Purpose

The power of purpose

Imagine a life where every moment of every day was filled with the highest purpose. What would it be like to feel like each day brought opportunities to contribute to something bigger than you?

Imagine if you had much more energy than you presently do. What if you had a seemingly unlimited daily reserve of energy to impart to every important task?

Imagine how much you would accomplish if you put your full effort into everything you did. What would it be like to have a compelling reason to give your strongest and smartest effort to everything you set your mind and hands to?

Imagine being freed from the anxiety of not knowing how to best spend your time. What would it be like to perceive a clear path through life’s many options, and to have strong confidence with every step?

Imagine transcending the effect of uncertainty and the decisions of others on how you feel about yourself. What would it be like to have the power to choose who you are and how you feel, instead of having others decide it for you?

All of these outcomes and more belong exclusively to those who have identified what they want and oriented their lives toward obtaining it. Those with a clear purpose and plan in life will have a fundamentally superior experience compared to those who do not. They will achieve more, and better, and feel much greater joy while doing so, according to their own definitions of “more”, “better”, and “joy”. They will do so in spite of the disappointments, surprises, and sorrows along the way.

A transcendent purpose gives you permission to go all out

It’s rare enough to find a person who is willing to explicitly define what they want out of life. Most people prefer remaining in the vacuous comfort of not really knowing what they want in life, which protects them from the pain of failing to have it.

Of those with the courage to define what they want from life, most are looking for the shortest possible path to what they want, asking, “What is the minimum I need to do?” The problem with this approach is that great outcomes require great sacrifices—sacrifices whose costs almost always exceed the limits of what someone who does not yet have them imagines possible.

We have a perennial ability to underestimate the cost of outcomes. By the time you find out the true cost of what you seek, it is usually too late to pay it. An uncommon kind of person doesn’t wait for the bill. They proactively ask, “What more can I do?” This person is always doing all they can to achieve what they want. Sooner or later, they will reach a point where anything more they can do is no longer worth the effort it would take, except in one special situation: that of a transcendent purpose.

There are two characteristics that make a purpose transcendent:

1. It is recognized as more valuable than anything else.
2. Any effort applied to it will result in worthwhile advancement of it.

These two properties make it so very few purposes qualify as transcendent, but those that do always have sufficient justification for doing everything you can to advance them. Nothing short of these properties justify unbounded effort.

A transcendent purpose makes it possible to see where intensity benefits and where it harms

Most comments about balance in life come from people who have the opposite of the credentials in life that you’d expect from someone with an opinion worth hearing on the topic. Balance is not an inherent quality in life, but rather one that can only be defined and weighed with respect to what is of greatest value to the individual. Plenty of high achievers feel greater balance in their lives than those who criticize them for what they perceive to be the lack thereof.

Without a defined transcendent purpose, all discussion of balance is no better than feeling one’s way through the dark. The difference between necessary sacrifice and overzealousness can only be assessed once a purpose is defined. How can one say what is worthwhile independent of knowing the value of the expected outcome?

A transcendent purpose is worth anything else. Without a defined purpose, necessary efforts could easily be withheld in the name of balance in spite of how many worthwhile paths would be precluded by such an approach. Anything that ultimately detracts from your transcendent purpose is overzealous, but anything that fails to advance your transcendent purpose is insufficient.

While all of these statements accurately suggest that, for most, the life plan will result in some increase in activity, don’t mistake this for an increase in pressure or overwhelm, as you’ll feel less of both as you implement your life plan.

The only way to alleviate anxiety towards being better than you are is to have compelling reasons to believe that you are already the best you can be or doing the best that you can. You can’t feel peace in doing less than your best, and you won’t be successful in persuading yourself that you are doing your best without compelling evidence. The life plan is your evidence.

Rather than seeing every moment as a high-pressure decision to make, your prioritization of all things according to purpose will make the pace you set and the breaks you take intentional and for the greatest benefit. You will definitely get much more done by living a life plan than not, but living a life plan does not mean you will be a robot who never has downtime or never hesitates before beginning a new task.

You don’t need work/life balance, you need full-tilt purpose!

If you ask a successful person what they do for fun, the odds are high that they will look at you funny. Successful people tend to say that they would do what they do even if they had enough money that they never had to work again. How do successful people find a way to enjoy what they have to do when normal people make a distinction between what they have to do (work) and what they want to do (play)? By choosing paths where what they have to do is clearly necessary for what they want; they choose their work based on their purpose, and they understand how it directly contributes to it.

In recent years, more and more people are seeking what they call work/life balance. Instead of seeing work as something you do to finance what you want to do, your purpose can help you see it as something you get to do, like everything else you choose, to advance your purpose.

In truth, there is no such thing as balance, just priority. For example, for many, the priority of family exceeds the priority of work for money. For these, there is a point at which the needs of work must sublimate to the needs of family. There is no need to artificially juggle the two; the one is subordinate to the other. So it is with all contending pieces in one’s life.

Your purpose, in conjunction with your values and beliefs, is the key to defining the priority of everything in your life. Much more will be said about this in the “Values” chapter.

A focus on purpose yields great progress in things small and large

In Atomic Habits, author James Clear makes a convincing argument for the compounding effects of small, consistent changes. As the book title suggests, small habits need not be related to one another. Whatever benefits are possible from disconnected, individual changes, imagine the extra dimension of compounding that occurs when they are oriented coherently towards the same purpose. Furthermore, consider the additional motivation you can find in starting and continuing small changes when they serve your overarching purpose. Imagine how much overwhelming motivation flows into a small task when it has a visible impact on your supremely important purpose!

While small changes do indeed have an enormous aggregate impact, there are also some few choices we make in life that can easily dwarf them.¹ To prove this point, enumerate a few hallmarks of success in your own life or in the lives of those you know. Consider how they happened. It is much more likely that they came about from one or just a few big decisions or actions than that they came from small sustained changes.

In a way, your habits will raise the floor of your experience compared to the average person, but the ceiling of your experience will much more likely be determined by how you react and respond to those rare opportunities that capture the vast majority of meaning and accomplishment in life. When it comes to the big actions, tiny motivation simply won’t suffice.

It’s more accurate to understand that small habits and big decisions are partners rather than independent phenomena. Often, the decision to begin what will be sustained into a habit is itself a big change. For instance, starting a new career, getting married, joining the military, having a child, enrolling in college, or writing a book all require dramatic initial action, even though continuing them requires a much smaller but sustained effort over time. In both the initiation and the sustainment, you are much more likely to begin and continue activities that are based on a central purpose than those which are not.

Progress in a purpose can’t be measured directly

It’s easy to frame progress as finishing tasks, but this perspective is limited in the motivation and sustained productivity it can yield. When you instead frame your work as the art of advancing your purpose, you are freed from the drawbacks of being task-focused. You will find yourself reducing procrastination, increasing productivity, and enjoying work a lot more than before. It’s more difficult to procrastinate against a purpose than it is a task. After all, while the task may be something you need to get done, you chose your purpose, and it is what you say you want. It’s easier to hold back on a task than it is your purpose, for the same reason—your purpose is exactly what you want. When you see how whatever you are working on in the moment is the present instantiation of your purpose, you can learn to enjoy it.

Unlike a goal, a purpose is so transcendent that it cannot be measured or accomplished directly. Your progress on a purpose can only be measured by proxy, since you can finish subordinate elements of the life plan like goals and tasks, but never your purpose itself. You measure progress in your purpose through:

• Assessing the character qualities you have attained.
• Measuring what you value, and by how much.
• Considering the goals you have set and accomplished.
• Thinking about the tasks you have set out to complete, their prioritization, and the rate at which you complete them.

Seeing work as the advancement of your purpose creates a positive feedback loop; your reallocation of the time and energy from convincing yourself to begin or continue in important tasks to actually moving them forward will dramatically boost your throughput and the satisfaction you feel in that progress.

The existential level of importance

Something that is existential carries the highest weight of importance. An easy way to describe something existential is as part of the phrase: “If I don’t , I’m going to die.” Interestingly, all people have felt like this about many things at many times, even if they didn’t put it into these words. Food, water, sleep, and sex are all frequent fillins to the sentence, but some people have elevated other things to this level of importance, for good and bad. Many parents have made the well-being of their children existential priorities, and successful business people have placed their business at this level; for some, escaping pain, worry, or sadness can take ultimate priority; drug addicts treat their high with this level of importance, among many other examples.

It turns out that no matter what you put into this slot, only one thing can go there. This is one way of identifying your prime priority.

Successful people learn how to choose what they get existential about. They master how to lock in one target. They proactively plan plausible paths to obtain their existential goals, and they lock onto them like a snapping turtle until they yield.

Promoting your purpose to the existential level

Making your life’s purpose mere self-preservation is going to direct you away from the greatest meaning and motivation in life. To encounter the power available in a life plan, you have to come to see your purpose as more important to you than life itself. If you aren’t willing to die for your purpose, then maintaining your life is your true transcendent purpose, and that’s pretty lame.

Self-preservation doesn’t just limit your accomplishment; it ensures your failure. A willingness to die for something more important than life is required to find sufficient meaning to live. The purpose of maintaining your life runs counter to everything of value great enough to contend with the ever-present malevolence of this life. You will not invest full intensity into something less than a life-or-death matter. If you want to unleash your latent potential, you’ll have to find a cause that you can promote to a primal priority.

The power of a supreme priority is so visceral that it is a common theme in myth and stories. Think of just how many stories you know of where the protagonist’s entire world balances on just one fulcrum. It’s such a ubiquitous scenario that you’ve probably never noticed how frequently their existential focus falls on something rather arbitrary, all things considered.

As an example, the protagonist in Rocky IV experiences the death of his friend during a boxing match. Instead of seeing this as an unfortunate but not altogether unpredictable accident, Rocky risks everything to fight the man himself. His wife tells him how silly this is, as he is risking his life, his family, and all the wealth he won in prior bouts, telling him that she not only thinks he will lose, but that he will die trying. Rocky responds by saying:

“Maybe the best I can do is take everything he’s got. But to beat me...he’s gonna have to kill me, and to kill me, he’s gonna have to have the heart to stand in front of me, and to do that, he’s gotta be willin’ to die himself.” (Rocky, from _Rocky IV_ )

You may have found the movie campy, but more than one highly successful person² has cited its intersection with the deep currents of reality as having been critical to their mindset.

Your purpose needs to be the most important thing in your life, which means it must be more important to you than life itself. You need to stare it down and say and truly believe that you are going to give it everything you’ve got, even if it kills you.

If its not worth everything, its not worth doing

A popular phrase says that if it’s worth doing, it’s worth doing well. This is true, but fails to recognize the existence of competing demands for your limited resources. To do something well requires feeding it the resources it requires, which necessitates depriving something else of those resources.

The truth is that if something isn’t worth giving everything for, it’s not worth giving anything for. The only proper place anything worth less than everything has is if it serves as a prerequisite to what is worth everything.

The widespread failure of people to see this truth is not due to it being false, but because they don’t understand the difference between a purpose and a goal or task. A goal or task is never worth giving everything for, but your purpose must be, or you are guaranteed to eventually fail—not just at your purpose, but at life.

Your purpose must be existential. Your life does not have inherent meaning. It has the meaning you assign it through your adopted purpose. If you want your life to be worthwhile, you need to adopt an existential purpose. What isn’t worth dying for isn’t worth living for.

The benefits of hierarchically arranging your life by purpose

When you reorganize your life with a single focal point—your purpose—you might fear that you will need to clear out a great many present activities that you value.

In reality, if you properly understand joy, you will find that everything you deem valuable continues to have a place at the table when you make it your explicit purpose. You’ll keep everything good, you just make it easier and better.

Many changes will consist only of why you do what you do, not what you do. Even those that touch on what you do or when or how you do it will likely not be terribly obvious from the outside, like rewiring a house, even if the internal differences are immense. You’ll be amazed at the magnitude of change in how you feel and what you accomplish!

The benefits of prioritizing your life according to your purpose stem from the properties of hierarchical arrangement. Reality is hierarchical. It is naturally organized into a network with levels of detail. For example, the workstation at which I am typing this can be treated as one entity at the highest level of detail—a set of monitors, a laptop, a desk, and notes—and a whole bunch of atoms on another. It turns out that we could keep going in either direction: the workstation itself is just a subcomponent in the room, which is a subcomponent in the house, and so on.

The life plan organizes your life as a hierarchy of several categories under a single purpose, each with layers of detail within them. Much like a chest of drawers, you only have to unpack the contents of each category when needed. In each category and on each level, you are prioritizing by your purpose, giving you the benefits of organizing in high detail across your life without the burden of doing so all at once.

Sublimating your life to your purpose yields increased focus. Focus isn’t just a question of saying yes to one thing and no to everything else. Life is more complicated than this, and you’ll need a way to easily see what doesn’t fit, and where to place the rest. When you prioritize the maximal fulfillment of your purpose, you will find the importance of everything in your life clarify to the point where it is obvious and easy to choose between options for your time, emotions, and other resources.

Sublimating to your purpose will increase the accuracy and consistency of your prioritization, vastly increasing your impact. Hierarchical arrangement of your life arranges everything into just a few pieces, which are much easier to organize and prioritize than treating them all independently. Following the 80/20 rule, prioritizing the highest impact tasks and goals can easily yield ten times greater progress than otherwise. Just imagine getting ten times more done simply by making better choices about what to do next!

On meaning and vocational work

You might make the mistake of thinking that living a life plan means you need a very specific career that directly matches your described purpose. This is highly unlikely.

Work—whether in or out of the home—is no different than anything else in your life plan. Whatever you do should be the fullest potential contribution to your overarching purpose. What you do is not the driving factor— why you do it is.

Many today—particularly young people—seem to think that a job worked only for the money it pays is some tragedy of unattained opportunity. The prime benefit of work outside the home is almost always what you get paid to do it. Though it is possible to find intrinsic meaning in what you do for a living, it is much more likely that the value of the money you earn is greater to you than the value of what you do, otherwise you would volunteer.

Having a life plan will help you feel the same way about whatever you do for money as you do what you do for purpose, because the one will directly feed the other in ways you have perceived and actively think about.

Working for money does not in any way preclude finding great meaning in your work. Very few transcendent purposes can be pursued without temporal means.

Few people find their purpose in their job, but most need the money their job provides in order to fund their purpose. If you find your job meaningless, it isn’t because you need a job with greater meaning, but because you have failed to honestly perceive the value of the money it provides.

When you recognize the value of money in terms of your transcendent purpose and know exactly what higher value outcomes it makes possible, it’s much easier to find deep meaning in work—even if the main benefit it provides is a paycheck.

A strong purpose helps you notice opportunities

A surprising share of what makes an abundant life comes from the ability to recognize and take advantage of unforeseen opportunities. A strong purpose will help you do this more than anything else. You will find that the incidental gains accrued by taking advantage of unexpected incidental opportunities will often outweigh those intentionally sought, and sometimes by a shocking ratio. Opportunities are like toddlers:

• Many are accidents. You can’t predict them, but you need a way to respond to them if they happen.
• Most are not paid attention to, and in ignoring them, guarantee great regret later. The greatest treasures come from those who value them in the moment.
• They usually don’t play nicely with others. You need a way to prioritize which is most important, because you can probably only really pursue one at a time.
• They are particularly impatient. If you don’t handle them when they appear, they usually will scurry away.
• They can suddenly stink very badly. It’s vital to know when to discontinue what once looked like a great idea.

Opportunities can be far more subtle than their benefits. You are much more likely to notice something you are looking for, especially if it is subtle.

A strong purpose will increase your ability to notice otherwise hidden opportunities. Your well-defined life plan provides a scaffold of what to look for and reasons to look for it. Without a life plan, you’ll be stuck in an up-close view of life, unable to see and take advantage of unforeseen opportunities outside the scope of the present task at hand.

With a life plan, you’ll be cognizant of the overarching purpose that matters the most to you, as well as many goals and even more tasks that will contribute to it. This web of priorities creates a net on which many unexpected opportunities might catch to your advantage. Having an idea of what you are after is a prerequisite to noticing and taking advantage of incremental opportunities along the way.

Your purpose will help you justify the reallocation of resources necessary to take advantage of life-changing opportunities that you might otherwise pass over as impossible. Your life plan vitally assists you in deciding what is important, heightening the likelihood that you will notice and leverage unexpected opportunities.

Always take advantage of incidental opportunities that take much less present effort now than they would in the future. For example, if you happen across items for sale at the store that you weren’t planning on buying, but that you use, buy as many as you will use before they expire. Pull a weed as you walk by on your way to the objective that brought you that way. And always—always—write down ideas worth having that come to you unbidden.

Purpose enables clear and confident decisions

When you have a purpose, you have a framework that makes every decision clearer than it would otherwise be. Your purpose gives you criteria to measure against every decision before you. It also acts as an organization system to look for, gather, and evaluate evidence. In all things, you are able to evaluate the costs and benefits against your chosen purpose: either a clear best choice emerges, or you will have done the due diligence necessary to prove to yourself that the decision isn’t terribly important to you.

Purpose drives stable confidence

When you are doing the best you know in service of your purpose, you can generate feelings of confidence, peace, and satisfaction that endure much more strongly than feelings that come from arbitrary environmental conditions. Every time you act in preference to your purpose, you generate more supporting evidence for your capacity, selfworth, and eventual success. As you continue to learn about the life plan, you will begin to realize how you can make every moment of your life into supporting evidence for your confidence through intentionally choosing to act to advance your purpose.

Increased confidence in your life plan will generate a positive feedback loop. The more you live according to your plan, the more confidence you will have to continue aiming towards a better life. You’ll come to recognize the life plan as a tool to continuously improve your life. You will set out to become a person with even better qualities, even more accurate values, even more audacious goals, and even more high impact tasks. The more improvement you encounter, the more courage you will have to fully invest any energy you’ve been withholding.

Even if your purpose is fixed, its meaning to you will change radically over time

Joy is one word, but don’t let that fool you into thinking its a simple thing. You will find that your understanding of what joy means will deepen over time, as will your comprehension of how much is possible, how long it can endure, and how intense it can be.

Your understanding of your purpose is a naturally iterative process. With every additional example of the many experiences reserved for those who live intentionally, you will find that every piece of your life plan pulses into greater and greater richness. The meaning your life plan helps you encounter will deepen as you experience more and more of the intensity in life that remains permanently hidden from most people.

The illusion of lack of purpose: the danger of implicit purpose

You may feel like the idea of acting with an overarching purpose is something new or different compared to life as you presently live it, but this is an illusion. Humans are inherently purpose-driven creatures, and when we are unaware of a motivating purpose, the issue isn’t the absence of purpose, but the absence of awareness of it. Think of human purpose like a slot that must be filled at all times. If you don’t fill it intentionally and consciously, it will still be filled—it just won’t be filled with what is best, you won’t use it up to its potential, and it will likely rotate out to something else just as arbitrarily and unnoticed as it came.

When a person does not have a consciously-chosen purpose, they will typically default to baser aims that have some relationship to avoiding pain and maximizing present pleasure. These will always end in lesser long-term consequences than intentionally selecting and pursuing a valuable purpose.

All sentient beings have something more important to them than anything else. It is whatever they are presently doing. Most people never make their priorities explicit, and are constantly and subconsciously jostling what is most important. The problem isn’t that they don’t have something of highest priority—it’s that they choose what is most important by reacting to what is around them rather than proactively selecting it ahead of time.

Unintentionally choosing a purpose will not result in anything near the same success as pursuing one intentionally. One does not tend to land darts as near the bullseye when blindfolded and spinning as they do when aiming, no matter how bad they are at the game.

A person who allows their purpose to be passively-selected will never stay with a purpose long enough to make significant progress in it. They will flitter between multiple, usually-conflicting purposes one after another, leading to even more disastrous results than any single baser purpose might yield alone. The constant change in purpose makes it difficult to identify the patterns that might otherwise help the individual to identify the source of the problems they find themselves constantly plagued with, which stem from the lack of a consistent and worthwhile purpose.

While adopting a purpose seems like a big commitment, realize you are already doing it, just not intentionally or well. The difference in the life plan is intentionally choosing what the most important thing is, and keeping it consistent.

This is precisely the opportunity before you: to make intentional what you have consistently taken for granted your whole life, and in doing so, to unleash the power uniquely available to those who do.

Until now, your attention has fluttered haphazardly from one thing to the next with only the slightest coordination and intention. The best things in life carry the greatest price, and almost none are available to those who incidentally meander through life. From now on, you will know how to organize your attention toward what you want the most, unlocking the attainments that require full and deliberate intention.

Fake freedom from lack of purpose

You may hesitate to adopt a transcendent purpose because you realize that as soon as you do, you will begin feeling guilty any time you deviate from it. The fake freedom that failure to live intentionally offers is not worth its cost. While you will feel guilty in the event you deviate from a purpose you’ve chosen, failing to choose one will absolutely result in worse outcomes still.

Guilt for underperformance is a small price to pay for the vastly improved outcomes that can only come through intentional effort. And remember, you have full control to make any changes to your life plan you feel are necessary. That kind of flexibility is empowering, but it comes at a price.

Eliminating purpose gaps

So often in modern life, people burn precious time and other resources in situations that they know do not directly contribute to what they feel important. Whether you are in a dead-end job, a dead-end relationship, a dead-end hobby, a dead-end church, or anything else, align your whole life to your purpose. Immediately swap out dead ends for something that contributes directly to your purpose, or at least spend that time looking for what does.

Greater joy comes from choosing to be responsible for the benefit of others

Even if a group of people share the adoption of joy as their purpose, there will be tremendous variations between how they define joy. One dimension of this difference is how much they view joy to be a function of what they are able to do for others versus what they do for themselves.

It’s easy to see joy as a uniquely selfish pursuit. Surely, there are ways that joy can be pursued and obtained that place self before others. However, if your motivation is limited to your own progression, you will hit an absolute limit in your improvement, and therefore a limit in your joy.

The fact is that the path of self-improvement for the sake of self quickly hits diminishing returns, where the increased sacrifices necessary to continue improving can’t deliver sufficient benefit to self to make them worthwhile. Since joy comes from improvement, the diminishing returns of improvement for self create an unsurpassable asymptote in your path to greater joy.

The greatest joy is only available in improvement for the sake of others, and the quantities are not even close to comparable. While the joy you can find through improvement for self-benefit is very limited, the joy available to you through improvement for others is unlimited. The cause of other people can absorb any sacrifice you give for it, up to and including all things.

The joy you feel in self-improvement for your own sake is obviously limited to yourself. When you become willing to rejoice in the joy of others, the domain of what you can receive through your sacrifice extends through all people, in a chain as infinite as the relationships between all people, through all time.

How much joy you experience will be determined by how much responsibility you willingly take upon yourself. The more you assume responsibility for the benefit of others, the more reasons you will have to become the best person you can possibly be, the more meaning you will find in your life, and the more joy you will experience as you grow into your full potential.