Day 83. Take the road to somewhere

Someone said:

It’s not what you do; it’s how you do it.

It’s not what you see; it’s how you look at it.

It’s not how your life is; it’s how you live it.

I say: Live it with purpose. Live it with direction. Your purpose. Your direction.

The question for YOU is to determine just WHAT YOUR PURPOSE IS and which direction do you want to go to get there.

My direction in career choice has changed radically over the years. I was a journeyman machinist. I become a manufacturing engineering manager selected to be the youngest plant manager in my company’s 100 yr. history. Instead I became a high-tech sales engineer demonstrating CAD/CAM/CIM and grew to be a Regional Technology Manager specializing in manufacturing. That was before I went to the “dark side of sales” as a bag carrying salesman, until I became the VP of Sales for a solid modeling product that couldn’t manufacture squat. I knew lots about CAD/CAM and absolutely nothing about I.T.; that is until I went to work for Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) where my clients were the top I.T. execs at Corporate and the 4 Divisions of Johnson Controls Inc. I was awarded DECathalon (Top 1% of the company, 100K employees) for my work in I.T. information and systems integration two years later. My latest career direction change, that I chose, led me to move away from direct sales and become the Corporate Training Director for Invenio Solutions, doing new hire onboarding and sales training for Microsoft (and 13 other companies) products, services, and technologies.

I have changed direction many times over the years. Always purposefully. And what was my purpose? To help. To help a company prosper. To help a division succeed when no one thought it could. To help a corporation realize that the future was not hardware, but software. To help individuals to understand sales, what it’s all about and how to do it better, how to help others.

That has always been my purpose. To help others achieve their goals. Knowing that by doing so it would help me achieve mine: to be helpful to others, to always achieve success, to find the next challenge. To be the best, broadest generalist I could be and share that with others.

Today's short excerpt from the book 100 ways to Motivate Yourself by Steve Chandler reminds us all of the need to have a purpose in our life and to have a direction. Many are too busy seeking success in terms of money, title or perceived prestige.  What is your purpose? What, when you look back, will you say your life’s work was all about. What direction are you taking to make your purpose a reality? I often interview salespeople who state they have ten years’ experience. I have to determine if they have 10 years’ EXPERIENCE, or if they have had one year of experience 10 times over. What about you? Is your direction a flat line? Or does it take an upward tilt? I make it sound like simple stuff but, consider this: “Making the simple complicated is commonplace; making the complicated simple, awesomely simple, that’s creativity.” — Charles Mingus

Steve’s book makes motivating oneself seem simple. Today I challenge you to look at your life and write down your purpose. It’s not as easy as you may think. Write it down. Then walk away. Then look at it again and ask yourself, is this really MY purpose?  Next, write down the direction you’re going that will make your purpose a reality. Write it down. Walk away. Come back and review. This exercise is only as valuable as you make it. It requires two difficult things of us all: introspection and honesty. We are all on the road of life, make sure you’re headed somewhere specific.

I hope you enjoy each shared chapter at the start of your day –

Matt

83. Take the road to somewhere

Energy comes from purpose. If the left side of your brain tells the right side of your brain that there’s a sufficient crisis, the right side sends you energy, sometimes superhuman energy. That’s why there’s such a difference between people who set and achieve goals all day, and people who just do whatever comes up, or whatever they feel like doing. To one person, there is always added purpose. To the other, there is boredom and confusion, the two greatest robbers of energy. Knowing what you’re up to, and why you’re up to it, gives you the energy to self-motivate. Not knowing your purpose drains you of all motivation.

We’ve all heard the stories of a diminutive mother who, seeing that her small child was trapped, lifted a tremendously heavy object, such as a car, so the child could be freed. When asked to repeat the superhuman feat later, of course the woman couldn’t do it. Being a single father has put me in touch with the dramatic connection between purpose and energy. If I am cooking something, for example, and out of the corner of my eye I can see flames emerging from the kitchen, it is amazing how fast I can move from the living room into the kitchen. Cri-sis creates instant purpose, which creates instant energy. When our purpose is great, so is our strength and energy.

“But, I don’t know what my purpose is,” a lot of people tell me, as if someone forgot to tell them what it is. Those people may wait forever to be told how to live and what to live for.

There can only be two reasons why you don’t know your purpose: 1) you don’t talk to yourself; and 2) you don’t know where purpose comes from. You think purpose comes from out-side yourself instead of from within. Purposeful people know how to go deep into their own spirit and talk to themselves about why they exist, and what they want to do with the gift of life.

“Only human beings have come to a point where they no longer know why they exist,” said the Lakota shaman Lame Deer. “They don’t use their brains and they have forgotten the secret knowledge of their bodies, their senses, or their dreams.”

Lame Deer is not optimistic about what the future holds for people who live without purpose. “They don’t use the knowl-edge the spirit has put into every one of them,” he says. “They are not even aware of this, and so they stumble along blindly on the road to nowhere—a paved highway that they themselves bulldoze and make smooth so that they can get faster to the big empty hole that they’ll find at the end, waiting to swallow them up. It’s a quick, comfortable superhighway, but I know where it leads. I’ve seen it. I’ve been there in my vision and it makes me shudder to think about it.”

Purpose can be built, strengthened, and made more inspir-ing every day. We are totally responsible for our own sense of purpose. We can go inside our own spirit and create it, or not. The energy of our lives is wholly dependent on how much pur-pose we’re willing to create.