Feeling your Life's Purpose …
Feeling your Life’s Purpose …
We’re making a big ‘to do’ about your Life’s Purpose … yet this is a Personal Finance forum not some sort of wacky ‘self help’ love-fest. So why?
Well, it’s for a very financial reason … it tells us the scale of our ultimate financial journey … it tells us how high a [financial] peak we must climb – and, how soon we must reach the top.
Despite the highlights, the key word is actually ‘must‘ … if we don’t have a very powerful reason that resonates deeply and emotionally withing us, it’s unlikely to happen.
Don’t believe Sir Edmund Hillary when he said that he climbed Mount Everest simply “because it was there” … he was clearly understating what must have been a deep, deep need that meant that he simply must climb the tallest peak on earth.
Of course, your Life’s Purpose only needs to resonate with one person: you. However, it’s my job – our job – to help you put it into perspective and make sure that you are selecting the right mountain to climb …
… select one too high, but fail, where does that leave you? Select one too small and you remain unfulfilled.
So Scott should not at all feel badly in any way when I read his post (and the ensuing comments) and say:
Honestly, I don’t ‘feel’ it, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t there. From reading what you’ve said here, particularly in response to Josh’s questions
I’m just using Scott’s post to make my point … so, when I reread that post and comments, I think I’m seeing the following two parts:
1. You (Scott) seem to see yourself helping people through your profession, but feel time constrained in doing so.
Simple solution: remove the time barriers – there are a number of ways to ‘up’ the % of time that you can do this that don’t require a lot of money e.g. work for somebody else and let them handle the sh*t 
Of course a more ‘expensive’ way to achieve the same (better?) result is to free up your time by replacing your ACTIVE income with a similar amount of PASSIVE income.
Thus being effectively ‘retired young’ would give you the TIME to not care how much you earned while doing this work; I can even see how it would allow you to volunteer to medically help those locally or abroad who can’t afford to pay, if that’s what you wanted to do.
But, TIME doesn’t necessarily require many millions (just a few!) i.e. at a MINIMUM it would simply require some % of your current salary (depending on what % of your lifestyle – if any – you would be willing to trade for that ‘freedom’) x 20 (to 40) = Your Number.
2. However, the thing that I’m reading is bumping your Number is up seems to have nothing to do with your Life’s Purpose (i.e. ‘helping people’), and more to do with ‘lifestyle’ … which is OK – lots of people get rich ‘just because’.
BUT, in my experience, just wanting the good things in life doesn’t carry the emotional sway to push you through the barriers that will inevitably get in your way.
In other words, unless I’m missing something KEY, it is your Time / Helping others requirement that seems to hold the ‘emotional power’?
Here’s a way to test how you feel: if you had the FREEDOM to help others (i.e. you bought the required amount of TIME through passive income) but didn’t have the LIFESTYLE to look like Elvis Teresa while you were doing it, how would you feel?
Whether this helps, or am I just missing a big piece of your puzzle, this is the type of thinking and self-analysis that I want you all to do …
… the aim is to come up with the SMALLEST Number and the LONGEST Date that does the job. Why? It should be pretty obvious by now … if not, it will be very soon
Thanks for being so candid, Scott (and, thanks for being so probing, Josh).
@ Adrian – I think I’m having difficulty in figuring out how one can put money requirements into a purpose statement then. To be honest, everything I ever learned from big success and motivation gurus is that the term ‘purpose’ is something you dedicate your life to that is ‘bigger’ than yourself, ie;, not tied to money and not something you want to use to purchase ferrari’s and 2 million dollar homes and world travel. It’s something outside of yourself that you want to do to make a difference for others with your life. This is simply what i’ve learned about purpose long before I began any work with the 7 millionaires in training. We use the term ‘purpose’ daily in my office and in meetings to remind each other to do everything we can to help as many people as possible. Been using that term for a long time. But with these exercises, this is the first time i’ve seen someone attempt to match a purpose with a yearly living expense requirement(a great idea!)
As I said in my previous post, I don’t think anyone is gonna ‘feel’ it with someone else’s purpose statement(some people’s statement is just extremely vague and I think others are reluctant to comment on it), because so far, I can see no one’s purpose statement equaling millions of dollars. Seriously, think about it. As I’ve seen other’s statements, my mind immediately did what I guess you and Josh did with my statement, which is not see where fulfilling the statement requires millions, and my brain picked out a million and one ways that people are doing that right now while broke(the reason why I didn’t say anything or analyze their statement to them is that I figured that meant $ to them somehow).
Ultimately, it’s the desired lifestyle that people want to improve/increase. If not, multimillionaires such as yourself wouldn’t even own multimillion dollar homes, european sports cars, travel the globe in first class and afford their children private schools after they made their fortunes- they earned those bucks to make THOSE things happen increase their ‘perceived security’ while making sure they don’t have to work and can do so only if they choose. Do you see where i’m coming from?