There is so much importance given to finding your purpose, mission, and vision. But why exactly is it essential to find your purpose and have a clear vision? Finding the answers to such questions is a long and arduous process that requires introspection. If the first step in starting a new project is to define a purpose, it is crucial to know the purpose of finding one’s purpose.
If there is one thing that you can be sure of is that things will go wrong. Murphy’s law sums it up perfectly: Anything that can go wrong will go wrong. No matter how good you are, adversity strikes eventually. That’s how things go; you start a project, and it takes a while to find your rhythm, but soon enough, you begin to thrive. Things are looking up when all of a sudden, you hit a wall, and progress stops.
Purpose Helps You Persevere
There are periods when things don’t go your way on a project you started. Seeing how people give up when they see no significant growth is mind-boggling. That’s where purpose comes in to picture. It helps you persevere through the hard days when you most need the motivation not to quit and keep going.
I am in the middle of a critical personal project to lose at least 40 kilos and get in shape. I have started and quit so many times that I have lost count. Whoever said getting started is the most crucial step spoke in haste. I can best describe my experience as one false start after another. Most days, I feel like quitting, but I remind myself of the stakes and why I am doing this in the first place. It can be a struggle because no one else cares about me losing weight, maybe including you.
Every time I feel like cheating on my diet or feel lazy before exercising, I need to remember why this ( to generalize and, for the lack of a better word) sacrifice is necessary. In short, purpose boils down to why you do what you do. It is the answer you give when the voice inside your head inevitably asks, “What is the point of doing this anyway?”
Purpose Gives You Conviction and Focus
Knowing why you started a particular project helps you remain patient and see things long-term and gives you the conviction you need to stay on course. It empowers you to deal with any failures and setbacks that are bound to occur.
You will start seeing rapid growth when you shift your routine and take unprecedented action. When you begin a new project from scratch, you know nothing as a beginner and are motivated to learn. Over time, the motivation starts to fade, and the learning curve becomes steeper until you reach a plateau.
In my case, when I made changes to my diet, I lost a lot of weight rapidly. I was overweight, and the sudden change in my regimen shocked my system. But soon, my body adapted, and the rate I lost weight slowed. I didn’t lose a single gram in weeks and felt like quitting.
You can observe a similar pattern when you are learning a new skill. For example, if you start learning french, you will learn a lot of new words and phrases initially. You will enjoy having conversations with people that you could not do before. But soon, you will reach a plateau where you will feel like you have stopped improving. Most people give up when they hit a plateau and never become fluent. At this time, you need to remind yourself why you started learning in the first place. In my case, I was learning because I needed the language to stay in France.
Purpose Helps You Deal with Failure
The same thing happens in business. If you are an entrepreneur, you will experience periods where your company will stop growing. There will be fewer new clients, and profits will not increase as steadily as you want. You will have to remind yourself and your employees why their work matters. That’s when you need to rely on the purpose and vision of your company.
Having a clear vision of where you want to be in the future helps you overcome the challenges you are currently facing and enables you to make the right decisions. There might be plenty of reasons you are failing, but knowing why you started won’t allow failure to cripple you or make you doubt yourself.
A clear vision and purpose give you the courage to pick yourself up, dust yourself off and find another way to go to your promised land. You might have made a few wrong moves along the way, but you will treat these setbacks as a valuable experience that will serve you well in the future.
Simon Sinek, the author of ‘Start with Why,’ sheds light on the importance of finding one’s purpose or ‘why’ in a popular TED talk. Knowing why you do what you do helps people understand who you are as a person, what your business does, and why you are different from anyone else they will ever meet.
Finding your purpose in a long process is different for everyone and will take too long to discuss here. This piece is the first step, and I want to convince you why you need to think about the purpose behind everything you do in your personal and professional life. The sooner you start thinking about your purpose and having a clear vision, the sooner you find it.