How to Find Your Life’s Purpose and Stop Feeling Lost

If you want to find your life's purpose and stop feeling lost in life, this video will introduce you to the exact process I used. You know, for most of my 20s, I was obsessed with one goal. What is the point of my life? And how do I find work I love that actually makes my life worth living? What's up, guys? Alex Hind over at Modern Health Monk, author of Milk the Pigeon, a field guide for anyone lost in their 20s. By the way, if you're trying to find your purpose in life, this book is the exact book that I wrote for my former self. So, I think it'll help you. But anyway, let's jump in. Finding your life purpose is very rarely this, "Oh my God, hallelujah" moment where like the angels are blowing their trumpets and the clouds are parting and God speaks down from heaven and says, "You're designed to be a nurse, Jane. " It's usually a lot more organic than that. And the way I think about it is that it's sort of like an everexpanding process. Meaning that every month or every year, you get like a 1 to 10% nudge in the right direction. And your goal in life is to stay aligned with those nudges as much as possible. And as life goes on, your life will become more and more more aligned with the things that you love to do. When I was in my 20s, this was my default obsession. All I wanted was nothing more than to find work I loved that was meaningful and just to live in general live a very meaningful life. Because what I saw around me was people working these BS corporate jobs just to exist on this financial treadmill just to buy a stupid apartment in a place they didn't really even like that much just to go right back to work to do the same thing all over again. It was like you're working a job you hate to come home to an existence that you dislike to go back to a job you hate to come pay your rent. What I learned early on in my 20s was that most people just don't think. They don't think at all. We just accept that is the way that you do life. probably because our parents and our teachers and our society has told us, you go through school, you go to college, you get married, you have kids, you have the 2. 5 kids, white picket fence life, and your life's [ __ ] over at that point. But the truth is, that's not what you have to do. You can choose whatever you want to do. But it takes a lot of courage to ignore the voices of the people who are older than you. And so, as children, we don't have a lot of confidence, right? Even in our 20s, it takes age typically and experience to develop confidence in life. A byproduct of that confidence is that you start taking risks to build the life that you want. My first job, you know, I was an undergraduate. I went to Clemson University. I was a premed and environmental science major because I didn't know if I wanted to be a doctor or like a wildlife biologist and live in the woods all day doing field work. And eventually, as time went on, when I graduated, I couldn't find a job in either field. So, I just picked the first job that I could get, which was as a teaching assistant in a high school in New York. And after the year had ended, even though I liked the job, I knew for sure it wasn't my life purpose. And I thought, it's better for me to take the risk on the life that I want to live than it is just to sit here and become another corporate drone for the next 40 years. And so I quit the job. I booked a one-way ticket to China. And I figured, let me live a year as a monk and a martial artist. And so that's what I did. But after a year in China, I pretty quickly learned that I wasn't destined to be a full-time monk in residence in a monastery. And also, I didn't love martial arts as much anymore to the point where this was going to be my full-time thing. I ended up coming back to the US and I sort of was like back to square zero, back to square one where it's like, well, what do I do now? I had basically tried to have 50 different jobs in the next 5 years, right? I worked at a startup. marketing job. I volunteered. I did mission trips. I did everything that I could to see what I truly love to do. Because of that, [snorts] it helped me understand that each thing you try nudges you 1% more towards success. And as each thing you try nudges you more towards success, it becomes very clear that finding your purpose in life is not typically a moment. It's a process. And if you understand that it's a process of progressive evolution of inching more towards the life you want to live, you put less pressure on yourself for this next thing, this job, this career, this project, this side hustle to fulfill you and be like the end game because that's not life. The only endgame is death. Now, one of the hardest things for me was trying to figure out really what do I do? I mean, one of the main feelings I felt in my 20s was the feeling of being lost. And I've actually put together a brand new guide here, which is a 12step guide to reinvent yourself. If you're going through a quarter or midlife crisis, you're trying to figure out what next, how to find a life you love and a job you love, make sure you download the guide below or go to modernhealthmunk. com because I'm breaking down exactly what I have done. And really what my whole book, you know, Milk the Pigeon is really about is this three-step process. Now, when I was in my 20s, there was this blog that I found when I was incredibly lost. And it was called something like around the world in 80 jobs. And it was this guy that was doing a very creative challenge.

Basically, for a month, he would work a specific job anywhere in the world just to try to see what the work was he. And he did all of the most absurd things from like being a lumberjack in Canada to English teacher in Thailand to working helping clean up coral reefs to accounting. And there's something about this that I think is more wise than we give him credit for. Because something I've learned about finding work you love and meaning and purpose is that clarity comes through action and alignment, not thinking. One of the things I would do as a career coach was I would have 20somes, like let's say they wanted to be a doctor, I would have them cold call and cold email 10 doctors, friends of friends, friends of family, their own family doctor, and just be like, "Can I just pick your brain for 5 or 10 minutes over coffee about what the field is like because I'm really thinking of becoming a doctor and I really want to know what it's actually like, right? Not the fantasy. " And I kid you not, 90% of the time the doctors they told them that they spoke with really did not recommend them to go into the field. And when they mentioned why, the paperwork, the bureaucracy, the short patient visits that are not fulfilling even for the doctor. And what I find is this process can be used on almost any profession. Reach out to people who are really in the field and ask them what does a day in the life actually look like? Not the fantasy, but what does it actually look like? So getting back to the idea of around the world in 80 jobs, finding purpose and meaning in the right career comes through action. And then the second thing I mentioned was alignment. And what alignment feels like is it feels like falling in love. If you've ever been on a date where right away you really like someone, you're energized, you're talkative, you're very attentive, you get that chills feeling, then you know exactly what I'm talking about. But the same thing is true in work. When you're in the right field, you feel that falling in love sensation. You feel turned on, lit up, energized. You can't stop thinking about it. You're trying to figure out the next level. And because of that, you do a really good job of doing excellent work. And the number one thing that I've seen correlates more with success long term is how much you can be gritty about a field you're aligned with. How long can you stay in the game in a field you genuinely are interested in and you want to be the best in? That will determine a lot of your success. So how can you actually find your thing in life? I want you to think about a few things here because this is what made all the difference for me. A lot of what life is about this idea of progressive evolution. You know one of my favorite self-growth author authors Earl Nightingale he says that success is the progressive evolution or realization of a worthy ideal. It is not a destination. It's not an end point. It's the non-stop evolution towards more of the life that you love. You know, even right here shooting these videos, Modern Health Monk wasn't necessarily my passion. This business has evolved over the years, and it started off more wellness and weight loss, then it morphed towards more personal development, which is more of what I care about. And what I learned over time was that if I'm obsessed with just the process of evolution, I will always be good. But if I think that there's going to be one day where I'm like fully aligned with my purpose and it will never change, then that's a bit delusional because most of the days I am aligned with doing the work that I love. But what I primarily try to do is not focus on whether one thing is my purpose or my clear goal in life. It's more so thinking about am I continually evolving more towards that. So just like modern health monk when I started it [clears throat] wasn't my life's purpose over time. Not only has it evolved more and more and more to be my life's purpose, but the other parts of my life have also evolved. I've started other businesses. I've written other books. All of these have led to a crystallizing point where things are more and more aligned than ever before. If you stop obsessing about like finding your purpose and instead just take imperfect action with the thing that is most aligned right now, at the very least that will lead you to the next thing and the next thing. And as time goes on, if you're able to stay aligned with those things, you'll see that you've created an incredible life, more than you could ever dream of. So just chase that. So don't waste your whole life waiting to take action because you're trying to find your purpose. Take the best imperfect action you can now, the most aligned job or career or opportunity, and then focus just on that. The rest will take care of itself. And if you need the additional help, make sure you download my 12step guide if you're going through a quarter or midlife crisis on how to reinvent yourself in the next 90 days. We break it down step by step. It's the first link below this video, and it'll help you figure out how to reinvent yourself and create an incredible life and incredible career. So, check it out. Now, one principle I haven't shared here is a specific exercise that I've used for finding your life purpose. And it's just called the 390 method to find your life purpose. And I shot an entire video on it right up here.