How to Find Your Life Purpose – Get In Your Lane

Transcription of the above video:

As you may or may not know, I love my diagrams, so when I get an insight about a concept or something, I just really love to make a diagram of it. I’m a very visual guy, and I like to communicate in visual ways. This one is about life purpose and how the whole thing about life purpose works in my opinion or from my perspective or according to this insight that I’ve had.

So get this. Point number 1: finding your life purpose is kind of like swimming, and there are these different lanes. See, I have 6 here. I’ve numbered them just for illustration purposes. So it’s also like swimming in the sense that when you start out, you start out in the shallow part and you go deeper as time goes on.

Paddling in the shallow end is fun but it’s not very satisfying. And similar with life purpose, in life, we tend to engage in sort of shallow things and that’s just a signal that you’re still learning to swim in terms of life purpose.

The deeper you go in terms of the water and the deeper you go in terms of life purpose, so is the depth of what you engage in in life. This’ll make more sense in a second.

This red line, this is kind of a path through life, if you like. So I’ve drawn a bit of a squiggle because that’s typically how we go.

Lane number 6 is actually your life purpose, but I’ll explain that in a second. Now this squiggly line. We all have free will.

We can choose to swim in any lane that we like, and we can choose to swim in that lane for as long as we’d like. It’s our life at the end of the day.

But there is a lane, there is a way of life for each of us individually, that is our life purpose.

This lane here, lane number 6, is a fast lane. It’s like a fast-flowing river. Once you’re in this lane…and this is the correct lane for you, which is the key point. It’s the correct lane for you and this is unique to everyone.

You get swept along by the current, and you move through life with ease.

Now, your emotions are indicators, and these let you know whether you’re in the correct lane or not.

Now, it’s kind of like that hot and cold game? Where if you and I played this game, I’d hide your phone. You’d turn around, close your eyes, I would hide your phone somewhere in the room, and then once I’d hidden it, you’d open your eyes and start searching around.

And the only clues I’m able to give you are ‘warmer, warmer’ or ‘colder, colder’. So as you get closer to the item, I say, “warmer, warmer.”

The further away you get, I say, “Colder, colder, ice cold,” if you are far away from it.

And that’s how the game works, and you continue that process until the person finds it. Similarly with this. So your emotion, positive emotion and negative emotion, are like the hot and cold thing.

So stuff you feel good about leads you closer to this lane, and the further away you get, the colder you get, the worse you feel.

But again, there’s free will. You can do anything you like. Like I said, there is this one lane. Once you find it, you will no.

So joy is the indicator that you found the correct lane for you and that exists here.

So once you’ve stumbled upon the right lane for you, then joy is the emotional indicator that tells you that you found it.

Now, everyone talks about finding your purpose. What is my purpose? How can I find my purpose? If it’s to be found, that means it must already be there, get it?

It must already be there. We don’t choose to put it there. We don’t choose what we feel good about; it just kind of happens.

I can’t decide to love something I don’t love. I’m not a big fan of angling. I can’t imagine anything more boring than that personally.

So I can’t make myself feel good about going out on a fishing trip. It’s never going to happen, right? I didn’t choose that.

What I feel good about is public speaking. I didn’t choose that. I just feel really good when I’m doing it.

Similarly, somebody who absolutely loves angling, they didn’t choose that. One day they went angling and all of a sudden this rush of positive emotion came and they said, “Wow, I really love angling.”

And by the same token, they think about public speaking and they get this dread of emotion. “No, that’s bad,” and that’s the emotional indicator that it’s not for them. So the point there is if it’s to be found, then it must already be there.

We don’t choose our life purpose. It’s there. Same way that we don’t choose to feel bad about something.

So when you’re in any lane besides your life purpose, 1 through 5, doubt is a regular experience. So we are a victim of uncertainty. When you’re in any of these 5 lanes, we wonder, “Is the grass greener on the other side?” “Is the grass greener in another lane?”

And that’s what causes us to venture into one of those other lanes. “Is the grass greener over here? No? Greener over here? Greener over here?” If you’re miles away from your life purpose here, this is where you’d feel the worst. This is why, in this example, I’ve gone rapidly back to lane 6 because you’ve got some past experiences,

“Oh, I felt better here. I almost feel like I found it here, but I tried some other things and thought the grass was greener but it definitely wasn’t greener there,” and you eventually find your way back.

So that’s what usually causes us to venture into the other lanes. We might even swim back into lanes we were previously in. Even though 10, 20 years ago we were in this lane and we said, “Oh, I felt much better living in this place and I feel much worse now so I’m going back so you swim back.”

And there’s this memory of, “Oh, I felt slightly better at this point in my life and I was doing these things. Perhaps if I delved into that a bit more I might actually find a true purpose.”

Now, doubt in all this…the ‘is the grass greener on the other side?’ thing…this doesn’t exist in lane 6. This is your purpose lane, and no doubt exists here.

You don’t feel doubt. There’s a knowing in this lane that eliminates all doubt, and the fact that you experience the heights of positive emotion here that you don’t experience anywhere else is the clear confirmation that lets you know you’re in the right lane.

That therefore eliminates all doubt because you never question if the grass is greener anywhere else because, for you, it can’t be. Based on your experience in all the other lanes and how you felt in those lanes, this one just feels so much better that you don’t doubt it.

So there we go. That’s the insight I had today, and that’s my explanation of it.