hours—a day, a weekend. Then, get off your buttocks and get back to work.

If you are a parent. Don't use your child as an excuse not to pursue your goals. Look at them as your motivation to succeed.

I know it's challenging, especially in the first year of raising your child, to make time for yourself, but carve out what you can, when you can.

Think about it, which would you instead tell your kids when they grow older, "Raising you was too hard, so I just gave up on my dreams." Or, "Raising you was the challenge that helped make me stronger. You inspired me every day to pursue my dreams to make you proud."

I remember feeling noxious every time I had to wake up multiple times a night to feed or change my daughter's diapers. It was tough, but I got used to it. 

Hard? Yes. For the best reason? Raising my offspring. Heck, Yeah!

I discovered I'm capable of so much more. If I can survive on very little sleep and still go to work and perform at a professional level, I can do more in my life than I previously thought.

Not to mention, using what very little free time I had in the most efficient way possible helped me start my Fried Chicken and Sushi webcomic and update it twice a week consistently. 

I found the magic in how productive you become when you limit the amount of time you have to spend on something.

Try it. Whether you're a parent or not, behave like one.

Take full responsibility for your success. Be grateful for what you have. 

No one will help you the way that you can.

Make up your mind that you can do much more than you think you can each day.

Use your limitations to motivate you.

See how much you can do in a short period. Take what you feel is lacking in your life and reframe how you think about it. Can you turn it into something that can light a fire in you to push harder towards your goals?

I think you can.

No.

I know you can.

Now, get out there and make things happen. Before I put you in time-out.