Purpose is the thing that keeps us together.
Without a proper purpose, we’re very valuable to getting depressed, going crazy, or don’t feel good anymore.
When you’re feeling low in energy, or don’t have any life goals or further ambition, you lack a purpose — you don’t set long-term goals either.
In this article, I’ll share 4 techniques that help you set your goals and decide your path, leading to you finding your purpose.
Decide Your Starting Point & Final Destination
Most people don’t ever think about their purpose and setting goals.
That’s what’s withholding them from achieving great things and feeling fulfilled. Setting goals is a habitual process that you need to keep doing every day.
You don’t set goals once and that’s it. You have to evaluate them on a daily, weekly, monthly, annual, and multi-annual basis.
Here’s what you should do:
- Determine your starting position: evaluate your current position, this is objective and you can check with your peers.
- Decide your endpoint: this is more difficult. You have to be ambitious to come up with a good plan.
But remember this: you don’t have to achieve your endpoint straight away — failure is okay.
For example:
“I want to be financially independent and have enough monthly income to travel the world whenever I want.”
That’s a tough goal — but we can work towards that.
Setting The Inbetween-Goals To Reach Your Endpoint
When you’ve set your endpoint you’re not done.
The hard work is yet to come. You need to find a way — a path, to achieve that certain endpoint.
How to do that?
- Create goals that are manageable. You shouldn’t overdo it.
- Make them time-bound and set deadlines — punish yourself if you don’t make it on time.
- Evaluate yourself and how you think you’ve performed a certain task.
- Repeat for each task you need to accomplish your end goal.
Now, an example.
In our case, smaller goals could be:
- Publishing a newsletter every week.
- Publishing on Twitter every day.
- Publishing on Medium every day.
- Read every day.
- Listen to a podcast every day.
- …
You can add some of your own ideas to that list, but the most important part is that you can check on yourself whether you’re on the right path or not.
If you figure that writing every single day isn’t for you, it’s possible that you might have to change your endpoint.
Don’t make radical changes to your endpoint though — you have to try first.
Write Your Goals Down — This Makes ThemMore Confrontational
We need to be confronted with the things we haven’t done yet.
At the same moment, we also love to get rewarded for the things that we have done — that’s why should write our goals down, with trackers.
But you need to break them down.
Don’t set yourself these huge goals that aren’t achievable at all within a short time span.
Besides that, it’s more motivating to achieve smaller goals because you’ll get more of them — try this once and you’ll never go back. I’d do it like this:
- [Goal A to complete in 4 hours]
Split that up into several goals:
- [A1: complete in 1 hour]
- Short break (5 minutes)
- [A2: complete in 1 hour]
- Short break (5 minutes)
- [A3: complete in 1 hour]
- Short break (5 minutes)
- [A4: complete in 1 hour]
You can do this forever.
Do you see the 5-minute breaks? Let’s talk more about that.
The 30/5 — Method for Taking Breaks
You’re wasting energy.
Most people don’t know how to take proper breaks without exhausting themselves.
It’s understandable.
Most people are working for like 2 hours and then want to take a good break of 30 minutes — that ratio is too high.
That will not work.
After 30 minutes of break, you want to stay in the flow and don’t get back to work which makes you less productive.
Instead, take shorter breaks of 5 minutes per 30 minutes of work that you have completed.
If you have an electronic device like a laptop or a phone, you know that 24 hours of usage doesn’t require 24 hours of charging. Only a fraction of that time is needed to fully recharge your device — the same works for you.
Take that in mind when you’re studying, working, or doing anything that costs energy.