Creating a Life Purpose

by Elisabeth Power

Take a job. Hate the job. Quit the job. Find a new job. Complain about the new job. Find another new job. Like the new job, but make some big mistakes. Get fired. Change paths. Find a new job. Hate the new job. Wonder if there isn't something better.

Most of us are introduced to the world of work by way of an entry-level nightmare filled with mundane and mind-numbing tasks. The dull work required of an entry-level grunt is tedious and hardly comparable to the intensity of school. Eventually, boredom gets the mind wandering back to the days when life was good, when challenges were fun. Longing for a purpose fills meaningless hours at a pointless job.

Purpose

It's an ordinary word packed full of potential energy. To those who have yet to find the right direction, purpose is highly coveted. High-school kids think they'll find their calling in college. College grads (and those who didn't graduate) take boring jobs hoping work will lead to an epiphany. Even some older adults reluctantly admit to settling for a stumbled-upon career path. Some had to take jobs to feed the kids, but some stayed on an unrewarding career path because it was the easiest thing to do.

We all know someone who has known what to do all along. It's that friend of yours, the preschool teacher, who spends her day singing the alphabet and wiping snotty noses. She's fueled by her passion, knowing that every child she teaches could go on to be the next great leader. Yet ask her how she found that purpose, and she's likely to shrug.

The secret to having a purpose-filled life is this: A life purpose isn't found; it's created. There are only a few ground rules.

1. Get to know yourself. Inventory your skills, talents and interests. Tally your successes and learn from your failures—learn from them both.
2. Investigate career paths that combine your strengths and minimize your weaknesses.
3. Figure out what it will take to get you to the life you see for yourself and create a plan that will get you there. Take baby steps, like enrolling in a community college course, or attending a professional organization meeting. So long as you stick to a plan, you are moving in the right direction.
4. Creating a purpose takes time. Start with finding a direction, with a general purpose in mind. Over time, you will refine your purpose and it will take shape over the course of your life.

You alone hold the ability to create your life purpose. And once you take steps toward that purpose, you break the cycle that sociologists call the Ten-Year Drift. With a little research, and a commitment to change, creating a life purpose is both achievable and empowering.

Read the autobiography of someone with a rewarding career, to find evidence that creating a life purpose is worthwhile. Carroll Spinney, better known as Big Bird on Sesame Street, imagined his life as a puppeteer from the time he was a young boy. In his autobiography, The Wisdom of Big Bird, Spinney described creating his plan. Back in the 60s, he puppeteered Bozo the Clown's sidekicks on The Bozo Show. While this was easy and well-paying work, Spinney wanted to be more than a sidekick. He left Bozo because he wanted to teach compassion and kindness through his skills and talents as a puppeteer.

As a result, he stayed with Big Bird and the Muppets despite significant drawbacks, including an uncomfortable costume. Big Bird has become an icon of American childhood, representing compassion, acceptance and kindness. Spinney never planned infamy, but the rest of it is exactly what he crafted.

Most of us have to do without the early direction, internal motivation and good luck that Carroll Spinney benefited from. Instead, we muddle through the transition from school to work over the course of a decade. Decisions are made quickly, at a young age, with little deliberation. A college freshman's decision to major in business rather than botany is based on preference rather than experience. The effects of this decision can, but don't have to last a lifetime.

The outcome of quickly made career decisions partnered with an inadequate self-assessment of useful career skills takes most of us through a pattern of directionless drift. We tolerate a series of unfulfilling jobs because they're obvious. In other words, we settle for the path of least resistance because we don't really know where we would excel.

Start looking for signs of Drift in your community, and you'll see it everywhere. Drifters tend to take food service, retail, and administrative jobs to pay the bills while searching for something better. These are the baristas and administrative assistants with master's degrees. This pattern characterizes the lives of young adults in this country and the effects are staggering: depression, underemployment, loneliness, and anger.

Sometimes, Drifters are dead-set on a career in a field where it is easy to enter and difficult to succeed. Singing, writing, and acting are appealing careers, particularly for those individuals with talent. But because there are many applicants and relatively few openings, these jobs require a finite set of top-notch skills, some degree of talent, and, like Carroll Spinney, being in the right place at the right time. It's no secret that it takes a while to get these gigs—look at all the actors with bartending on their résumé.

So what's a Drifter to do? How can you create the self you want to be?

Prepare

First, prepare for a journey. Create a situation analysis that identifies your previous successes and failures. (You don't want to go down the same path twice, right?) Evaluate and carefully consider your financial situation, and perhaps save enough "transition money" to be able to take a pay cut, or to take a class, if that's what your plan calls for. Without funding, even the best plans can fall short.

Understand

Next, understand who you are. Even if you aren't the journaling type, start writing your own user's manual. Record your interests and strengths, which you can find by:

• Going on a scavenger hunt to collect information from old school projects, report cards and yearbooks. What did you enjoy as you were growing up? What were you good at?
• Talking to your family and lifelong friends. Ask what you liked to do as a child. Listen for big-picture concepts and patterns, such as helping others, solving problems, or being creative.
• Brainstorming a list of tasks at which you succeed, and likewise the ones which you didn't. Look to old performance reviews or, failing that, meet with a former boss or colleague. Explain what you're doing, ask for honesty, and don't get defensive. It's important for you to know what skills you do well and should seek out along with the skills that you just don't have and should try to avoid.
• Thinking about your talents—have you won any awards? Do others admire your ability to speak in front of others, or your ability to retain everything you read? Are you a good writer? Have others considered you to be a good leader?
• Getting lonely. Go on vacation or long walks alone. (But be safe about it.) Think about who you are while having fun. Resist the temptation to call friends, listen to a radio, and so on. Your job here is to get to know yourself, so spend your alone time analyzing successes and failures. Keep track of your ideas in a journal. Keep track of what you like to do while you're by yourself, and see if it offers any clues. For example, do you love organizing things? If so, maybe you have organizational skills that you would enjoy using on the job. Heck, maybe you even want to make a career of it.

Research

Next, research your options. Consider the skills, talents, and interests collected in the previous step. Use the Internet or library to find career paths that align with your skills, talents, and interests. Some careers will be similar to your current work. Others will be completely different. Keep an open mind. You may be surprised to find a passion in a new area, and your previous training might even put you on the right track. Going from a desk job to brain surgery requires extensive retraining, but starting a health-care business might be more within reach.

Plan

Plan your journey. Once you have determined a new career path that aligns with your skills, talents, and interests, come up with a detailed written plan to get yourself onto that path. Your plan might include:

• Volunteering your time. Meet people who already work in your new path by attending professional association meetings. Explore the idea of shadowing someone for a day—see what your future looks like.
• Taking a community-college class to develop a skill required on your new path. Take advanced or challenging classes if possible, to see if you sink or swim. Grades aren't necessarily important.

Also, in your plan, you should determine realistic goals with appropriate timelines. For example, in six months, I will be working part-time doing X. In one year, I will be interviewing for full-time work in the Y field.

Open Yourself to Change and Stay Focused

Once your plan is in place, open yourself up to change and stay focused. Once you fully commit to the change, opportunities will emerge. Tell people you trust about your change and your new goals. When you doubt yourself, think about why you're making the change. Think about the benefits of making the change to reaffirm your goals. Finally, fill in the blanks to help you accept embrace your new path.

• "I learned A by doing B"
• "Without X, I would not value Y"

Evaluate

Finally, when you come upon your goal deadlines, evaluate your choices. Regularly adjust your plan as needed. Consider a ceremony, or rite of passage, once you meet a major goal. Celebrate with friends over dinner at your favorite restaurant and mourn your Drift. Give each of your friends a few words to say about each of your previous directions.

These steps come together to create your purpose:

• Prepare for change
• Understand who you are
• Research your strengths, talents, and interests
• Plan for a journey
• Open yourself to change
• Set the plan in motion
• Evaluate the results

If you follow the PURPOSE plan, you'll start on the journey to a meaningful direction. Through much tweaking and self-observation, over time, you'll create your own life purpose.

Elisabeth Power writes nonfiction, with a particular focus on career development and the phenomenon of Ten-Year Drift. She also teaches writing and career development at DeVry University's Seattle Campus.