I am 34 years old and I spent most of my life aiming toward…”something”. I don’t know what. I worked really hard at it too. Read lots of personal development books. Talked to counsellors, life coaches, etc.
I wrote, and I thought a lot about this stuff but for what???
Nothing! That’s what! Life went nowhere and I mostly hated it and as time went on it got worse, I got really pissed off in the past year or so.
Only in the past few days have I realised the problem. I didn’t know what I was aiming at.
Yes, I learned a lot. An awful lot and I probably have grown more, or at least I understand personal development better than a lot of people I come across, but inside I felt the same.
You see, as a child I felt something wasn’t right. I didn’t agree with the life that was being presented to me, the life that I was being (strongly) encouraged to create/aim for/live. so I set about learning and creating my own life that would suit me. What did i do…
First I gathered as much facts as I could.
…and that’s about it.
Here I am about 25 years later no further on. I still feel the same as I did but I’m no further on really. I look at some of my family and friends who took the accepted/suggested/society recommended path and they’re making money, and living a life and here I am splasing around getting nowhere.
I’ve gotten very frustrated and fed up with this.
…extremely so.
The other night I was in the car with my beautiful beautiful girlfriend discussing this and I was really depressed. The chat made me even more depressed…which was a good thing…because I was starting to feel something.
So that night I sat up in bed and thought about this for ages.
Actually that statement is inaccurate. To say that I thought suggests that I made the action happen, really what I did was sit there and do nothing and allow thoughts to come to me.
I realised I was frustrated because I feel that despite everything I’ve done in life I feel no sense of success.
That begged the question…What is success? or at least what is it for me
All these years what was I aiming for? I had no definite aim so I could never reach it. I could never be successful.
I now knew that I needed an aim in life. A general overall guiding light for my life. Something that would guide all aspects of my life.
I read a few very interesting blogs, and articles about this on www.stevepavlina.com, and found some interesting ideas and thoughts on finding purpose in your life. He has a blog called How to find your life purpose in about 20 minutes which I read and followed the instructions for about 2 days…
I’m close I think.
I can see the light off in the distance.
I don’t have a definite statement of purpose yet but I now have an idea what it is. Now I have something definite to aim for, and it feels good. Really good.
I am going to know my true purpose…my best path for me.
I’m going to work toward that.
By the way I mentioned above how I didn’t feel successful in life.
One of the things I realised was that if you’re successful in life then I expect you’d being enjoying it. So now I’m going to work really hard to enjoy life and to live life as a person who enjoys it.
You might be thinking aren’t they both the same thing…maybe, maybe not. Think about it. I think there’s a very subtle difference
Enjoy!
Tags: depression, enjoy, Growth, joy, learning, Life on Purpose, Personal development
