Have you found your life’s purpose yet?
Do you enjoy doing it and does it come effortlessly? If it does, then this might just be what you were meant to do. PHOTO | FILE
What you need to know:
- The truth is that it might just be right under your nose, and has been for a long time.
- Do you enjoy doing it and does it come effortlessly? If it does, then this might just be what you were meant to do.
- Your life, like everyone else’s is an individual path. What you need to do is learn how to distinguish between the beaten path and what Karundu likes to call, Your True North.
To make it in life, there is the good old beaten path. Go to a good school, get good grades, get a good job; what some like to call permanent, a pensionable job with a couple of benefits.
This is the path your parents and grandparents may have followed. It is an ideal way of kick-starting life because it gives you direction. But is that all? Is living your life to the fullest just about trudging along the same path your parents went through?
The answer is no! James Karundu, founder of PassionBiz Academy, a business mentorship and coaching organisation, believes it is essential to follow the beaten path up to a certain point.
“You need to figure out what is the right point to detour to your life’s purpose.” He says.
Your life, like everyone else’s is an individual path. What you need to do is learn how to distinguish between the beaten path and what Karundu likes to call, Your True North.
The Truth North is what some may call your life’s purpose. But how do you know you were made for one thing over another? Karundu has a simple formula to help you figure it all out in his classic 5E’s + TLC.
1.Easy:
Does what you do, or like to do, come easily to you? It could be writing, football, even understanding the complexity of soil and its impact on plants. Bill Gates and childhood friend Tim Allen would spend hours coding as teenagers; soon they created computer code for the first personal computer. They founded Microsoft, which is one of the world’s leading technology firms, and which has changed how the world interacts and works.
2.Effortless:
Maybe you never struggle doing whatever it is that you do. It is the kind of thing that could take you 15 minutes to do, when for someone else with lesser skill or knack may take even 10 times the effort and time to get it done.
3.Excites you:
This is your go to, even the sound or the thought of it gives you reason to stay up at night or get up early in the morning. You constantly have new ideas and insights and you keep researching on them.
4.Energises you:
This is the thing that lights the fire in your belly. You can’t live another day without engaging in it, be it developing an application, writing, sport, acting. It is endless research and improvement. If what you enjoy doing was taken away from you today, you would be completely empty. Daymond John, founder of FUBU fashion line and co-host of Shark Tank, an American reality TV show where budding entrepreneurs pitch their business ideas to industry titans, has admitted to his obsession to see people wearing his clothes, even if it was for free.
5.Evidence of impact:
When you are so engaged in the hobby or craft you enjoy, there is an impact. Not just monetarily, but also in your community. It could be teaching part time at a local school, or maybe organising a fundraising concert with your music band for a charity of your choice. It’s simply using your gifting to do more than make money.
6.Talk about it all the time:
You probably annoy people when they see you now. This is all you ever talk about. It could be a new car design, your fascination with new engineering techniques, the phenomenal goal you saw Ronaldo shoot during a UEFA championship match. Listen to yourself more closely in conversation because that is where your life purpose lies.
7.Love it:
If you ramble about it every waking day, you sure do love what you are doing. When you love something, it oozes out of you, not just in speech but also in how you lead your life. Those interested in sport may find themselves adapting to better eating and exercise routines. An engineer may spend more time exploring new innovations; a writer may spend more time writing and sharing insight with other likeminded writers to grow his skill. What you love, you will naturally find yourself inclined to improve.
8.Care deeply about it:
Whatever you love, you will deeply care for. And this may find you drawn to either creating or being involved in a cause. Erin Gruwell, an American teacher and founder of Freedom Writers Foundation, an organisation that uses a unique and transformative teaching curriculum to improve the quality of learning and prospects for children, used her love for teaching and literature and adapted a new model of learning to disenfranchised students, impacting their lives greatly. This lead to some of her students initially unable to read, co-authoring an anthology of their personal memoirs.
