Arjun Badola

How to bring purpose in life

I believe purpose in life comes when you create something in this world. Creating anything requires energy, creativity, effort and so many other factors. Creation may vary from starting your blog to doing science experiments, it can be anything!

I believe these are the three things which bring purpose in life when you create something:

  1. Visible Results: When you create, you have something over which you can review or see results of your efforts. For example, reading a book might be a good activity but if the knowledge derived from it is not used in reality then what is the point? (I am not talking about books read for leisure)
  2. You Learn: Suppose you decide to open a YouTube channel. Soon you will realize that it’s not only about creating good content on your channel but requires many other things. Like: –
  3. Good communication skills: The ability to convey to your audience your thoughts/opinion in the simplest manner. Sometimes, YouTubers have good content but are still unable to gain an audience, reason being over complicating their video.
  4. Video graphic skills: This also includes your audio quality, setting up a background, etc.
  5. Promotion/Marketing: After good content and quality video you still need to put efforts to promote your channel. As you get into the promotion stage, you start learning about Google Ad sense and start reading about things related to it. You will also be exposed to various other things which you might have never encountered in your life if you would have not started a YouTube channel.
  6. Confidence: This is the most essential one. You need to have the confidence to be in front of camera, record yourself and courage to take-in the criticism.
  7. Expands your scope of thinking: when you try to create something, you try out new things. You start exploring new things and begin to learn/read about it. I had talked about it in my previous article, that how exploring and learning should be your top priority in life. So including in an activity which involves creating something is a step towards exploring and learning.

I am not putting these pointers as to scare you away from starting a YouTube channel or a new venture. These pointers just show that with every decision to do something, you open up so many opportunities to learn something. Working around and trying such things might lead you to a problem but, you never know you might actually find a solution to that problem and if lucky enough you would end up making the world a better place.

Even if you agree that creating something brings purpose to life, there is still a problem.

Problem: Are you lucky enough to find anything which interest you?

I would consider you lucky if you have found that one thing which you love to do. It’s hard, finding that one thing which you enjoy and would love to work on it anytime during 24 hours even if someone woke you up in the middle of the night.

Here is the list of people I think who were lucky enough to find their one thing:

  1. Warren Buffet: Investing
  2. Steve Jobs: Apple
  3. Bill Gates: Microsoft
  4. Mark Zuckerberg: Facebook
  5. Elon Musk: SpaceX/Tesla/Boring Company/PayPal (even though he co-founded many companies but all were towards making society a better place.)
  6. Karl Marx: Marxism

Each person in this list might have done something which some of you might have an opinion that whatever they have done is wrong.

I would like to mention Apple’s Think Different commercial clearly states my point here. Below is the line which was used in the commercial:

“Here’s to the crazy ones, the misfits, the rebels, the troublemakers, the round pegs in the square holes… the ones who see things differently — they’re not fond of rules… You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them, but the only thing you can’t do is ignore them because they change things… they push the human race forward, and while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius, because the ones who are crazy enough to think that they can change the world, are the ones who do.”— Steve Jobs, 1997

People which I have mentioned above cannot be ignored. As they have brought a change in the society for sure. I am sure the list is not complete but I have mentioned these six as I have read more about them then the people who could not make it to the list.

The only point which I would like to put forward is, don’t spend most of your time doing something which can easily be replicated. Rather try to invent things if you can’t, then keep learning how to, because that is how you are going to bring purpose in life.

(Thanks to https://lazymarxist.wordpress.com for reading drafts of this.)