Live by Design – Clarity
“If one does not know to which port one is sailing, no wind is favorable” Lucius Annaeus Seneca
Picture yourself getting up in the morning, getting in your car and heading off. Nothing strange there right? People do go to their offices and other places.
Imagine driving without any destination in mind, merely following the road wherever it takes. Now that sounds bizarre. To the adventurous ones, this might not sound that bizarre. What if you do every day? That would be really crazy thing to do.
Would you do that?
The fact is lot of us live our life like that, daily. 98% of the people don’t have a clear purpose in life. That’s a real shocker.
You can be a member of that 2% if you are not already there. Like any journey you need a destination, clarity of purpose, you’re “Why”.
As the numbers suggest most of us live life without any destination, a life that keeps happening on an auto mode and not by your choice. Your subconscious mind dictate your actions and behaviours.
Wouldn’t it be great to live by choice and not by chance, live consciously? Even if it doesn’t lead to an expensive Malibu, Villa, BMW or a private jet and if it does then that’s icing on the cake.
The thing is you may be sitting on the driver’s seat, but if you don’t have clarity of your purpose, you are not driving. You may feel in control, but you are not. It’s just happening and you are merely existing and living whatever comes your way.
If I ask you what is your LIFE PURPOSE? This will make you think as you have never really worked on defining that. Well, of course, you can say that everything in your life is all hunky-dory and you really never felt the need to do that. Still, if this question does pop up, most likely you will be stuck and forced to think about it and not just think, but think hard.
The key is to find the purpose and then assess your current life with it and not define purpose based on your current life, which a lot of us may be doing. You will struggle for hours to come up with your purpose as this requires a lot of introspection.
When we were young we were carefree so didn’t really think about it. Then, we went to school, college, and probably did post-graduation. Till that time our parents defined our life for us. Post that we got busy building our life as it happened, got a job, new relations, got married etc. We started living life just as it came by. We got so busy with everything and never really got the time to define our purpose. Now, some of you may have a different opinion and may say their life is well defined, and they are happy. That’s fine, and I don’t want to say you are an exception. What I merely want to point out is that for a lot of us life goes in a pretty standard way as I have described.
Recently I was addressing some employees in an organization. I asked them to introduce themselves stating their name, location, job responsibilities, the usual stuff. Just out of curiosity I asked them “What’s your purpose in life”. I was amazed that most of them talked about things not linked to what they were currently doing. Of course, I wasn’t expecting them to articulate it clearly and in a short span of time they came up with stuff like working for a noble cause through NGO’s, one of them wanted to work for the advancement of the sport that he liked and others had different aspirations too. Whatever they came up with was not linked to the path they were walking on. Luckily there was no HR person present.
Simply putting it, as we, get on with our life we are so exhausted, stressed out, confused working on others purpose, goals and expectations. You work for big organizations and working hard for their purpose but when it comes to your own, you either give up or are working in the wrong direction.
Success needs clarity and awareness.
Having a purpose is like having a destination in mind and working your ways towards it. This does not guarantee that you will have a smooth ride till your destination but at least those challenges which you will face will be worth it and meaningful.
This is part four of a series of eight posts. To know more about the transformation journey and the process watch out for the next post……
Author: Abhishek Budhraja
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