Why Purpose Driven Life Is The Most Important Path

In today's letter we talk about the importance of living on purpose, deconstructing Blank Street Coffee, health and how to let go.

Last week I was drinking an oat latte in a coffee shop in Vilnius, Lithuania, and I saw a beautiful hourglass behind me on a shelf. It was after my speech about brand purpose and storytelling at the Digital Marketing Europe conference. I was writing and reflecting on my speech and what I learned from other speakers and people at the conference.

After I came back home to London from the conference I got very sick for a few days. I got a stomach bug. I think it was the stress and all the traveling in the past four weeks. This led me to take some days off...

I used to love to explore London and wander around the city and in particular end up in Waterstones or Foyles. This is a habit that I stopped, due to work, training and commitments in the past year.

When I was reflecting in that coffee shop I realized that my speech wasn’t as good as it should have been - I could have done much better. It was an okay speech but it wasn’t extraordinary. I had to practice more. I had to invest more time in that speech. I didn’t.

I knew that because whenever I do a client's workshop I invest a lot of time in preparing the workshop, writing, researching and analyzing.

I didn’t, because I have so much on my plate and I keep saying YES to side projects when I should be saying NO more often.

I thought of a book I heard about years ago called The One Thing by Gary Keller with Jay Papasan. I never read it - for obvious reasons. So when I went wandering on Saturday to Waterstones in Piccadilly Circus I looked for the book and found it. But I didn’t buy it, I left it because I thought I’ll buy it later… Just seconds before I was going to leave the store I rushed back to the shelf and bought the book.

By Tuesday afternoon I had read the whole book. Last night I was going through all my notes and highlights in the book.

This same weekend I gave half of my clothes to charity, threw away a lot of stuff from my place, cleaned my phone, deleted the majority of files, deep cleaned my place and turned it upside down to make sure I don’t have stuff that I don’t need.

What’s more important is that I made a very important decision: I gave up 90% of the projects and stuff I was doing on the side. I made a decision and plan to focus only on ONE thing that truly matters to me.

I have to say that it felt scary at first, because I had made a huge financial investment in one of the things I was doing on the side, and it meant that I would ‘lose’ that money.

I thought to myself, it’s better to ‘lose’ that amount but win in peace of mind and focus on the things that matter for me: mastery of brand storytelling.

You see, brand storytelling is the One Thing I love and there is no ceiling in what we can learn and how we can improve. I want to be on this journey of mastery - which doesn’t mean that it has a final destination because in reality mastery is a journey that never stops. In branding, brand storytelling, brand purpose, it’s not just ONE element that you have to learn. There are so many other elements like human psychology, human behavior, content marketing, aesthetics and other things.

The trip, speeches, the hourglass and obviously the book made me realize and remind myself that a life lived on purpose is the most powerful of all - and the happiest.

What I realized was that when we live our lives aligned with our purpose we are more fulfilled, we are happier because we know that feeling - we know that we are aligned with what is truly ours.

The rest of the stuff is just distractions and the universe is constantly testing us about how serious we are about our purpose.?

?? This week’s Thought On Purpose:

“Purpose” may sound heavy, but it doesn’t have to be. Think of it as simply the ONE Thing you want your life to be about more than any other.

?? This week I’m reading:

The One Thing - Gary Keller with Jay Papasan.

“I cannot believe that the purpose of life is to be happy. I think the purpose of life is to be useful, to be responsible, to be compassionate. It is, above all, to matter, to count, to stand for something, to have made some difference that you lived at all.”

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