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 person1 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.
Footnotes
- 1. David Goggins and Alex Hormozi have both referred to watching, rewatching, and remembering the Rocky training montages for motivation to do uncommonly difficult things. ↩