kaizenA question that I have battled with for a long time really is what is my purpose in life… Not quite knowing the answer ensures that we don’t live the lifes we should really be living.

Certainly it took me a very long time to be clear as to what my purpose was and that has led to my successes getting more frequent and more interesting…

Having said that my not having a clear purpose led to all sorts of interesting experiences from owning a restaurant to making films to living in Peru and developing websites and social media strategy for companies around the world.

Over the past few years though I began to realise that the more doubt and hesitancy I had as to what I wanted to achieve the less effective I would continue to be. So at the beginning of last year I began to really firm up what my purpose should be.

The thing I realised is that whilst it is important to know what your purpose is in life there is no rule to say that your purpose cannot change and grow with you as you change and grow.

This is where I think I was most stuck – but I came up with a purpose and am doing my best now to live to that purpose.

I am however confident that it will grow and evolve as I go through life.  There is a Japanese concept called Kaizen which I think will help with that

Literally Kai – Change;  Zen – for the better…

The idea behind it is you create a standard, follow it and then improve it depending on what you discover by living it.

One of the things I decided to do in 2015 was to start watching Ted videos regularly – I am aiming for one a day… The video below is one that I found yesterday whilst researching for this post and I think you may well find it really useful.

In it Adam Leipzig says establishing your purpose boils down to 5 simple questions.

These are:

What is your name?

What do you love to do? Or in one word what is the one thing you feel supremely qualified to teach other people to do?

Who do you do it for?

What do they want or need?

How do they change as a result of what you give them?

And this gives you a sentence that essentially sums up who you are…

Now as I am writing this blog post as part of something called Writeandrun31 and Janathon below is an example of Adam’s formula related to why I exercise:

IE My name is Justin, I run and train for my family who want to have me around in a healthy way to help them grow…

Or if I am doing it for my web agency I would say:

My name is Justin, we develop websites and strategies for small businesses to help them grow and this enables them to punch above their weight.

Now arguably your life purpose should be about more than work or exercise, indeed I think there are probably five areas that we need to work on to really live a life well lived and these are: health, wealth, family, friends and fulfilment but giving thought to your life’s purpose and working through the exercises in this video will I think help.

Hopefully this gives you some good ideas and if the post doesn’t then this video almost certainly will.

I hope you enjoy it and would love to hear your thoughts in the comments below:

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