Monday, July 5, 2010

Three Guiding Principles for your Life and Career - Part 3

Find Your Passion

The happiest people are the ones that find their passion, the one thing that they enjoy doing above all else and they build a life around that passion.  Finding your passion provides you with a drive and a focus that is essential to achieving anything worthwhile in life.  So many of us simply drift into our roles in life,  instead of conscientiously sitting down and determining who we are and what we are about and where we want to go in life.  Life has a current of its own that will pull you to places you never expected.  So unless you know where you are going and can swim against the current to better direct yourself, you will wind up in a place that you never wanted to be.
In his book Law of Success, Napoleon Hill describes the need to find a passion and a direction in life, he titles this purpose as your 'Definite Chief Aim', it is the target that you should be shooting for constantly.  Before you set your 'Definite Chief Aim' you need to know something about yourself and that is what do you have a passion for? So many times people will pick a target and run towards it only to discover at the end that it was all for nothing.  Before you define you life target you need to decide who you are and what really gives you satisfaction.  Once you identify your passion you can then go on to build a 'Definite Chief Aim' around that passion.
If you do not work at your passion you will burn out.  You eventually find yourself at a point asking yourself the question immortalized by the Talking Heads in their song Once In A Lifetime, "Well I did I get here?", or even worse lamenting over lost time because you had been working at things that held no meaning to you.
God created everyone a specific purpose and we need to find that purpose and chase it with our entire being.