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!