If you want to be successful and produce extraordinary results in life, you must live your life with passion and purpose. However, passion and purpose are two overrated principles most people buy into.
While it is true that passion and purpose are important in our life, they are not the Holy Grail to success. They are just part of the equation. You need more than just passion and purpose if you want to achieve outstanding results in your life.
However, that does not mean passion and purpose are not vital. Most of the time, it is our passion that drives us into taking action and doing our best. And it is our purpose that makes us feel like life is worth living and that we are going in the right direction.
In this article, you will discover the secrets of how to live life with passion and purpose that most people longed for.
Most people have no idea what their passion and purpose are. They have no idea what they love doing and they do not know what they wanted to achieve in their lives.
Ever wonder why most people are not living extraordinary life right now?
If you have no idea what you want out of your life, you will never accomplish it. And if you don’t know what you are passionate about, you will live a boring life and you will never perform at your best.
Here are 3 ways how you can discover your passion and purpose:
First, I call this the ‘shotgun method’. This method is best when you have no idea about what you want to do or where your passion is in life.
And just like a shotgun, you shoot with scatter bullets. You widen your perspective and you try out everything. Since you have no idea what you love doing or what you want to accomplish in life, you might just try everything and see what comes up.
How can you tell if something tastes good? The answer is simple, you eat it and you taste it. The same concept applies here.
When you have no idea where your passion is, try out everything and see what sticks.
When I first started this blog, I’m testing to see if blogging is my passion. I blog almost every day. And after a few months down the road, I still feel passionate about it. Hence, the more I blog, the more passionate I feel.
So you can apply the same principle to find out what you’re passionate about.
You can always start small. Like me, you can start a blog and talk about it.
Or you can record a video and put it up on YouTube. Create a Facebook fan page. And you can also get involved with other related activities. Attend a seminar and see if you like the idea of standing on stage and giving a speech to share your thoughts.
By the way, if you would like to start a YouTube channel, make sure to use Youtube Video Maker to help you with your video content. These days, there are a lot of software and tools available to help you create videos online and make your YouTube journey a bliss.
There are hundreds of ways you can try out things.
The key is to keep moving forward. Take some form of action and keep firing your shotgun. You want to keep throwing mud at the wall and see what sticks.
So keep shooting and keep moving forward until you know what is right for you.
The second method to discover your passion and purpose is through asking self-discovery questions.
Questions are powerful because they make us think. Of course, not all questions have the same power.
If you want to get the right answer, you must ask the right question.
And don’t just answer the questions inside your head. Don’t just think about the answers, you have to ink them. You want to write them down.
This is why you need to get yourself a success journal.
When you write down your thoughts, you can return to them in the future. When you put down your thoughts into words, you make them tangible and you can see them more clearly from a bigger picture.
You are simply telling yourself that what you do is important and that is why you are writing them down. You will be more committed when you put your thoughts into words.
So are you ready to do some writing? Get your success journal ready and answer these 10 questions below. Remember, write down the answers.
The above 5 questions are meant to spark your thoughts and help you discover your purpose in life.
If you want more, you can go through this article here and do the 30 self-discovery questions.
The following 5 questions will be directed to discover your passion in life.
Up to this point, you should at least have some ideas about what you are passionate about. If you don’t, go through this article and go for more.
Some of these questions are powerful and can be very thought-provoking. All you need is to treat this exercise as seriously as possible.
If you truly want to discover your passion and purpose in life, do this exercise. Don’t just read through the text. If you just do the reading, nothing is going to change. Write down the answer and see if it opens your mind.
This is one of the most powerful techniques to discover your real WHY and your purpose for what you want to do.
This technique is simple to do but to get the best result, do it with someone else. You can do this with your spouse, your colleague, your partner, or friends, or for the best result, do it with your mentor.
When you do this exercise with someone you respect, the result comes faster and you will discover your real deep purpose in why you want to achieve what you want in life.
All you need to do is to get someone to ask you the “why” questions 7 times.
For example, if you want to be financially free, get your partner to ask you why. “Why do you want to be financially free?”
Then you will get to answer, say, “I want to be financially free so that I will never have to worry about money and I can drive a better car.”
And then your partner will ask the why question again, “Why is it important that you want to drive a better car?”
The exercise goes down to 7 levels deep. Your partner has to ask you the why question 7 times.
And trust me, in the beginning, it will be easy. Your answer will be logical and it comes from your head. As you go deeper, you will start to feel it from within and answer from your heart.
You will feel emotional, and most of the time, the deeper it goes, the harder it is for your words to come out of your mouth. The reason is that you will speak from your heart, not from your head.
I have done this exercise before and I considered it one of the most profound techniques to discover your ultimate purpose behind what you want.
Of course, you and your partner who does this exercise must be committed and treat this as seriously as possible.
Now you have learned the 3 techniques on how to discover your passion and purpose in life, let’s talk about living them.
Living life with passion and purpose can be difficult. Passion is like fuel to power your car. Your passion is the energy that powers your dreams. And when you are living a passionate life, you are living a purposeful life.
The problem is that we are too busy with our everyday work and we tend to forget about our dreams, passion, and purpose in life.
Furthermore, most people listen too much to what others have told them. They follow the crowd and do whatever everybody is doing. And they wonder why life is boring because they are not living life on their own terms.
Here are 7 tips on how to live life with passion and purpose:
Are you living a meaningful life? Is your life all about checking updates on social media? Is your life all about work and chasing to pay bills? Is your life boring and directionless?
People don’t feel purposeful and they are not living with passion when they don’t the life that they desire. Hence, you must create meaning in your life.
You have to define your ideal life, live it, and make it meaningful.
If something is not meaningful to you or if it is not important to you, you will never bother about it. Think about it, if a bicycle is not important to you, do you think you will own one or take care of it if you have one?
Not likely. The same goes for money, lovers, friendships, and everything in your life. When something is not important (not meaningful) to you, you will never bother about it.
People who say that money is not important, usually don’t have much of it. People who say that life is meaningless, usually live a boring and directionless life.
So, make your life meaningful. How? Use the self-discovery questions above to discover your ideal life and how you want to live it.
When your life is meaningful, you will tend to be more purposeful and go through your days with a passion.
Read: How Do You Define Success and The Real Meaning Behind (Must Read)
You should stop comparing yourself to others. How others live their life has nothing to do with you. Most people try to compare themselves with their colleagues and friends. They want to know who is doing much better, who is earning more, and who is driving a better car.
Don’t! Stop comparing yourself with others. You can be poor and at the bottom of your career right now. However, that does not mean that you will be at the bottom forever.
Jack Ma, one of China’s richest men and the founder of Alibaba, once applied for a job at KFC and got rejected. If he was to compare himself with others, he would feel like a big failure. Luckily he didn’t. He chose to focus on what was possible and move on with his life.
You should do the same. Don’t compare yourself to other people. It will only make you feel miserable if you are not ‘there’ yet.
Plus, there’s nothing much to compare about, really. Someone who drives a better car does not mean that he is doing much better than you. It’s just a plain comparison and a material possession, nothing much.
Choose to believe in yourself. Where you are right now is just where it is right now. Things will change and you will change. You will never be where you are right now forever. You will move up the ladder and accomplish a better result.
It is just not your time yet. So stop comparing yourself with others, and move on with your own life.
Read: How to Believe in Yourself to Achieve Your Goals and Dreams
There are plenty of benefits you can get from journaling. Not only that it can boost your creativity, but journaling also helps strengthen your self-discipline and able to evoke mindfulness.
Research has shown that people who experience a state of mindfulness tend to be more present in the moment and they have a better edge at actively directing their thoughts.
In other words, journaling helps to connect you and your deeper self. Take it as a practice that is able to remind yourself about what you want and how you did in life.
Again, if you need to get yourself a good journal, get this success journal from BestSelf…
If you want to make your life purposeful, try meditation. And like journaling, meditation brings a lot of great benefits to your life.
Albert Einstein once said that “Imagination is more important than knowledge”, and he is absolutely right.
When you meditate, you are practicing how to actively direct your thoughts. You are cultivating the power of visualization.
You can visualize how you want your life to be like and what you want to accomplish in the future. And because our minds cannot differentiate the real from the fake, you will feel the energy flowing in you and act as if what you see in your head is real.
Thoughts are things. Whatever you want to achieve, you must first see it in your mind’s eye and then manifest it in the real world.
And meditation helps a lot in achieving this.
Live in the present. Your thoughts are not you. So, stop worrying too much about your future or being concerned too much about your past. What matters most right now, is this present moment.
If you watch the movie, Kung Fu Panda, there is a quote I like a lot.
“Yesterday is history, tomorrow is a mystery, and today is a gift… that’s why they call it the present.”
You can check through all the best Kung Fu Panda quotes from my previous article.
Most people are too concerned with what has happened and what will be happening. That is why they are not living in the present.
They worry about their unpaid bills. They worry if the traffic is jammed. They worry about what if they can’t make it. And more.
When you have too much of worries in you, you will never live with passion and purpose.
Please understand that you cannot control everything in life. The only thing that you can control is yourself – your thoughts. So do just that.
I strongly suggest you read this article from Psychology Today about living in the present to learn more on this subject.
One of the best ways to live a purposeful life is to work on your goals. Studies have shown that people feel the most satisfied and fulfilled when they are working toward a worthy ideal.
If you want to feel happy and satisfied, do something that will move you forward. This is especially true if the goal you are chasing is aligned with your purpose.
Try to go through a weekend without any purpose or anything to do. You will quickly feel bored, mundane, and directionless.
On the other hand, if you go through your weekend knowing what you should do, and what you want to accomplish and you actually act on it, you will feel purposeful and accomplished.
We often cannot separate living a purposeful life from the things that we want in life. When we are working toward our dreams, we are fulfilling our purpose.
This is why taking action and acting on our goals is important.
In fact, most people don’t feel purposeful because they are not doing anything about the things that they want in life.
Just work on your goals and by the end of the day, you will feel your life is worthy of living.
Read: How to Set Goals and Achieve Them
Another key to living a purposeful and passionate life is through contribution. It is almost the same as working toward your goals, you will feel accomplished and fulfilled.
It does not matter how much you contribute as long as you do it. You can donate if you have extra money. Or you can volunteer if you have additional time.
What if you don’t have the time and money to do all these? Simple, just be kind and helpful.
Help someone whose hands are full to open the door. Hold the lift for strangers. Smile and greet people you don’t know. Always be helpful and make people’s lives better.
When you do this random act of kindness, it makes you feel good too.
It makes you feel that your life is worth living and you are living on purpose and with passion. People who live life without passion will never act this way.
Trust me, helping other people who are in need is one of the greatest accomplishments in life. Thus, help more and give more.
You don’t have to put your life to the test to live it with purpose and passion. Follow the suggestions and tips given above to find out more.
Living your life with a clear purpose and passion is what everyone wants. However, this is not a one-time process. Your purpose and passion may change. So keep finding and don’t settle.
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And you can also get involveD with related activities.
Typo in CAPS. You're welcome. I didn't read the whole article. But it was interesting up to that point. Thank you.