What is your purpose?

What is my purpose? What am I here to do? I think most of us have have asked ourselves (or God) these questions at one time or another. I admittedly envy the people who have a great answer for this question...

Your Calling

One of the ideas that was rediscovered during the Reformation was the idea of "vocation" or "calling." You see - only those in the Roman Catholic Church had a calling - priests, monks, nuns, etc. were called by God, and everyone else was not.

But in truth we are each called (by God) to do the best we can in the various roles we have in life. Are you a father, mother, husband, wife, sister, brother, son, daughter, homemaker, employee, etc?

Each of these is a calling - something that we are called to do to the best of our ability.

How different would the world be if each of us tried to be the best husband, father, or employee we could be?

Would jobs be better if owners and bosses tried to be the best owner or boss they could? What if all employees were the best employees they could be?

Most people dislike their jobs or at least have many things they would rather be doing. It shouldn't be this way. That job is one of your callings - one of your vocations. You should do it to the best of your ability (even if you aspire to other things).

If you are the best employee you can be in your current role, do you think that improves your chaces of getting a better job down the road? I do. Even if your goal is (as mine was) to get away from being an employee, that's no excuse for being the best employee you can as long as you are in that vocation.

Confessions of a Dishonest Employee

OK - confession time for me:

I was not a perfect employee. Office supplies ended up at my house. I spent time on the clock taking care of personal business.

Of course, nearly everyone does this, so it's OK, right? Wrong? Stealing is stealing. Period. It took me being able to look at this situation from the outside to figure this out.

If your wife called and said your daughter needed a red pencil for a homework assignment - could you bring one from the office, what do you do?

Now imagine that the office supplies are sold in a store at your office - the pencil is $0.10 and the petty cash box is open with noone around. Would you take a dime and use it to buy a red pencil?

The situations are effectively the same, but most people answer those two questions differently (I know I used to).

I was looking at accepting a job offer recently, and I realized a lot of the things I had done wrong in my last job, and I was thinking about how to avoid them in my new job. Would I have been perfect? No. But I like to think that I would have been a lot better and thought about my actions more thoroughly.

Vocation and Family

I really think we have lost the idea of vocation in the family.

Never before have men been so quick to abandon their roles as husband and father.

Never before have women been so quick to abandon their callings as wife and mother.

We have not taken our family vocations seriously, and this cannot help but spread outside the home as well.

To overgeneralize:

• Kids have a lot less respect for their parents than they used to.
• Husbands and wives have a lot less repect for their roles (and marriage in general) than they used to.
• CEOs have less repect for their employees than they used to.
• Employees have less respect for their bosses than they used to.

I fear that "pride in your work" and "doing your best" has been replaced with "what's in it for me" and "it's my right".

Instead of maximizing what we get, we should be maximizing what we give. The rewards follow (or maybe they don't - but that doesn't mean we shouldn't do it).

Most things I have done in my life were done selfishly. I need to start doing more for others - taking others into account in my decisions.

And not pretending like I am doing things for others by stealing a red pencil for my daughter either...

So, What's Your Point?

That's a great question - I guess I want each of us to take more pride in our various roles in life. I know I need to do this - especially in my role as husband and son (no kids yet).

And I'm not sure everyone thinks about this. I didn't think about it much until recently, and I don't think many of us do.

These little (or big) actions slide under the radar of our conscience:

• Got too much change back at Albertson's and didn't say anything? Congratulations you stole from Albertson's. (Though if you are like me you are quick to go to customer service if you are shorted change!)
• Put 5-1/2 gallons in your "5-gallon" water refill? Congratulations - you stole water from Wal-mart. (Ask me how I know about this one - just figured that out a few weeks ago!)
• Live with your giflfriend before marriage? "Everyone does it." Increasingly true but still adultery.
• Gossip about someone at work? Congratulations - you just broke the 8th Commandment (the one we never talk about).

We need to take our actions seriously. Everyone else (including God) does.

Your True Purpose

Your purpose is to perform your best in the roles you are already in.

Even if you are meant to do bigger and better things down the road, that does not excuse you from doing the best you can now.

I think we all know people that never became great in the eyes of the world but had a profound impact on many people simply by being the best mother, teacher, grandmother, or friend that they could. Always ready with a smile and a helping hand...

If each of us could be like that in each of our callings, I like to think that the world would be a much better place.

Focus

Wow - I can't believe it has been over a month since I posted. My apologies to everyone.

This post is about a topic I have sort of known the importance of for a long time, but I am just recently realizing how important FOCUS is to achieving success (and in a timely fashion).

Successful People

Successful people have focus. They have a drive that keeps them focused on a specific business or dream, and many of them keep pushing that business long after they are successful.

Look at people like Michael Dell and Warren Buffett. I often wondered why you would not "cash out" once you were already a billionaire - why keep working when you have that much money? Because they are focused - the have drive and passion for the business and it is not just about money.

Buffett turned over about $30 billion to the Gates Foundation to distribute because he wanted to stay focused on running Berkshire Hathaway. That's what I call focus - turning over almost all of your wealth to someone else for charitable distribution while you continue to do what made you the money in the first place.

How to Use Focus in Your Life

I don't know where you are in your life, but focus is extremely important. As I began to undertake ventures outside of my regular job, I began focused, but then saw more and more opportunities and therefore lost focus.

In retrospect, I know exactly what I should have done: put all of my energy outside my job into only ONE venture - both physical energy as well as the focused thought to really make my physical energy produce great results.

Put energy into one venture until it is self-sustaining then decide whether to continue to focus on its growth or make it a passive business (or sell it off). Then you can start a new venture once you have been successful with one.

People with several successful businesses did not grow them all at the same time. They focused on one at a time, then moved on to the next.

How Focus Helps

I have only recently begun to realize the power of focus - ironically it is at a time when I am not focused on anything.

From simple-ology (see a future post - I promise less than a month :) ) we know that the quickest way to get what you want is a straight line (i.e. go straight to your goal).

If you have multiple goals at once, you cannot go in a straight line to all of them at the same time, so you end up wandering around, hopefully eventually hitting one or more of your goals.

But if you have multiple goals at once, in addition to all of the basic things of life that have to get done, your "to do list" can quickly become overwhelming. Your brain gets overwhelmed and either gives up or makes you extremely stressed out, both of which provide serious barriers to progress.

Enter FOCUS: by focusing on one goal at a time, you put all of your energy into one activity. Not only does your brain like focused activity much better, but you also feel much more rewarded as you are always making progress towards an identified goal.

My Focus

So right now I am focused on figuring out God's purpose for my life to ensure that my focus is consistent with His purpose.

See I believe that God has given us certain abilities and passions in order to accomplish certain things in this world. Each of us has different gifts, and I believe that we were meant to use those gifts for His purposes and enjoy our "work" using those gifts.

I do not believe that we were meant to do work we don't like or be content with dead-end jobs. We are to use our gifts to accomplish things we are passionate about. "Work" is intended to be satifsfying, not meaningless.

I know that I have been blessed with some wonderful innate abilities (as have you), and I want to maximize my use of those to God's purpose in the world.

P.S. I will let you know when I have it all figured out :)

A Beginning

Well, this is my first post on my first blog. Somehow I thought it would be more exciting than this...

This site is dedicated to documenting my quest for financial freedom. I am 30 right now, and my promise ("promise" is more committal than a "goal") is to have enough passive income by the time I am 35 that my wife and I never have to work again.

My purpose for this blog is to share my journey and especially some of the passive income opportunities I run across - many people don't even know such opportunities exist.

My eventual goal is to start a newsletter and forum to develop a community of like-minded people to share their ideas and success stories.

To the future!