How often do you or someone else say, “I need purpose in my life”? Or maybe you ask yourself at night, “Why do I even bother doing this pointless job that has no real impact on the world?”
Going through periods such as those can be daunting and demotivating. The reason is that we humans tend to imagine grandiose feats as worth celebrating and minimising the impact of small contributions.
This is best illustrated by the story of the old man saving starfish:
“A young man is walking along the ocean and sees a beach on which thousands and thousands of starfish have washed ashore.
Further along, he sees an old man, walking slowly and stooping often, picking up one starfish after another and tossing each one gently into the ocean. “Why are you throwing starfish into the ocean?” he asks.
“Because the sun is up and the tide is going out, and if I don’t throw them further in, they will die.”
“But, old man, don’t you realize there are miles and miles of beach and starfish all along it! You can’t possibly save them all, you can’t even save one-tenth of them. In fact, even if you work all day, your efforts won’t make any difference at all.”
The old man listened calmly and then bent down to pick up another starfish and threw it into the sea.
“It made a difference to that one.”
Our ultimate purpose is to get into a position to help others
A common thing I read online is – I wish I was rich / in a better place to help those in need. It’s a fallacy – you always feel like you can have more before you can start helping out. Those that help out more when they become richer were usually already helping when they weren’t.
The point is this, instead of focusing on changing the world. Focus on helping one person, one animal. That is enough to have a purpose in life. The easy way to do that is to become highly proficient in something. This either gives you sought-after knowledge which can be gifted or will earn you enough money to put you in a position to help others via monetary support.
Do not confuse fame, respect, and power to purpose
When we start dreaming of the glorious purpose and helping many people, we truly crave the respect it will give us. Everybody loves a hero. But thinking about these actions if you are not already in a position (financially or by other means) to help the world is just procrastination disguised as philanthropy.
The tough pill is that unless you are in the top % at something or have considerable financial means, you will probably not change the world, and there is nothing terrible about that. It’s sometimes more rewarding to help a few people because the help will be personal.
It’s also true that most people don’t need advice. There is abundant excellent advice for free on the internet, and 99% of the world is not taking advantage of it.
If you genuinely want to change the world, then you must sacrifice your time and pleasure
Unless you inherited lots of money, the only way to change the world is by working your ass off to either become extremely rich and influence decisions with money or to become extremely good at something to be in the top few people in that field, so that your opinion is respected enough and can influence others.
Both things require an incredible amount of time, effort, and luck. And if you want to get there, you will need to use the advice on taking action to the extreme while being highly focussed. Most people don’t want this.
For the rest of us, become good enough to help a few people. That’s all you need to fulfill your purpose. You don’t need to be written down in the history books to have had a good, honest life.
