What is your purpose?
Quit asking that.
I am as guilty as anyone saying it, but you and I both need to stop.
- Maybe you are living your purpose in that job you hate right now.
- Maybe you don’t get to discover your calling until you are 80.
- Maybe your purpose was to have that first child and die tragically less than a year later.
- Maybe your life is nothing more than doing good deeds for the short time you are here.
- Maybe your purpose is struggling with your purpose.
The point is this: Quit looking for something to happen so you can be happy. Just choose to be happy now.
A lot of people say to me, “I’m twenty-five years old and still have no idea what my purpose in life should be.” When Colonel Sanders was twenty-five, he still had yet to be a fireman, a streetcar conductor, a farmer, a steamboat operator, and finally proprietor of a service station, where he sold chicken. The chicken was great and people loved it but he didn’t start making real money until he started franchising at the age of sixty-five. That’s the age he was when he found his “purpose“ in life. I don’t like the word purpose. It implies that somewhere in the future I will find something that will make me happy, and that until then, I will be unhappy. People fool themselves into thinking that the currency of unhappiness will buy them happiness. That we have to “pay our dues,” go on some sort of ride, and then get dropped off at a big location called our “purpose,” where now we can be happy.
–James Altucher, Choose Yourself
