This post follows on from yesterday’s post where we started looking at the foundations on which we can build our best life. Today we look at the second pillar of the foundations. We believe that working through each of these pillars is the best way to prepare ourselves for doing the subsequent work that optimises our lifestyle to promote happiness and fulfilment.

Purpose

You can change the world!

But on the other hand, you really don’t have to. If everyone changed the world just once in their life, the world would change every three seconds. That’s probably a little much for most of us.

Often when confronted with the terms purpose we begin to consider a level of altruism which we do not consider when setting goals. At Optima Vita we do believe in the everyone making a contribution to their community and to society but everyone’s purpose does not need to be in some way striving for a better world.

Setting, knowing and understanding our purpose is very different from setting our goals. Where goals may be individual objectives, our purpose is the why that we have set them.

For some people their purpose may be to be a great father. It may be to lead an international tech company. It may be to develop products for western consumers. It may be to be the President or Prime Minister. It may be to write the novels that burn inside them. It may even be to lead a quite, happy existence, leaving a light footprint on the planet.

Our purpose should be the first thing that we want people to say about is in our obituary. It can be as altruistic or as selfish as we want it to be. It can be something big or something that only means something to ourselves. It is important, however, that our purpose can be used for us to set some of our goals. It should be something that we can use our available resources (time, money, energy) to work towards if we get the opportunity.

When we set or articulate our purpose we are setting a direction for our lives. It doesn’t matter if it’s something that sets really stretching goals that take years to achieve or really simple daily targets.

Our purpose is our guidance and our intention. It can evoke passion or peace but it should evoke an emotion.

To get clarity on your purpose, write it down. Check back on it every day for a couple of weeks or so. Alter it as you see fit. If it doesn’t really change for about two or three weeks then you’ve nailed it.

We will pick up on our goals to deliver our purpose in another post.