A conversation with a good friend of mine inspired this article. Him and I are the same, just born to different parents at different times. We didn’t know each other very well until college, but since then have realized that we have similar thinking patterns.

We’ve lived very different lives, and yet have ended up wondering and struggling with the same things. What is my purpose? How can I be happy? Can I follow my dreams?

What came out of the conversation is that the answer to these questions does not matter. You won’t be able to answer these questions by thinking about it. Creating a list, doing research, worrying what other people would think, being afraid you might fail, is all overthinking it.

Instead, you just need to take your shot. Whatever that itch has been, just fucking itch it. You won’t know how it feels until you do. The journey and next steps starts to unfold after you take that first shot. Because what comes after, is the next shot. And the next. Then the next. Until one day, you’re doing something that you had no idea you could be doing.

This is really helpful for someone like me because I am an over thinker. I wonder what can make me happy. I question my questions. What can I do that will make me satisfied with the day? What action can I do to make today feel like a success? What can I do to make me smile? Is it music? Is acting my passion? What about a life in blogging and exercise? I ponder these questions all day, then try to write something about it, and then proceed to not take any of my own advice.

So when my friend told me to just take my shot, I responded with, “okay, you’re right. What are the things I should take a shot at? Hm, let me make a list.” No, you idiot. The entire point is to just do.

So what shot have you not taken because you’re too scared or too busy or too whatever? Listen to Nike, and this LinkedIn post, and just do it. Take your shot. Don’t wait to find the answers. They’ll come along the way.

While searching self development, you’ll often run into a fable about the lion and the gazelle.

“Every morning in Africa a gazelle wakes up. It knows it must outrun the fastest lion or it will be killed. Every morning in Africa a lion wakes up. It knows it must run faster than the slowest gazelle or it will starve. It doesn’t matter whether you’re the lion or a gazelle. When the sun comes up, you’d better be running.”

Many motivation speakers will use this to inspire people to get moving.

The best usage of this, in my opinion, comes from Eric Thomas. He puts a slightly different spin on to this quote, which inspired this article for the Living Accidentally series.

Lately, I’ve been noticing that a lot of what I am doing is just doing things to “stay alive.” I’m just looking for a job to get money just to get by. I’m exercising only because I know that I need to move to keep my body in general shape to “stay alive.” I know that once I stop moving, I’ll fall deeper into depression and have a harder climb to get out.

I’ve realized that living accidentally is just staying alive. It’s flat, straight, doing the bare minimum. In early stages of life, it’s easy to “stay alive,” but this isn’t actually “living.” When you’re simply “staying alive,” you’re living on accident. You’re doing just enough to get by, and not creating anything for yourself.

Staying alive isn’t living, but it is easy. Everyone can stay alive, but not everyone can live. After some time, the ironic thing about life is that staying alive actually starts to become difficult. The reasons to stay alive slowly erode as you realize that you need more to actually live.

The last part of the fable says that it doesn’t matter whether you’re a lion or a gazelle. That either way, you have to be running. This is very true. You need to keep running to survive.

But the spin is that we should all live like lions. While both are running, the lion is the one running TO something. The gazelle is only running FROM something.

In order to live your life with purpose, you have to run TO something. This is the key difference between the two and could completely change the way you view life. You have to have a lion mentality to not just stay alive, but to LIVE.

Which are you? The lion or the gazelle? Check out Eric Thomas speak about this here.

The Living Accidentally series has been about finding your own path to life. It’s been about living with purpose instead of waking up everyday being part of someone else’s journey. To find satisfaction with life, you will need to wake with purpose.

Purpose can be defined by anything you want. That’s the beauty of living with your own purpose, walking your own path. It can be driven by anything you want.

I’ve been writing about this because these articles are directed at me, more then anyone else. I’m finding that looking for purpose, trying to enjoy life, searching for life meaning, trying to be happy, etc. has all been very elusive.

The irony in searching for purpose is that the more you search for it, the harder it’ll be to grasp. It’s like trying to love and squeeze a cat or dog. The harder you try to love it, the more it seems to want to squirm away (for many pets anyways…). But when you ignore it and wait for it to come to you, it’ll come by and allow you to pet him/her.

Purpose seems like that. The more you try to find it, the harder it seems to be.

This isn’t to say that you should sit and do nothing and eventually purpose will come up to you. The journey we should be going down is to begin to know yourself. Find out what your priorities are. Find out what your values are. And the only way to do that is to start doing things.

I’m definitely stuck in a loop, because as I write this, I’m realizing that I have written some version of this in an earlier article. I’m really pushing myself today to get this article written. And as shitty as it is, I’m going to post it anyways, because this is part of my path to learn more about myself.

Many of us grow up in a designed system. We go through grade school, university, get a career, get married, raise a family, put kids through system, and then eventually die. (Apologies to nonchalantly throwing out death in the first 2 sentences of this article!) This system has been on repeat for generations. We are lucky and should be grateful to be able to grow up in this sort of environment. It could be a lot worse, like not being able to get an education or choose our life partner.

However, in this system, we don’t get to make too many of our own choices until we have income that lets us live independently from our parents. And even after, parents often have an impact in our decisions, consciously or subconsciously, whether we like it or not.

Before we are able to become completely independent, we are mainly told what to do on a day to day basis. Go to school, study this, do this activity, go to this practice, etc. If we’re being honest, a big part of our careers are all about listening to other people as well. Deadlines for projects, revenue targets to hit, sale numbers to reach, meetings to go to, etc.

The early parts of human life are filled with lots of direction from other people and what they think is the best for us. If you are lucky, some of these people become your mentors and push, pull, maybe sometimes carry, convince when necessary, and support you in creating your own path for life.

Some of us are not so lucky and just float through life accepting what other people tell us to do, because that was how we were raised. We accept our accidental life, and live on thinking this is what life is.

I believe that a “mid-life crisis” is when we start to wake up from an accidental life and begin to ask the right questions.

At first, it’s easy to slip into a state of blaming everyone and everything. You may blame society, your parents, your environment, and/or your school for being where you are today. Because when being raised in a system, our decisions were limited, and many of us never actually learned how to make a decision. And when a decision has a negative consequence, your natural reaction is to blame someone else. How could it be your fault when you never even wanted or knew you were making that decision?

This deflection of consequences and blaming others is great if you want to continue living the way you are. It may be why many people are fine working at large organizations where they are told what to do most of the day. That way, if something goes wrong, the blame is mainly on the decision-maker.

The realization that you can be THE decision-maker of your life is a big step towards walking your own path. Life starts to change when you start to own every decision and consequence. Purpose begins to shape when you decide that you are responsible for your actions. It’s scary at first. It’s scary to realize that we can decide what to do next. It’s scary to think that our actions are our own. It’s scary to realize that regardless of the things happening around us, our reactions to these happenings are entirely in our control.

And then it begins to be empowering. What happens next is my decision. How I react is my choice. What I do is up to me. I am in the driver seat, and I decide where and how fast to go.

This shift from “along for the ride” to “I am the ride” is the start towards living with purpose. It’s going to be bumpy, you’ll get lost, you might go backwards, you’ll love some things, hate lots of other things, get embarrassed, learn stuff, and experience the entire spectrum of emotions. In the end, it’ll be totally worth it because the decisions, actions, consequences are all yours. You’ve decided to own it, and have begun paving your own life path.

Start small. The decision to own your actions can be overwhelming. Start small by catching yourself when you begin to put fault onto things. Don’t look to blame someone. What happened, has happened. What you can do now is to accept and own the situation you are in. Own your reactions and your next steps. This shifts you back into the driver seat and gives you the ability to navigate the situation. Then, you’ll remember that someone long ago told you about this annoying thing called the Serenity Prayer. Back when you owned none of your actions, this prayer made no sense. But now, with a shift in mindset into ownership, of living a life with purpose, you begin to understand the power behind this concept. So take ownership of your life and remember, “God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and wisdom to know the difference.”

Some of us have realized that we’ve been living our lives on accident, and not on purpose. This lead to the question of “how to live with purpose”, which is such a difficult question to answer. We discovered that to “find” our purpose, we must build it ourselves. And to build it, we should start small and ask “what would make today a success?” It’s the small steps that will eventually come together to form a larger vision, and it’s viewed as much in hindsight as it is in foresight.

What’s next is understanding the cost to everything we do. Whether it’s time, effort, money, emotion, there’s always a cost. And when starting to live on purpose, instead of on accident, we make a change to the costs.

When living accidentally, our journey is not our own. We are walking someone else’s path. Therefore the costs we pay to live accidentally isn’t necessarily for us nor is it something we have chosen. The ultimate cost to this accidental life most likely boils down to our own life satisfaction and happiness.

Of course, there’s costs to living on purpose as well. However, the key difference is that when living on purpose, the costs are your decision. You get to choose what you are willing to pay to live your own journey.

An easy example to give on cost is when considering physique and health. If you want to be healthy and have a great physique, the cost is the time and discipline to eat healthy and exercise regularly. If you do not want to go through the pain of exercising everyday and eating the right foods, then you’re not willing to pay the cost for it.

Another example is being financially rich. Regardless of how you get rich, are you ready and willing to put in the hours of hard work and dedication that comes with financial wealth? If it’s through a start up company, are you willing to ride the uncertainty that comes with a small company for the possible big pay out? If the plan to get rich is through climbing the corporate ladder, are you willing to sacrifice a big portion of your life to the office?

Everything we do has a cost. The great thing about living with purpose is that you get to choose the cost. So what you end up discovering are the pains that you can deal with while heading down your own path. Everyone has desires and wants. Not everyone is willing to pay the cost to achieve those things.

What is it that you want enough, that gives you the drive to push past the cost and the pain to achieve your desire? The difficult things that you are willing to put up with will give you guidance in following your life path. And if everything we do has a cost, shouldn’t we at least decide and pay for something we want? When we start to make active, purpose driven choices, we start to lay down the foundations for our own path. In the end, the sacrifice we give to work on our journey will be worth the cost.

So ask yourself this: what am I willing to put up with to achieve my desires? Whatever that answer is, will lead you closer to your true desire and your own path.

Whenever I read self-help articles, the hardest thing for me is what to do after I read it. A ton of articles out there say “start small”, may give a few examples, but not entirely useful. What is starting small, damn it?!

So here’s my example.

I’m preparing to move countries over the next few weeks and I’m bringing along 2 cats. We’ll be traveling for 36 hours, and they will unfortunately have to be in a kennel for the entire duration. When I initially thought of moving with 2 cats, I was frozen with my imagined one million things to do to take them with me. The more I thought of this to-do list, the longer and harder it seemed to become.

Luckily, the decision to move coincided with my writing of the Living Accidentally series.

In Part 1, I write that you must live with purpose. When it comes to moving, preparing and actually moving becomes the “purpose.” So now, every single day until the point I move and settle into my new home, I have a single purpose.

In Part 2, I said to start small and do one thing that would mark the day as a success. It was difficult to do this at first because the list of to-do’s seemed SO long and I didn’t know where to begin. Do I buy the flight first? When do I go to the vet? How can my cats fly? Can my cats even get to the country I’m moving to? Do I have enough time to get them vaccinated before my visa expires? Do I have to extend my visa? Am I even allowed to extend my visa?! When I was just thinking in my own head, the questions and thoughts were never ending. I was having arguments with myself. I felt like a crazy person having crazy conversations.

But one evening I asked myself “what is the one thing I can do tomorrow that would make it a success?” I wrote that thing down, which happened to be “cat travel preparation.”

So the next day, I wrote out what “cat travel preparation” meant. It turned out to be a long list. But it was a list of small things that I could actually do. Over the next few days, I eventually made a schedule to put the cats into their kennels every day, incrementally increasing the length of time. This also got me to create a plan to alter their eating schedule so that they will get to relieve themselves one last time before we start our 36 hour journey. Working on my cat travel plans also made me start to work on my own stuff, like what I am packing, throwing away, selling, and giving away.

The tiny act of asking “what will make today a success” gave me the nudge I needed to get things rolling. Now I have a much better picture of what my next few weeks will look like as I prepare to move myself and my cats to another home.

I know that “cat travel plans” is not the same as “life plan”, and I don’t expect a life plan to unfold from scheduling my move. However, what I will take away is the feeling of being successful and satisfied of my day. I believe that our bodies and minds will start to naturally work towards feeling like this, and as we take each step, we’ll have a little more clarity towards the place we are going. It all starts from starting small.

Part 1 of the Living Accidentally series left off questioning how to live on purpose. When I think about Living On Purpose, my mind automatically questions “what is my life purpose?” How does someone even decide that, especially if you are lost, stumbling, in the dark, stuck in a corner, in a blackhole, or wherever you are when you come to realize that you must live with purpose?

The answer is that this question is actually too monstrous of a question and cannot be answered with thought alone. Fortunately, I believe it’s the wrong question to be asking.

The right question is “what is one thing I could do today to make it a success?”

Start small. Finding your life goal doesn’t happen over night. Having a life plan doesn’t happen with a snap of a finger. Your own path and destination is only forged as you walk it. Meaning, the path you want to go on, isn’t actually there until you pave it. You won’t know exactly where you are going until you get there and it’s extremely daunting to decide where you’ll be in 5 years. So the trick is to start small and doing the one thing that would make today a success.

Choose something that you can do, and do it on purpose everyday. Pour all your thoughts into that one thing. Behave as if the only thing you need to do, and will do, is that one thing. Put all your energy into it. Let yourself be immersed in it. Let your body feel what it feels like to put all your focus, attention, energy into that one thing.

You woke up to do this one thing.

You got out of bed to do this one thing.

You brushed your teeth for this one thing.

You put on clothes to do this one thing.

You are eating for this one thing.

You turned on your computer to do this one thing.

By giving this one purpose for the entire day and completing it, you are doing two things.

First, you are reminding your body and mind what a successful day feels like. It’s important to build this feeling of success everyday. Your body and mind will naturally start to adjust and work towards this feeling. For those who feel lost, the feeling of a successful accomplishment, even when it’s starting small, is a huge win. The feeling of a successful day, when it comes from a small task, is like the tiny snowball before it rolls down the hill and becomes an avalanche. It’s the small, continual work that defeats the crushing feeling of being stuck or lost.

Second, you just started paving your own path. Life stories and life plans do not come from step 1. In the snowball example, step 1 isn’t even the snowball. It’s you picking up snow. Or even learning what snow is! Life plans are written in retrospect and you have to take the first step to your own path. On step 2, you still won’t have a life plan, but you’ll be headed in some direction. Maybe you pick up more snow and start to pack it into a snow ball. It may feel like a huge step and that it’ll be forever cast in stone, but it’s not. It’s only huge because you’ve taken so few steps, and each one seems giant. But keep going, and on step 100, you’ll have a snowball, a general direction, and maybe some picture of purpose. On step 1,000, things will become more clear and the steps will be easier to take. Suddenly, on step 10,000, you realize you have reached one portion of your plan and working on another. On Step 100,000, you are now juggling multiple “goals” and “plans” and living your “purpose.” Only then, once you look back at step 1, will you be able to see what your purpose was all along.

Ironic, that the only way to see forward, is to go forward and look back.

This is how you gradually go from living accidentally and start living on purpose.

For those of you who would like an example of starting small, here’s my example. For others, tune in next time to find out that everything we do comes at a cost. What are you willing to pay to live with purpose and walk your own path?

Up to now, I have lived an accidental life. I don’t mean that I was an accident because my parents made a mistake. I mean that many of my decisions were on accident. I chose to go left or right, to change jobs, cities, relationships, but a lot of these decisions were on accident in a sense that I didn’t purposefully arrive at the place to make these decisions. I was faced with making these decisions due to my neglect of my own plan.

As Jim Rohn says:

“If you don’t design your own life plan, chances are you’ll fall into someone else’s plan. And guess what they have planned for you? Not much.”

I have never really thought about my life plan. I simply lived life and took opportunities that arose. This lead to falling into other people’s plans and many big decisions I made weren’t on purpose for myself. It was on accident for someone else and/or to fit into a social system.

Repeat this enough and you’ll end up wondering where the time has gone and why you aren’t feeling accomplished or satisfied. You neglected the biggest part of living, which was to live on purpose.

This seems to be the irony of “finding purpose.” You don’t actually “find” purpose. It has to be built, designed, crafted, catered by you, on purpose, for you. A lot of us will float through life without working on your own path. Then you look up one day working and living in a way you don’t want to and you wonder where the hell things went wrong.

It will be daunting to come to this realization at any point in life. Fortunately, it does not matter when you realize this. The only thing that matters is what you do after you come to this realization.

I am at this point now and it is terrifying. It feels like I’m starting over, when it actually is not. I have way more life experience than I did years ago, and I know much more about myself. It’s now up to me (and to you, if you’re in a similar situation) to decide what to do next. Decide, with purpose, where you want your life to be.

Honestly, it’s unclear to me how to break down what feels like a huge decision into actionable steps. Where do you even start when thinking about a “life plan?” What the fuck does a life plan even mean?

My next article will be a continuation of my research into living on purpose, instead of by accident. I will try to answer in my own way on how to take actionable steps on building a life lived on purpose.

The title should actually be “Why James Can’t Build Habits.” Everything I’ve written so far about habits, change, mental challenges, etc. have been all directed towards myself. Ironically I’ve struggled to follow any of my own advice. I bet this is a common theme amongst many people who are trying to alter their day to day. There’s a lot of advice on the internet on how to do anything. Yet, so many of us struggle to actually apply any of it to our lives. It’s why Mel Robbins says that things are simple, but not easy.

Let’s jump right into an assessment of myself. By following along, you may be able to identify similar hurdles and make the first jump over it.

So why can’t James build habits? I’ve come up with a few reasons why some of my habits have not stuck. The example I will use is writing every day.

When I first decided to write every day, I just jumped right into stream of consciousness writing (sometimes referred to as free writing or morning pages). It was easy because I could start writing at any moment without needing any subject to write about. However, it became difficult after just a few days. I continually powered through each day, but I became frustrated with the practice and felt it was just dragging my mood down every time I wrote. This lead to the first problem with my approach.

I started writing only because it’s what others were doing. I kept reading about how successful people kept journals. I aimlessly decided to write. If you want to form a habit, you have to have a reason behind it. It needs to be stronger than “because I read about it and other successful people do it.” If you just follow others without knowing why, you will eventually stop. With the power of purpose, you will not rely on just your feelings or motivation.

For me, I want to write and journal because it has helped me put my thoughts in order. I have a million thoughts wandering around in my head, and the physical act of typing or writing out the thought helps to process my own thinking.

The next problem with my approach was that it was not scheduled. I planned to free write every morning at 9am. But more often than not, I never actually wrote at that time. Sometimes I’d write first thing when I woke up. Other days I’d write after working out. Some days it was after breakfast or even after lunch. Because my writing habit was not scheduled, it never became a routine. It became more like a chore, just something I had to do at some point in the day. By not scheduling the habit, we are actually saying that it’s not important enough to prioritize. In order for a habit to become routine, we must be able to give it value enough to prioritize. By sticking with the same time everyday, we then actually value the habit and create the routine.

The last problem I found with my approach was that it was not measured. When I first started, I told myself I’d write for 30 minutes a day. But I actually rarely wrote for the full 30 minutes. Some days I’d write just for 5 minutes. Yes, I got to say I wrote everyday, but was it just to give myself a pat on the back? This happened because I was not measuring my writing and because I did not have a clear purpose behind it.

So the few changes I’m going to be making moving forward with my habits are summarized below:

1. Know why you are forming a habit.
   • By giving purpose and a reason behind the habit, you do not rely on just feelings or motivation.
2. Schedule your habit.
   • By scheduling your habit, you are giving it value and prioritizing it.
3. Measure your habit.
   • By measuring your habit, you know exactly how well you are doing.
   • It also gives a clear goal to hit and a reason to celebrate when you do.

I believe adding these 3 pointers will help solidify my writing habit. I hope it will help solidify whatever habit you are trying to create as well.

I’ve been watching a lot of Tom Bilyeu and Impact Theory lately. I recently watched one of his talks at Mindvalley and the line below really speaks to me:

“It doesn’t matter who you are today. The only thing that matters is who you want to become and the price you are willing to pay to get there.”

He mentions in this talk that humans are the ultimate adaptation machines. And it all starts by making an intentional choice. We must choose to believe in ourselves.

To believe in yourself, we must have self-esteem built on an unshakeable foundation. Often times, our self-esteem is centered around how smart we are, how right we are, how good we are. Unfortunately, these are very fragile traits. Once we meet someone smarter, proven wrong, or fail at something, our self-esteem crumbles.

Instead, Tom Bilyeu states to build your self-esteem around something that is anti-fragile. Something that the more it is attacked, the stronger it becomes. He says the one identity that he has come across that is anti-fragile, is that of a learner.

A learner is someone that takes advantage of all situations. By wanting to learn in all scenarios, a learner finds out where they are most weak and are able to build themselves from that point. They develop their self-esteem around their growth, and not based on what others think of them.

The shift to a learner mindset will also help you confront who you actually are. It’s only when you honestly acknowledge where you are, when change can occur. Because now you can identify your starting point, and the skills you’ll need to cover the gap to where you want to be. Once you know where you want to go, you will have the right intention to start to rebuild yourself.

Dig into yourself. Really question your current values and belief system. Shift your mentality to become a learner. Then make an intentional choice on where you want to be. As you progress, you will find and learn the skills you need to get from here, to your future.